The Origin and Goal of the Human Being

GA 53 — 20 October 1904, Berlin

Reincarnation and Karma

Eight days ago, I spoke about the composition of human beings and the different parts of their being. If you disregard the finer division that we discussed at that time, we can say that the human being can be divided into three parts: body, soul, and spirit. Now, consideration of these three parts of the human being leads to the great laws of human life, to the same laws of the soul and spirit, just as consideration of the external world leads us to the laws of physical life. Our conventional science knows only the laws of physical life. It has nothing to say about the laws of soul and spirit life in the higher realms. But there are just such laws in these higher realms, and these laws of soul and spirit life are undoubtedly even more important and significant for human beings than what happens externally in physical space. But the high destiny of human beings, the understanding of our fate, the understanding of why we are in this body, what the meaning of this life is — the answers to these questions can only be found in the higher realms of spiritual life.

Now, a consideration of soul life shows us the great fundamental law of soul life, the law of development in the soul realm, the law of reincarnation. And a consideration of spiritual life shows us the law of cause and effect in spiritual life, the law that we know well in the physical realm, that every fact has its cause. Every act of spiritual life has its cause and must have its cause, and this law in spiritual life is called the law of karma. The law of reincarnation or reincarnation consists in the fact that man does not live only once, but that man's life proceeds in a whole series of repetitions, which, however, once began and will once come to an end. Starting from other states of life, human beings, as we shall see in later lessons, have entered into this law of reincarnation, and they will later overcome this law in order to move on to other phases of their development. The law of karma says that our destiny, what we experience in life, is not without cause, but that our deeds, our experiences, our sufferings and joys in one life depend on previous lives, that we have shaped our own destiny in past lives. And just as we live now, we create the causes for the fate that will befall us when we are reincarnated; that will be the cause that will shape the fate of our lives in the future.

Now let us take a closer look at these mental images of spiritual development and spiritual causation. The law of reincarnation or rebirth states that the human soul appears and lives on this earth not once, but many times. Of course, only those who have advanced so far through mystical, theosophical methods that they are able to observe the spiritual realms of existence in the same way that ordinary people observe the external realms of sensory life and sensory facts can fully understand this law in its immediate reality. Only when the higher facts unfold before his spiritual eyes, just as the facts of the physical world unfold before the physical senses of the sensory human being, does reincarnation become a fact for him. There are also many things that human beings today do not yet understand in terms of their actual nature, but they can see their effects and therefore believe in them. Reincarnation is something that most people cannot see as a fact, something they are not accustomed to viewing as an external effect, and therefore they do not believe in it. The phenomena of electricity are such that every physicist will say that the actual nature of electricity is unknown to us; but people do not doubt that something like the nature of electricity exists. They see the effects of electricity, the light and the movement. If people could see the external effect of what memory is playing out before their physical eyes, they could not doubt that reincarnation exists. Memory can still be recognized. Nevertheless, one must first become familiar with the external expression of reincarnation in order to gradually accustom oneself to the idea and to arrive at seeing in the right way what Theosophy calls reincarnation.

I would therefore like to begin by looking purely externally at those facts that are accessible to everyone, that everyone can observe, but that they are not accustomed to viewing from the right perspective. However, if they became accustomed to viewing these external facts from the right perspective, they would say to themselves: I do not yet know reincarnation to be a fact, but I can assume, as with electricity, that such a thing exists. — Anyone who wants to see the external physical facts in the right light must closely follow the law of development that we have been observing everywhere in the external world since the scientific research of the 19th century. They must ask themselves: What is happening before our eyes in the world of living beings? — I would like to note from the outset that I only want to touch on this fact in general terms, because I will be talking about Darwinism and theosophy in the next lectures. All the questions that may arise in connection with this part of today's lecture are linked to doubts and thoughts about whether theosophy can be refuted by modern Darwinism. These questions will be answered in the lecture I will give in eight days.

