V
From
these reflections on the segment of human life that is formed
by, or associated with, a vocation, you will have seen that it
is difficult to explain these things because they bring so much
into consideration. We must bear in mind that everything that
is brought into a life through the laws of destiny, of karma,
depends on many factors, and the very multiplicity of life
rests upon just this truth.
A
special comment is in order here if, in the word vocation, we
subsume individual human elements from a life's destiny. In
other words, what is called the vocation of an individual must
not be confused with what we designate, in the broadest sense,
as his official position. It is obvious that all sorts of
confusion would result if we directed our attention to what
someone represents in his or her official position and subject
this to the point of view of vocational life represented here.
The very fact that people frequently have to follow their
vocation within an official position causes the most complex
external factors to have a bearing on their lives, and other
karmic threads may, after a fashion, also weave into their
vocational karmas.
To be
sure, we are living today in a period that is being slowly
transformed, but the things we must mention here relative to
vocational karma are by no means the sole determinants in
placing a person in this or that position in life. We know that
today vocational karma is crossed in many ways by the karma of
entire ranks and classes of human beings. The ambition, vanity,
and prejudice of an individual, as well as the people around
him, have a bearing on the many factors that influence the way
he or she occupies a position in life within a group. All of
them work into vocational karma from without and render it
possible for ahrimanic influences to mingle continually in
human activity. Someone in a certain position in life, who,
through all sorts of means that are well-known and need not be
mentioned, has become, let us say, a minister or councilor of
state, does not necessarily have the mission (vocation) to
occupy this post. Such a person may hold a high position, yet
his or her mission may be that of a clerk, but we need not
suppose that for this reason the position cannot be occupied.
It is the peculiarity of our time that the materialistic
interpretation of the basic assumptions, justifiable as they
may be in themselves, has brought forward such a theory of life
as that of the “selection of the fittest.” Even Oskar Hertwig,
the student of Haeckel
(Note 70)
has criticized such an
interpretation by pointing out that this age of ours which has
produced such a doctrine clearly selects the least fit for the
most important positions, and this to an extent that is
unparalleled when compared to the total scope of life in other
ages. We are not simply deprecating our own times in a
pessimistic way and referring to the good old times that are
past, but we stand here in the presence of an actual fact. The
very people who take pride now in the theory of the selection
of the fittest are the ones who in reality yield to the
tendency of choosing the least qualified people for the
seemingly most important places in life.
This
is a bitter truth today. Yet, it would be recognized if the
present age were not entirely under the influence of the most
far-reaching faith in authority, stupor of opportunism, and
dominated by what is called public opinion, which a philosopher
of the nineteenth century termed “private foolishness.” To
repeat, people would see what is of real importance here if it
were not for the immense influence of present public opinion
that flows from such muddy sources. We must, therefore,
understand that our age has to be educated to a stronger grasp
of life through learning to see that we are immersed in
one-sidedness, in the selection of the worst. This must
come to pass in spite of so-called public opinion and its hero
worship of the least qualified people.
Official positions are often filled by Ahriman-Mephistopheles
and, as the Faust unfolds, you can see how
Mephistopheles attends to his official responsibilities. Faust
was able to free himself from Mephistopheles only at the end of
his life. He comes now to the King's palace and produces paper
money — an invention of extraordinary importance for the last
century. But it is Mephistopheles who really invents it. Faust
is then guided into the ancient world by Homunculus, who had
come into existence through the help of Mephistopheles. He even
becomes a commander-in-chief and conducts wars, but in the
presentation used by Goethe in this act, we can see that, in
reality, Mephistopheles carries on these wars. In the end we
see how Faust gradually frees himself from Mephistopheles. Even
though Faust, after he has abandoned the professorship he
previously held, simply roams about the world without having
definite official position; we must say that Mephistopheles
stands beside him in the way in which the Mephistophelian force
plays into the life of humanity. This is one thing we must pay
attention to.
A
second fact is equally important. It is extremely difficult to
properly investigate what really works in man's nature in the
course of karmic evolution. Indeed, we may say that in this
area, too, scientific development has arrived at a point where
it must be replaced by spiritual scientific observation. It is
precisely in dealing with the life of the soul that scientists
make the most terrible blunders. Indeed, we observe that there
is a perverted scientific school of thought that ventures to
confront soul life by trying to observe it in a scientific way,
admitting that it is not to be found in consciousness but that
much of it rises up into consciousness from the unconscious or
subconscious that lies below the threshold. In previous
discussions we have presented concrete examples of soul life
that really lie in the subconscious and rise up into
consciousness like the clouds of smoke that are produced when
bits of paper are burned in the region of a solfatara.
