XII
Yesterday
I gave you pictures of two or three personalities. In order to allow
for the possibility of proof and confirmation, at least as far as
external details are concerned, it is necessary to choose fairly
well-known personalities and in describing them to you I have pointed
in each case to characteristic qualities which can afford clues for
the spiritual scientific investigator and help him to follow up the
karmic relationships. This time I have chosen subjects which will
also enable me to deal with a problem that has been put to me by
members of our Society. Simply stated, it is as follows. Constantly,
on every suitable occasion, reference is made — and of course
correctly — to the fact that in very early times there were
Initiates possessed of a lofty wisdom and at a high stage of
development, and the question arises: If human beings pass through
repeated earth-lives, where are these highly-initiated personalities?
Where are they today? Are they to be found among the human beings who
have been led to reincarnation at the present time? I have
accordingly chosen examples which will enable me to deal with this
very problem.
I
gave you, as far as was necessary, a picture of the hero of the
freedom of Italy, Garibaldi; and if you take what I said yesterday
and add to it all that is well-known to you about this personality —
a whole wealth of information is available about him — I think
you will still find a very great deal in Garibaldi that is puzzling
and that opens up significant questions.
Take
two events of his life which amused you yesterday. — He became
acquainted through a telescope with the girl who was to be his
life-companion for many years, and he learnt of his own
death-sentence when reading his name for the first time in print.
There is still another very striking event in his life. The
life-companion whom he found in the way I have described, and who
stood at his side with such heroism, was the sharer of his life for
many years. He certainly managed to see something very good through
his telescope! Later, she died, leaving him alone, and he married a
second time, this time not through a telescope — not even a
Garibaldi is likely to do such a thing more than once! — this
time he married, shall I say, in a perfectly conventional bourgeois
manner. But for Garibaldi the marriage lasted no longer than one day.
So you see, there is this other very striking fact in Garibaldi's
relations with the ordinary bourgeois conditions of this world.
And
now we come to something else of importance. The things I am
describing to you come, as it were, with a sudden jerk to one
accustomed to occult researches of this kind; they are clues that
enable his vision to penetrate right into an earlier life or into a
number of earlier lives. And in Garibaldi's life there is still
another circumstance which raises a formidable problem.
Garibaldi,
you know, was a Republican in his very bones; he was a Republican
through and through. I made that abundantly clear in yesterday's
lecture. And yet in all his plans for the liberation of Italy he
never set out to make Italy into a Republic, but rather into
an Empire under Victor Emanuel. That is an astonishing fact.
When one looks at Garibaldi's whole life and character and then
considers this fact, it really does astonish one.
There
we have on the one hand Victor Emmanuel, who could of course reign as
king only over a liberated Italy. And we have on the other hand
Mazzini — also deeply united in friendship with Garibaldi —
who, as you know, stood for a long time at the head of what was
intended to be an Italian Republic, for he was willing to come
forward only as the founder of an Italian Republic. The karmic
relationships of Garibaldi will never be solved unless we take note
here of a special set of circumstances.
In
the course of a few years — Garibaldi, you know, was born at
Nice in 1807 — there were born within an area of a
comparatively few square miles, four men who had a significant
connection with one another in the wider course of European
circumstances. In Nice, at the beginning of the 19th century,
Garibaldi was born; in Genoa, not far away, Mazzini; in Turin, again
not far, away, Cavour; and from the House of Savoy, once more at no
great distance, Victor Emanuel. These four men are all quite near to
one another in respect of the times and places of their births. And
it is these four men together who, if not agreeing in thought, if not
even acting always in mutual agreement, nevertheless established the
country which became modern Italy.
You
can see how the very way in which these four personalities are
brought together in history suggests that they have, not only for
themselves, but for the world, a common destiny. The most significant
among them is, without doubt, Garibaldi himself. Taking into
consideration all human conditions and relationships, we cannot but
agree that he is by far the most significant figure of the four.
