II
It is a little
difficult to continue what has been given in the last lectures,
because so many friends who have not taken part in these studies are
here to-day. On the other hand it is hardly possible to make a new
beginning, for many things contained in the previous lectures have
still to be completed. Friends who have just arrived will have to
realise that if some of our thoughts to-day prove somewhat difficult
to understand, it is because they are connected — inwardly,
though not outwardly — with preceding lectures. At Easter we
shall have a self-contained course, but to-day I must continue what
has gone before. We did not expect so many friends at this date,
although needless to say we are extremely glad that they have
come.
In recent lectures
we have been speaking of definite karmic relationships — not
with the object of finding anything sensational in the successive
earthly lives we have studied, but in order to arrive step by step at
a really concrete understanding of the connections of destiny in
human life.
I have described
successive earthly lives of certain historic figures, in order to
call forth an idea of how one earthly life works on into the next
— and that is not an easy matter.
Again and again it
must be emphasised that a new trend has come into the
Anthroposophical Movement since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at
Dornach. Of this I should now like to say a few introductory words.
— You know, my dear friends, that since the year 1918 there
have been all manner of undertakings within the Anthroposophical
Society. Their origin is clear. When the Anthroposophical Society was
founded, this question was really being asked, out of a deep occult
impulse: Would the Anthroposophical Society continue to evolve by
virtue of the inner strength which (in its members) it had acquired
until then? There was only one way to make the test. Until then, I,
as General Secretary, had had the leadership of the German Section,
which was the form in which the Anthroposophical Movement had existed
within the Theosophical Society. The only way now was for me no
longer to take in hand the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society
but to watch and see how this Society would evolve through its own
inherent strength.
You see, my dear
friends, that is something quite different from what the position
would have been if already at that time (as at our Christmas
Foundation Meeting) I had said that I would undertake the leadership
of the Society. For the Anthroposophical Society, if led by me, must
naturally be an altogether different thing than if led by someone
else. Moreover, for certain deep reasons, the Society might have been
led all the better if I myself had not had the administrative
leadership. Many things might have been done if human hearts had
spoken — things which in fact remained undone, or which were
even done from outside, often enough under resistance from the
anthroposophists.
During the War, of
course, we had little opportunity to unfold our forces in all
directions. So it came about that after the year 1918, the prevailing
state of affairs was taken advantage of by those from many quarters
who wanted to do this or that. If I had said at the time, “No,
these things shall not be done”, then of course we should hear
it said to-day: “If this or that had only been allowed, we
should now have numbers of flourishing
undertakings.”
For this very
reason it was the custom at all times for the leaders of occult
movements to let those who wanted to do something try it out and see
what became of it, so that convictions might be called forth by the
facts themselves. For that is the only way to call forth conviction.
And so it had to be in our case too.
The upshot of it
all has been that since the year 1918, opposition to our Movement has
grown rife, and has brought about the present state of affairs, when
it is impossible for me, for instance, to give public lectures in
Germany.
At the present
moment these facts must in no way be concealed from the
Anthroposophical Movement. We must face them with all clarity. As
long as we work with unclear situations we shall make no
progress.
As you know, all
manner of experiments were made in the hope of being ‘truly
scientific’ — shall we say? Quite naturally so, in view
of the characters of those concerned! Scientists who also partake in
our Society naturally like to be scientific. But that is the very
thing that annoys our opponents. When we say to them, “As
scientists we can prove this or that truth”, they come forward
with all their so-called scientific claims, and then of course they
become furious. We should be under no illusions on this point.
Nothing has annoyed our opponents more than the fact that our members
have tried to speak on the same subjects as they themselves do, and
in the same manner, only — as these our members often used to
say — “letting a little Anthroposophy flow into
it.” It was precisely this which called forth our opponents in
such overwhelming numbers.
Again, we offend
most strongly against the life-conditions of Anthroposophy if we give
ourselves up to the illusion that we can win over the adherents of
various religious communities by saying the same or similar things as
they, only once more “letting Anthroposophy flow into
it.”
