IX
We shall continue
for a time to study the laws prevailing in the development of human
karma, and I shall say something to-day about the inner aspect of the
shaping of karma, of the part of karma that is connected especially
with the moral, ethical and spiritual life.
You must remember
that directly we look beyond the physical world — and this is
always so in studying karma — the karmic connections are
spiritual. Even when they take effect in the physical, for
example in illness, whatever is karmic in an illness has a spiritual
cause. So that under all circumstances we come to the spiritual
whenever we approach the study of karma. To-day, however, we shall
turn our attention more particularly to the ethical aspect of karma,
to the workings of karma in the life of soul.
I have already
told you that the forming of karma is connected with those Beings who
in very ancient times of evolution were actually present on the earth
and who departed from the earth at the time of the separation of the
moon, taking up their abode in the cosmos as Moon-inhabitants, Moon
Beings.
What we call Moon
— of which the physical part as ordinarily described is no more
than an indication — must be regarded as the bearer of certain
spiritual beings, the most important of whom once lived on earth as
the great primeval Teachers. It was they who established among men on
earth that ancient wisdom of which I have so often spoken. These
Beings were on the earth before the separation of the moon. In those
times they infused the primeval wisdom into man who acquired it
through a kind of inner illumination. And the way in which these
Beings worked was altogether different from the way in which men can
work on the earth to-day.
The activity of
these ancient, primeval Teachers among men must in truth be described
as a kind of magic, taking effect inasmuch as the influence of the
human will upon happenings in the external world was infinitely
greater than is possible to-day. Nowadays the will can work on the
external world only through physical means of transmission. If we
want to push some object we must put our will into operation through
the arms and hands. But in the days of the primeval Teachers the
human will still had a direct and immediate action upon processes in
the outside world, upon the very processes of nature. It was a kind
of action that we should now call magical. But in point of fact the
last vestiges of this power of the human will persisted until
comparatively recent times. Rousseau, for example, tells us that in
certain warmer regions he was able to paralyse and even kill toads
which came near him, simply by fixing them with his gaze. This power
of the human will which in warmer climates persisted until the 18th
century, has diminished through the course of the ages and has now
vanished. But in ancient Egypt man was still able to influence and
promote the growth of plants through his will. And when the primeval
Teachers were on the earth, even inorganic processes of nature could
be brought under the sway of the human will.
These things of
course depended upon a true, instinctive insight into the connections
of world-existence which remain completely hidden from the crude,
material science of modern times. It is evident, however, that the
influence of warmth upon the working of the human will must be taken
thoroughly into account, for Rousseau, who was able, in warmer
regions, to kill toads with his gaze, subsequently tried in Lyons to
stare at a toad in the same way, supposing that it would at least be
paralysed. But the toad was not paralysed; on the contrary it fixed
its eyes upon him and he himself became partially paralysed and had
to be restored to life by snake-poison administered by a
doctor.
This way of
activating the will is of course dependent upon an instinctive
knowledge of the whole environment of man.
Out of their own
spiritual foundations the primeval Teachers possessed a totally
different, far deeper and more penetrating knowledge of nature than
is within the reach of man to-day. They were endowed with powers
which cannot be comprised in natural laws. Nor was this necessary
when the primeval Teachers were working on the earth, for nothing in
the least resembling modern natural science was then in existence. It
would have seemed utterly pointless and nobody would have understood
its purpose. For in those days all such activity was founded upon a
far deeper, more inward knowledge and understanding than is possible
to-day.
These primeval
Teachers transferred the scene of their work from the earth to the
moon and as everything in the cosmos is interconnected, a mighty task
is now allotted to them within the nexus of cosmic happenings. They
are Beings who have a great deal to do with karma, with the forming
and shaping of human karma. For an essential part of the weaving of
karma is to be observed when, after having laid aside his etheric
body a few days after death, the human being lives through his
sleeping life (not his waking life) backwards. When he passes through
the gate of death he has, first of all, a clear retrospective vision
of what he has experienced in life — a grand and majestic
panorama in pictures. After a few days this panorama slowly fades
away as the etheric body dissolves in the cosmic ether, and then an
actual journey backward begins.