Garibaldi's mentality, however, expresses itself in an elemental way.
Mazzini's mentality is that of a learned philosopher; Cavour's that
of a learned lawyer. And as for Victor Emmanuel's mentality ... well,
there is no doubt about it, the most important among them all is
Garibaldi. He possesses a quality of mind and spirit that expresses
itself with elemental force, so that one cannot remain indifferent
towards it. One cannot remain indifferent, for one simply doesn't
know whence these traits come ... as long as they are looked at from
the standpoint of the personal psychology of a single earth-life.
Now
I come back to the question: Where are the earlier Initiates? For
certainly it will be said that they are not to be found. But, my dear
friends — I shall have to say something paradoxical here! —
if it were possible for a number of human beings to be born today at
the age of seventeen or eighteen, so that when they descended from
the spiritual world they would in some way or other find and enter
seventeen- or eighteen-year-old bodies, or if at least human beings
could in some way be spared from going to school (as schools are
constituted today), then you would find that those who were once
Initiates would be able to appear in the human being of the present
day. But just as little as it is possible, under the conditions
obtaining on earth today, for an Initiate, when he needs bread, to
nourish himself from a piece of ice, just as little is it possible
for the wisdom of an older time to manifest directly, in the
form that you would expect, in a body that has received education —
in the present-day accepted sense of the word — up to his
seventeenth or eighteenth year. Nowhere in the world is this
possible; at all events, nowhere in the civilised world. We have here
to take account of things that lie altogether beyond the outlook of
the educated men of modern times.
When,
as is the custom today, a child is obliged as early as the sixth or
seventh year to learn to read and write, it is torture for the soul
that wants to develop and unfold in accordance with its own nature. I
can only repeat what I have already told you in my autobiography,
that I owe the removal of many hindrances to the circumstance that
when I was twelve years old I was still unable to write properly. For
the capacity of being able to write, in the way that is demanded
today, kills certain qualities in the human being.
It
is necessary to say such a thing, paradoxical though it may sound,
for it is the truth. There is no help for it — it is a fact.
Hence it is that a highly evolved individual can be recognised in his
reincarnation only if one looks at manifestations of human nature
which are not directly apparent in a man, if he has gone
through a modern education, but reveal themselves, so to speak,
behind him. We have in Garibaldi a most striking example of
this. What did civilised men, including Cavour, or at all events the
followers of Cavour, think of Garibaldi? They regarded him as a
madcap with whom it was useless to discuss anything in a sensible
manner. That is a point of which we must take note; for there was
much in his arguments and in his whole way of speaking that was bound
to appear illogical, to say the least, to people enamoured of modern
civilisation. Very often the things he says simply do not hold
together. But when we are able to see behind a personality, and can
look at that which in an earlier earth-life was able to enter into
the body, but in this earth-life, because modern civilisation
makes the bodies unfit, was not able to enter into the body —
then we can begin to have an idea of what such a personality really
is. Otherwise we are right off the track, for what is of most
importance in such a personality lies right behind the things he can
reveal externally. A good conventional man of the world, who simply
expresses himself in the way he has learned to do, and in whom we see
merely a reflection of the teaching and education he has received at
school and elsewhere — such a man you can “photograph”
in his moral and spiritual nature. He is there. A man, however, who
comes over from other times bearing a soul filled with great and
far-reaching wisdom, so that the soul cannot express itself in the
body, can never be estimated with the means afforded by modern
civilisation by what he does in the body. Above all, Garibaldi cannot
be judged in that way. In his case it is rather like having to do —
I am speaking metaphorically — with spiritualistic pictures,
where a phantom becomes visible behind. With a personality like
Garibaldi, you see him first as he is according to conventional
standards, and behind you see something spiritual, a spirit-portrait,
as it were, of that which in this incarnation cannot enter fully into
the body.
When
we take all this into consideration, and particularly if we meditate
upon the special facts I have mentioned, then our vision is indeed
led back from Garibaldi to a true Initiate who to all appearance
lives out his Garibaldi-life in a quite different way, because he is
unable to come down into his body.