So, we must understand this development in the right way. In the 18th century, the great naturalist Linnaeus still said that as many plant and animal species exist side by side as were originally created. No naturalist shares this idea anymore. It is assumed that more perfect living beings have developed from less perfect organisms. In this way, natural science has transformed what could previously only be viewed as coexisting into a succession in time. If we now ask ourselves: How is it possible that evolution occurs, how is it possible that there is a connection between the succession of different species and genera in the animal and plant kingdoms? — then we arrive at a law which, although somewhat obscure to our natural science, is nevertheless connected with the law of physical evolution. And that is the fact expressed in what is called heredity. As is well known, the offspring of an organism is not different from its ancestor. We therefore encounter a similarity between ancestors and descendants. And because this similarity is joined by a difference over time, diversity arises. It is, so to speak, the result of two factors: that in which the descendants resemble their ancestors, and that in which they differ. This also gives rise to the diversity of animal and plant forms, from the most imperfect to the most perfect. It would be impossible to understand why diversity exists if the law of heredity did not exist. And it would also be impossible to understand why the descendant is different, so that this difference is added to the similarity. This connection between similarity and difference gives rise to the concept of physical development. You find it in plant, animal, and human life. But if you ask: What develops in the physical, what in plant life, what in animal life, and what in human life? — then we arrive at a fundamental difference between human life and animal life.

Once you have clarified this difference and thought it through completely, you will not remain where the physical researcher remains. You will feel compelled to go further; you will have to expand the concept of development considerably. It is only clinging to old habits of thinking that prevents people from reaching higher stages of development. I would now like to clarify this difference between humanity and animality. It is expressed in a fact that is indisputable but not sufficiently taken into account. However, once you have grasped it, it is enlightening and thoroughly illuminating. This fact can be expressed with the catchphrase: Humans have a biography, animals do not. Of course, every owner of a dog, horse, or monkey will object that an animal has peculiar, individual inclinations and, in a certain sense, an individual existence, and that one can therefore also write the biography of a dog, a horse, or a monkey. That is not to be doubted. But in the same sense, one can also write the biography of a quill pen. However, no one will dispute that it is not the same when we speak of a human biography. Everywhere there are only transitions, degrees of difference, and therefore what applies primarily to humans also applies in a figurative sense to subordinate beings; indeed, it can even be applied to external things. Why should we not be able to describe the characteristics of an inkwell? But you will find that there is a radical difference between the biography of a human being and the biography of an animal. If we want to talk about what interests us in animals to the same extent as the biography of an individual human being, then we must provide a description of the species. When we describe a dog or a lion, what we describe applies to all dogs or all lions. We do not need to think about the biographies of outstanding people. We can write the biography of Mr. Lehmann or Mr. Schulze. It differs significantly from any animal biography, and it is of equal interest to humans as the description of the species is to animal life.

This means that for anyone who thinks in this precise manner, a biography means to humans what a description of a species means to animals. In the animal kingdom, we therefore speak of the development of species and genera; in humans, we must start with the individual. Humans are a species unto themselves, not in the physical sense, in that humans are at the highest level of animality, for in terms of species, humans are the same as animals: when we describe humans as a species, we describe them in the same way as we describe the lion species or the tiger species, the cat species. The description of the individual human being is essentially different. The individual human being is a species unto itself. This statement, understood thoroughly, is what leads us to a higher understanding of the description of evolution within the human realm. If you want to learn about the generic nature of human beings, if you want to learn about what is external form — for that is the generic nature of human beings — then you will resort to the concept of heredity, just as in animal development, and then you will know why Schiller had a certain shape of nose, a certain physiognomy; then you will derive Schiller's form from his ancestors with more or less success. Beyond that lies what is the biography of the human being. This is what radically distinguishes one human being from all others. Of these two areas, the generic is not important for the concept of reincarnation or re-embodiment. What matters is the other area, which we distinguish from the generic as the actual soul, as the inner life of the human being, that which distinguishes one person from every other.

You all know that each of us has a very special soul life and that it is expressed in what we call our actual sympathies and antipathies, what we call our character, what we recognize as the peculiar way in which we can express ourselves spiritually. Just as what lions do bears the specific stamp of lions, of the lion species, so the specific achievements of Mr. Müller or Mr. Lehmann bear the specific imprint of these individual souls. Sympathy, antipathy, inclinations, habits, in short, everything we call a person's temperament and character—their desires, drives, passions, the way they want to be strong or weak, this way or that—we can only address as individual traits in human beings. However, we find everywhere in the animal kingdom the same thing that we have now regarded as peculiar to the soul of living human beings. We also find sympathies and antipathies, inclinations, drives, even a certain character. Generally speaking, apart from finer distinctions, we call the sum of what we observe in animals as their habits the expression of animal instincts. Now, 19th-century natural science attempted to explain this instinct, this soul in animals, in the same way as the external form, namely through heredity. It was said that animals perform certain activities, and by performing many activities over and over again, these activities become imprinted in their nature, so that they become habitual; then they appear in their offspring as inherited instincts, for example when certain dogs are trained to run fast by being used for hunting. Through this practice of running fast, the offspring of these dogs are then born with the instinct to run fast as predisposed hunting dogs. This is the way Lamarck seeks to explain the instincts of animals; they are supposed to be inherited practices.