But now, since the
Christmas Foundation Meeting, an entirely new element must come into
all that is being done in the field of Anthroposophy. Those of you
who have observed the way Anthroposophy is now being presented here,
or the way it was presented at Prague and again at Stuttgart, will
have observed that impulses are now at work which call forth
something altogether new, even where our opponents are concerned. If
we try to be ‘scientific’ in the ordinary sense of the
word — as, unfortunately, many of our members have tried to be
— then we are presuming, so to speak, that it is possible to
enter into discussion with them. But now take the lectures that have
been given here, or the lectures at Prague, or the single lectures at
Stuttgart — can you believe for a single moment that there can
be any question of entering into discussion with our opponents on
these matters? It goes without saying: we can enter into no
discussion with our opponents when we speak of these things. How, for
example, should we discuss with any representative of the
civilisation of to-day the statement, for example, that the soul of
Muavija appeared again in the soul of Woodrow Wilson?
[See Vol. I, lecture X.]
Thus in the whole
Anthroposophical Movement there is now a prevailing quality which can
tend to nothing else than this. — We must take it at last in
real earnest that there can be no question of entering into
discussion or argument with our opponents. For if we do so, it will
in any case lead nowhere. Thus we must realise that, with regard to
our opponents, it can only be a question of refuting calumnies,
untruths and lies. We must not give up ourselves to the illusion that
these things can be discussed. They must expand by their own inherent
power; they cannot be decided by any dialectic.
Through the whole
tenor of the Anthroposophical Movement as it has been since Christmas
last, this will perhaps be realised increasingly, even by our
members. Henceforth the Anthroposophical Movement will take this
attitude: It will no longer pay heed to anything other than what the
spiritual world itself requires of it.
It is from this
standpoint that I have placed before you various thoughts on karma.
Those of you who were here, or who heard my last lecture at
Stuttgart, will remember that I tried to show how the individualities
who lived in the 8th and 9th centuries
A.D. at the Court of Haroun al Raschid in
Asia, having continued to evolve after death in different directions,
played certain definite parts in their new incarnations. At the time
of the Thirty Years' War (and a short time before) we have on
the one hand the individuality of Haroun al Raschid, reincarnated in
the Englishman, Bacon of Verulam. And a great organiser at the Court
of Haroun al Raschid, who had lived at the Court — not indeed
as an Initiate, but as the reincarnation of an Initiate — this
individuality we found again as Amos Comenius, whose field of action
was rather in Middle Europe. From these two streams, much in the
spiritual part of modern civilisation flowed together. In the
spiritual and intellectual aspect of modern civilisation, the Near
East — as it was in the time immediately after Mohammed —
lived again, on the one hand through the reincarnated Haroun al
Raschid, Bacon of Verulam; and on the other hand through Amos
Comenius, who had been his counsellor.
In the present
lecture I wish to emphasise the following fact: — The evolution
of man does not merely take place when he is here on earth, but also
when he is between death and a new birth. Bacon as well as Amos
Comenius, having fastened Arabism — so to speak from two
different sides — on to the civilisation of Europe, died again
and passed into the life between death and a new birth. And there
they were together with many souls who came down to earth after their
time. Bacon and Amos Comenius, having died in the 17th century, lived
on in the spiritual world. Other souls, who came down to earth in the
19th century, were in the spiritual world together with the souls of
Bacon and Amos Comenius from the 17th to the 19th. On the one hand
there were souls who gathered mainly around the soul of Bacon —
Bacon whose work became so dominant. Then there were the souls who
gathered around Amos Comenius. And though this is rather a pictorial
way of speaking, we must not forget that there are
‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ — albeit
under quite different conditions — even in the spiritual world
which men pass through between death and a new birth. Such
individualities as Bacon or Amos Comenius worked not only through
what they brought about on earth — through their writings, for
example, or through the traditions of them which lived on on earth.