(Note 71)
To be sure, a great deal lies below in the depths of consciousness.
We may
say, then, that for a proper understanding of things some
psychologists already presume it to be necessary to posit the
presence or absence of an obscure, unconscious capacity in the
soul. Since, however, they are not yet willing to adjust to a
more comprehensive spiritual scientific conception of the
world, they can produce only a caricature. A person holding the
point of view of scientific psychology looks upon a human life
as it has developed. To be sure, it is no longer supposed that
what the soul feels and wills, what causes it happiness or
unhappiness, joy or pain, depends only on what it has retained
in consciousness. The effort is made now to quiz the soul to
draw out of it what it has passed through in joy, sorrow,
disillusionment in life and other things that have been
forgotten. What has been forgotten, however, has not
disappeared, so it is said, but has burrowed into the
subconscious.
Especially the unsatisfied and subsequently suppressed
appetites of an earlier time are said to agitate in the
subconscious. Let us take the specific case of a woman in her
thirtieth year. When she was sixteen, she fell in love,
developing a genuinely erotic passion, which, so this
scientific school says, would have led her life astray if she
had surrendered to it and if it had been fulfilled. Under the
influence of her education and the advice of her elders,
however, she suppressed it — swallowed it, to use a trivial
expression — down into her soul. She lives on and fourteen
years pass. She is perhaps now married in keeping with her
position in life. So far as her daily thinking and feeling are
concerned, the matter is long forgotten; but what is forgotten
has not disappeared. The content of the soul is not exhausted
in what it knows, this school of thought would claim, and in
the depths of her soul this incident is still present. But in
spite of being outwardly happy, this lady suffers from an
indefinable tendency toward pessimism, a partial weariness of
life, from nervousness or neurasthenia, or something of the
kind, and these symptoms are then diagnosed as an expression of
her suppressed anxiety about the incident earlier in her life.
The effort is then made to introduce this kind of psychology
into the science of healing, to cure such souls through
questioning. The patients are told that such experiences still
reside in the deepest regions of the psyche, apparently
forgotten by the upper level of consciousness, and that they
must be drawn to the surface. If, under the influence of a
skillful interrogator who, according to the views in vogue,
must be a psychologist, they are thus brought to the surface,
and if the person comes to understand the matter, then things
will be better. Actual “cures” are frequently achieved by these
means, although in most cases patients only seem to be cured.
To what extent they are apparent cures, however, we can explain
on some other occasion. This, then, is one example of how
scientists try to penetrate the depths of the soul's life.
Another example has to do with a man thirty-five or forty, who
is suffering from a certain weariness of life, from a certain
vacillation in life. Neither he nor those about him know why,
least of all he himself. Someone who deals with such a “science
of the soul,” as we have explained, then burrows into the
forgotten subterranean soul life of this man and brings to
light the fact that the plan he had for his life when he was
about sixteen was wrecked. He then had to turn to a different
plan, one that was unrelated to the other. Certainly he seems
to have been content in what he felt, thought, and willed from
one day to another, but this is not the entire life of the
soul; the shattered plan of life still continued to be a living
force in the deepest crevices of the soul.
In
this case, too, the “experts” believe the man can be cured
when, through questioning, this shattered plan of life is
discovered and the person can come to an understanding of it
through his questioner. It is also supposed that there is much
in the depth of the soul that the consciousness knows nothing
of. In short, the conclusion has been reached that
consciousness represents only a small part of what comprises
the life of the soul. But what people are now trying to find on
the bottom of the soul's life is really some sort of soulless
sediment. A theologian recently called it somewhat coarsely —
“the bestial slime at the bottom of the soul.” That is to say,
disillusionments, suppressed appetites, ruined life plans, “the
bestial slime at the bottom of the soul,” all come from the
lower depths of the soul life. This refers to everything that
is rooted in the life of the flesh, the blood, the animalistic;
it does not come from the soul's depths in a conscious way
because consciousness would, and actually does, resist all
this.
