REINCARNATION AND KARMA
In the midst between body and spirit lives the
soul.
The impressions which come to it through the body are transitory. They
are present only as long as the body opens its organs to the things of
the outer world. My eye perceives the color of the rose only so long as
the rose is opposite to it and my eye is itself open. The
presence
of the things of the outer world as well as of the bodily organs is
necessary in order that an impression, a sensation, or a perception can
take place. But what I have recognized in my spirit as
truth
concerning the rose does not pass with the present moment. And, as
regards its truth, it is not in the least dependent on me. It would be
true even although I had
p. 60
never stood in front of the rose. What I know through the spirit is timeless or
eternal.
The soul is placed between the present and eternity, in that it holds
the middle place between body and spirit. But it is also the
intermediary between the present and eternity. It preserves the present for the
remembrance.
It thereby rescues it from impermanence, and brings it nearer to the
eternity of the spiritual. It stamps eternity on the temporal and
impermanent by not merely yielding itself up to the transitory
incitements, but by determining things from out its own initiative, and
embodying its own nature in them by means of the actions it performs. By
remembrance the soul preserves the yesterday, by action it prepares the
to-morrow.
My soul would have to perceive the red of the rose always afresh if
it could not store it up in remembrance. What remains after an external
impression, what can be retained by the soul, is the
conception.
Through the power of forming conceptions the soul makes the corporal
outer world so far into its own inner world that it can then retain the
latter
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in the memory for remembrance and, independent of the gained
impressions, lead with it thereafter a life of its own. The soul-life
thus becomes the enduring result of the transitory impressions of the
external world.
But an action also receives permanence when once it is stamped on the
outer world. If I cut a branch from a tree something has taken place by
means of my soul which completely changes the course of events in the
outer world. Something quite different would have happened to the branch
of the tree if I had not interfered by my action. I have called forth
into life a series of effects which, without my existence, would not
have been present. What I have done
to-day endures for
to-morrow; it becomes permanent through the
deed, as my impressions of yesterday have become permanent for my soul through memory.
Let us first consider memory. How does it originate? Evidently in
quite a different way from sensation or perception, because these are
made possible by the corporality. Without the eye I cannot have the
sensation "blue." But in no way do I have the
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remembrance of "blue" through the eye. If the eye is to give me this
sensation now, a blue thing must come before it. The corporality would
always allow impressions to sink back into nothingness if it alone
existed. I remember; that is, I experience something which is itself no
longer present. I unite a past experience with my present life. This is
the case with every remembrance. Let us say, for instance, that I meet a
man and recognize him again because I met him yesterday. He would be a
complete stranger to me were I not able to unite the picture perception
with my impression of him to-day. The picture of to-day is given me by
the perception, that is to say, by my corporality. But who conjures that
of yesterday into my soul? It is the same being in me that was present
during my experience yesterday, and that is also present in that of
to-day. In the previous explanations it has been called
soul. Were it not for this faithful preserver of the past each external impression would be always new to a man.
As preserver of the past the soul continually gathers treasures for the spirit. That
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[paragraph continues]
I can distinguish right from wrong follows because I, as a human being,
am a thinking being, able to grasp the truth in my spirit. Truth is
eternal; and it could always reveal itself to me again in things, even
if I were always to lose sight of the past and each impression were to
be a new one to me. But the spirit within me is not restricted to the
impressions of the present alone; the soul extends its horizon over the
past. And the more it is able to bring to the spirit out of the past,
the richer does it make the spirit. In this way the soul transmits to
the spirit what it has received from the body. The spirit of man
therefore carries each moment of its life a twofold possession within
itself, firstly, the eternal laws of the good and the true; secondly,
the remembrance of the experiences of the past. What he does, he
accomplishes under the influence of these two factors. If we wish to
understand a human spirit we must therefore know two different things
about him, first, how much of the eternal has revealed itself to him;
second, how much treasure from the past is stored up within him.
p. 64
The treasure by no means remains in the spirit in an unchanged shape.