Earthly existence
flows in such a way that although we grasp it in remembrance as a
unity, this is an illusion. Life does not flow onwards
uninterruptedly. We live through the day consciously, the night
unconsciously; the day consciously, the night unconsciously, and so
on.
When in
remembrance man thinks back over his life, he forgets that the nights
are always there between the days. During the nights a very great
deal happens to the soul, to the astral body and ego, only man knows
nothing about it. What happens to him while he is unconscious during
the nights in earthly existence, this he lives through in a backward
course after death, so that time actually seems to him to be flowing
backwards; in full consciousness he lives backward through the
nights.
As approximately a
third of life is spent in sleep, this backward journey is also lived
through in a third of the time of the earthly life. If, therefore, a
man has reached the age of 60, some 20 years have been spent in sleep
and the backward journey lasts for about 20 years. Then he enters the
Spirit-land proper, into a different form of existence. This backward
journey, this vision of what has happened during the nights, is lived
through after death in such a way that the great and significant
difference between its experiences and those of ordinary sleep is
strikingly apparent.
With the exception
of the dreams rising out of sleep which do not, after all, reproduce
the experiences of earthly life very faithfully but in an illusory,
fantastic shape — with the exception therefore of the dreams
welling up from the night-life, the human being has little
consciousness of all the manifold happenings in which he is involved.
In earlier lectures here I have described what happens to the human
being during sleep; but after death he experiences it with
extraordinary clarity and definition. This life in the soul-world
after death is much richer in impressions than earthly life. The
pictures a man experiences and how he himself is involved in them
— all this comes to him with extraordinary intensity; there is
nothing dreamlike about it. It is experienced, if I may put it so, as
a kind of photographic negative. If you caused suffering to some
person during your earthly life, you experienced this infliction of
suffering as it proceeded from yourself. You experienced what
proceeded from yourself, was done by yourself. But journeying
backward after death you do not feel what you experienced
during earthly life, but you slip as it were into the other person
and feel what he experienced as the result of your
action.
To take a drastic
example. — If you gave someone a box on the ears, you do not
experience what you felt in earthly life as you planned and carried
out this act, but on the backward journey you experience, instead,
the feelings of the other person whose ears you boxed. You live
through it as your own experience, and indeed with extraordinary
concreteness, with greater intensity. No impression on earth is as
powerful as the impressions along this backward course after death
for a third of the time of the earthly life. During this period the
whole karmic fulfilment of what was done in life is experienced
— from the standpoint of the other man. You live through the
whole karmic fulfilment, but not, of course, as earthly experience
— that will come in the subsequent life on earth. Even though
it is not as intense as regards the action as it will be in a later
incarnation, you experience the impression more strongly than could
be the case in any earthly life.
This is a very
striking fact. It is the intense reality of the experiences that is
so remarkable.
But even if the
human being were able to unfold in his ego and astral body the degree
of strength that is his when he passes through the gate of death, he
would experience this whole backward journey at most as a very vivid
dream. And he might expect it to be so if, after death, he were
merely to look at the earthly life and what it has made of him. But
this backward journey is not a vivid dream; it is an experience of
far greater intensity than any experience in earthly existence. Only
now there is no physical body, no etheric body, through which
man's experiences are mediated to him on
earth.
Just think what
you would experience on earth with your ordinary consciousness if you
had no physical body and no etheric body. You would flit over the
earth with now and again a dream arising; then you would sleep again,
and so it would continue.
It is easy to
conceive that after his earthly life a man who had reached the age of
60 lives through a dream continuing for 20 years; but what he lives
through is by no means a dream, it is an experience of the greatest
intensity. What makes this possible? It is because the moment a human
being has passed through the gate of death, has laid aside his
etheric body and begins his backward journey, the Moon Beings draw
near him and with their ancient magical powers they pass into him,
into his experiences, and impregnate his pictures with cosmic
substance.
