IX
In
these lectures we are speaking of karma, of the paths of human
destiny, and in the last lecture we studied certain connections which
can throw light on the way in which destiny works through the course
of successive earthly lives. I have decided — although needless
to say it was a decision fraught with risk — to speak in detail
of such karmic connections, and today we will carry our studies a
little further.
You
will have seen that in describing karmic connections it is necessary
to mention many details in the life and character of a human being
which in the ordinary way might escape attention. In the case of
Dühring, I pointed out how a bodily peculiarity of one
incarnation became a particular trend and attitude of soul in the
next. For it is a fact that when one presses through to the spiritual
worlds in search of the true being of man, the spiritual loses its
abstractness and becomes full of force; on the other hand, the
corporeality, all that comes to expression in the bodily nature of
man, loses, one may truthfully say, its materiality; it assumes a
spiritual significance and acquires a definite place in the
interconnections of human life.
How
does destiny actually work? Destiny arises from the whole
being of man. What a man seeks in life as the result of a karmic
urge, and which then comes to him in the form of destiny, depends
upon the fact that forces of destiny, as they pass from life to life,
influence and condition the very composition of the blood in its more
delicate qualities and regulate the activity of the nerves; to their
working is due also the instinctive sensitiveness of the soul to this
or that influence. We shall not easily find our way into the
innermost nature of karmic connections if we do not pay attention —
with the eye of the soul, of course — to the particular
mannerisms of an individual. Believe me, for the study of karma it is
just as important to be interested in a gesture of the hand as in
some great spiritual talent. It is just as important to be able to
observe — from the spiritual side (astral body and ego) —
how a man sits down on a chair as to observe, let us say, how he
discharges his moral obligations. If a man is given to frowning, to
knitting his brow, this may be just as important as whether he is
virtuous or the reverse.
Much
that in ordinary life seems to be quite insignificant is of very
great importance when we begin to consider destiny and observe how it
weaves its web from life to life; while many a thing in this or the
other human being that appears to us particularly important becomes
of negligible significance,
Generally
speaking, it is not, as you know, very easy to pay real attention to
bodily peculiarities. They are there and we must learn to observe
them naturally without wounding our fellow-men — as we
certainly shall do if we observe merely for observation's sake. That
must never be. Everything must arise entirely of itself. When,
however, we have trained our powers of attention and perception,
individual peculiarities do show themselves in every human being,
peculiarities which may be accounted trifling but are of paramount
importance in connection with the study of karma. A really
penetrating observation of human beings in respect of their karmic
connections is possible only when we can discern these significant
peculiarities.
Some
decades ago, a personality whose inner, spiritual life as well as his
outer life were intensely interesting to me, was the philosopher
Eduard von Hartmann.
When
I try to study von Hartmann's life in such a way as to lead to a
perception of his karma, I have to picture. to myself what was of
value in his life somewhat in the following way. — Eduard von
Hartmann, the philosopher of the Unconscious, was really an explosive
influence in philosophy, but thinkers of the 19th century —
pardon me if I sound critical, I mean it not unkindly —
received the effects of this explosive effect in the realm of the
spirit with extraordinary apathy. Indeed, the men of the 19th century
simply cannot be wakened — and I include, of course, the 20th
century that has now begun; it is impossible to shake them out of
their phlegmatic attitude towards anything that really stirs the
world inwardly. No enthusiasm of any depth is to be found in this
phlegmatic age — phlegmatic, that is to say, in respect of
spiritual life.