The conceptions which man extracts from his experiences fade gradually
from the memory. Not so, however, their fruits. One does not remember
all the experiences one had during childhood when acquiring the arts of
reading and writing. But one could not read or write if one had not had
the experiences, and if their fruits had not been preserved in the form
of abilities. And that is the transmutation which the spirit effects on
the treasures of memory. It consigns the pictures of the separate
experiences to their fate, and only extracts from them the force
necessary for enhancing and increasing its abilities. Thus not one
experience passes by unused; the soul preserves each one as memory, and
from each the spirit draws forth all that can enrich its abilities and
the whole content of its life. The human spirit
grows
through assimilated experiences. And, although one cannot find the past
experiences in the spirit preserved as if in a storeroom, one
nevertheless finds their effects in the abilities which the man has
acquired.
p. 65
Thus far spirit and soul have been considered only within the period
lying between life and death. One cannot rest there. Anyone wishing to
do that would be like the man who observes the human body also within
the same limits only. Much can certainly be discovered within these
limits. But the
human form
can never be explained by what lies between birth and death. It cannot
build itself up unaided out of mere physical matter and forces. It takes
rise in a form like its own, which has been passed on to it by
propagation. Physical materials and forces build up the body during
life; the forces of propagation enable another body, inheriting its
form, to proceed from it; that is to say, one which is able to be the
bearer of the same life-body. Each life-body is a repetition of its
forefathers. Only
because
it is such does it appear, not in any chance form, but in that passed on
to it. The forces which have given me human form lay in my forefathers.
But the spirit also of a man appears in a definite form. And the forms
of the spirit are the most varied imaginable in different persons. No
two men have the same spiritual
p. 66
form. One ought to make investigations in this region in just as
quiet and matter-of-fact a manner as in the physical world. It cannot be
said that the differences in human beings in spiritual respects arise
only from the differences in their environment, their upbringing, etc.
No, this is by no means the case, for two people under similar
influences as regards environments, upbringing, etc., develop in quite
different ways. One is therefore forced to admit that they have entered
on their path of life with quite different predispositions. Here one is
brought face to face with an important fact which, when its full bearing
is recognized, sheds light on the nature of man.
Human beings differ from their animal fellow-creatures on the earth
as regards their physical form. But among each other human beings are,
within certain limits, the same in regard to their physical form. There
is only one human species. However great may be the differences between
races, peoples, tribes, and personalities as regards the physical body,
the resemblance between man and man is greater than between man and any
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brute species. All that expresses itself as human species passes on
from forefather to descendants. And the human form is bound to this
heredity. As the lion can inherit its physical form from lion
forefathers only, so the human being inherits his physical body from
human forefathers only.
Just as the physical similarity of men is quite evident to the eye, the
difference
of their spiritual forms reveals itself to the unprejudiced spiritual
gaze. There is one very evident fact which shows this clearly. It
consists in the existence of the biography of a human being. Were a
human being merely a member of a species, no biography could exist. A
lion, a dove, lay claim to interest in so far as they belong to the
lion, the dove genus. One has understood the separate being in all its
essentials
when one has described the genus. It matters little whether one has to
do with father, son, or grandson. What is of interest in them, father,
son, and grandson have in common. But what a human being signifies
begins, not where he is a mere member of a genus, but only where he is a
separate being. I have not in the least understood the
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nature of Mr. Smith of Crowcorner if I have described his son or his
father. I must know his own biography. Anyone who reflects accurately on
the essence of biography becomes aware that in regard to spiritual
things
each man is a species by himself.
Those people, to be sure, who regard a biography merely as a
collection of external incidents in the life of a person, may claim that
they can write the biography of a dog in the same way as that of a man.
But anyone who depicts in a biography the real individuality of a man,
grasps the fact that he has in the biography of
one human being something that corresponds to the description of a whole genus in the animal kingdom.
Now if genus or species in the physical sense becomes intelligible
only when one understands it as the result of heredity, the spiritual
being can be intelligible only through a similar
spiritual heredity.
