Lecture Eight
From many studies on the subject of the forming of human
destiny or karma you will have realised that human life is not
viewed in its entirety if sleep is left out of consideration.
When a man reflects about himself with the ordinary
consciousness of to-day, he looks back only upon the days
because the nights are passed in unconsciousness. In the case
of normal sleepers, therefore — as nowadays there are no
Seven Sleepers — a third of life is disregarded. But for
experience of the super-sensible and of man's participation in
the spiritual world, it is this very third of life that is of
essential importance. When a person has reached a definite age
he looks back over the days he remembers, as far back as his
memory goes. The nights are between the days but in his
recollection the nights are left entirely out of
consideration. A true retrospect is really not possible
for a man of modern times because his observation of life is
far too superficial. But if he were capable of carrying out
such a retrospect, then precisely through what he does
not see in the ordinary way he would have an indication
of karma. Observation of the life of sleep gives significant
hints of individual karma. Attention must above all be paid to
the essential difference between the two moments of waking and
going to sleep.
Ordinary consciousness can feel this difference
instinctively, but Initiation-Science alone can throw
light upon it. The difference between the moment of waking and
the moment of going to sleep is particularly evident to people
who are sick or ailing. They notice more readily than do those
in good health that the moment of going to sleep is often
accompanied by at least a slight feeling of pleasure. The
moment of waking, on the other hand, has something slightly
unpleasant about it; waking is accompanied by happiness only if
the attention of the person concerned is at once turned to the
outer world and when his consciousness of the outer world
drowns what is rising up from within him. For many people the
moments both of waking and of going to sleep are shrouded in a
certain dimness. At the moment of going to sleep a man has the
feeling that he is somehow dragging the past day's experiences
along with him, that these become more and more nebulous and
that he then abandons them. The moment of waking is accompanied
by a slight feeling of oppression, a feeling of lifting oneself
out of certain depths, bringing from them something that is
carried over into the day and is got rid of only during the
course of it. The result is that a certain feeling of
unpleasantness may be associated with the experience of
waking. An unpleasant sensation of taste may intensify into an
equally unpleasant sensation of a stupefied head. People do not
as a rule distinguish between these delicate experiences but
they are unmistakeable indications of a great deal in human
life. For what is really taking place? We describe quite
correctly and from a certain standpoint very exactly what is
taking place if we say: during sleep the physical and etheric
bodies lie in the bed and the ego and astral body pass out into
the spiritual world, returning into the physical and etheric
bodies in the morning on waking. But how does this process take
place? In order to make progress in our study of karma we will
envisage the whole process which, to begin with, it is
justifiable to describe in a rather abstract way.
This emergence of the ego and astral body from the physical and
etheric bodies can be sketched like this. Let us suppose this
figure to be the human being and here are the physical body and
the etheric body. In the evening, when sleep begins, the ego
and astral body move outwards. We will draw quite
diagrammatically how the two members widen out, expand, but
describe a kind of circle. In the morning, on waking, the ego
and the astral body pass into the physical body again through
the limbs, actually by way of the fingers and toes. The fact is
that a circle is
described and this statement must be taken more literally than
is usually imagined. In reality, when a normal human being
wakes in the morning, the picture seen by clairvoyance is not
of the whole astral body and the whole ego being immediately
within the physical and etheric bodies; on the contrary, ego
and astral body pass only slowly and by degrees into the
physical body from morning onwards until towards midday and
afternoon. You will say that if this were really the case we
should feel our ego and astral body moving only gradually from
the tips of the fingers and toes towards the head. To very
exact clairvoyant observation this is actually the case, only
the person concerned does not inwardly feel it to be so, for
the reason that the way in which these higher principles work
is different from any kind of physical activity. You see, if a
locomotive is propelling a carriage, it pushes forwards
from the spot where it is at the moment. And if a railway line
is, say 30 metres long and the engine is pushing forward, as
long is needed for the first metre, then so long for the
second, and so on, at a certain point there may be no effect
from the engine if it has not yet reached thus far. But with
spiritual conditions it is different; spiritual conditions are
effective at other places as well as where they happen to be
centred. So the waking hours of the day are used for the
purpose of bringing our ego and astral body slowly into our
physical and etheric bodies from the tips of our fingers and
toes. But the ego and astral body begin to be active from the
very beginning, from the moment of waking, so that one has the
feeling of being completely filled by them. To clairvoyant
sight, however, it is clear that an actual revolution
takes place through the day; the complementary revolution takes
place during the night. But a revolution also takes place
— one that is less dependent upon time — when you
have an afternoon nap. Here again the ego and astral body leave
the physical and etheric bodies and the process adapts itself
to your need of sleep. Sleep is a prophet and knows when you
will wake although you yourself do not; your astral body under
all circumstances knows it. It knows when you will wake even if
as the result of some disturbance you sleep for a shorter time
than you intend, even if before going to sleep you say that you
want to sleep for only half-an-hour but you lie asleep for
three hours instead. The astral body knows exactly how long you
will sleep. It is an accurate prophet because the inner,
spiritual circumstances are, in fact, different from the
external circumstances experienced at the time.