In
another recent series of lectures I gave a picture of the encounter
between the Roman world and the world of the Northern Germanic
peoples at the time of the migrations, at the time when Christianity
was beginning to spread to the North from the southerly regions of
Greece and Rome. You have only to picture these physical forefathers
of Middle and Southern Europe truly, and you will get some impression
of the inner, dynamic vigour which once spurred men to action in the
world. The Germanic tribes whom the Romans encountered in the early
Christian centuries knew what it was to live in union with the
spiritual powers of nature. The attitude of these men to the
Spiritual was quite different from ours; in most of them, of course,
there was still an instinctive inclination towards the Spiritual. And
whereas we today speak for the most part phlegmatically, so that one
word simply follows another, as though speech contained nothing real,
these people poured out what they actually experienced into words and
speech. For them the surging roar of the wind was as much a physical
gesture, a manifestation of soul-and-spirit, as when a man moves his
arm. In the surge of the wind and in the flickering of the light in
the wind, they saw an expression of Wodan. And when they carried
these realities over into speech, when they clothed them in language,
they imbued their words with the character of what they
experienced. If we were to express it in modern words, saying “Wodan
weht im Winde” (Wodan weaves in the wind) — and the
words were almost similar in olden times — there the weaving
activity pours into the language itself. Think of how this direct
participation in the life and forces of nature vibrates and pulsates
in the words, how it surges into them! When a man of those times
looked up to the heavens and heard the thunder roaring and rumbling
out of the clouds, and behind this nature-gesture of the thunder
beheld the corresponding spiritual reality of being, he brought the
whole experience to expression in the words ”Donner (or
Donar) dröhnt im Donner” (Thor rumbles in
the thunder) — for thus we may hear, transposed into modern
language, words that still echo the sound of the ancient speech. And
just as these men felt the Spiritual in the workings of nature and
expressed it in their speech, so did they also express their
experience of the God who aided them when they went forth to battle,
who lived in their very limbs and in their whole bearing and action.
They held their mighty shields before them, shouting the words like a
war-cry. And the fact that spirits, whether good spirits or demons,
stormed into the words which rose and fell with powerful resonance —
all this they expressed as they rushed forward to attack, in the
words: “Ziu Zwingt Zwist.” Spoken behind the
shield, spoken with all the rage and lust of battle, that really was
like the breaking of a storm! You must imagine it shouted as it were
against the shields by thousands of voices at once. In those early
centuries, when the peoples of the South came into conflict with
those pouring down from Middle Europe, it was not the outer course of
the battle that had the decisive effect. No — it was rather
this mighty shout accompanying the attack against the Romans! For in
those early times it was this shout that filled the people coming
from the South with a terrible fear. Knees trembled before the “Ziu
Zwingt Zwist,” bellowed forth by a thousand throats behind
the shields.
And
so we are bound to say: these same men are there again in the world
today, but they have become phlegmatic! Many a man alive today
bellowed and roared in those days of yore but has now become utterly
phlegmatic, has adopted the attitude of soul typical of the 19th and
20th centuries. But if those men were to return in the mood of soul
that inspired them in the days when they yelled their war-cry, they
would feel like donning a nightcap in their present incarnation, for
they would say: This phlegmatic apathy out of which people simply
cannot be roused, belongs properly under a nightcap; bed is the place
for it, not the arena of human action!
I
say this only because I want to indicate how little inclination there
was among the men of von Hartmann's time to let themselves be roused
by an explosive force like that contained in his Philosophy of the
Unconscious. He spoke, to begin with, of how all that is
conscious in man, all his conscious thinking is of less significance
than that which works and weaves unconsciously in him, as it does in
nature, and can never be raised into consciousness. Of clairvoyant
Imagination and Intuition, Eduard von Hartmann knew nothing; he did
not know that the unconscious can penetrate into the sphere of human
cognition. And so he asserts that what is really essential in the
world and in life remains in the unconscious. This very reasoning,
however, gives him the ground for his view that the world in which we
live is the worst world imaginable. He carried his pessimism even
further than Schopenhauer and reached the conclusion that the
evolution of culture must culminate in the destruction of the whole
of earth-evolution. He would not insist, he said, that this would
happen in the immediate future, because that would not give time to
apply all that will be necessary for carrying the destruction so far
that no human civilisation — which in any case, according to
his view, is worthless — will be left. And he dreamed —
you will find it in his Philosophy of the Unconscious —
he dreamed of how men will ultimately invent a huge machine which
they will be able to lower deeply enough into the earth to produce a
terrific explosion, scattering the whole earth in fragments through
universal space.
It
is true that many people have been enthusiastic about this Philosophy
of the Unconscious. But when they come to talk about it, one does
not feel that it has taken any real hold of them. A statement like
Hartmann's can, of course, be made, and there is something powerful
in the mere fact of its utterance — but people quote it as
though they were making a casual remark, and that is the really
terrible thing.
Yes,
there was actually a philosopher who spoke in this way. And this same
philosopher went on to expound the subject of human morality on
earth. It was his work Phänomenologie des sittlichen
Bewusstseins (Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness) that
interested me most of all. He also wrote a book entitled Das
religiöse Bewusstsein der Menschheit (The Religious
Consciousness of Mankind), and another on Aesthetics — in fact
he wrote a very great deal.[With the exception of the Philosophy
of the Unconscious the works of Eduard von Hartmann mentioned in
this lecture have not been translated into English.] And it was all
extraordinarily interesting, particularly where one could not agree
with him.