I have received my physical human form from my forefathers. Whence have
I that which comes to expression in my biography? As physical man, I
repeat the shape of my forefathers. What do I repeat as spiritual
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man? Anyone claiming that what is comprised in my biography requires
no further explanation has to be regarded as having no other course open
to him than to claim equally that he has seen, somewhere, an earth
mound on which the lumps of matter have aggregated quite by themselves
into a living man.
As physical man I spring from other physical men, for I have the same
shape as the whole human species. The qualities of the species,
accordingly, could be bequeathed to me within the genus. As spiritual
man I have my own shape as I have my own biography. I therefore can have
obtained this shape from no one but myself. Since I entered the world
not with undefined but with defined predispositions; and since the
course of my life as it comes to expression in my biography is
determined by these predispositions, my work on myself cannot have begun
with my birth. I must, as spiritual man, have existed before my birth.
In my forefathers I have certainly not been existent, for they as
spiritual human beings are different from me. My biography is not
explainable through
p. 70
theirs. On the contrary, I must, as spiritual being, be the
repetition of one through whose biography mine can be explained. The
physical form which Schiller bore he inherited from his forefathers. But
just as little as Schiller's physical form can have grown out of the
earth, so little can his spiritual being have done so. It must be the
repetition of another spiritual being through whose biography his will
be explainable as his physical human form is explainable through human
propagation. In the same way, therefore, that the physical human form is
ever again and again a repetition, a reincarnation of the distinctively
human species, the spiritual human being must be a reincarnation of the
same spiritual human being. For as spiritual human being, each one is in fact his own species.
It might be said in objection to what has been stated here that it is
pure spinning of thoughts, and such external proof might be demanded as
one is accustomed to in ordinary natural science. The reply to this is
that the reëmbodiment of the spiritual human being is, naturally, a
process which does not belong to the region of external physical facts,
but
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is one that takes place entirely in the spiritual region. And to this region no other of our
ordinary powers of intelligence has entrance, save that of
thinking.
He who is unwilling to trust to the power of thinking cannot, in fact,
enlighten himself regarding higher spiritual facts. For him whose
spiritual eye is opened the above train of thoughts acts with exactly
the same force as does an event that takes place before his physical
eyes. He who ascribes to a so-called "proof," constructed according to
the methods of natural science, greater power to convince than the above
observations concerning the significance of biography, may be in the
ordinary sense of the word a great scientist, but from the paths of true
spiritual investigation he is very far distant.
One of the gravest prejudices consists in trying to explain the
spiritual qualities of a man by inheritance from father, mother, or
other ancestors. He who contracts the prejudice, for example, that
Goethe inherited what constitutes his essential being from father or
mother will at first be hardly approachable with arguments, for there
lies
p. 72
within him a deep antipathy to unprejudiced observation. A
materialistic spell prevents him from seeing the relations of phenomena
in the true light.
In such observations as the preceding, the presuppositions are
supplied for following the human being beyond birth and death. Within
the boundaries formed by birth and death the human being belongs to the
three worlds, of corporality, of soul, and of spirit. The soul forms the
link between body and spirit because it penetrates the third member of
the body, the soul-body, with a capacity for sensation, and because it
permeates the first member of the spirit, the spirit-self, as
consciousness-soul. In this way it takes part and lot during life with
the body as well as with the spirit. This comes to expression in its
whole existence. It will depend on the construction of the soul-body how
the sentient-soul can unfold its capabilities. And, on the other hand,
it will depend on the life of the consciousness-soul to what extent the
spirit-self can develop itself in it. The more highly developed the
soul-body is, the more complete is the intercourse which the sentient-
p. 73
soul will be able to develop with the outer world. And the
spirit-self will become so much the richer and more powerful, the more
the consciousness-soul brings it nourishment. It has been shown that
during life this nourishment is supplied to the spirit-self through
assimilated experiences, and the fruits of these experiences. For the
interaction of soul and spirit described above, can, of course, only
take place where soul and spirit are within each other, penetrating each
other, that is, within the union of "spirit-self" with
"consciousness-soul."