If I may use an
analogy, what happens is just as if I were to paint a picture. In the
first place it is simply a picture and doesn't cause actual
pain — provided it is not too hideous — and even then the
impression is only a moral or aesthetic one. It hurts nobody. But
suppose I were to paint a picture, let us say, of three of you here
and the picture were permeated with some magic power causing these
three to step from the picture and carry out everything they had
planned against others. You would react with more force and vigour
than anthroposophists are wont to reveal! So it is after death. The
experiences are full of living force, living activity, because these
Moon Spirits permeate the pictures with their own substantiality;
they saturate these pictures with a super-reality of
being.
After death,
therefore we pass through the region of the Moon Beings and what we
experience as the balancing-out of our own deeds is stamped with
mighty force in the cosmic ether. This backward journey — when
it is described not merely in principle as in the book
Theosophy,
but when one tries to describe it as concretely as
I want to do now — this backward journey after death is
extraordinarily interesting and a highly important section of
life.
In our time the
experiences that may come to a human being during this period after
death are particularly complicated. Just think how essentially the
whole constitution of soul of these Moon Beings differs from that of
the inhabitants of the earth. These Moon Beings with whom we have so
much to do after death once imparted to men that primeval wisdom
which in our time has completely faded away. As I have often
explained, men could not have attained their freedom if the mighty
wisdom of these primeval Teachers had remained. It has faded away and
been replaced by something else, namely, abstract thinking. The human
being to-day thinks in concepts which no longer have any very real
relationship with the spiritual world. Let me repeat an example I
gave on another occasion. — Aristotle has bequeathed to us ten
concepts which were really a survival of ancient wisdom: Being,
Quantity, Quality, Relation, Position, Space, Time, Possession,
Action, Suffering. He called them the ‘Categories’. They
are ten simple concepts. These ten concepts are generally enumerated
in our text-books of Logic. In classical schools they have to be
learned by heart; professors of philosophy are familiar with them.
But nothing more is known than just the ten concepts by name: Being,
Possession, Position, Space, Time, and the rest. To what does such
knowledge amount? These ten concepts seem tedious and dry to a modern
man. But to one who perceives their significance they are no more
tedious than are the 22 or 23 letters of the alphabet: a, b, c, d, e,
f, g, ...
Just think of it.
— If you knew nothing more about the alphabet than a, b, c, d,
e, f, g, up to z, if you knew this and nothing more, what would you
make of Goethe's Faust? You would open the book and find
these 22 signs scattered about in manifold permutations and
combinations. Faust contains nothing but these 22 signs
inter-connected in different ways. And if you knew nothing more, if
you had never learnt to read but merely opened the book and saw these
signs, just think how different it would be from what it is now, when
you can take Faust and read it. That is a different matter
altogether! No book in the world contains anything except these 22
signs and yet just think what you can make of them! The whole world
of the mind is open to you because by juggling with these 22 letters
you can apply them.
But the logicians
who have accepted the ten Categories to-day: Being, Quantity,
Quality, Relation, Space, Time, Position, Possession, Action,
Suffering — these men know as little to what these Categories
really apply as someone who has never learnt to read and simply
recognises a, b, c, d, e, f, knows of all the books of the world. It
is exactly the same thing. For these ten concepts of
Aristotle's Logic have to be understood in such a way that they
can be applied in manifold permutations, just as the letters are
manipulated in the physical world by multifarious combinations and
permutations. Then, with these ten concepts we read in the
spiritual world. They are the letters.
But in our time
the concepts are known by name and that is all — which is
equivalent to knowing nothing more of the alphabet than the letters
in their sequence. Think what you would miss if you could not read
but only knew a, b, c, d! Correspondingly, men miss everything that
is in the spiritual world if they are unable to manipulate and apply
the ten concepts of Aristotle in all manner of ways, in order to read
in the spiritual world.