In
the case of such a man one may very naturally desire to know the
connections of his destiny. One may try, perhaps, to make a deep
study of his philosophy, to glean from his philosophical thoughts
some idea of his earlier earthly lives, but all such attempts will be
fruitless. Nevertheless a personality like Eduard von Hartmann
interested me in the highest degree.
When
one has occultism in one's very bones — if I may put it so —
the impulses for looking at things in the right way arise of
themselves. And here one is confronted with the following
circumstances. — Eduard von Hartmann was a soldier, an officer.
The Kürschner Directory, besides recording his Doctorate
of Philosophy and other academic degrees, put him down until the day
of his death as “First Lieutenant.” Eduard von Hartmann
was an officer in the Prussian Army and is said to have been a very
good one.
From
a certain day onwards this fact seemed to me more significant in
connection with the threads of his destiny than all the details of
his philosophy. As for his philosophy — well, one is inclined
to accept certain things and reject others. But there is nothing much
in that; everyone who knows a little philosophy can do the same and
the result will not amount to anything very striking. But now let us
ask ourselves: How comes it that a Prussian officer, who was a good
officer, who took very little interest in philosophy while he was in
the Army but was much more concerned with sword-exercises — how
comes it that such a man turns into a representative philosopher of
his age?
It
was due to the fact that an illness left him with an affliction of
the knee from which he suffered for the rest of his life, and he was
invalided out of the Army on a pension. At times he was quite unable
to walk and was obliged to recline with his legs stretched out on a
sofa. And then, after having imbibed contemporary scholarship, he
wrote one philosophical work after another. Eduard von Hartmann's
philosophical writings are a whole library in themselves; his output
was prodigious.
Now
when I came to study this personality, it dawned upon me one day that
there was very special importance in the onset of this knee
affliction. The fact that at a certain age the man began to suffer
from an affliction of the knee interested me much more than his
transcendental realism, or even than his famous saying: “First
there was the religion of the Father, then the religion of the Son,
and in the future there will come the religion of the Spirit.”
Such sayings show ability and astuteness of mind, but they were to be
met with at every street comer, so to say, in the 19th century. But
for a man to become a philosopher through contracting, while he was a
Lieutenant, an infirmity of the knee — that is a most
significant fact. Moreover until we can go back to such things and
not allow ourselves to be dazzled by what appears to be the most
striking feature in a man's life, we shall not be able to discover
the karmic connections.
When
I was able to bring the affliction of the knee into its right
relation with the whole personality, I began to perceive how destiny
manifested in the life of this man. And then I could go back. It was
not by starting from the head of Eduard von Hartmann, but from the
knee, that I found the way to his earlier incarnations. What seems to
be of most importance in the life between birth and death does not,
as a rule, afford the most reliable starting-point.
And
now, what is the connection? Man as he stands before us as a physical
being in earthly life, is a threefold being. He has his
nerves-and-senses organism, which is concentrated mainly in the head
but at the same time extends over the whole body. He has his rhythmic
organisation, which manifests particularly clearly in the rhythm of
the breath and of the circulation of the blood, but again extends
over the whole human being and comes to expression every where within
him. And thirdly, he has his motor organisation which is connected
with the limbs, with the functioning of metabolism, with the
reconstruction of the substances of the body and so forth. Man is a
threefold being.
And
then in regard to the whole constitution of life, we come to realise
that on the journey through births and deaths, what we are accustomed
to consider in earthly life as the most important part of man, namely
the head, becomes of comparatively little importance shortly after
death. The head that in the physical world is the most essentially
human part of man, really expends itself in physical existence;
whereas the rest of the organism — which, physically speaking,
is subordinate — is of higher importance in the spiritual
world. In his head, man is most of all physical and least of all
spiritual. In the other members of his organism, in the rhythmic
organisation and in the limbs-organisation, he is more spiritual. He
is most spiritual of all in his motor organisation, in the activity
of his limbs.