Let us consider, first, the interaction of the soul-body and
sentient-soul. The soul-body is, as has become evident, the most finely
elaborated part of the corporality; but it, nevertheless, belongs to it
and is dependent on it. Physical-body, ether-body, and soul-body
compose, in a certain sense, one whole. Hence the soul-body is also
drawn within the laws of physical heredity through which the body
receives its shape. And since it is the most mobile and, so to speak,
volatile form of corporality, it must also exhibit the most mobile,
volatile manifestations of heredity. While,
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therefore, the difference in the physical body is smallest,
corresponding to races, peoples, and tribes; and while the ether-body
presents, on the whole, a preponderating likeness although a greater
divergence in single individuals, in the soul-body the difference is a
very great one. In it is expressed what one already feels to be the
external,
personal,
uniqueness of a man. It is therefore also the bearer of that part of
this personal uniqueness which is passed on from parents, grand-parents,
etc., to descendants. The soul as such leads, as has been explained, a
completely self-contained life of its own; it shuts itself up with its
inclinations and disinclinations, its feelings and passions; but, as a
whole being, it is nevertheless active, and therefore this whole comes
to expression also in the sentient-soul. And because the sentient-soul
penetrates and, as it were, fills up the soul-body, the latter forms
itself according to the nature of the soul and can in this way, as the
bearer of heredity, pass on tendencies, passions, etc., from forefathers
to children. On this fact rests what Goethe says: "From my father I
have stature and the serious manner of life,
p. 75
from the little mother the joyous disposition and the love of
romance." Genius, of course, he did not receive from either. In this way
we are shown what part of a man's soul qualities he hands over, as it
were, to the line of physical heredity.
The matter and forces of the physical body are in the whole external
physical nature around us. They are continually being taken from it and
given back to it. In the space of a few years the matter which composes
our physical body is entirely renewed. That this matter takes the form
of the human body, and that it always renews itself again within this
body, is due to the fact that it is held together by the ether-body. And
the form of the latter is not determined by events between birth—or
conception—and death alone, but is dependent on the laws of heredity
which extend beyond birth and death. That soul qualities also can be
transmitted by heredity, that is, that the process of physical heredity
receives an infusion from the soul, is due to the fact that the
soul-body can be influenced by the sentient-soul.
Now how does the interaction between body
p. 76
and soul proceed? During life the spirit is bound up with the soul in
the way shown above. The soul receives from it the power of living in
the Good and the True, and of thereby bringing in its own life, in its
tendencies, impulses, and passions, the spirit itself to expression. The
spirit-self brings to the I, from the world of the spirit, the eternal
laws of the True and the Good. These link themselves through the
consciousness-soul with the experiences of the soul's own life. These
experiences themselves pass away, but their fruits remain. The
spirit-self receives an abiding impression by having been linked with
them. When the human spirit approaches an experience similar to one with
which it has already been linked, it sees in it something familiar, and
is able to take up a different attitude toward it than if it were
facing it for the first time. This is the basis of all learning. And the
fruits of learning are acquired capacities. The fruits of the
transitory life are in this way graven on the eternal spirit. And do we
not see these fruits? Whence spring the innate predispositions and
talents described above as characteristic of the
p. 77
spiritual man? Surely only from capacities of one kind or another
which the human being brings with him when he begins his earthly life.
These capacities, in certain respects, resemble exactly those which we
can also acquire for ourselves during life. Take the case of a genius.
It is known that Mozart, when a boy, could write out from memory a long
musical composition after hearing it only once. He was able to do this
only because he could survey the whole at one glance. Within certain
limits a man is also able during life to increase his capacity of rapid
survey, of grasping combinations to such an extent that he then
possesses new faculties. Lessing, indeed, has said of himself that by
means of a talent for critical observation he had acquired for himself
something that came near to being genius. One has either to regard such
abilities founded on innate capacities with wonder as miracles, or one
must consider them as fruits of experiences which the spirit-self has
had through a soul. They have been graven on the spirit-self. And since
they have not been implanted in this life, they have been in a former
one. The human spirit is
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its own species. And just as roan as a physical being belonging to a
species bequeaths his qualities within the species, so does the
spirit within
its species, that is, within itself.