If
you consider the peculiar characteristics of Garibaldi's life to
which I drew your attention, you will not find this so astonishing
after all. A man must surely be somewhat of a stranger to earthly
conventions if he finds his way into family relations through a
telescope! Such a happening is certainly not usual, and it was not
the only one in Garibaldi's life. In the characteristic style of his
life there is something that points right away from ordinary
alignment with bourgeois conventions.
Thus,
in the case of Garibaldi, we are led back to an Initiate-life, and it
was a life in those Mysteries which I described to you some months
ago as proceeding from Ireland. Garibaldi, however, is to be found in
an offshoot of those Mysteries at no great distance from here, in
Alsace. There we find him, as an Initiate of a certain degree. And it
is moreover fairly certain that between this incarnation in the 9th
century, A.D., and his
last incarnation in the 19th century, there was no further
incarnation, but a long sojourn in the spiritual world. There you
have the secret of this personality. He received all that I have
described to you as the wisdom of Hibernia, and he received it at a
very high stage of Initiation. He was within the places of the
Mysteries in Ireland, and was actually the leader of the colony that
came over later into Europe.
It
goes without saying that just as an object reflected in a mirror
becomes different in its reflected form, so all the wisdom of that
time and place, embracing as it did the physical world and the
spiritual world above it — all the wisdom in which an Initiate
of those times participated, as I described it to you a few months
ago — had to express itself during the 19th century in
accordance with the civilisation of that period. You must accustom
yourselves, when you find a philosopher in bygone times, or when you
find a poet or an artist, not to look for the same
individuality in the present epoch as a philosopher, poet or artist.
The individuality passes from earth-life to earth-life, but the way
in which he is able to live out his life depends upon what is
possible in a particular epoch. Let me here insert an instance that
will make this plain.
We
will take another very well-known personality, Ernst Haeckel.
Ernst Haeckel is famous as an enthusiastic adherent of a certain
materialistic Monism — enthusiastic, one may say, to the point
of fanaticism. He is well enough known to you; I need not give you
any description of Haeckel. Now when we are led back from this
personality to a former incarnation, we come to Pope Gregory VII, the
monk Hildebrand, who afterwards became Pope Gregory VII.
I
have chosen this instance so that you may see how differently the
same individuality may express himself externally, in accordance with
the cultural “climate” of the period. One would certainly
not expect to look for the reincarnation of Pope Gregory VII in the
19th century representative of materialistic Monism.
The
things that a man brings to manifestation on the physical plane, with
the means afforded by external civilisation, are far less important
to the spiritual world than one is inclined to suppose. Behind the
personalities of the monk Hildebrand and Haeckel lies something
wherein they are alike and this is of much greater account than the
differences between them. One of them fights to the utmost to enhance
the power of Roman Catholicism, and the other fights to the utmost
against Roman Catholicism, but for the spiritual world it makes
little difference. These things, fundamentally speaking, are
important for the physical world only; they are quite different from
the underlying elements in human nature which count in the spiritual
world. And so we need not be astonished, my dear friends, if we have
to see in Garibaldi an Initiate from an earlier age, an Initiate, as
I said, of the 9th century. In the 19th century this comes to
expression in the only way possible during that century. You will
agree that for the whole way in which a man takes his place in the
world, his temperament, his qualities of character are of importance.
But if everything that made up Garibaldi's soul in an earlier
incarnation had emerged in the 19th century, together with his
temperament, he would most certainly have been regarded as a lunatic
by the men of the 19th century. He would have been considered quite
mad. As much of him as could emerge — that, externally, was
Garibaldi.
And
now, once we have been led in a certain direction, explanations light
up for other karmic connections. The other three men of whom I have
spoken, who were brought together again with Garibaldi in one region
and approximately in the same decade, had been his pupils in that
distant time — mark well, his pupils, assembled from
distant parts of the earth, one from far away in the North, another
from far away in the East and the third from far away in the West,
called from all corners of the earth to be his pupils.