There
is certainly some truth in this theory of the “bestial slime at
the bottom of the soul.” How often in life do we hear our
consciousness say: “I really want only one thing; I would like
to experience this or that, which is why I turn to this or that
person.” But the slime at the bottom begins to work, and it may
be only bestial appetites that are at play, disguised by what
the consciousness says. It is further maintained by this
“scientific” school that these unconscious regions also harbor
everything that is derived from the connection of the
individual with race, nation and all sorts of other historical
residues that play their roles unconsciously in the soul, while
the consciousness itself is behaving quite differently. In view
of all that is brewing in the world today, one couldn't even
say that these things cannot be confirmed by examples from all
over the world. How could one deny that many people today speak
of lofty ideals regarding the rights and freedom of a people
while all that is really active in their souls is what burrows
in the bottom slime, deriving from the connections
psychoanalysis seeks to analyze.
Then
the theological psychoanalysts — and I do not know how they
and the scientific psychoanalysts reason with each other —
also include the demonic as part of the subconscious life of
the soul — in other words, that which emerges from still
greater depths, the utterly irrational, as it is said. The
theological psychoanalysts take great satisfaction especially
in the thought that unknown demons work in the subconscious
soul in order, for example, to change people into gnostics or
theosophists. They think that when the soul has been
psychoanalyzed, when we have penetrated its deepest regions
where the “primeval slime” lies, a demonic teaching such as
that of gnosis can be discovered there, or a demonic teaching
such as that of psychoanalysis — excuse me, not
psychoanalysis, which according to the view of these men and
women is not to be found there, but theosophy and other things
also mentioned in this connection. Well, I really did not want
to enter into a criticism of psychoanalysis, but my purpose in
explaining all this is to indicate that something in these
psychonanalytical endeavors forces contemporary research into
contact with what lies, works and weaves below the conscious
part of the soul. Nonetheless, the most perverted findings must
result from these endeavors because of the preconceptions of
scientists and their unwillingness to take account of spiritual
scientific investigations in this field. What they are able to
discover in the life of the soul can only be analyzed in the
right way with the knowledge that human life proceeds through
repeated lives on earth. Yet the psychoanalysts attempt to
explain what exists at the bottom of the soul on the basis of a
single life on earth, and it is not surprising that the picture
they paint is so highly distorted.
One
who finds, for example, ruined life plans at the bottom of the
soul must first investigate the significance of such a ruin in
the total human life that passes through repeated lives on
earth. He or she would then perhaps discover that certain
aspects of such a total human life are also active in the
subconscious and, as a matter of destiny, have actually
hindered that particular life plan from coming to fruition.
Such an individual would then observe that this ruined life
plan in the depths of the soul is destined, not simply to cause
illness in this incarnation, but also to be carried through the
portal of death as a force in the life between death and a new
birth, playing its true role only in the next life on earth. It
may, indeed, be a necessity that such a ruined life plan should
at first be preserved in the depths of the soul where it may be
strengthened and thereby enabled to gain its true form between
death and a new birth so that it may take on the shape
predestined for it in the next earthly life; this it could not
have done in this present earthly life because of other
characteristics in the soul's life.
So the
“bestial slime at the bottom of the soul” — as I have said,
the expression is disagreeable — is there, to be sure; but
bear in mind what I have said regarding the relationship
between the head and the rest of man's organism. His body is
connected with his earthly life — indeed, with his present
incarnation in many respects — whereas his head is the result
of earlier stages of the evolution of the earth and is
connected especially with his preceding incarnations. When you
take this into consideration, you will understand that from the
rest of the organism, in accord with the role that it plays in
the entire karmic connection, much works upward that must
possess a different stage of maturity from what comes from the
head and nervous system. But one who merely analyzes the slime
at the bottom in the psychoanalytic way is utterly misled. He
is like a person who wishes to know what kind of grain will
grow in a particular soil before grain has been grown there. In
analyzing the soil he finds a certain manure with which it has
been fertilized. So he says, “Now I know the manure from which
the next crop of grain will grow.” The grain does not by any
means grow from the manure, in spite of the fact that it must
be there! The essential thing is what is planted in this mud at
the bottom. This is often predestined to exert its influence
through the portal of death into the next development on earth.
What is needed is not to investigate the bestial bottom slime,
but what is planted in this muddy substance as the seed of the
soul.
So-called psychoanalysis makes possible investigations in the
very region where present preconceptions are working in a
disastrous fashion; we are dealing here with a field from which
present thinking tends strongly to take its directions, since
it is not content with what conscious experiences give to the
soul. The general area in which research ought to be done is no
longer in dispute, but because people who cannot understand
spiritual science have no true guidelines for their
investigations, they burrow aimlessly in the fields assigned
them through their official connections or their own agitation.