In each life the human spirit appears as a repetition of itself with the fruits of its former experiences in previous lives.
This life is consequently the repetition of another, and brings with it
what the spirit-self has, by work, acquired for itself in the previous
life. When the spirit-self absorbs something that can develop into
fruit, it penetrates itself with the life-spirit. Just as the life-body
reproduces the form, from genus to genus, so does the life-spirit
reproduce the soul from personal existence to personal existence.
Thus the experiences of the soul become enduring not only within the
boundaries of birth and death, but out beyond death. But the soul does
not stamp its experiences only on the spirit which flashes up in it, it
stamps them, as has been shown, on the outer world, also, through the
deed.
What a man did yesterday is to-day still present in its effects. A
picture of the connection between cause and effect is given in the
simile of sleep and death.
p. 79
[paragraph continues]
Sleep has often been called the younger brother of death. I get up in
the morning. Night has interrupted my consecutive activity. Now, under
ordinary circumstances, it is not possible for me to begin my activity
again just as I like. I must connect it with my doings of yesterday if
there is to be order and coherence in my life. My actions of yesterday
are the conditions predetermining those I have to do to-day. I have
created my fate of to-day by what I did yesterday. I have separated
myself for a while from my activity; but this activity belongs to me and
draws me again to itself after I have withdrawn myself from it for a
while. My past remains bound up with me; it lives on in my present, and
will follow me into my future. If the effects of my deeds of yesterday
were not to be my fate to-day, I should have had, not to
awake
this morning, but to be newly created out of nothing. It would be
absurd if under ordinary circumstances I were not to occupy a house that
I have had built for me.
The human spirit is just as little newly created when it begins its
earthly life as is a man newly created every morning. Let us try
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to make clear to ourselves what happens when an entrance into this
life takes place. A physical body, receiving its form through the laws
of heredity, comes upon the scene. This body becomes the bearer of a
spirit which repeats a previous life in a new form. Between the two
stands the soul, which leads a self-contained life of its own. Its
inclinations and disinclinations, its wishes and desires minister to it;
it takes thought into its service. As sentient-soul it receives the
impressions of the outer world and carries them to the spirit, in order
that the spirit may extract from them the fruits that are for eternity.
It plays, as it were, the part of intermediary; and its task is fully
accomplished when it is able to do this. The body forms impressions for
the sentient-soul which transforms them into sensations, retains them in
the memory as conceptions, and hands them over to the spirit to hold
throughout eternity. The soul is really that through which man belongs
to his earthly life. Through his body he belongs to the physical human
species. Through it he is a
member of this species. With his spirit he lives in a higher world.
p. 81
[paragraph continues] The soul binds the two worlds for a time together.
But the physical world on which the human spirit enters is no strange
field of action to it. On it the traces of its actions are imprinted.
Something in this field of action belongs to the spirit. It bears the
impress of its being. It is related to it. As the soul formerly
transmitted the impressions from the outer world to the spirit in order
that they might become enduring in it, so now the soul, as the spirit's
organ, converts the capacities bestowed by the spirit into deeds which
are also enduring through their effects. Thus the soul has actually
flowed into these actions. In the effects of his actions man's soul
lives on in a second independent life. And it is inevitable that the
human spirit should meet again the effect of these actions. For only the
one part of my deed is in the outer world; the other is in myself. Let
us make this clear by a simple example taken from natural science.
Animals that once could see migrated to the caves of Kentucky, and have,
through their life in them, lost their powers of sight. The existence
in darkness has caused the eyes to
p. 82
be inactive. Consequently the physical and chemical activity that is
present when seeing takes place is no longer carried on in these eyes.