No, these leading spirits were also working through the souls whom
they sent down, or the souls with whom they were together and who
were then sent down; they worked by causing certain tendencies to
germinate in these souls in the spiritual world. Thus among the men
of the 19th century we find souls who had become dependent already in
their evolution in the pre-earthly life on one or other of these two
spirits — the discarnate Amos Comenius, and the discarnate
Bacon.
As I said, I want
to lead you more and more into the concrete way in which karma works.
Therefore I will now draw your attention to two personalities of the
19th century whose names will be known to most of you. One of them
was especially influenced in his pre-earthly life by Bacon, and the
other by Amos Comenius.
If we observe
Bacon as he stood in earthly civilisation — in his earthly life
as Lord Chancellor in England — if we observe him there, we
find that his working was such that an Initiate stood behind him. The
whole Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, as it is outwardly pursued by
the historians of literature, is appallingly barren. All manner of
arguments are brought forward which are supposed to show that
Shakespeare the actor did not really write his dramas, but that they
were written by Bacon the philosopher and Lord Chancellor, and so on
...
All these things
— working with external methods, seeking out similarities in
the way of thought in Shakespeare's dramas and Bacon's
philosophic works — all these are barren superficialities. They
do not get at the real truth. For the truth is that at the time when
Bacon, Shakespeare, Jacob Boehme, and a fourth were working on the
earth, there was one Initiate who really spoke through all four.
Hence their kinship, for in reality it all goes back to one and the
same source. Of course, these people who dispute and argue do not
argue about the Initiate who stood behind, especially as this
Initiate — like many a modern Initiate — is described to
us in history as a rather intolerable fellow. But he was not merely
so. No doubt he was so sometimes in his external actions, but he was
not merely so. He was an individuality from whom immense forces
proceeded, and to whom were really due Bacon's philosophic
works as well as Shakespeare's dramas and the works of Jacob
Boehme, and also the works of the Jesuit, Jacob
Balde.
If we bear this in
mind, then we must see in Bacon, in the philosophic realm, the
instigator of an immense and far-reaching stream of the
time.
It is most
interesting to observe what could become of a soul who lived
throughout the two centuries, in the life beyond the earth, under the
influence of the dead Bacon. We must turn our attention to the way in
which Bacon himself lived after his death. For our studies of human
history it will in fact be more and more important to observe the
human beings who have lived on earth not only until the moment of
their death but in their working beyond death, where they work on and
on upon those souls who are afterwards to descend to earth. This
applies especially to those who have themselves been responsible for
great spiritual achievements.
No doubt these
things may be somewhat shocking for men of the present time. So for
instance I remember — if I may make this digression — I
remember on one occasion I was standing at the entrance to the
railway station in a small German University town with a well-known
doctor who went in a great deal for occultism. Around us stood many
other people. Presently he warmed up to his subject and out of his
enthusiasm said to me in a loud voice, so that many of those who were
around could hear him: “I will make you a present of the
biography of Robert Blum; but that is a biography which begins only
after his death.” Spoken loudly as it was, one could well
observe the shock it gave to those who were standing around us! One
cannot say without more ado to the people of to-day, “I will
make you a present of the biography of a man, but it begins only
after his death.”
For the rest
— apart from this two-volumed biography of Robert Blum, which
begins not with his birth but with his death — little has yet
been done in the way of relating the biographies of men after their
death. Biographies generally begin at birth and end at death; there
are not yet many works that begin with a man's
death.
Yet, for the real
happenings of the world, what a man does after his death is immensely
important, notably when he passes on the results of what he did on
earth — translated into the spiritual — to the souls who
come down after him. We cannot understand the age which succeeds a
given age if we do not observe this side of life.
Now I was
specially interested in observing those individualities who
surrounded Bacon after his death. Among them were individualities who
were subsequently born as natural scientists. But there were also
others who were born as historians; and if we observe the influence
of the dead Lord Bacon on these souls, we see how the materialism
which he founded upon earth — the mere researching into the
world of sense (for, as you know, everything else was for him an
‘idol’) — translated into the spiritual, reverts
into a kind of radicalism. And so indeed, in the very midst of the
spiritual world, these souls received impulses which worked on in
such a way that after their birth, having descended to the earth,
they would attach no value to anything that was not a concrete fact
visible to the senses.