In this connection
something very droll has been happening among philosophers for a long
time. About the middle of the Middle Ages there lived a very astute
and clever man, by name Raymond Lully. From tradition he still knew
something about this permutation of the categories of logic, of the
fundamental concepts of logic, and he gave out what he knew —
clothing it in the form of pictures as was customary in those times.
What he really wanted to say, or rather, what he would have said if
he had expressed the reality, was this: My contemporaries are all
blockheads, because they only know a, b, c, d; they do not know how
to read with the fundamental concepts, the root concepts. A man must
understand in his head how to combine these fundamental concepts as
letters are combined into words and sentences. Then he can read in
the spiritual world. — Raymond Lully did not say this in such
direct words for that was not the custom in his days. He said: Write
the fundamental concepts on slips of paper, then take a kind of
roulette, spin it and the concepts will be thrown about among each
other; and then read. Then there will be results.
This, however, was
only an analogy, for he did not really mean anything like a dead,
mechanical roulette; he meant the spiritual head which must
manipulate and combine these concepts. But those who heard of it took
the analogy literally and have laughed about it ever since,
considering it to be a piece of childishness on the part of Raymond
Lully. The childishness, however, is purely on the side of modern
philosophy which does not understand what was
meant.
Practically
everything that in olden days was brought to humanity by the primeval
Teachers whom we know as the Moon Beings, has been lost. But during
his backward journey in the first period after death the human being
becomes acquainted in a very special way with this knowledge. He
knows then how these ancient Sages thought, what kind of wisdom they
possessed. Hence the graphic, concrete reality of his experiences
during this period.
But in our time
things have become complicated and confused owing to a kind of lack
of understanding. Human beings, who since the fading of the primeval
wisdom have been living here on earth with their abstract concepts,
have not the power to understand the inner soul-constitution of these
primeval Teachers since they entered the
Moon-existence.
When a modern
scholar is passing through this period of his life after death, be
speaks a very different language from these primeval Teachers who, as
I shall describe to you in more detail, have a very great deal to do
with the shaping of karma. These primeval Teachers and the men of
to-day who die imbued with modern culture and the fruits of modern
civilisation do not really understand one another.
It is extremely
difficult to form a clear conception of these things, for observation
of what is happening to human beings in this connection is by no
means easy. But in characteristic cases observation is
possible: for instance, one can study two men who died not so very
long ago and who have gone their way backward after death, two men
who were steeped in modern culture and who nevertheless were very
different from each other.
We can take a man
who was brilliant in his own way, a scientist of average calibre like
Du Bois-Reymond, or someone of the same type, and observe his
backward journey after death. Another personality, too, can be
observed in the same way. A very interesting personality as regards
this backward journey through the soul-land is the one who hovered
before me while I was composing my Mystery Plays and who took shape
in the character of Strader. Strader in the Mystery Plays is an image
of an actual person who in his youth entered the monastic life but
subsequently abandoned it and worked in the field of rationalistic
philosophy as a professor in a University. This man — he was
responsible for a number of writings — has all the abstraction
of a modern thinker, but his thoughts are extraordinarily
penetrating, full of warmth and vigour. It does one good to find this
quality of heart in a modern thinker.
The full-blooded
vigour of Hegel, for example, who could present the highest
abstractions with tremendous depth of emotion but also with utmost
concreteness, is of course no longer possible to the same extent in a
man of to-day. Hegel was a thinker who was able to imbue concepts and
ideas with such concrete reality that he could, so to speak, hack
wood with them. But the man to whom I am now referring revealed
something of the same heart-quality in handling abstract concepts. As
I said, his life hovered before me when I was shaping the figure of
Strader in the Mystery Plays.