However, careful consideration soon reveals that complex instincts in particular cannot possibly be inherited and cannot possibly be linked to any inherited exercise. It is precisely those instincts that are most complex that, by their very nature, show observers that it is impossible to say that they originate from heredity. Take a fly that flies away when you approach it. This is an instinctive reaction. How could the fly have acquired this instinct? Its ancestors must not have had this instinct. They must have had the conscious or unconscious experience that remaining stationary was harmful to them under certain circumstances, and as a result they must have acquired the habit of flying away to avoid harm. Anyone who really overlooks the connection will hardly be able to say that so many insects, because they found that they were being killed, got into the habit of flying away so as not to be killed. In order to pass on these experiences to their offspring, they would have had to stay alive. So, you see, it is impossible to speak of heredity in this way without getting caught up in the worst contradictions. We could talk about hundreds and thousands of cases where animals do something only once. Take pupation: this is only done once in a lifetime, and it is clear from this that it is not possible to speak of heredity in the realm of soul life as we do in physical life. Therefore, the natural scientist completely abandons the idea that instincts are inherited practices. Here we are not dealing with a transmission of what is directly experienced in physical life, but with an effect of the animal soul world. We will talk about this animal soul world in more detail in the next lectures. Today we can content ourselves with stating the impossibility of speaking of the transmission of spiritual characteristics from ancestors to descendants in the same sense as one speaks of heredity in the physical realm. Nevertheless, if human beings want to see any meaning and understanding in the world, they must bring a connection into the world; they must be able to trace every effect back to its cause. Therefore, what occurs in the individual soul life, what occurs in the individual human being in terms of sympathies and antipathies, expressions of temperament and character, must be traceable to causes.

Now, people appear to us as different in terms of their characteristics. We must therefore explain the diversity of human individuals. We can explain them only by introducing the same concept of development into the spiritual realm as we have in the physical realm. Just as it would be absurd to believe that a perfect lion suddenly grew out of the earth as a species, or that an imperfect animal suddenly developed, so it is impossible that the individuality of human beings developed out of the indefinite. We must derive the individual in the same way that we derive the perfect species from an undeveloped species. No one who really thinks about it will honestly want to explain the spiritual characteristics of a human being in the same way as physical characteristics through heredity. What is connected with the body, what is caused by the fact that I have weaker hands than others, that is physical heredity. Because I have a weak physique, the weakness of my hands will also be greater than that of someone else who has a stronger physique. Everything connected with the physical body can be described in terms of heredity, but not that which belongs to the inner life of the soul. Who would attribute Schiller's characteristic idiosyncrasies, his talent, his temperament, and so on, or the talent of a Newton, to his ancestors? Those who close their eyes will be able to do so. But it is impossible to arrive at such a conclusion for those who do not close their eyes. If human beings, as spiritual beings, are their own species, then the complex spiritual characteristics that we encounter in this or that being must not be attributed to their physical ancestors, but must be attributed to other causes in the past that existed elsewhere than in the ancestors. And since the causes apply only to the individual human being, they also have to do only with the individual human being. And just as we cannot trace the lion in the bear species, individuality cannot be derived from another human being, but only from the human being himself, because the human being is the individual of his own species. Therefore, it can only be derived from himself. Because man has certain characteristics that define him just as the lion defines the species, they must also be derived from the individual himself. This brings us to the chain of different incarnations that the individual human being, like the lion species, the whole species, must already have gone through. That is the external point of view. When we look around us in physical life, it seems only understandable to us if we are able to go beyond mere heredity and conceive of a law of reincarnation, which is the law of nature on the soul level.

