Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I

GA 90a — 14 November 1904, Berlin

LXXI. The Origin of Karma

We understand karma to be something that began in the middle of the Lemurian period and will end at the close of the sixth root race. Individual karma comes into being through birth and death. A being that does not extend into the phenomenal form with a part has no individual karma. A world body passes from one form of appearance into another. But we call that which expresses itself through good and evil karma; only what lies between birth and death belongs to the chain that we call individual karma. How did karma come into the world?

Let us visualize the situation in the middle of the Lemurian period. The formative design was present to such an extent that a human body was there into which thought could enter. But before that, what we call the human soul had connected with this body; it had come over from the moon man, and bodies had been created according to his pattern. Initially, they were endowed with two sexes. Built up, but not perfect. We still have to treat these bodies as perfect animals; they only become human after Manas has moved in. So, just as with animals, we cannot speak of karma in humans either.

The bodies were gradually perfect; likewise, the souls that had come across were shaped according to different degrees of perfection: Solars, Pitris, seven low Pitris; there were also normal ones and those who always remained at one level. So there were seven degrees of development. The most perfect could already use power to control the bodies. The others had not yet reached that stage; people were like a machine that they did not have the power to control. Such Pitris became people of all the most perfect kinds: the first Arhats. They had perfect bodies, perfect kamic creativity, perfect Manas, but few and exquisite: teachers, rulers, rulers. Through pronounced high Arhats, Kamisches was achieved. They had superhuman abilities and perfect insight into what creativity is, almost at the level of earlier stages. As matter, man was much finer and therefore easier to create. They were initiated into nature. The spark of Manas did not help the others quickly, because that can only be when Kama sets the physical particles of the brain in motion. The thoughts are as if in a bed. It was a dream-like thinking that took hold here: dreamers, highly developed animals, dull humans.

They would have continued to exist on earth if a third group had not intervened. Arhats could not build up karma because they surveyed everything and chose good; these because they were unable to recognize.

There were three groups of Pitris who refused to take possession of these bodies and who wanted to wait until they themselves took possession of the bodies, until they could fully control them on their own. The bodies at that time could only move manas automatically. They waited, and from this the third group arose; they waited until they had been prepared by the second, i.e., the iyanic entities, to such an extent that they themselves could control them. So the bodies were there, but were not occupied. They were seized by much lower kamic entities. The consequence was that they descended, that they regressed, becoming like animals, and these are the amanasic entities. This is the original sin, which consists in the fact that manas has not taken possession of the bodies, and therefore something different has arisen than was foreseen in the normal plan of the world. It was an act of freedom.

The Arhats, of course, only inherited perfect qualities, the dream beings inherited human qualities in ever-increasing potency. These inherited a deteriorated human form, and that is original sin. Through this step of freedom, man is a self-determining conscious being. Only these Pitris, whom we call the luciferic ones, have been able to achieve freedom.

It would have been in the will of the Elohim for all to incarnate. These beings came under the influence of those who had remained at an earlier level of dhyan; these refused to incarnate. Now the possibility of illness also arose. These bodies, left to themselves, were subject to elemental influences. When the Pitris had matured, they found their bodies had already deteriorated. The shock of going down into the physical nature must be improved, and that is karma; original sin, one's own sinful body.

The Bible first presents this as the influence of the serpent. Further on, in magnificent images. First, those who had become arhats under the influence of the Elohim; they were absolutely under the guidance of the Elohim. They could use the natural forces that were already there, not learn. The others, who came later and who later inhabited the bodies, had to create according to their own immediate view. They were now further removed from their own creative beings, and this is very beautifully depicted in Cain and Abel.

Without sin there would be no freedom, no possibility for self-conscious man. This is how what we have called the Luciferic principle is linked to the development of man. Man owes the fact that he could use the seed power during the Atlantean period to the Luciferic principle.

Only through the people created in this way could science and art come into the world. What the Arhats taught was unearthly knowledge, the ancient wisdom that our theosophy brings. Earthly knowledge was created by these beings subject to karma.

The mixing of humans with animals: Because the bodies deteriorated, the ape-like creatures emerged, and these mixed with the bodies inhabited by lower Pitris. The most highly developed apes are those people who have lost themselves in a cul-de-sac and missed the connection. They sometimes have more developed astral bodies than lower people because they have guilt-free kama.