When this man died
his backward journey was particularly interesting to me. A fact to be
taken thoroughly into account was that all his thinking had a certain
theological bent. Like that of a modern scientist, or at least a
natural philosopher, it was entirely abstract, but all the time there
was this nuance of theology (coming of course from earlier
incarnations) and his thinking was lit by a gleam of consciousness
that it is possible to speak, at least, of the reality of a spiritual
world.
Hence this
man's thinking has more affinity with the soul-constitution of
the Moon Beings than has the thinking of an average scientist like Du
Bois-Reymond, for example. When such men are passing through the
soul-world, through the Moon sphere, one can perceive a marked lack
of understanding — it is like someone who lives in a foreign
country and never learns the language; the others do not understand
him and he does not understand them. This, broadly speaking, is the
fate of a man who is a typical product of modern civilisation when he
enters upon this backward journey after death.
But it was rather
different in the case of this personality, the prototype of Strader.
— I have to resort to earthly language although it is utterly
inadequate when applied to what I am here describing. — When,
after death, this personality was journeying backward through the
course of his life, it could be observed that the Moon Beings took a
certain interest in the way he was bringing his thoughts, his
abstract thoughts, into the soul-world. And he, in his turn,
experienced a very remarkable awakening, an awakening in which he
seemed to be saying to himself: ‘Ah, now I see that all I
fought against is, in reality, quite different.’ (He had fought
against many things that were traditional). — ‘I see now
that it only gradually came to be what it is, because the ancient
truths have become abstract words. I was often fighting against
windmills; now, however, I see realities.’
Something of
extraordinary interest is happening here — and a whole number
of such men in modern life might be cited as examples. There is
something extremely interesting in this backward journey after death
where the foundations of karma are laid.
An even more
striking figure in this connection is the philosopher Jacob
Frohschammer, who wrote Die Phantasie als Weltprinzip
(Imagination as a World-Building Principle). I have often mentioned
him. There was still a great deal of inner substance in his abstract
concepts, but, like the man just described, he was an abstract
thinker. He could, however, so little tolerate the abstractions of
modernism — I do not now mean ‘modernism’ in the
terminology of Roman Catholicism — that he simply refused to
acknowledge concepts as world-building forces; he would acknowledge
only imagination. He said: imagination is working everywhere;
the plants grow, the animals exist and so forth, through imagination.
In this respect Frohschammer's book is extraordinarily
interesting.
It is wonderful to
observe how such a personality, who has still retained much of what
was alive in cultural life before the modern, abstract way of
thinking became customary, is able to blend with the substance of the
Moon Beings. Investigations of this kind are profoundly interesting
because a closer insight into the laws of the evolution of karma
grows out of them. And when one is drawn by a certain sympathy to
such a personality — as I myself was drawn to the prototype of
Strader in the Mystery Plays — it is the warmth of soul by
which one is united with him that makes it possible to share the
experiences of this very significant journey after
death.
The fact that the
impressions are so strong for the man who is passing through these
experiences has an after-effect, too, upon the person who is
following them with knowledge. And that in itself is a very
remarkable thing. For it becomes evident how much more impressive are
the experiences after death than those of earthly life. I ask myself
to-day in all earnestness: If I should wish to add a fifth Mystery
Play to the four already written, would it be possible for me again
to include the figure of Strader, now that for some considerable time
I have watched these pictures of what Strader's prototype
experienced after death? ... It would be quite impossible, because
the moment I want to present the earthly figure, where the
impressions are far less intense, the pictures of the impressions
experienced by Strader's prototype after death are there before
me. And they are far, far stronger; they blot out what was there
during the earthly life.
I can observe this
quite clearly in myself. As you may imagine, I took an extraordinary
interest in the life of this man, for he was the prototype of
Strader. He has since died and the impressions coming to him, after
death, are incomparably more interesting to me than anything I can
find out or describe about him while he was alive.
When I think about
my Mystery Plays I realise that because of the vivid impressions of
this prototype of Strader in the life after death, the character of
Strader is the one that fades away from me most completely of all.