I will now speak
in a somewhat popular form, but I beg you not to take my words too
literally, for if you do so it will of course be only too easy to
say: ‘How grotesque!’ Among these souls there were also
some who, by their former tendencies — derived from former
earthly lives — were destined to become historians. And among
them was one who was the greatest. (I am still speaking of the
pre-earthly lives of all these souls). One among them was the
greatest. Under the influence of Lord Bacon's impulses, all
these souls said to themselves, in effect: It is no longer
permissible to write history as it was written in former times, to
write it with Ideas, investigating the inner connections. Only the
actual facts must now be the object of our
research.
Now I ask you,
what does this mean? Are not the intentions of men the most important
thing in history? — and they are not outwardly real!
These souls, however, no longer permitted themselves to think in this
way; and least of all did the soul who afterwards appeared again as
one of the greatest historians of the 19th century — Leopold
von Ranke. Leopold von Ranke was a pre-earthly disciple of Lord
Bacon.
Study the earthly
career of Leopold von Ranke as a historian. What is his principle?
Ranke's principle as a historian is this: nothing must be
written in history save what is to be read of in the archives. We
must compile all history from the archives — from the actual
transactions of the diplomats.
If you read Ranke
you will find it so. He is a German and a Protestant, but with his
sense of reality this has no effect on him. He works objectively
— that is to say, with the objectivity of the archives. So he
writes his History of the Popes — the best that has ever been
written from the pure standpoint of archives. When we read Ranke we
are irritated, nay dreadfully so. It is a barren prospect to imagine
the old gentleman — quick and alert as he was until a ripe old
age — sitting forever in the archives and merely piecing
together the diplomatic transactions. That is no real history. It is
history which reckons only with the facts of the sense-world —
that is to say, for the historian, with the
archives.
And so indeed,
precisely by taking into account the life beyond the earth we have
the possibility to understand why Ranke became what he
was.
But now we can
also look across to Amos Comenius, and observe how he worked on the
pre-earthly willing of souls who afterwards descended to the earth.
For just as Leopold von Ranke became the greatest disciple of Bacon
— of Bacon after his death — so did Schlosser become
the greatest disciple of Comenius after his death.
Read
Schlosser's History; observe the prevailing tone, the
fundamental note he strikes. On every page there speaks the moralist
— the moralist who would fain seize the human heart and soul
— whose object is to speak right into the heart. Often he
scarcely succeeds, for he is still rather a pedant. He speaks, in
effect, like a pedant speaking to the heart. Nevertheless, being a
pre-earthly disciple of Amos Comenius, he has absorbed something of
the quality that was in Comenius himself, who was so characteristic
by virtue of the peculiar quality of his spirit. For after all,
Comenius too came over from Mohammedanism. Though he was very
different from the spirits who gathered around Lord Bacon,
nevertheless Comenius too, in his incarnation as Comenius,
concentrated on the real, outer world. Everywhere he demanded
visibility, objectivity, in education. There must always be an
underlying picture. He demands vision — object lessons, as it
were; he too lays stress on the sense-perceptible, though in quite
another way. For Amos Comenius was also one of those who at the time
of the Thirty Years' War believed most enthusiastically in the
coming of the so-called Millennium. In his
Pansophia he wrote down great and
world-embracing ideas. He wanted to work for human education by a
great impulsive power. This too worked on Schlosser. It is there in
Schlosser.
I mention these
two figures — Ranke and Schlosser — in order to show you
how we can understand what appears as the spiritually productive
power in man only if we also take into account his life beyond the
earth. Only then do we understand it — just as we have also
learnt to understand many things by taking into account repeated
lives on earth. For in the thoughts which I have recently placed
before you, we have observed this marvellous working across from one
incarnation to another. As I said, I give these examples in order
that we may then consider how a man can think about his own karma.