Now
gifts and talents belonging to the head are lost comparatively soon
after death. On the other hand, the soul-and-spirit which, in the
realm of the unconscious, belongs to the lower part of the human
organism, assumes great importance between death and a new birth. But
whereas, speaking generally, the organism of man apart from the head
becomes, in respect of its spiritual form, its spiritual content, the
head of the next incarnation, it is also true that what is of the
nature of will in the head, works especially into the limbs in
the next incarnation. A man who is lazy in his thinking in one
incarnation will most certainly be no fast runner in the next: the
laziness of thinking becomes slowness of limb; and, vice versa,
slowness of limb in the present incarnation comes to expression in
sluggish, lazy thinking in the next.
Thus
a metamorphosis, an interchange, takes place between the three
members of the human being in passing over from one incarnation to
another.
What
I am telling you here is not put forward as a theory; it is based on
the very facts of life. And in the case of Eduard von Hartmann, as
soon as I turned my attention to the affliction of the knee, I was
guided to his earlier incarnation, during which at a certain moment
in his life he had a kind of sunstroke. In respect of destiny, this
sunstroke was the cause that led in the next earthly life, through
metamorphosis, to an infirmity of the knee — the sunstroke
being, as you will realise, an affliction of the head. One day
he was no longer able to think. He had a kind of paralysis of the
brain, and this came to expression in the next incarnation as an
affliction of one of the limbs. Now the destiny that led to paralysis
of the brain was due to the following circumstances. — This
individuality was one of those who went to the East with the Crusades
and fought over in Asia against the Turks and Asiatic peoples,
acquiring, however, a tremendous admiration for the latter. The
Crusaders encountered very much that was great and sublime in the
East, and the individuality of whom we are speaking absorbed it all
with deep admiration. And now he came across a man concerning whom he
felt instinctively that he had had something to do with him in a
still earlier life. The account, so to speak, that had now to be
settled between this and the still earlier incarnation, was a moral
account. The metamorphosis of the sunstroke in one incarnation into
the affliction of the knee in the next appears at first to be a
purely physical matter, but when it is a question of destiny we are
invariably led back to something that appertains to the moral life.
This individuality bore with him from a still earlier incarnation the
impulse to wage a fierce battle with the man whom he now encountered
and in the heat of the blazing sun he set about persecuting his
opponent. The persecution was unjust, and it recoiled upon the
persecutor himself inasmuch as his brain was paralysed by the heat of
the sun. What was to be brought to an issue in this fight originated
in a still earlier incarnation when this individuality had been
brilliantly, outstandingly clever. The opponent whom he encountered
during the Crusades had suffered injury and embarrassment in an
earlier incarnation at the hands of this brilliant individuality. As
you see, it all leads back to the moral life, for the forces in play
originated in the earlier incarnation.
Thus
we have three consecutive incarnations of an individuality. A
remarkably clever and able personality in very ancient times —
that is one incarnation. Following that, a Crusader, who at a certain
time in his life gets paralysis of the brain, brought about as the
result of a wrong committed by his cleverness which had, however, in
the next incarnation, caused him to acquire tremendous admiration for
oriental civilisation. Third incarnation: a Prussian officer who is
obliged to retire owing to an affliction of the knee, does not know
what to do with his time, goes in for philosophy and writes a most
impressive book, a perfect product of the civilisation of the second
half of the 19th century: The Philosophy of the Unconscious.
Once
this connection of lives is perceived, things that were previously
obscure become quite clear. When I was reading Hartmann while I was
still young, without knowing anything about these connections, I
always had the feeling: Yes, this is extremely clever! But when I had
read one page I used to think: There is something brilliantly clever
here, but the cleverness is not on this particular page! I always
felt I must turn the page and look at the previous one to see if the
cleverness were there. In short, the cleverness in this writing was
not of today, but of yesterday, or of the day before yesterday.
Light
came to me for the first time when I perceived: the outstanding
cleverness really lies two incarnations ago and is working on from
there. Great illumination is shed upon the whole of this Hartmann
literature — which, as I said, is a library in itself —
as soon as one realises that the cleverness in it is working on from
a much earlier incarnation.
And
when one came to know Eduard von Hartmann personally and was talking
with him, one also felt: another man is there behind him, but even he
is not the one who is talking; behind him again is a third, and it is
the third who is really the source of the inspirations. For listening
to Hartmann was often enough to drive one to despair! There was an
officer, talking philosophy without enthusiasm, apathetically,
speaking with a certain crudity of the loftiest truths. One could see
how things really were only when one knew: the cleverness behind what
he says is that of two incarnations ago.