For those who are capable of spiritual observation, this is not a hypothesis but a conclusion. What I have said is only a conclusion. The fact of reincarnation itself is evident to those who can rise to direct observation through the methods of mysticism and theosophy. In the last lesson, we wanted to learn to use a theosophical microscope, as it were. Today we want to state that theosophists have reached the point where what we call sympathies and antipathies, passions and desires, in short, character, lies before their spiritual eye as a fact, just as the external physical form lies before the eye of the physical observer. If this is the case, then the observer of the soul is in the same position as the external researcher, then the observer of the soul has the same facts at his disposal, then he regards the complex structure, that luminous figure embedded in the external form, as external reality, just as the external form is reality for the physical observer. In this case, this auric structure expresses for him the fact that he is dealing with a high, perfect spiritual being, with a differentiated, organized aura equipped with many organs, just as we are dealing with a being that has many organs in the case of the lion.

And when we look at the soul, the aura, in imperfect savages, it appears relatively simple; it appears in simple colors, appears in such a way that we can contrast this simple aura, this undifferentiated, colorless aura of the savage, in terms of its perfection, with the complicated aura of a European cultured person in the same way as an imperfect snail or amoeba contrasts with the perfect lion. And then we follow the development in the soul realm in the same way as the aura. Then we see that a perfect aura can only arise through development, namely by seeing that the aura was more imperfect when we go backwards. For those who can observe in this realm, this provides a direct observation of the soul life itself.

When we now ascend to the spiritual life, we encounter the physical law of cause and effect in the higher life, the law of karma. This law of karma means exactly the same for the spirit as the law of cause and effect, the law of causality, means for external, physical phenomena. When you see any fact in the outer physical world, when you see a stone falling to the ground, you ask: Why does the stone fall? And you do not rest until you have determined the cause. When you have spiritual phenomena, you must likewise ask about the spiritual causes. And how close to us are spiritual facts! One person is what we call happy, another is doomed to unhappiness throughout his entire life. What we call human destiny is encompassed in the question: Why is this and that? In the face of this “why,” all external science is completely at a loss, because it does not know how to apply its law of cause and effect to spiritual phenomena. If you have a metal ball and you throw this metal ball into water, a very specific thing will happen. But the result will be completely different if you have first heated the metal ball to red hot. You will try to understand the different phenomena in terms of cause and effect. And in the same way, you must ask in spiritual life: Why does something succeed for one person and not for another? Why am I successful in this, but not in that? — This leads to recognizing why a certain fact has a very specific characteristic in reality. By first heating the metal ball, it boils in the water. It does not depend on the water, but rather the change that has previously taken place with the metal ball causes the fate that the metal ball experiences in the water. Thus, the fate of the metal ball depends on the conditions it has previously undergone; it depends on what phenomena approach it in a subsequent experience of this ball — to stay with the example.

We must therefore say: every action I perform contributes to my spiritual being and changes my spiritual being in the same way that heating changed the physical metal ball. Here, even finer thinking is necessary than in the realm of the soul. Here we must patiently and calmly realize that an action changes the spiritual human being. If someone steals something today, it is an action that stamps the spiritual human being with a lower quality than if I do good to a person. It is not the same whether I commit a moral action or a physical one. What the heated metal ball is to water, the moral stamp is to human beings. Just as nothing physical will remain without effect for the future, so too will the moral stamp remain without effect for the future. Even in the spiritual realm, there are no causes without corresponding effects. From this follows the great law that every action must necessarily produce an effect, an effect for the spiritual being concerned. The moral stamp must find expression in the spiritual being itself, in the destiny of the spiritual being.

This law, by which the moral stamp of an action must take effect under all circumstances, is the law of karma. Thus we have become acquainted with the concepts of reincarnation and karma. Many objections are raised against these concepts, but no real thinker can object to their general character. Human life shows us in all its manifestations, and external facts prove, that development also exists in spiritual life, that cause and effect also exist in spiritual life. Even those who do not share the viewpoint of theosophy have attempted to seek cause and effect in the spiritual realm as well, for example, a philosopher of modern times, Paul Ree, a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche. He attempted to explain a spiritual phenomenon in an external way through development. He asks: Has conscience always been present in development? And he then shows that there are people who do not have what we call conscience in our development. He says that there have been times when what we call conscience was not yet developed in the human soul. At that time, people had different experiences from us. People found that when they committed certain acts, these acts brought punishment upon them, that society took revenge on those who harmed society. As a result, a feeling for what should be and what should not be developed within the human soul. Over time, this has become a kind of inheritance, and today people are born with the feeling that is expressed in the conscience — something should be or something should not be. According to Ree, this is how conscience developed in general among all of humanity. Ree has shown here in a beautiful way that we can also apply the concept of development to the qualities of the soul, that is, to the conscience. Had he taken one step further, he would have entered the realm of theosophy.

