Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science

GA 69d — 31 May 1911, Linz

22. Karma and Reincarnation

Theosophy is not a gray theory. It should be an immediate, invigorating factor in human life. It should pour into our entire soul life and give us security, hope, confidence, and joyful devotion to the world and our lives.

Through the knowledge of karma and reincarnation, one acquires not only knowledge, but also vitality and security in life.

Our physical events depend on spiritual laws, and so spiritual laws play into the physical world. How are causes and effects related? Karma is the law that shows us how life can be explained. Definitions are worthless; they are merely descriptions of existence. One must seek out the present karma from birth to death of a human being. One must consider the stages of a human being's life.

Let us consider a very striking example: a young man has been thrown off the usual course of his life at the age of eighteen and must now take up a profession. Until now, he has lived off his father's money, but now he will become capable and will later feel gratitude towards fate ...

Often it is not love that is lacking, but that understanding love which is active. But you will not find that if you do not think correctly ...

There are such turning points in life that occur very stealthily. You have to compare earlier stages of life with later ones.

You all know that nothing makes you happier than when you remember in later life that you were able to worship something from the depths of your soul in your youth. Such moods transform into insight in later life, they bear fruit and create in us the gift of love, of fruitful love. Our enthusiasms keep us young. Those who have been able to revere for a long time find it easier to stay young. If, for example, you learned to be devout in your youth, if you often found yourself looking up, then this will return in a very specific way in old age. Devout people have a very special gift; they spread an atmosphere of happiness and blessing. A devout childhood – a blessed old age. No hand will bless in old age that did not devoutly fold its hands in childhood. There is a very specific regularity: what we felt in our first seven years comes back in the last seven years; in the middle there is a junction, the later appears earlier. Today, people rarely take this regularity into account when considering life. This can be observed when reading autobiographies. There is usually only a dry way of looking at life. The fact that moods of earlier days bear fruit later on is new to most people.

There is a beautiful example of looking at a person in a new way – I mean Richard Wagner's autobiography.

We can already see in everyday life how causes have an effect on later life, how devotion in youth becomes a blessing in old age. Such a power that we acquire can then be expressed in full force in old age. People will see this better later on; now there are only hints.

We act with our body. Our body is the tool of the spirit. But it has its limits, and in this life we must leave this tool as it is...

This power forms tools for a future life, which are only hinted at in this one...

Today's science distinguishes between sensory and motor nerves. But there are no motor nerves. The muscles are moved by the astral body. The so-called motor nerves are only there so that we can feel our own movements. What works in the astral body? The world tone, which does not come to consciousness as sound, but as movement. It is perceived as an effect where it is the cause.

The more we bring the idea of karma to life within ourselves, the more it depends on us. The idea of karma is suggested as something natural in nature. Every being determines its environment through its nature. Edelweiss only grows in the area that suits it. It is natural for us to come together with this or that person, because, like edelweiss, we choose our environment.

Let's assume that we lived with someone in some life and we did them an injustice. Is it really just a matter of us having done them this injustice? We may have thrown a stone at them, and if we had not done this wrong, we would have become a different person. An impulse of longing arises in us to do something in the world that removes this obstacle, and this impulse now also forms the force that brings us together with this person again in a future life. Longing is one of the forces that truly shape the body. Such a force or magical longing drives us together with this person. In this way, whole series of relationships are created where our longing has driven us to meet this person.

We must be clear that in life we pass by an infinite number of things that we do not even notice. People pass by an infinite number of things, for which their degree of interest varies greatly. Upon closer observation of life, we notice the fact that we often dream of things that we overslept when we woke up. The soul is connected to the world in a completely different way than our consciousness. In dreams, the soul experiences with particular clarity what it does not consciously experience here. And often, when we believe that we have nothing to do with the people we encounter, it is only an illusion ...

There are people who find it particularly cruel to have to come back to this world again and again. To such people, one must simply say that even if they do not want to come back today, it is not cruelty, but a consolation that makes life worth living. Theosophy cannot help someone who is completely without consolation at the moment. But ultimately, it is not important that we are able to provide our soul with moments of happiness ...

But when these have become impulses, then come the moments when we withdraw. It is not important that we comfort ourselves in a moment of pain, but that we are able to comfort ourselves at all. Karma elevates us so that, no matter how difficult our life may be, we reach a lonely height. Theosophy does not remain theory, it becomes life ...

Before asking what universal love is, we might ask what love is in the first place. This question of what love truly is is the most difficult to answer. Usually, we do not know the answer to this question ...

It is a fact that it is more important to heat the stove than to simply ask it for warmth. Schopenhauer says: “Preaching morality is easy, justifying morality is difficult.” The main thing is to give the soul fuel, which then transforms into power. The fuel is the power of thought with which we fill our soul.

Love is the immediately fertilizing power that we pour into the soul. The most sacred thing is the name of divine love; that is why even theosophists shy away from speaking of it ...

We do not come back a second time until we have processed the forces of our first life. For we do not advance only as human beings; as the physical world changes, so does spiritual life. Each time we take on a new task; we do not start from scratch every time. There are also other times in relation to the way we live in this world. There were times when people did an extraordinary amount for their inner spiritual life. In the period after the third and fourth centuries AD until the Reformation, almost nothing was achieved in terms of external culture. The sixteenth century also brought no new ideas to the world. The vast majority of people lived completely devoted to the life of the outside world. This has an effect on the soul. What would happen to people's souls if only the external world had an effect on them? Nothing from this life would be carried over into the next life. For such souls, it is necessary to seek out the opposite pole ...

What the individual conquers for himself, he conquers for all of humanity.