It
may seem disrespectful to relate such things, but no disrespect
whatever is intended. Moreover I am convinced that it can be of great
value for any human being to know of such connections and apply them
to his own life, even if it means that he has to say to himself:
Three incarnations ago I was an out-and-out scoundrel! It can be of
immense benefit to life when a man can say to himself: In one
incarnation or another, perhaps not only in one, I was a thoroughly
bad lot! In speaking of such things, just as in other circumstances
present company is always excepted, so here present incarnations are
excepted!
I
was also intensely interested in the connections of destiny of a man
with whom my own life brought me into contact, namely Friedrich
Nietzsche. I have studied the problem of Nietzsche in all its
aspects and, as you know, have written and spoken a great deal about
him.
His
was indeed a strange and remarkable destiny. I saw him only once
during his life. It was in Naumburg, in the nineties of last century,
when his mind was already seriously deranged. In the afternoon, about
half-past-two, his sister took me into his room. He lay on the couch,
listless and unresponsive, with eyes unable to see that someone was
standing by him: He lay there with the remarkable, beautifully formed
brow that made such a striking impression upon one. Although the eyes
were expressionless, one nevertheless had the feeling: This is not a
case of insanity, but rather of a man who has been working
spiritually the whole morning with great intensity of soul, has had
his mid-day meal and is now lying at rest, pondering, half dreamily
pondering on what his soul worked out in the morning. Spiritually
seen, there were present only a physical body and an etheric body,
especially in respect of the upper parts of the organism, for the
being of soul-and-spirit was already outside, attached to the body as
it were by a stubborn thread only. In reality a kind of death had
already set in, but a death that could not be complete because the
physical organisation was so healthy. The astral body and the ego
that would fain escape were still held by the extraordinarily healthy
metabolic and rhythmic organisations, while a completely ruined
nerves-and-senses system was no longer able to hold the astral body
and the ego. So one had the wonderful impression that the true
Nietzsche was hovering above the head. There he was. And down below
was something that from the vantage-point of the soul might well have
been a corpse, and was only not a corpse because it still held on
with might and main to the soul — but only in respect of the
lower parts of the organism — because of the extraordinarily
healthy metabolic and rhythmic organisation.
Such
a spectacle may well make one attentive to the connections of
destiny. In this case, at any rate, quite a different light was
thrown upon them. Here one could not start from a suffering limb or
the like, but one was led to look at the spirituality of Friedrich
Nietzsche in its totality.
There
are three strongly marked and distinct periods in Nietzsche's life.
The first period begins when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy out of
the Spirit of Music while he was still quite young, inspired by
the thought of music springing from Greek tragedy which had itself
been born from music. Then, in the same strain, he wrote the four
following works: David Friedrich Strauss; Confessor and Author,
Schopenhauer as Educator, Thoughts out of Season, Richard Wagner in
Bayreuth. This was in the year 1876. (The Birth of Tragedy
was written in 1871). Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is a hymn of
praise to Richard Wagner, actually perhaps the best thing that has
been written by any admirer of Wagner.
Then
a second period begins. Nietzsche writes his books, Human, All-too
Human, in two volumes, the work entitled Dawn and thirdly,
The Joyful Wisdom.
In
the early writings, up to the year 1876, Nietzsche was in the highest
sense of the word an idealist. In the second epoch of his life he
bids farewell to idealism in every shape and form; he makes fun of
ideals; he convinces himself that if men set themselves ideals, this
is due to weakness. When a man can do nothing in life, he says: Life
is not worth any thing, one must hunt for an ideal. — And so
Nietzsche knocks down ideals one by one, puts them to the test, and
conceives the manifestations of the Divine in nature as something
“all-too-human,” something paltry and petty. Here we have
Nietzsche the disciple of Voltaire, to whom he dedicates one of his
writings. Nietzsche is here the rationalist, the intellectualist. And
this phase lasts until about the year 1882 or 1883. Then begins the
final epoch of his life, when he unfolds ideas like that of the
Eternal Recurrence and presents the figure of Zarathustra as a human
ideal. He writes Thus spake Zarathustra in the style of a
hymn.
Then
he takes out again the notes he had once made on Wagner, and here we
find something very remarkable! If one follows Nietzsche's way of
working, it does indeed seem strange. Read his work Richard Wagner
in Bayreuth. — It is a grand, enraptured hymn of praise.
And now, in the last epoch of his life, comes the book The Case of
Wagner, in which everything that can possibly be said against
Wagner is set down!