I would like to mention just one more phenomenon, namely that we can pinpoint the exact moment in European cultural history when conscience was first mentioned. If you go through the entire ancient Greek world and follow the descriptions and accounts, you will find nowhere, not even in the ancient Greek language, a word for what we call conscience. There was no word for it. What Plato tells us about Socrates is particularly striking. None of the Socratic dialogues contain the word that later appeared in Greece, only in the last century before Christ. Some believe that the daimon is the conscience. However, this can easily be refuted and therefore cannot be seriously considered. We find conscience only in the Christian world. There is a trilogy of dramas, the Oresteia by Aeschylus. If you follow these three dramas, you will see that Orestes is under the immediate impression of matricide. He murdered his mother because she killed his father. Now we are shown how Orestes is pursued by the Furies, and we are shown how he faces trial and is acquitted by the court. Nothing appears except the concept of the gods taking revenge externally. The process is expressed in the fear of external forces. There is nothing in it that encompasses the concept of conscience.

Then comes Sophocles and then Euripides. In their works, Orestes appears to us in a completely different light. Why he feels guilty is presented to us here in a completely different way. In these poets' works, Orestes feels guilty because he now knows that he has done wrong. And from this, the word conscience is formed in Greek and also in Latin. Being aware of one's own actions, being able to observe oneself, being present in one's own actions — this must first have developed. If Paul Ree were right in saying that conscience is a consequence of general human development, that it develops from what humans observe when they are punished for harming their fellow human beings, and that it therefore harms them when they do something that is not in accordance with a reasonable world order, then this conscience would undoubtedly have had to occur generally. Because the external cause is the same, it should occur in larger groups of people; it should occur in a tribe at the same time and develop in a manner appropriate to the species. Here one would have to study Greek history as the history of the soul. At that time, when the concept developed in Greece in individuals, which we do not yet find in ancient Greece, there was a period in which public unscrupulousness was the order of the day. Read the descriptions of the period of the wars between Athens and Sparta! So, with regard to conscience, we cannot speak of something natural as we do with animals.

Another objection is raised. If human beings live repeatedly, they should remember their previous lives. However, it is not immediately obvious why this is usually not the case. We must clarify what memory means and how it comes about. I already explained last time that although human beings today, at their present stage of development, live in the soul-astral and spiritual-mental realms, they are not conscious of these two worlds; they are only conscious of the physical world and will only achieve in the future and at higher stages what a few individuals have already achieved today. The average person will only later achieve consciousness in the soul and spirit. The average person is conscious in the physical world and lives in the soul and spirit world. This stems from the fact that their actual thinking power, the brain, needs the physical world in order to be active. Being physically active means becoming conscious in physical life. During sleep, the human being is not conscious of himself. Those who develop themselves using mystical methods also develop consciousness during sleep and in higher states. This makes it possible to remember what the human being experiences in the course of life. Because his brain exists in the physical world, he remembers what he encounters physically. People who do not only work with their physical brain, but can also make use of the material of the soul in order to be just as conscious within the soul as ordinary people are conscious within the physical body, also have a greater capacity for memory. Just as the imperfect animal does not yet have the ability of the developed lion, but will one day have this characteristic, so too will the human being who does not yet have the ability to remember past lives attain this ability later.

In the even higher realms, it is difficult to gain insight into the connection between cause and effect in a spiritual way. This is only possible in the mental world when humans are able to think not only in their physical and astral bodies, but also in purely spiritual life. Then they are also able to say why every event has occurred. This realm is so high that it takes a lot of patience to acquire the qualities that enable one to see through cause and effect in spiritual life. Those who are conscious in the physical realm and live only in the soul and spirit have only the memory of what has happened to them from birth to death. Those who are conscious in the soul have the memory of birth to a certain extent. But those who are conscious in the spiritual realm see the law of cause and effect in its real context.

