33. Are Successive Incarnations Similar to Each Other?

A second question is the following: “Are two successive incarnations of a person similar to each other, so that, for example, an architect is born again as an architect, a musician as a musician?”

This may be the case, but it does not have to be. Such similarity does occur, but it is by no means the rule. It is easy to get the wrong idea in this area because one thinks about the laws of reincarnation in terms that are too closely tied to outward appearances. For example, someone loves southern regions and therefore believes that he must have been a southerner in a previous life. Such inclinations, however, have nothing to do with the causal body. They are only of immediate significance for the one life. What works from one incarnation into the next must be seated deeper in the core of the human being. For example, let us assume that someone was a musician in one life. The spiritual harmonies and rhythms that are expressed in tones reach into the causal body. The tones themselves belong to the outer physical life. They are located in the parts of the human being that arise and pass away. The Kama-manas body [the intellectual or emotional soul], which is once the appropriate apparatus for tones, can be the appropriate apparatus for the contemplation of numerical and spatial relationships in a subsequent life. And a musician can become a mathematician. It is precisely through this fact that, in the course of his incarnations, man becomes a universal being by going through the most diverse activities of life. But, as I said, there are exceptions to this rule. And these can then be explained by the great laws of the spiritual world.