Now
in the Irish Mysteries a definite obligation went with a certain
degree of Initiation. It consisted in this, that the Initiate was
bound to help on his pupils in all future earth-lives; he must not
desert them. When, therefore, owing to their special karmic
connections they make their appearance again on earth at the same
time as their teacher, this means that he must experience the course
of destiny with them; their karma has to be brought into reckoning
with his own. If Garibaldi had not, at an earlier time, been
associated as teacher with the individuality who came in Victor
Emmanuel, then he would have been in very deed a Republican and would
have founded the Republic of Italy. But behind all abstract
principles are actual human lives passing from one earth-existence to
another. Behind lies the duty of the Initiate of old towards his
pupils. Hence the contradiction, for in accordance with the
conceptions and ideas facing Garibaldi in the 19th century, he became
quite naturally a Republican. What else should he have been? I have
known a number of Republicans who were faithful servants of royalty.
Inwardly they were Republicans, for the simple reason that in a
certain period of the 19th century — it is long past now, at
the time when I was a boy — everyone who counted himself an
intelligent person was a Republican. People said: Of course we are
Republicans, only we must not show it in the outer world. Inwardly,
however, they were Republicans. So, of course, was Garibaldi, except
that he did not show it in the outer world. He did not carry his
republicanism into effect and those who were inspired by him could
not understand this. Why was it? Because, as I have explained to you,
he could not desert Victor Emmanuel, who was karmically united with
him. He was obliged to help him on; and this was the only way he
could do it.
Similarly
the others, Cavour and Mazzini, were karmically united with
Garibaldi, and he was able to do for them only as much as their
capacities allowed. Whatever could proceed from all four of them,
that alone Garibaldi was able to bring to fulfilment. He could not go
his own way independently.
From
this deeply significant fact, my dear friends, you can see that many
things in life can be explained only from out of an occult
background.
Have
you not often experienced how at some moment of his life a person
does something that is quite incomprehensible to you? You would not
have expected it of him; you cannot possibly explain it from his
character. You feel that if he were to follow his personal character,
he would do something different. And you may be right. But there is
another man living near him, with whom he is karmically united, as in
Garibaldi's case. Why does he act as he does? It is really only
against an occult background. that life becomes explicable. And so,
in the case of Garibaldi, for example, we can truly say that we are
led back to the Hibernian Mysteries — it sounds like a paradox
but it is a fact. If we turn our gaze to the spiritual, we find that
what meets us in external life on earth is, in many of its aspects,
Maya. Many people with whom you are constantly together in ordinary
life — if you could tell them what you are able to learn about
them by looking through to the individuality behind — would be
exceedingly astonished, they would be utterly bewildered. For what a
man expresses outwardly — and this is particularly so in the
present age, for the reasons I have given — is the merest
fraction of what he really is, in terms of his former earth-lives.
Many secrets are hidden in the things of which I am now speaking.
And
now let us take the second personality of whom I gave you yesterday a
brief characterisation — Lessing, who at the end of his life
came forward with his pronouncement on repeated earth-lives. In his
case we are led very far back, right back into Greek antiquity, when
the ancient Mysteries of Greece were in their prime. Lessing was an
Initiate in these Mysteries. And with him, too, we find that in the
18th century he was unable, so to speak, to come right down into his
body. In the 13th century, as a repetition of his life in ancient
Greece, we find an incarnation when he was a member of the Dominican
Order, a distinguished Schoolman with subtle and penetrating
concepts; and then, in the 18th century, he became the journalist par
excellence of Middle Europe.