Another objection that is raised is the question: Doesn't this lead us into fatalism? If everything is caused, then human beings are subject to fate, telling themselves again and again: This is my karma, and we cannot change destiny. — This is just as impossible to say as it is to say: I cannot help my fellow human beings, and it makes me so despondent when I cannot help them; I must despair of making them better, for it is in their karma. Anyone who compares the law of life with the laws of nature to any degree and knows what law is will never be able to arrive at such an erroneous conception of the law of karma. The way sulfur, water, and oxygen combine to form sulfuric acid is subject to an immutable law of nature. If I act against the law that lies in the properties of the three substances, I will never produce sulfuric acid. My personal action is part of it. It is my freedom to bring the substances together. Even though the law is absolute, it can be put into effect by my free action. The same is true of the law of karma. An action I have committed in past lives inevitably has its effect in this life. But I am free to counteract the effect, to create another action that legally cancels out the harmful consequences of the earlier action. Just as, according to immutable laws, a red-hot ball placed on a table will burn the table, so I can cool the ball and then place it on the table. It will no longer burn the table. In both cases, I have acted according to the law. An action in the past determines me to an action; the effect of my action in my past life cannot be eliminated, but I can perform another action and, just as lawfully, change the harmful effect into a beneficial one, except that all this proceeds according to the laws of spiritual causes and effects. The law of karma can be compared to what I have in an account book. We have certain figures on the left and right. If we add the left and right and then subtract them from each other, we get the balance of the cash register. This is an immutable law. Depending on how my previous transactions have gone, the balance of the cash register will be good or bad. But however this law works, I can still add new transactions, and the entire balance changes just as lawfully as it changed before. I am caused in a very specific way by karma, but at any moment the account book of my life can be changed by new entries. If I want to add a new item, I must first add up both sides to see whether I have a cash balance or debts. It is the same with the experiences in the account book of life. They fit into life. Those who can see how their life is caused can also say to themselves: my account closes actively or passively, and I must add this or that action to cancel out the bad in life, to gradually be freed from what I have accumulated as my karma. This is what we see as the great goal of human life: to be freed from the karma that has once been caused. Finding goals for the account book of life is in the hands of each individual human being.

This gives us the two great laws, the law of soul life and the law of spirit life. The question already arises today: What happens between the two lives, how does the spirit work between death and the next birth? — We must consider human destiny in the time between two lives and go through the stages between death and a new life. We will then see what can penetrate Western knowledge in terms of faith, knowledge, and religiosity. The great laws speak not only to the senses, but also to the spiritual and the soul, so that human beings can speak not only of cause and effect in the physical, but also in the spiritual life; for what the great spirits have said will come to pass; it will become apparent that we only understand the world in part if we take only what we hear, see, and touch. In order to understand the world completely, we must ascend and explore the laws that constitute the whole of human perception, in order to learn where human beings come from and where they are going in the future. These laws must be sought in the spiritual realm, and then we will understand the saying of Goethe, who was a representative of theosophy, and recognize what he meant by it:

Mysterious in the light of day,
Nature cannot be robbed of its veil,
And what it may not reveal to your spirit,
You cannot force it to reveal with levers and screws.

Only when human beings step beyond the merely personal, when they are aware of the preponderance of individuality, of the higher personal over the personal, when they understand how to become impersonal, to live impersonally, to let the impersonal reign within themselves, only then do they live out of the culture entangled in the outer form into a vibrant culture of the future. Even if this is not what theosophy recognizes as its highest ideal, even if it is not the ultimate ethical consequence we draw from theosophy, it is a step toward the ideal that human beings can only learn to live when they look not at the personal, but at the eternal and imperishable. This eternal and imperishable, the Buddhi, the seed of wisdom that rests in the soul, is what must replace the mere culture of the intellect. There is much evidence that Theosophy is right in its view of the future of human development. The most important, however, is that forces are at work in life itself which we must truly grasp and understand in order to fulfill ourselves with their ideal. This is the greatness of Tolstoy, that he wants to lift people out of the narrow circle of their thoughts and deepen them spiritually, that he does not want to show them the ideals of our material world, not of our somehow shaped social life, but the ideals that can only spring from the soul. If we are true theosophists, then we will recognize the forces at work in world evolution; then we will not remain blind and deaf to what shines toward us in our present in theosophical sense, but we will recognize these forces, which are usually spoken of prophetically in theosophy. It must be the characteristic of a theosophist to overcome darkness and error, to learn to assess and recognize life and the world in the right way. A theosophist who would withdraw, cold and alienated from life, would be a poor theosophist, even if he had much to preach about theosophical dogmas.