Before we can dwell on the way in which good and evil — or
illnesses or the like — work over from one incarnation to
another, we must first learn to perceive how that which afterwards
emerges in the spiritual and intellectual life of civilisation also
works across from one incarnation to another.
Now my dear
friends, I must admit that for me one of the most interesting
personalities in modern spiritual life, with regard to his karma,
was Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Anyone who observes him closely will
see that his most beautiful works depend on a peculiar fact, namely
this: Again and again, in his whole human constitution, there was a
kind of tendency for the Ego and astral body to flee from the
physical and the etheric bodies.
Morbid conditions
appear in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, bordering very nearly on dementia.
But these morbid conditions only express in a rather more extreme
form what was always present in him in a nascent state. His
soul-and-spirit tends to go out — holds to the physical and
etheric only by a very loose thread. And in this condition —
the soul-and-spirit holding to the physical and etheric by a very
loose thread only — the most beautiful of his works originate;
I mean the most beautiful of his longer works and of his shorter
poems too. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's most beautiful poems may
even be said to have originated half out of the body. There was a
peculiar relationship between the four members of his nature. Truly
there is a great difference between such a personality and an average
man of the present time. With an average man of this materialistic
age we generally find a very firm and robust connection of the
soul-and-spirit with the physical and etheric. The soul-and-spirit is
deeply immersed in the physical and etheric — ‘sits
tight’, as it were. But in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer it was not
so. He had a very tender relation of the soul-and-spirit to the
physical and etheric. To describe his psyche is really one of the
most interesting tasks one can undertake when studying the
developments of modern spiritual life. Many things that emerge in
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer appear almost like a dim, cloudy recollection
— a recollection which has however grown beautiful in growing
dim. When Conrad Ferdinand Meyer writes we always have the feeling:
He is remembering something, though not quite exactly. He changes it
— but changes it into something beautiful and form-perfected.
We can observe this wonderfully, piece by piece, in certain of his
works.
Now it is
characteristic of the inner karma of a human being when there is such
a definite relationship of the four members of his nature —
physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And in Conrad
Ferdinand Meyer's case, when we trace back this peculiarly
intimate connection, we are led, first of all, to the time of the
Thirty Years' War. This was the first thing clear to me in his
case: there is something of a former earthly life at the time of the
Thirty Years' War. And then there is a still earlier life on
earth going back into the pre-Carlovingian age, going back quite
evidently into the early history of Italy.
When we endeavour
to trace Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's karma, the peculiar,
intangible fluidity of his being (which none the less expresses
itself in such perfection of form) — the peculiar, intangible
fluidity of his life somehow communicates itself to our
investigation, until at length we feel: We are getting into
confusion. I have no other alternative but to describe these things
just as they happened in the investigation.
We go back into
the time of the 6th century in Italy. There we have the feeling: We
are getting into an extraordinarily insecure element. We are driven
back again and again, and only gradually we observe that this is not
due to ourselves but to the object of our research. There is really
in the soul — in the individuality — of Conrad Ferdinand
Meyer something that brings us into confusion as we try to
investigate him. We are driven to return again and again into his
present incarnation or into the one immediately before it. Again and
again we must ‘pull ourselves up’ and go back
again.
The following was
the result. — You must remember, all that has lived in a human
soul in former incarnations becomes manifest in the most varied forms
— in likenesses which are often quite imperceptible to outer
observation. This you will have seen from other instances of
reincarnation given here.
So at length we
come to an incarnation in Italy in the early Christian centuries
— at the end of the first half of the first millennium
A.D. Here we come to a halt. We
find a soul living in Italy, to a large extent at Ravenna, at the
Roman Court. But now we come into confusion. For we must ask
ourselves: What was living in that soul? The moment we ask ourselves
this question (in order to call forth the further occult
investigation), the whole thing is extinguished once
again.