They do this in the most unskillful manner, placing everything
in a false position because they do not know better. Their
research would yield the proper results only if they were able
to follow the true karmic threads, as I have indicated at least
suggestively through reference to one thing and another. This
psychoanalysis is terribly unsound, especially when it stirs up
the region of the elemental. Yet it is of great importance to
investigate fine and intimate formations of the threads
reaching into the future destiny of a human being. What takes
place in a person's conscious life from waking until sleeping
reveals little of those forces that continue to work as a
karmic stream through various incarnations. What we experience
consciously during our waking life belongs largely to the
present incarnation. It is well that it is so because we should
be industrious in our present incarnation. But much that will
be carried through the portal of death as a germ formed from
the experiences of our present incarnation — the incidents
through which we have passed, the proficiencies achieved — all
this plays a significant role in our life from the moment of
falling asleep to that of waking, and this often influences our
dreams. We must learn, however, to judge the formation of
dreams in the right way. When people say that they are
reminiscences, this is often true, but they do not act in the
stream of our karma in a linear fashion. In fact, they often
act in such a way that their significance is the exact opposite
of what they are represented to be. I will give you an example
from literature in order to bring out clearly what I wish to
say.
The
aestheticist Theodor Vischer
(Note 72)
included in his novel Auch Einer a clever little story that
I will introduce here because I am speaking of vocational life in
a more comprehensive way, that is, including everything that is
connected with one's occupation. So I will give an illustration
of this. In Vischer's novel, there is a conversation between a
father and his son. They are walking together and, after the
father has questioned his son about all sorts of things, the
boy says, “Just think, the teacher told us that we should
always ask what a person's occupation is because to have a
proper occupation is important. In this way it is possible to
learn whether or not the person is respectable and whether he
has a good soul life.” “I see,” says the father.
“Yes, indeed, and after the teacher told us this I had a dream
in which I was walking by the lake over there and in my dream I asked
the lake what sort of occupation it had, and the lake answered,
‘I have the occupation of being wet.’ ” “Is
that so?” says the father.
This
is a most clever anecdote and one that reveals that the person
who thought it out had much knowledge of life. The father said,
“Is that so?” because he naturally did not wish to confuse his
son and tell him what a stupid thing the teacher had said. But
that father no doubt had his thoughts on the subject. He really
should have enlightened his son in a more intelligent way than
the teacher had done, and should have said to him, “We should
not form our judgments so superficially. It might well be that
a person would be wrong as to what a respectable occupation is
and might falsely consider a man to be disreputable; he might
also be disadvantaged in some way.” In short, the father would
have had to correct his son, but in this particular case it was
not necessary. The boy was still young, and his dream could
still work in a favorable manner on him. This dream worked in
his subconscious, but in such a way as to erase the stupidity
of the teacher from his soul. Thus, the dream took on a form in
the boy's subconscious, which is cleverer than the superficial
consciousness, in such a way that a breath of ridicule was
spread over the stupidity of the teacher. The lake said its
occupation, its vocation, was to be wet. This is something that
will work in a wholesome way in expelling the harmful
influences of such teaching. Here the dream is a reminiscence
that comes the very next night, but it also serves as a
corrective in life. In fact, the astral body often works in
this way, and we might find, together with the residue
remaining in the soul from living experiences, particularly
from wrongful instruction, that a corrective is also present in
the subconscious forces of the soul. This often produces its
influence even in the same incarnation in young people. Above
all, however, its influence is carried through the portal of
death and continues further. This constitutes a means of
self-correction in man, and we must pay attention to this
fact.
In
mentioning these things I simply wanted to indicate how much
there is in a human soul and how this forces its way from one
incarnation into the next. We have to do with a whole complex
of forces that project from one incarnation into another. Now
we must consider what relationship exists between this complex
of forces and the human being insofar as his life flows along
between birth and death. Here he or she is really an instrument
with four strings — physical, etheric, astral bodies, and ego
— on which this bow of karmic forces plays its tune. The
individual life comes into being according to the measure in
which one or the other — the etheric body, the astral body, or
the etheric together with the ego — is swept by the bow of
karma, if you allow this comparison with a violin. The tones of
these four strings of life may interplay in many ways, making
it difficult to speak of and decipher, not in mere empty
abstractions but in lithic detail, the individual life-melodies
of human beings. Thus, it is possible to decipher them only
when one is able to see how the bow of karma plays upon the
four strings of a human being. However, general points of view
come into consideration here, and to these we must turn our
attention.