You
will certainly have realised that there is a very great
difference between the process of going to sleep and that of
waking. When we wake we have just been in the spiritual world
and when we go to sleep we pass out of the physical world and
into the spiritual world. A stream bears us along in the
spiritual world between sleeping and waking and we also have
experiences then — experiences which are, however, wrapt
in unconsciousness. We have experiences during sleep which are,
in fact, similar to those of the daytime, only they are of much
greater intensity.
If
you observe the soul's waking life you will find there, in the
first place, the thought-experiences evoked by the
various impressions made by life. But memories of the earthly
life already past are always intermingled with these
experiences. Try for once to consider how in every situation
memories mingle with the momentary impressions made by life. In
fact, if close attention is paid, one can get a picture of how,
at different moments, life is a veritable hotch-potch, a
mingling of memories and instantaneous impressions. There are
two quite different factors: the thoughts which rise up from
within and the thoughts which enter via the senses. These are
quite different currents of the inner life and during sleep
they are also in evidence. The stream of what is present
(impressions of the daily life) on going to sleep continues
during the night and perpetually flowing towards this is
what we experience on waking.
These two currents stream towards each other: the one stream,
experienced particularly on going to sleep, is the one already
mentioned, the one that is experienced consciously,
vividly and powerfully during the first decades after death
when life is lived through again in reverse order. As I put it
to you rather drastically: if you give someone a box on the
ear, then, in living through the event after death you do not
experience the anger which you consciously felt on Earth when
giving the blow, or maybe the satisfaction at being able
to express the anger. Instead, you undergo what the other
person experienced, his physical pain and also
his moral suffering. This is what you would experience,
but in a picture, not yet in reality, if you could consciously
continue your life when it is already becoming dim at the
approach of sleep. If you were to pass into sleep with full,
clear consciousness, you would live through the day's
experiences in reverse, but in pictures. Whereas during the
first decades after death it is all experienced as
reality.
What I have described applies, approximately, to life by day in
the waking state, when we are given up to outer life merely
with our thoughts. But there is also the other current
and this has something stupendous in it. We experience it on
waking, as I have explained, but there is an element of
heaviness in it which is carried into the day and is only
gradually overcome; later in the day we become free of it. When
this second stream is fully perceptible to Initiation vision it
is seen to be a repository of the whole karmic past which
passes before the human being every time he sleeps. Whereas a
person can experience something of the karma that is taking
shape for the future, when he wakes from sleep he has in the
feeling I have described a faint, admittedly a very faint,
glimpse of his present karma. The moment of waking brings a
faint indication of what an individual bears within him from
his past earthly lives. This is of course taken into what the
astral body and the ego radiate when from the tips of the
fingers and toes they spread through the body. A very
burdensome karma, a karma that is difficult to bear, radiates
unhealthy material deposits into the head, whereas a good karma
radiates health-bringing deposits. And it is here that the
spiritual and the natural make contact. The good in a man's
karma radiates the healthy states of the organism into the head
in the morning and clarifies it; healthy elements radiate
upwards from good karma. From bad karma, from the residue of
whatever guilt has been incurred, unhealthy deposits in the
human organism are reduced to a kind of vapour which rises up
into the head. The head then feels dull and heavy. The weaving
of karma right into the physical can be perceived from the
condition prevailing on waking in the morning. Karma takes
shape through the alternating effects of sleeping and waking
life. Now just as the karma that takes shape from what we have
done every day of our life until its end, signifies in sleep
during the night what the momentarily formed thoughts signify
during the day, so does that mighty spectacle encountered
when we have slept from evening to morning signify the
cosmic memories of our past karma. Just as we have
personal memories when we wake, from going to sleep until
waking we have our karmic memories, if our consciousness
extends so far. Memories of the different lives through which
we have passed on Earth come to meet us. Soon after going to
sleep there can be revealed to one who is able to understand
such experiences through Initiation wisdom and Initiation
insight, the last Earth-life, the last Earth-life but one and
so on, right back to lives which become indefinite because the
individual himself was then still living in the universal All,
with a dreamlike, plant-like consciousness. Thus sleep is
actually the window through which man looks at his karma. He
becomes familiar with his karma and works at its further
shaping during sleep through the deeds and thoughts which fill
his waking life. This is the first weaving of karma: it takes
place during sleep. We have already considered a second
weaving that takes place during the first decades after
death.