Take
that drama of tolerance, Nathan the Wise, or such a book as
The Dramatic Art of Hamburg — read for yourselves
certain chapters of that book and then read The Education of the
Human Race. These writings are comprehensible only on the
assumption that all three incarnations of this personality have
worked upon them: the Greek Initiate of olden times (read Lessing's
treatise, How the men of old pictured death); the Schoolman,
versed in medieval Aristotelianism; and lastly he who, with all this
resting in his soul, found his way into the civilisation of the 18th
century. Then, if you will keep in mind what I have just told you, a
certain fact will become clear, a most striking and surprising fact.
It
is remarkable how Lessing's life gives one the impression of a
continual search. He himself brought this characteristic of
his spiritual nature to expression when he uttered the famous saying,
which has been quoted again and again (quoted, however, with very
little understanding, by people who have no particular desire to
strive after anything at all): “If God held in his right hand
the whole full Truth, and in his left the everlasting striving after
Truth, I would fall down before Him and say, ‘Father, give me
what thou hast in thy left hand’.” A Lessing could say
that. But when a mere pedant says it after him, it is of course
intolerable. Lessing's whole life was indeed a search, an intense
search. This comes to expression again and again in his works, and if
we were honest with ourselves we should have to admit that many of
Lessing's utterances are clumsy on this account, precisely those that
are the most full of genius. People do not dare to admit that they
stumble over them, because in history and literature Lessing is
accounted a great man. In truth, however, his sayings often trip one
up, so to speak; or, rather, they give one a feeling of being
stabbed. You must, of course, become acquainted with Lessing himself
to understand this. If you take up the book by Erich Schmidt, the two
volumes on Lessing, then even when Erich Schmidt quotes him word for
word you will not feel as though his utterances impaled you.
Not at all! They may be the utterances of Lessing as far as the sound
of the words goes, but what is written in the book before and after
them takes away their edge.
It
was not until the end of his earthly life that this seeker came to
write The Education of the Human Race, which closes with the
idea of repeated earth-lives. What is the explanation?
My
dear friends, the way to understand this fact is through another fact
I once mentioned. In the quarterly periodical [Das Reich. The
articles are contained in the volume of the Complete Edition of
Rudolf Steiner's works entitled,
Philosophie und Anthroposophie.
(Bibliographical No. 35.)] now discontinued, edited by our friend
Bernus, I wrote an article on The Chymical Wedding of Christian
Rosenkreutz and I drew attention to the fact that it was written
down by a boy of seventeen or eighteen. The boy himself understood
not a word of it. We have external proof of that. He wrote down this
Chymical Wedding from beginning to end. The last page is not
extant, but he wrote down the whole of the Chymical Wedding,
without understanding a word of it. If he had understood it, he would
have been bound to retain the understanding in later years. The boy,
however, became a pastor, a good, honest pastor of the
Württemberg-Swabian type, who wrote exhortations and theological
treatises which are distinctly below the average, and very far indeed
from having anything to do with the content of the Chymical
Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. Life itself proves to us that
it was not the Swabian pastor-to-be who wrote this Chymical
Wedding out of his own soul. It is an inspired writing
throughout.
So
we may not always have to do with a man's own personality; there may
be times when a spirit expresses itself through him. But there is a
difference between the good Swabian pastor Valentin Andreae, who
wrote those conventional theological treatises, and Lessing. Had
Lessing been Valentin Andreae, merely transported into the 18th
century, he might perhaps have written in his youth a beautiful
treatise on the Education of the Human Race, bringing in the idea of
repeated earth-lives. But he was not Valentin Andreae; he was
Lessing, Lessing who had no visions, who even — so it is said —
had no dreams. He banished the inspirer — unconsciously of
course. If the inspirer had wanted to take possession of him in his
youth, Lessing would have said: Go away, I have nothing to do with
you. He followed the path that was normal for an educated man in the
18th century. And so it was only in extreme old age that he was
mature enough to understand what had been in him throughout his life.
It was with him as it would have been with Valentin Andreae if the
latter had also banished the inspirer, had written no trivial,
edifying sermons and theological treatises, but had waited until he
reached a grey old age and had then written the Chymical Marriage
of Christian Rosenkreutz consciously.