We become aware of
the experiences which this soul underwent while living at the Court
at Ravenna — at the Roman Court. We enter into these
experiences and we think we have them, and then again they are
extinguished — blotted out from us; and we are driven back
again to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer as he lived on earth in the immediate
past. At length we perceive that in this later life he obliterates
from our vision the content of his soul in the former life. Only
after long trouble do we perceive at length how the matter really
stands. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer — or rather the individuality
who lived in him — was living at that time in a certain
relationship to one of the Popes who sent him, among others, to
England on a Roman Catholic, Christian Mission.
The individuality
who afterwards became Conrad Ferdinand Meyer had first absorbed all
that wonderful sense of form which it was possible to absorb in Italy
at that time. The Mosaic art of Italy bears witness to it; also the
old Italian painting, the greater part, nay practically the whole of
which has been destroyed. This art did not
continue.
And then he went
on a Roman Catholic Christian Mission to the Anglo-Saxons. One of his
companions founded the Bishopric of Canterbury. What afterwards took
place at Canterbury began essentially with this foundation. The
individuality, however, who after-wards appeared as Conrad Ferdinand
Meyer, was only there as a witness, so to speak. Nevertheless, he was
a very active person, and he called forth the ill-will of an
Anglo-Saxon chieftain, at whose investigation he was eventually
murdered. That is what we find to begin with.
But while he lived
in England there was something in the soul of this Conrad Ferdinand
Meyer which robbed him of real joy in life. His soul was deeply
rooted in the Italian art of his time — or, if we will call it
so, in the Italian spiritual life. He gained no happiness in the
execution of his missionary work in England. Yet he devoted himself
to it with great intensity — so much so that his assassination
was a reaction to it.
This constant
unhappiness — being repelled from something which he was none
the less doing with all force and devotion out of another impulse in
his heart — worked on in such a way that when he passed through
his next earthly life there ensued a cosmic clouding-over of his
memory. The inner impulse was there but it no longer coincided with
any clear concept.
And so it came
about that in his subsequent incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer,
an undefined impulse was at work in him, to this effect: ‘I was
once working in England. It is connected somehow with Canterbury. I
was murdered owing to my connection with
Canterbury.’
So indeed the
outer life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in this incarnation takes its
course. He studies outer history, he studies Canterbury, studies what
happened in Canterbury, in connection with the history of England. He
comes across Thomas à Becket, Chancellor of King Henry II in the
12th century. He learns of the strange destiny of Thomas à
Becket, who from being the all-powerful Chancellor of Henry II, was
murdered virtually at his instigation. And so in this present
incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, his own half-forgotten destiny
appears to him in Thomas à Becket. It comes before him,
half-forgotten in his subconsciousness, for I am speaking of course,
of the subconscious life which comes to the surface in this way. So
he describes his own fate in a far distant time. But he describes it
in the story of what actually happened in the 12th century between
King Henry II and Thomas à Becket of Canterbury, whose fate he
recounts in his poetic work Der Heilige (The Saint). So indeed
it is — only all this takes place in the subconscious life
which embraces successive incarnations. It is as though within a
single earthly life a man had experienced something in his early
youth in connection with a certain place. He has forgotten it. He
experienced it maybe in the second or third year of his life. It does
not emerge, but some other similar destiny emerges. The very same
place is named, and as a result he has a peculiar sympathy for this
other person's destiny. He feels it differently from one who
has no ‘association of ideas’ with the same
place.
Just as this may
happen within one earthly life, so it took place in the concrete
instance I am now giving you. There was the work in Canterbury, the
murder of a person connected with Canterbury (for Thomas à
Becket was Archbishop of Canterbury), the murder of Thomas à
Becket at the instigation of the King of England. All of these
schemes work in together. In the descriptions in his poem he is
describing his own destiny.
But now the thing
goes on — and this is most interesting in Conrad Ferdinand
Meyer's case. He was born as a woman about the time of the
Thirty Years' War — a lively woman, full of spiritual
interest in life, a woman who witnessed many an adventure. She
married a man who first took part in all the confused events of the
Thirty Years' War, but then grew weary of them and emigrated to
Switzerland, to Graubünden (Canton Grisons), where he lived a
somewhat philistine existence. But his wife was deeply affected and
impressed by all that took place in the Graubünden country under
the prevailing conditions of the Thirty Years'
War.