If
one is content with trivialities, one will simply say: Nietzsche has
changed sides, he has altered his views. But those who are really
familiar with Nietzsche's manuscripts will not speak in this way. In
point of fact, when Nietzsche had written a few pages in the form of
a hymn of praise to Wagner, he then proceeded to write down as well
everything he could against what he himself had said! Then he wrote
another hymn of praise, and then again he wrote in the reverse sense!
The whole of The Case of Wagner was actually written in 1876,
only Nietzsche put it aside, discarded it, and printed only the hymn
of praise. And all that he did later on was to take his old drafts
and interpolate a few caustic passages.
In
this last period of his life the urge came to him to carry through an
attack which in the first epoch he had abandoned. In all probability,
if the manuscript he put aside as being out of keeping with his
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth had been destroyed by fire, we
should never have had The Case of Wagner at all.
If
you study these three periods in Nietzsche's life you will find that
all show evidence of a uniform trend. Even the last book, the last
published writing at any rate, The Twilight of Idols, which
shows entirely his other side — even this last book bears
something of the fundamental character of Nietzsche's spiritual life.
In old age, however, when this work was composed, he becomes
imaginative, writing in a graphic, vividly descriptive style. For
example, he wants to characterise Michelet, the French writer. He
lights on a very apt expression when he speaks of him as having the
kind of enthusiasm that takes off its coat. This is a marvelously apt
description of one aspect of Michelet. Other similar utterances —
graphic and imaginative — are also to be found in The
Twilight of Idols.
If
you once have this tragic, deeply moving picture before you of the
individuality hovering above the body of Nietzsche, you will be
compelled to say of his writings that the impression they make is as
though Nietzsche were never fully present in his body while he was
writing down his sentences. He used to write, you know, sometimes
sitting but more often while walking, especially while going for long
tramps. It is as though he had always been a little outside his body.
You will have this impression most strongly of all in the case of
certain passages in the fourth part of Thus Spake Zarathustra,
of which you will feel that they could have been written only when
the body no longer had control, when the soul was outside the body.
One
feels that when Nietzsche is being spiritually creative, he always
leaves his body behind. And this same tendency can be perceived, too,
in his habits. He was particularly fond of taking chloral in order to
induce a mood that strives to get away from the body, a mood of
aloofness from the body. This tendency was of course due to the fact
that the body was in many respects ailing; for example, Nietzsche
suffered from constant and always very prolonged headaches, and so
on.
All
these things give a uniform picture of Nietzsche in this incarnation
at the end of the 19th century, an incarnation which finally
culminated in insanity, so that he no longer knew who he was. There
are letters addressed to George Brandes signed “The Crucified
One” — indicating that Nietzsche regards himself as the
Crucified One; and at another time he looks at himself as at a man
who is actually present outside him, thinks that he is a God walking
by the River Po, and signs himself “Dionysos.” This
separation from the body while spiritual work is going on reveals
itself as something that is peculiarly characteristic of this
personality, characteristic, that is to say, of this particular
incarnation.
If
we ponder this inwardly, with Imagination, then we are led back to an
incarnation lying not so very long ago. It is characteristic of many
such representative personalities that their previous incarnations do
not lie in the distant past but in the comparatively near past, even,
maybe, in quite recent times.
We
come to a life where this individuality was a Franciscan, a
Franciscan ascetic who inflicted intense self-torture on his body.
Now we have the key to the riddle. The gaze falls upon a man in the
characteristic Franciscan habit, lying for hours at a time in front
of the altar, praying until his knees are bruised and sore,
beseeching grace, mortifying his flesh with severest penances —
with the result that through the self-inflicted pain he knits himself
very strongly with his physical body. Pain makes one intensely aware
of the physical body because the astral body yearns after the body
that is in pain, wants to penetrate it through and through. The
effect of this concentration upon making the body fit for salvation
in the one incarnation was that, in the next, the soul had no desire
to be in the body at all.
Such
are the connections of destiny in certain typical cases. It can
certainly be said that they are not what one would have expected! In
the matter of successive earthly lives, speculation is impermissible
and generally leads to false conclusions. But when we do come upon
the truth, marvellous enlightenment is shed upon life.
Because
studies of this kind can help us to look at karma in the right way, I
have not been afraid — although such a course has its dangers —
to give you certain concrete examples of karmic connections which
can, I think, throw a great deal of light upon the nature of human
karma, of human destiny.
|