Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 17 December 1910, Hanover

34. Envy and Lies as Karmic Effects

Today we shall discuss some things from immediate life, the relationship of Theosophy to human life in general and how Theosophical thinking and feeling influence life.

It is often asked: How can theosophical views be proven? If only people would really pay attention, they would find evidence. There is a strong disbelief that what takes place in our souls has any meaning at all. People only ever want so-called logical evidence.

For example, two parties can argue about whether a piece of iron is magnetic. Some believe it on authority, others just want to trust their own eyes and so on. But anyone who makes an experiment with a magnet would soon find out the truth. So one should also measure life by theosophical truths. But you have to allow yourself a little more time to contemplate life than you are inclined to do today.

During my career as an educator, I observed the following. It was fashionable at the time to give young children a glass of red wine at mealtimes to fortify them; you have to make a note of such experiences for life. Today, you can see the difference between the great people who were regularly given a glass of red wine as children and others who grew up without this refreshment. All those who had a glass of red wine back then are now fidgety and nervous people! - Of course, there can also be other causes of nervousness, but I am only talking here about cases where there were no other causes.

Such effects cannot be recognized in five years as with the new remedies, the belief in these usually only lasts five years - you have to be more patient. But in this way, with careful, patient observation, you can see how karma works in one incarnation and how it works between two incarnations.

Envy and lies are two characteristics that people try to overcome with all their strength. We know that after a few incarnations the Luciferic beings work on the astral body of man, while lies and error are due to the influence of the Ahrimanic principle on the etheric body. One could shout to our clever, monistic population: “The people never notice the devil, even if he had it by the collar.” - As soon as people feel that they have such qualities as envy and mendacity, they do everything in their power to root them out. But because this is very difficult, something else tends to set in.

This is the explanation for all natural processes, that the skull bones and all our bones in general are transformed vertebral bones. In the forthcoming “Anthroposophy” I will point out that our taste organs, for example, are transformed, retarded facial organs.

Envy takes on a mask and transforms itself into censure. People then think that they must not close their eyes to the faults of others. Most criticism, censure and so on is based on transformed envy; it then appears as justified criticism. - Lucifer, who can no longer do anything with the person who has overcome envy, hands over the reigns to Ahriman, as it were, who then takes over the etheric body and arouses gossip and so on.

In the second half of his life it will then become apparent that such a person cannot really find his way in life, always turns to others for advice, never knows what to do on his own initiative. He who is a liar in one period of his life will be shy and reserved in another; he will not be able to look others frankly in the eye. There is profound truth in the saying that we cannot trust those who cannot look us calmly in the eye. Without the help of clairvoyance, such connections can be observed.

If a child is not encouraged to maintain the right balance between sociability and solitude - being together with disagreeable people is also loneliness - then quarrelsomeness, litigiousness, querulousness and so on tend to develop in old age. Opinionatedness, a spirit of contradiction is an effect of too much loneliness around twenty to thirty years ago.

The opposite: excessive sociability, lack of gathering - there are people who get bored as soon as they are alone - creates a certain inability to deal with one thing constantly and thoroughly. One consequence of such a restless nature is a reduced memory. If you compare the memory of people two millennia ago, when people immediately memorized the songs they heard word for word, with our memory today, you will be amazed. - Even between the first and second half of the twentieth century one would be able to notice the difference; memory has become less and less reliable. If Theosophy were not to penetrate humanity, people would soon have no memory at all. A fascination with rushing from one to another is the result of an excess of sociability. We must try to arouse children's interest in something they can spend at least an hour a day with. Quick judgment, strength of will and knowing what one wants can only be achieved through the necessary solitude. - All sociability today seems downright miserable; people who have lived next to each other for ten years know nothing about each other, nothing passes from one to the other. How few people today have an instinct for whether you have a person in front of you who is, so to speak, lying to you.

The only way to acquire such practical experience is by wisely dividing sociability and solitude. If we do not go through life blindfolded, then we see how theosophical truths are confirmed.

In the next embodiment, the karmic effect can now show itself into the body incarnation. As an effect of shyness, our organism will bring with it a tendency to infectious diseases. Envy will produce tired, pale people. If we practically believe in karma - which is not so difficult if people were not so stubborn - we would try to harmonize our actions with this belief, and the benefits would soon become apparent.

Just as edelweiss always grows on the mountain, never in the valley, so we are always brought together with the people with whom we have to balance karmic causes. If a weak child is born into our family, we can assume that this child has gossiped about us or envied us in a previous life. The more we give positive help to such a child by forgiving and forgiving again and again, the faster it will recover. If such a maxim is applied at the right time, the pale skin will take on color and the limbs will round out. The child will then be able to overcome its karma and absorb forces that will help it to grow.

In the case of children, one should also not neglect to awaken the necessary mental agility, for only through this can they attain a certain dexterity.

Liberal training does not protect you from becoming a clumsy person. There are people who can't even sew on a button themselves; they can't even carry a plate from one room to another without dropping it. What should be material skills must first be mental skills.

In the last four to five centuries, people have introduced an incredible materialism. Theosophy as a life practice will show that the spiritual and the soul are the causes of the physical.

There were certainly not as many short-sighted people as there are today four to five centuries ago. If people do not become more spiritual, they will become even more short-sighted.

These are karmic things that are confirmed by clairvoyant research. Long incarnations before the appearance

the Christ-Jesus, the Christ impulse did not yet work in the souls; now, however, it works in them. An example will show the profound significance of whether the Christ impulse can work within or not. A personality who lived on the border between the Middle Ages and modern times and who is extremely interesting, but whose name cannot yet be mentioned, shall now occupy us. When I visited our southernmost lodge in Palermo, I already felt during the journey from Naples to Sicily on the ship that I must find something significant here; there was something very special living in the spiritual atmosphere of Sicily. - You can only approach such problems dispassionately and without greed. - In the course of the next few days it turned out that these strange currents were caused by the fate of an earlier incarnation of the above-mentioned personality, the great philosopher Empedocles, who was also an architect and had introduced the Mysteries to Sicily. - Other philosophers would regard what he said as madness. - Empedocles was far ahead of his time; he already had certain materialistic ideas that were to come after the Christ impulse. He found the four elements first, as it were.

But Empedocles was also ahead of his time as a mystery sage, he had the longing to become one with the elements and he threw himself into Mount Etna. What spiritually dissolved there is still alive today in the atmosphere of Mount Etna.

Today, the Christ impulse can be found everywhere within the material. If Empedocles could have found it, he would have connected with it. He came too late or too early, so that he had to fully savor the pain of the initiates of that time, who could no longer reach the primordial wisdom and were thus driven to despair by the darkness surrounding them, because the Christ was not yet to be found. Without knowledge of the fate of Empedocles, it is impossible to understand his later incarnation, which was a very problematic personality.

If you compare the Christ personality with the Buddha, you can see the difference: the Christ taught love for the physical body temple in order to lead people towards the Christianization of the whole globe, so that souls can ascend to higher levels of existence and leave the earth as a corpse behind them. - The Buddha feels happy that he was in a body temple for the last time. We can recognize a descending karma of humanity from the beginning until the appearance of the Christ, but from then on an ascending one until the end.