This does not apply to the same extent to the other characters in the
Plays. You see there how what is here on earth aligns itself in true
observation with what is beyond the earth, and how the effect of such
things enables one to realise the tremendous intensity of the life
after death on this backward journey. The sheer intensity of it blots
out the impressions of earthly life.
Still more can be
said about these matters. I am not speaking here of anything that has
been invented, but of realities. We may know a man very well in his
earthly life and then experience what he has to undergo in the
backward journey after death. Everything takes a different form
because of the intensity of the pictures. If we have been exceedingly
interested in a man's earthly life — as I was in that of
a man who died a number of years ago — then our whole relation
to the earthly life changes; it has an entirely different character
when we subsequently share in the experiences of the personality in
question during the backward journey after death. And many things in
the earthly relationships are only now revealed in their whole
truth.
This is all the
more the case when the relationships in the earthly life were not of
a spiritual nature; when they were, when they were essentially
spiritual, there is, as it were, a continuous, onflowing development.
If, however, there had been, for example, a human relationship
without agreement in ideas and thoughts, then in certain
circumstances this relationship may be transformed after death into
something quite different, into an entirely different life of feeling
and the like. The cause of this change is the vividness of the
pictures which then appear.
I am describing
these things in order to call up before you a concrete image of types
of realities differing from those of earthly existence. There are
many different types of realities. And when, so to speak, the deeds
of the Moon Beings flow into the pictures which a man himself shapes,
this reality is such that it appears even more wonderful than the
subsequent reality when the man is passing through the spiritual
world proper and in union with the Hierarchies is concerned with the
elaboration of the results of his earthly life; this state of
existence runs a much simpler course because it is a kind of
continuation. But the radical transformation of the human being after
death, due as it is to the fact that he enters into relation with
Beings who left the earth long ago and founded a kind of Moon colony
in the cosmos — this is something that with tremendous
forcefulness discloses to us a reality which, because it follows
immediately after the life on earth, is closely related to and yet
essentially different from earthly reality.
When human beings
cling too strongly to earthly things it may be difficult for them to
find their bearings in the sphere of the Moon Beings. Something
happens then which I will describe in the following way. Picture to
yourselves the earth here, the moon there. — Now the active
moon-influences which are, in reality, reflected sun-influences,
penetrate just so far into the earth ... At this point
they cease. The moon-influences do
not penetrate very deeply into the earth, actually only as far as the
roots of the plants spread in the soil. The moon-influences are not
really active below the stratum of the roots of plants. There is only
a shallow layer up here where the moon-influences are held fast.
Sun-influences, of course, penetrate deeply into the earth. The
warmth of the sun in the summer is preserved; when you lay potatoes
in the soil the sun's warmth is still there during the winter.
The sun-influences penetrate deeply into the earth, the
moon-influences only as far as the level of the roots of plants ... a
shallow layer.
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The
moon-influences, rising up like mist from this shallow layer, may
cause human beings who have to pass after death into the Moon sphere
— the soul-world — but are unable to understand the Moon
Beings, to be trapped by this shallow stratum of moon-influences and
they can actually be seen by sensible-super-sensible perception
wandering about as ghosts, as spectral shades.
The legends and
poems which tell of these things are based upon reality, but in order
to form a sound judgment in this domain we must be entirely free from
superstition, we must proceed with critical deliberation and accept
only what can be put to the test.
In this backward
journey after death which lasts for a third of the time of the
earthly life, karma is prepared. For the Moon Beings mingle in these
‘negatives’ of a man's deeds, also of his deeds in
the life of thought. The Moon Beings have a good memory and they
inscribe into the cosmic ether every experience they share with the
human being.
We pass through
the life between death and a new birth and then, on the return
journey when we come back once more into the Moon sphere we find
everything inscribed there. And we bear it all with us into our life
in order to bring it to fulfilment by means of our earthly
will.
This, my dear
friends, is what I wanted to place before you to-day as a theme of
study.
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