We
shall acquire a more serious conception of life when the
significance of sleep has been grasped in this way, when we
realise that we sink into sleep every night because it is then
that we work at the formation of our karma, and because it is
during sleep that our karma from previous earthly lives finds
the way whereby it can play a part in our daily life. From the
night, karma gradually enters into our daily life and we bring
something quite definite with us into the day. An individual
who can recollect clearly how at one point in his life a
particularly significant event occurred to him, will, if he has
a more intimate, finely developed faculty of introspection,
easily perceive that if, let us say, this event took place in
the afternoon, ever since morning an inner restlessness was
impelling him towards it. Most people who can perceive
something of the sort will have had the feeling that from the
morning onwards they had been moving towards an event
that was to be significant in their life. Such an event —
if it was a really fateful although entirely unexpected event
— affected all the preceding hours of the day. On days
when something important is to happen to us we do not wake up
exactly as we do on days that take their usual course —
only we do not notice it. Those who used to lead the life of
peasants on the land — such people knew about these
things and did not like to be torn suddenly out of sleep,
because when there is no gradual transition into the waking
life of day one is wrested away from such intimate experiences.
Peasants say that on waking one should never look at the window
at once but away from it, so that while the light is still dim
one can become aware of what is emerging from sleep. The
peasant will not at once look at the window nor does he like to
be startled into waking suddenly; he likes to be wakened
naturally, at the same time every morning by the church bell,
so that he can prepare himself for this through the whole
period of sleep. Then the day dawns, the church bell sounds
into his life and then, in the early morning he has inklings of
his destiny, of events of destiny, not those resulting
from acts of free will. This is what he likes to happen and
unlike people claiming to be highly civilised he would hate to
be wakened by an alarum clock, for that drives one with dead
certainty away from everything spiritual — much more
forcibly, of course, than the window looked at
immediately on waking. But our modern culture has
introduced materialism into all the circumstances of life and
will continue to do so. There is a great deal in modern
life which makes it impossible for men to perceive the spirit
living and weaving in the world. The more aware they become of
that indefinite, half mystical influence which can radiate from
sleep, the more clearly is their attention directed to their
karma.
And
now you will understand why I was able to say that we readily
dream of individuals whom we meet in life and to whom we at
once feel drawn or the reverse, quite independently of
whatever outer impression they make. What is happening in such
cases? These are individuals with whom we were together in
earlier lives on Earth. Let us say that in the afternoon of
14th June, 1924, we have had the experience of meeting someone
we perhaps dislike. We now carry into sleep the experience that
gave rise to the feeling of dislike. But there, in sleep, the
karma is revealed; this person stands before us as he was in
the last earthly life or in the last but one, and so on; we
meet him as he was in his earlier life. We encounter everything
we experienced in connection with this individual who has now
appeared and who simply reminded us of something — we
meet him as a bodily figure, but in a spiritual way. No wonder
that we begin to dream of him; with ordinary consciousness we
cannot do otherwise. But if we come across an individual for
the first time, however beautiful or ugly his features may be
or however strongly he interests us, in our sleep we never meet
him, for he was never with us in earlier lives on Earth. No
wonder we cannot dream of him! You see how transparent such
things become when he facts are examined spiritually.
Now
what transpires between sleeping and waking in the forming of
karma may follow a normal, perfectly normal course. Then a man
will experience how his destiny takes shape as the fulfilment
of what he brought upon himself in earlier earthly fives. Or he
will experience the ultimate karmic value of what he thinks or
does in this present fife. It will as a rule live itself out in
what he thinks or does. But something quite different may come
about.
Suppose a man who is living on the Earth today achieved in deed
or thought something of real importance in an earlier life. The
karmic result of this does not lie in the physical body or in
the etheric body which are inherited from the parents, but it
lies in the astral body and ego — the members which are
outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep at night.