If we
observe a human being in those years when, as explained in my
brochure
Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy,
the physical body and especially the etheric
body are primarily coming into development, if we observe the
development of children from approximately the seventh to the
fourteenth years, we shall note that just at this time certain
characteristics appear in them that are especially typical of
this period. Certain things consolidate themselves in a way,
although many things overlap one another so that much that
appears during the first seven years can be more thoroughly and
profoundly observed only between the seventh and the
fourteenth. It will be found that something appears in a more
definite way in the developing child that we may call, in a
sense, the inner peculiarities that are consolidated through
the character and demeanor of the corporeality. This is so,
however, only insofar as they come to expression in the posture
and gestures of the physical being, and in the entire bearing
of his life. I refer to what is there taking solid form; not
all, to be sure, but a great part of what causes a human being
to be stocky and short, or to have a taller body that causes
him or her to walk in a particular way such as with a firm step
or a dancing gait, to mention radical contrasts. As I have
said, not all, but a great part of what thus appears in the
developing child is derived from karma and is the effect of the
vocation of his preceding incarnation. Mistakes are often made
when no attention is paid to what I have just said; that is,
when, to appear clever, an effort is made to determine what a
child's vocation will be from his manner and bearing. He would
thus, however, mistakenly be given a vocation similar to that
of his previous incarnation, and this would be detrimental to
the child.
When
this period of a child's life ends, or even before that time
because, as I have said, things overlap one another, then the
astral body manifests itself in a special way by working back
on what had been developed previously. If one realizes this and
has derived it from spiritual science, it can then be observed
also on the physical plane. In accordance with other karmic
forces, the astral body works back in such a way that it
transforms what had resulted from the purely vocational karma
during the seventh to the fourteenth years. In other words, two
antagonistic forces struggle with each other in the child. One
group of forces gives him form; these come more from the
etheric body. The other group, coming more from the astral
body, works against these and in part paralyzes them, so that
he is compelled to transform what has been forced upon him by
the vocational karma of his previous incarnation. In other
words, we may say that the etheric body works in a formative
way; that is, what is manifested as the bearing of the physical
body, as one's carriage, is derived from the etheric body. The
astral body works in a transforming way. Through the interplay
of these two forces, which are really in bitter conflict with
each other, much comes to expression that has to do with the
working of vocational karma.
This
now works together with other karmic currents, however, since
we must also consider the physical body. With it, what comes
primarily into consideration during the first period of life is
how the human being has placed himself in the world by means of
his karma. Even the kind of physical body we have depends upon
this since, by reason of our karma, we place ourselves in a
certain family in a specific nation. Thus, we receive a
definitely formed body, but this is not all. Just think how
much depends on the course of our life and on the situation
into which we have entered by placing ourselves in a certain
family. By that fact alone the basis is given for much in our
life. As a matter of fact, during the first seven years in
which the physical body is especially developing, forces are
active in it — or we had better say around it — that are
derived not from our vocation and all that was related to it in
our previous incarnation, but from the way in which we have
lived with others in previous incarnations. By this I mean how
we stood in this or that relationship with this or that person
during a preceding incarnation, not in any particular part of
our life — this belongs to another field — but throughout our
entire lifetime. Our souls work on this because they are
profoundly affected by the relationships we had with human
beings, and we bear with us what evolves from this process
through the portal of death. Because of these forces, we bring
it about that we place ourselves again in a certain particular
family and situation in life. So we may say that what actually
places our physical body here, in a sense, and works through
it, also determines our situation in life. This continues to
work further, of course, through the following lives, and meets
its counterbalancing force through the ego. The ego works in a
dissolving way upon life situations, but it also works in
conflict with what is already determined in them. We may,
therefore, say: Physical body, creative of the life situation;
ego, transformative of the life situation. Through the united
action of these two in this struggle, another current of karma
takes hold of life since two forces are omnipresent in an
individual: those that tend to keep him in a particular
situation, and those that tend to disengage him from it.
That
is to say, 1 and 4 work in a primary way upon one another, as
do 2 and 3; but all four also work in the most manifold ways
upon each other. The way we enter into relationships with new
human beings during our life according to our karma depends
upon the connection of 1 and 4 with each other. But this is to
be traced back, in turn, to our relationships in earlier lives.
The way we find our relationships in our daily work, our
vocation, is connected with 2 and 3 and their reciprocal action
upon each other.
I ask
that you reflect upon all this for the present. We shall
continue this study.
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