Such
are the links that unite successive earth-lives. And the day must
come when this will be clearly understood. If we take a single
earth-life, whether it be that of Goethe, or Lessing or Herbert
Spencer or Shakespeare or Darwin, and look at what emerges from that
life alone, it is just as though we were to pluck off a flower
from a plant and imagine that it can exist by itself. A single life
on earth is not comprehensible by itself; the explanation for it must
be sought on the basis of repeated earth-lives.
And
now we shall find it most interesting to study the two personalities
of whom I spoke yesterday, Lord Byron and my geometry teacher. (You
will pardon me if I become personal here.) They had in common only
the construction of the foot, but this is a feature that specially
repays attention. If one follows it up in an occult sense, it leads
one to a peculiar condition of the head in an earlier
earth-life. I have shown you a similar connection in the case of
Eduard von Hartmann. — There is no getting over it. One can do
no other than simply relate such things, as vision reveals them to
one. No external, logical proofs, no proofs in the ordinary
sense, can be given for these things. — When we follow the
lives of these two men, it appears to us as though the lives they led
in the 19th century had been shifted out of place. For we find, first
of all, a contradiction of something mentioned here a few weeks ago —
that in the course of certain cycles of time, those who were once
contemporaries will incarnate again as contemporaries. Everything, of
course, has its exceptions. In the spiritual world there are rules,
but there are no rigid schemes. Everything is individual.
Thus
in the case of these two personalities one is led back to a period
when their lives ran together. I would never have found Byron in this
earlier life if I had not found this geometry teacher of mine at his
side. Byron was a genius. My geometry teacher was not even a genius
in his own way. He was not a genius at all, but he was an excellent
geometrician, quite the best I have ever come across, because he was
a genuine geometrician and nothing else. In the case of a painter or
a musician, you know that you are dealing with a one-sided man. For
as a matter of fact, people are significant only when they are
one-sided. As a rule, however, a geometrician in our time is not
one-sided. A geometrician knows the whole of mathematics; when he
constructs something in geometry, he always knows how to state the
equations for it. He knows the mathematical, calculating side of it
all. But this geometry teacher, though an excellent geometrician, was
properly speaking no mathematician at all. He understood, for
example, nothing whatever of analytical geometry. He knew nothing of
the geometry that has to do with calculating and equations; in that
respect he sometimes did the most childish things. On one occasion it
was really very humorous. The man was so entirely a constructive
geometrician and nothing else that he arrived by means of
constructive geometry at the fact that the circle is the locus of the
constant quotient. He found it out by construction, and since no one
had found it before by construction, he regarded himself as its
discoverer. We boys, who were as yet unsophisticated and had a good
store of high spirits left in us, knew that in our book of analytical
geometry it is shown how one sets up such and such an equation and
the circle comes. We took the occasion to change the name of the
circle and to start calling it by the name of our geometry teacher.
The “N.N. line” we called it (I won't give his real
name). This man had in fact the one-sidedness of the constructive
geometrician to the point of genius. That was what was so significant
about him; his character and talents were so clearly defined. People
of the present day are not like that at all; you cannot get hold of
them; they are like slippery eels! My teacher was anything but a
slippery eel; he was a man with sharp corners, and that even in his
external appearance. He had a face shaped like this — quite
square, a most interesting head, absolutely four-angled, nowhere
round. Really, you could study in the face of the man the
right-angled nature of his peculiar constructive talent. It was most
interesting.