Such theosophists, who lead us up from the sensory world to the higher worlds, who themselves look into the supersensible worlds, should also teach us on the other side how to observe the supersensible on our physical plane and not lose ourselves in the sensory. We explore the causes that come from the spiritual in order to fully understand the sensory, which is the effect of the spiritual. We cannot understand the sensory if we remain within the sensory, because the causes of sensory life come from the spiritual. Theosophy wants to make us clairvoyant in the sensual. That is why it speaks of “ancient wisdom.” It wants to make us open-minded to the spiritual. It wants to transform human beings so that they can clairvoyantly see into the higher, supersensible mysteries of existence. But this should not be achieved at the expense of an understanding of what is immediately around us. A clairvoyant who is blind and deaf to what is happening in the sensory world, to what his contemporaries in his immediate surroundings are capable of accomplishing, would be a poor clairvoyant. And besides, he would be a poor clairvoyant if he were unable to recognize that which leads people into the supersensible in our time. What use would it be to us if we became clairvoyant and were unable to recognize what lies immediately before us as our next task!

Answering questions

Question: What is the relationship between animals as individual beings and as a species to humans?

The animal as a species is what the human being is. Animals as a species are not subject to reincarnation, nor are individual animals. The lion species, for example, will gradually become individualized and, in connection with higher beings, will undergo phases of development in the future that we can anticipate but cannot call human-like, because they will not be similar to what humans are today and will be least similar to what humans will then be. Read Haeckel's “Wonders of Life” about the time when life first arose on Earth. Animals cannot become humans. In any case, individual animals can never become humans.

Question: Does prayer have any justification according to theosophical views?

Prayer has existed throughout all stages of development. For the early Christians, it was not only a means of uniting man with his God. The mood that Tolstoy describes and feels in the soul of man, that he is imbued with it, should be evoked in Christians through prayer. The higher the things for which man prays, the better. Praying for external things is not in the spirit of early Christianity. “Father, not my will, but yours be done.” What is the will of the Father in the early Christian sense? It is the will that represents the primordial law of all world development. I want my successes and desires to be so perfect that they correspond to the meaning of the Father's will, that is, to the spiritual law of the world, so that they do not deviate from the great spiritual law of the world. If I have any prayer through which I seek an arbitrary request that springs from my everyday nature, from my whim, then the prayer is not kept in the style of: “Not my will, but Thy will be done.” A prayer in this style, however, is present when what is to be implored is not to be drawn down to us, when our will is not to prevail, but when we are lifted up with our will, when the goal is deification, the resurrection of the soul in the divine, in the Christian. Since Theosophy only wants to understand all religious creeds, it agrees with this. The only way he can come into conflict with Theosophy is if he does not understand his own religion. Anyone who knows Christianity in its methods — and prayer is one of the methods of Christianity, for it is a means of uniting with the divine universal soul — knows that it is not in contradiction with Theosophy.

Question: What does the Theosophist think of Christian baptism?

If we want to understand baptism correctly, we must go back to its original meaning. Baptism originally meant one of the first stages through which man gradually ascended to higher knowledge. It was present in the ancient mysteries as a so-called water test. It was one of the ceremonial acts associated with the gradual ascent of human beings to the highest wisdom. These ancient mysteries were nothing other than places of worship and schools of wisdom. Baptism was the first test for initiation. It was not merely an outward form, but was linked to certain degrees of knowledge. The person being baptized had to have developed certain virtues within themselves; then they were baptized. Above all, those being baptized in the ancient mystery religions were required to have acquired what is called firm self-confidence, the ability to always rely on themselves. This character trait was related to the fact that in the deeper mystery religions, the kingdom of God was sought within the human being, and that only those who had found direction and purpose within themselves, who could therefore trust themselves, were allowed to belong to the higher community. For them, inner transformation was the keystone of a curriculum.

That was the case in the mysteries. Then Christianity came and presented what had been taught in the mysteries as a truth for all humanity. It is a very significant mystical fact that now not only those who are initiated into the mysteries can be saved, but also those who simply believe. Thus baptism became a so-called sacrament of the Church. This baptism is the continuation of an ancient ceremonial practice, the water test in the mysteries. Here is a point where we must believe in spiritual knowledge or we will not progress. The actions performed during initiation into the community are such that they are connected with something spiritual, which is not merely an external formality, but something that is related to the entire spiritual life of the community, so that, from a spiritual point of view, something actually happens to the person being baptized. For those who are materialists, this is a completely fantastical thing. But for those who know something of the higher planes of existence, it is also a fact. Much inner spirituality has also been lost beneath the outer form. However, if we want to understand such an act, we must not forget that we must not drag it down into our current materialistic worldview.