This too is
eclipsed, as though with another layer. For it is so with this
individuality: That which is living in him is easily forgotten in the
cosmic sense, and yet he calls it forth again in a transmuted form,
where it becomes more glorious and more intense. For out of what this
woman observed and experienced in that incarnation there arises the
wonderful characterisation of Jürg Jenatsch, the man of
Graubünden, in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's historic novel.
Observing Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in this incarnation, we have indeed
no explanation of his peculiarity if we cannot enter into his karma.
I must say — speaking with a grain of salt — that I envy
the people who ‘understand’ him so light-heartedly.
Before I knew his reincarnations, all that I understood was that I
did not understand him. This wonderful inner perfection of form, this
inner joy in form, this purity of form, all the strength and power
that lives in Jürg Jenatsch, and the wonderful personal
and living quality in The Saint, — a good deal of
superficiality is needed to imagine that one understands all this.
Observe his beautiful forms — there is something of clear line
in them, almost severe; they are painted and yet not painted. Here
live the mosaics of Ravenna. And in The Saint there
lives a history which was undergone once upon a time by this
individuality himself; but a mist of the soul has spread over it, and
out of the mist it emerges in another form.
And again one
needs to know: All that is living in his romance of Graubünden,
Jürg Jenatsch, was absorbed by the heart and mind of a
woman; while in the momentum, the driving power that lives in this
romance there lives again the swashbuckler of the Thirty Years'
War. The man was pretty much of a philistine, as I said, but he
was a swashbuckler. And so, all that comes over from former
experiences on earth comes to life again in a peculiar form in Conrad
Ferdinand Meyer. Only now do we begin to understand him. Now we say
to ourselves: In olden times of human evolution, men were not ashamed
to speak of Spirits from beyond descending to the earth, or of
earthly human beings finding their way upward and working on from
spiritual worlds. All this must come again, otherwise man will not
get beyond his present outlook of the earthworm. For all that the
natural-scientific conception of the world contains, it is the
world-outlook of the earth-worm. Men live on earth as though only the
earth concerned them, as though it were not true that the whole
Cosmos works upon all earthly things and lives again in man. As
though it were not true that earlier epochs of history live on,
inasmuch as we ourselves carry into later times what we absorbed in
former times.
We do not
understand karma by talking theoretic concepts about successive
earthly incarnations. To understand karma is to feel in our hearts
all that we can feel when we see what existed ages ago flowing
into the later epochs in the souls of men themselves. When we begin
to see how karma works, human life gains quite a new content. We feel
ourselves quite differently in human life.
Such a spirit as
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer feels his former earthly lives like an
undertone — an undertone that sounds from far away. We
understand what appears in him only when we develop an understanding
for this undertone. The progress of mankind in spiritual life will
depend on its ability to regard life in this way, to observe in all
detail what flows across from former epochs of the world's
evolution into later epochs through the human beings themselves. Then
we shall cease, in the childish way of psycho-analysts, to explain
the peculiarities of souls by speaking of ‘hidden underlying
regions’ and the like. After all, one can ascribe anything one
likes to what is ‘hidden’. We shall look for the real
causes. In some respects, no doubt, the psycho-analysts do quite good
work. But these pursuits remind us of the story of how someone heard
that in the year 1749 a son was born to a certain patrician.
Afterwards this son emerged as a very gifted man. To this day we can
point to the actual birth-place in Frankfurt of the man who
afterwards came forth as Wolfgang Goethe. ‘Let us make
excavations in the earth and see by dint of what strange emanations
his talents came about’. Sometimes the psycho-analysts seem to
me just like that. They dig into the earth-realm of the soul, into
the hidden regions which they themselves first invent by their
hypotheses, whereas in reality one ought to look into the preceding
lives on earth and lives between death and a new birth. Then if we do
so, a true understanding of human souls is opened out to us. Truly
the souls of men are far too rich in content to enable us to
understand their content out of a single life
alone.
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