Now,
in vision, this personality is found directly by the side of Byron,
and one is led back to early times in Eastern Europe, one or two
hundred years before the Crusades. I once told you how, when the
Roman Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople, he had the
Palladium — which had been taken originally to Rome from Troy —
removed from Rome to Constantinople. The transference was carried out
with tremendous pomp and ceremony. For the Palladium was regarded as
a particularly sacred object, which bestowed power upon whoever had
it. It was firmly believed in Rome that as long as the Palladium lay
beneath a pillar in the city, the power of Rome resided in it, and
that this power had been brought across to Rome from the once mighty
city of Troy, devastated by the Greeks. And so Constantine, whose
destiny it was to transplant the power of Rome to Constantinople,
caused the Palladium to be taken across to Constantinople with great
pomp and ceremony, though to begin with, quite secretly. He caused it
to be buried, a wall built about it, and set up an ancient pillar
that came from Egypt, over the spot where the Palladium lay. On the
top of the pillar he placed an ancient statue of Apollo, so arranged
as to look like himself. Then he had nails brought from the Cross of
Christ. And out of these he made a sort of halo for the statue, which
was, as I have said, an ancient statue of Apollo and at the same time
was supposed to represent himself. And so there the Palladium lay, in
Constantinople.
Now
there is a legend which has later assumed strange forms, but is in
reality very, very ancient. Later, in connection with the Testament
of Peter the Great, it was revived and transformed, but it goes back
to very ancient times. The legend tells how at some time in the
future the Palladium would leave Constantinople and come further up
towards the North-East. Hence the idea in the Russia of a later time
that the Palladium must be brought from the city of Constantinople
into Russia, in order that all that is connected with the Palladium,
and had been corrupted under the rule of the Turks, might have its
place in the rule of Eastern Europe. Now these two personalities in
olden times — it was one or two hundred years before the
Crusades but I have not been able to fix the exact year —
resolved to go out from what is now Russia to Constantinople in
order, by some means or other, to capture the Palladium and bring it
into the East of Europe.
They
did not succeed. Such a project could never have succeeded, for the
Palladium was well guarded. There was no possibility of getting hold
of it, and those who knew how it was guarded were not to be won over.
But an overwhelming pain took possession of these two men. And the
pain that entered into them like a piercing ray, paralysing them both
in the head, manifested in Lord Byron in his being somewhat like
Achilles who was vulnerable in the heel, for Byron had a defect in
his foot. On the other hand he was a genius in his head, which was a
compensation for the paralysis he had suffered in that earlier
earth-life. The other man also, on account of the paralysed head, had
a defective foot, a clubfoot. But let me tell you (for it is not
generally realised) that man does not get geometry or mathematics out
of his head. If you did not step the angle with your feet, your head
would not have the perception of it. You would have no geometry at
all if you did not walk and grasp hold of things. Geometry pushes its
way up through the head and comes forth in ideas. And in
anyone who has a foot such as my geometry teacher had, there resides
a strong capacity to be alive to the geometrical constitution of his
limbs and his motor organism and to re-create it in his head.
If
one penetrated more deeply into this geometry teacher of mine, into
his whole spiritual configuration, one gained a significant
impression of him as a human being. There was something really
delightful about his way of doing things! Fundamentally speaking, he
did everything from the point of view of a constructive
geometrician and it was as if the rest of the world were simply not
there. He was a singularly free human being, but one had only to
observe him closely enough to feel as though some inner spell had
once held sway over him and had brought him to the one-sided
condition I have described.
But
now in Lord Byron — I have mentioned the other man only because
I should not have been able to get at the truth about Lord Byron if
he had not put me on the track — in Lord Byron you can truly
see karma working itself out. Once, long ago, he goes across from the
East to fetch the Palladium. When he is born in the West, he goes
eastward to help the cause of freedom, the spiritual Palladium of the
19th century. And he is drawn to the very same region of the earth to
which he had gone long ago, from the other side. It is really
staggering to see how the same individuality comes to the same
locality in one life from one direction, in another life from another
direction; first, attracted by something that is still deeply veiled
in myth, and later by what had become the great ideal of the “age
of enlightenment.” There is something in all this that stirs
one very deeply.
The
things that come to light out of karmic connections are indeed
startling. They always are. And in this realm we shall come to know
of many other striking, paradoxical things. Today I wanted to give
you a grasp of the remarkable way in which the connections between
earlier and later earth-lives can play into human existence.
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