But suppose that this karmic load has such strength that it
cannot wait until the age of life when the astral body may be
weak, for in old age muscles and bones have already become
brittle. Let us take seventy years — the patriarchal age
— to be the normal length of a man's life on Earth. In
these seventy years man's astral body and ego also undergo
development. The astral body of a child can work strongly and
forcefully upon the whole physical and etheric organism; it can
hammer, as it were, upon muscles and bones. In old age this is
no longer possible, for the astral body then becomes
relatively weak. The strength of the ego increases but it
withdraws into the weaker astral body and hence works with less
power. The astral body, however, is particularly responsible
here, for in old age it is no longer able to hammer effectively
upon muscles and bones. Now imagine that someone is living at
the present time, in the twentieth century, having lived before
in the fourteenth or eleventh century. During his life in the
eleventh century he performed a really significant act, one
that made very strong impressions on the astral body. The
ensuing result remains in the astral body and when the man
comes again in the twentieth century it wants to be finally
fulfilled and from this astral body to give the necessary
stimulus. When the result of the experience in the eleventh
century is of such significance that it cannot make use of a
feeble, aged astral body hardly capable of performing important
deeds, then it must use an astral body in the early years of
life. And if the event has been so important as to eclipse all
other events of life, a great deal must be compressed into the
period while the astral body is still youthful. What does this
mean? It means that the individual concerned will have a
short life in the twentieth-century incarnation. Here
you see how the length of life is determined by the
consequences of former earthly thoughts and deeds being
anchored in the astral body.
We
now go further. Think, for instance, of an astral body that is
positively inflated as the result of important deeds —
particularly evil deeds — in an earlier incarnation; such
deeds inflate the astral body and it makes a strong impact upon
the physical and etheric bodies. This strong impact is not
healthy; only a certain normal relation of the astral body to
the physical and etheric bodies is healthy. The strong impact
which can, for instance, be caused by bad karma, batters the
organs, softens them and causes disease. Now comes the second
incarnation. Such action or thinking in the eleventh century
can inflate the astral body, thereby condemning the individual
to death at an early age. But he may fall ill in any case,
apart from this violent impact; he may have a severe illness
and die from it. That is the physical aspect. For when we see
what is going on in the person's physical body, we say: he is
ill and the illness ends in death; he falls ill at the age of
twenty-five and dies at thirty in consequence of the
illness.
Is
this also the spiritual aspect? Is this also what would be said
by Initiation Science? No! Initiation Science would say the
opposite. For it is precisely the earlier significant action or
thought that brings about the death in the next earthly life;
the deed in the eleventh century brings about the death in the
twentieth century. And the death sends the illness on in
advance ... a man becomes ill so that he may die at the right
moment. The consequence of the later death, which is a karmic
necessity, is, as you now realise, the illness which is sent in
advance. That is the spiritual aspect. When one rises from the
physical world to the spiritual world everything is in fact
reversed; it takes the opposite course and we see how the
illness is karmically brought into man. That is the karmic
aspect of illness. This karmic aspect of illness can be an
extremely important factor for diagnosis. It need not
immediately be discussed with the patient but it may
certainly be important. If you bear in mind that what is
contained in karma has its own definite place, you will
certainly discover it.
Now
if the significant incident, action or thought affecting
another human being or some particular matter occurred in an
immediately preceding incarnation, let us say in the
eleventh century, when we are asleep we encounter what took
place in that century before anything dating from a still
earlier incarnation, let us say in the second century B.C. Thus
we gradually encounter what has happened to us in earlier
earthly lives. But if one begins here (pointing to the
sketch) then what is encountered first is what has made the way
from here to here. The karma comes to meet us; but this means
that what is above here has come from what is below, perhaps
from the heart; something that is low down in the organism and
was affected in the previous incarnation comes, however, from
the head. In the case of illness, therefore, when we see
how far back the influential events lie, karma can indicate to
us that an affection, let us say, of the legs, comes from
incarnations in the relatively near past, whereas a symptom of
illness in the head comes from incarnations in the
relatively far distant past. Thus the transition from the
spiritual into the physical can also be indicated by karma.
What results from this is extremely important for therapy. For
where must we seek the remedy for illness affecting the head
and for illness affecting the legs? The remedy for illness
affecting the head will be found in what existed far, far back
in the evolutionary process of Nature, in what is reminiscent
of very early Nature-processes, for instance, mushrooms, which
in their present imperfect form recapitulate an earlier plant
formation, or in algae and lichens, or, in the case of the
fully developed plant, in the root, since that is the part that
has remained at the earliest stage. Illness in the lower body
and more towards its periphery will have to be healed with what
appeared at a later stage in the evolution of Nature, namely,
blossoms, flowering plants or also with later formations
in the mineral kingdom. Whatever is a late development in
man must be healed with what is also a late development in
Nature. In the head, too, there are, of course, organs which
are comparatively late formations. When the Earth was still
recapitulating the Moon-evolution and Sun-evolution, man
existed without his present eyes, in general without
sense-organs, although the first rudiments of them were already
present during the Saturn-evolution. As they are today,
mirroring the outer world inwardly, they are a relatively late
product of evolution, appearing at the same time, for instance,
as siliceous substance in its present form on the Earth. Silica
as it is today is a late product in the evolution of the world
of Nature, although its rudiments were laid in the far, far
past.