The stream of nourishment which was formerly expended on this activity
now flows to other organs. These animals
can now
live only in these caves. They have by their act, by the immigration,
created the conditions of their later lives. The immigration has become a
part of their fate. A being that once acted has united itself with the
results of the action. It is so also with the human spirit. It is only
by having been active that the soul could have transmitted certain
capacities to it. And these capacities correspond to the actions.
By means of his actions, therefore, the human spirit has really
carved his fate. In a new life he finds himself linked to what he did in
a former one. One may ask, "How can that be, when the human spirit on
reincarnating finds itself in an entirely different world from that
which it left at some earlier time?" This question is based on a very
superficial conception of the linkings of fate. If I change my scene of
action from Europe to America I find myself in entirely new
surroundings.
p. 83
[paragraph continues]
Nevertheless, my life in America depends entirely on my previous life
in Europe. If I have been a mechanic in Europe, my life in America will
shape itself quite differently from the way in which it would had I been
a bank clerk. In the one case I should probably be surrounded in
America by machinery, in the other by bank offices. In each case it is
my previous life that decides my environment; it attracts to itself, as
it were, out of the whole surrounding world, those things that are
related to it. So it is with the spirit-self. It inevitably surrounds
itself in a new life with that to which it is related from previous
lives. And it is on this account that sleep is a good likeness for
death. For the man during sleep is withdrawn from the field of action in
which his fate waits for him. While one sleeps events in this field of
action pursue their course. One has for a time no influence on this
course of events. Nevertheless, our life on a new day depends on the
effects of the deeds of the previous one. Our personality actually
embodies or incarnates itself anew every morning in our world of action.
What was separated from us at night is on the next
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day, as it were, spread out around us. So it is with the actions of
the former embodiments or incarnations of man. They are bound to him as
his destiny, as the life in the dark caves remains bound up with the
animals who, through migration into them, have lost their powers of
sight. Just as these animals can only live in the surroundings in which
they have placed themselves, so the human spirit
can
only live in the surroundings which by its acts it has created for
itself. There can be no more appropriate comparison than that of sleep
with death. That I find in the morning a state of affairs which I on the
previous day created, is brought about by the immediate progress of the
events themselves. That I, when I reincarnate myself, find surroundings
which correspond with the results of my deeds in a previous life, is
brought about by the relationship of my reincarnated spirit with the
things in the world around. From this it stands out clearly how the
soul
forms a member of the constitution of man. The physical body is subject
to the laws of heredity. The human spirit, on the contrary, has to
incarnate over and over again, and its law consists in its
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bringing over the fruits of the former lives into the following ones.
The soul lives in the present. But this life in the present is not
independent of the previous lives. For the incarnating spirit brings its
destiny with it from its previous incarnations, and this destiny
decides the kind of life. Whatever impressions the soul will be able to
have, with what wishes it will be able to be gratified, what sorrows and
joys spring forth for it, depend on the nature of the actions in the
past incarnations of the spirit. The life of the soul is therefore the
result of the self-created destiny of the human spirit. The course of
man's life between birth and death is therefore determined in a
threefold way. And he is by these means dependent in a threefold way on
factors which lie
on the other side
of birth and death. The body is subject to the laws of heredity; the
soul is subject to the self-created fate. One calls this fate created by
the man himself his
karma.
The spirit is under the law of reëmbodiment or reincarnation. One can
accordingly express the relationship between spirit, soul, and body in
the following way as well. The spirit is
eternal; birth and death have dominion
p. 86
over the corporality according to the laws of the physical world; the
soul-life, which is subject to destiny, links them together during an
earthly life.
All further knowledge of the being of man has to be preceded by
acquaintance with the "three worlds" to which he belongs. They are dealt
with in the following chapters.
Thinking which takes up an unprejudiced attitude toward the phenomena
of life, not afraid to follow the thoughts resulting to their final
consequences, can, by pure logic, arrive at the conviction of the law of
karma and reincarnation. Just as it is true that for the seer with the
opened "spiritual eye," past lives, like an opened book, face him as
experience, so is it true that the
truth of it all becomes obvious to the unprejudiced
reason.
Theosophy, by Rudolf Steiner, [1910]
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