Hence when silicic acid is correctly administered as a remedy
it acts upon everything belonging to the nerves-and-senses
system, especially the senses, through the whole
organism. In their present form the senses developed in
an age when rocks containing silica also appeared in their
present form. In the first incarnation which can still be
called an incarnation, when with our whole bodily make-up we
were a more integral part of Nature, we lived, simply in
accordance with our karma, an existence shared with different
forms of plant and animal life, the successors of which are
here to-day. The mushrooms and the roots of plants are unlike
what they were in that early epoch but in a certain way what is
present to-day in the mushrooms, lichens, algae and roots of
plants is reminiscent of the conditions prevailing in our first
definite incarnation. In the blossoms and flowering plants of
today and in minerals at a corresponding stage ... (a gap in
the transcript here). I bring this before you only to show how
a true observation of karma leads to stages in the evolution of
Nature. And from the relation of Nature to Man we can recognise
how to heal. Every branch of life must ultimately be widened in
such a way that it gradually becomes spiritual knowledge.
Everything else is so much groping and fumbling, an existence
in spiritual darkness, and it is this that has brought mankind
into the present situation. If men are to emerge from it again
they must grasp the reason for it in clear consciousness, that
is to say, knowledge of the physical must be widened to
knowledge of the spiritual. And nothing can lead more
positively to realisation of the spiritual than the study of
karma.
When we picture how the forming of karma proceeds from sleep,
how again it passes into and through sleep, how the normal
forming of karma impels a man to action, makes his action again
subject to karma and how he thus lives out the ordinary karma
of life — from all this we see how karma works. When
again we see how the life of an individual is shortened and he
dies at an early age, indicating that karma has inflated
his astral body and must make strong demands upon it as the
result of past deeds, thus contributing to illness —
everywhere the working of karma is in evidence. Or let us
suppose a man has an accident and is ill as a result; then,
under certain circumstances, such an accident — which is
possibly, but not necessarily, determined by karma — can
continue to be a factor in the further course of karma through
the following lives on Earth. Illness may also be the
beginning of karma and then it will be found that such
illnesses make going to sleep an unwelcome and difficult
process. But when illnesses are the beginning of karma they
have something consoling about them.
In
the case of many illnesses the following must be said:
illnesses that are a fulfilment of karma, that make waking
unpleasant, point to previous experiences; illnesses that are
an augury of future karma and make going to sleep an unwelcome
and difficult process are the beginning of good karma. For
there will be compensation for what is suffered in such an
illness. We have the pain now and afterwards the compensation
for the pain, the uplifting, joyous experience. A great
deal in life looks different when viewed from the spiritual and
not from the physical standpoint. It is sometimes a thoroughly
painful physical experience not to be able to sleep, but true
observation of the spiritual aspect can be comforting. And if
we do not value the momentary physical effect above the
spiritual life we can actually say: Thank goodness that I so
often have difficulty in going to sleep, for that is a sign
that I shall experience much that will be uplifting in my
future earthly life; a great deal from my present life will
pass into the next one.
Sleeplessness can sometimes be a good comforter and if it were
not karmically beneficial in its spiritual aspect, it would be
much more harmful than it actually is. Many people tell one
such legends about their long bouts of sleeplessness that from
the medical point of view one might well ask how comes it that
they are still alive! Normal sleep is essential for normal
life. People tell one for how long they have not slept; one can
only wonder that they are still alive for they really ought to
be dead and yet they are not! But in such circumstances the
vivifying spiritual element contained in the ego penetrates
into life as compensation. To a brief survey of life it is
obvious that really restful sleep after hard struggles and hard
work is also at times desirable. But to lie in complete
restfulness without sleeping and to pass the night quietly and
fully awake is nevertheless the more desirable because
when it is done of set purpose a person then becomes more and
more aware of the Eternal. But the will must be in operation;
the condition must not, in essentials at least, be due to
physiological causes. Nevertheless there is karmic consolation
for difficulty in going to sleep and in sleeplessness, for this
really points to future karma, points to the future in certain
respects.
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