The animal species are destined to become human, not the individual animals; pets become faster, monkeys slower. The human generic soul is dhyanic; the generic souls of those Pitris refused and these were Lucifers.

The Arhats are not to be confused with the Buddhas and Boddhisatvas.

From the Q&A

If man had kept what he had rejected, he would not have developed so finely. His high development thanks to / gap in the transcript]

In the folk, ancient facts live, which are not based on arbitrariness but on deep connections. They all know the wooden horse. Odysseus is the clever, cunning representative of the mind, and thus the main characteristic of our fifth root race. At that time, the saga was developed in such a way that Odysseus came up with a wooden horse.

We also find the horse as a representative of the fifth root race. Pegasus; often in the Bible; in Indian legends, in which Vishnu rides on the horse Kalki. All before Christ. In the Apocalypse, when the seals are opened to us, the horse also appears to us, only then /gap in the transcript] then yellow. The horse is depicted as something special, as in connection with the fifth root race. Even with ancient Germans, who received it from Druid priests. There is hardly a nation of the fifth root race that does not honor the horse in a special way. Occult facts.

Certain animals had to be stripped so that certain characteristics could develop. In the past, it was only memory, but now intellectual mental activity was developing. He would not have been able to develop this activity if he had not given the characteristics that prevented him from doing so to odd-toed ungulates. We have to go back to even older times than the Lemurian era. At that time, what was to become odd-toed ungulates was peeled out. At that time, it was designed differently. Every being can only develop as its environment allows. Back then, there were watery air masses, thin water. Everything was fog. Niflheim.

They had to work their way through the states of condensation and thus became what they are today. Their form developed from completely different shapes, and this form arose at the time when the Atlanteans developed their intellect. These were therefore coherent for them. They said to themselves [gap in the transcript]

We must therefore relate to the horse in a very special way. If we had this organization within us, we would never have been able to ascend to our intellectual activity. It is, as it were, the flip side. Thus, in the horse, the human being of the fifth root race worships that to which he owes his intellectual activity. This is the reason for the solution of the seals in the Apocalypse.

Natural science should also be able to recognize this, or prove it, if the occult experience is correct. We would have to find the ancestors of our horse in the debris of Atlantis.

The uppermost layer of the earth is alluvium, under it diluvium, further tertiary layers. Then Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, formations in the rock. There we also find human-like skeletons. If we dig deeper, we come to the chalk, Jurassic formation. Now we find fossilized horse bones in the Eocene layers, and this is the layer of the Atlantic race. Intellectual knowledge is characterized by the fact that it has the object outside of itself and forms concepts about it. This was different with the original Atlanteans and Lemurians. They had an instinctive knowledge that was attached to the brain. This feeling has been lost, only present in pure sexuality, instinctive sense of belonging that man used to have in spirit. They had also perceived the relationship of their minds to horses. Thus man owes his higher qualities to what he has left behind in nature.

If we go back to the time of the Hyperborean race, we find that very specific human characteristics were acquired when very specific animal groups split off. The ancient peoples have always had a vivid awareness of their original kinship with very specific animal forms. The totemism of certain peoples is based on this feeling. They kill everything except certain animals; these are taboo for them. The tribe names itself after this animal and declares the animal to be taboo, not killable. Totemism thus leads occultly back to the splitting off of certain animal entities.

In the latest cultural studies, it has been noticed time and again that certain peoples had Darwinism within them as a feeling. This is not a game of imagination, but rather they have had animal splitting as the content of their memory from a primal consciousness. It is a splitting of forces. In some tribes there is an institution that cannot be explained to modern people, but which can be traced back to the fact that there are interactions that arise from perceptions other than external perceptions: psychic forces. Hence the custom of the man-child bed among some primitive peoples. That original influence of man upon man, which has been completely lost in the fifth root race. Customs are preserved which have lost their meaning. In just this way, an influence went from the whole of nature to man, he felt an original kinship with the animal: totem bear, bear-taboo, inviolable. Naivety does not invent symbols, they are based on facts. This was very clearly demonstrated in the centaurs. Man has withdrawn from the horse and has retained this memory. Odysseus has the cunning within him and he represents it externally, in that which conquers Troy.

Now there is something else underlying the love of the horse. In the next rounds, what had been rejected will be absorbed again. The generic souls will be redeemed again. What the human being develops in the fifth round will again be what will redeem him to the horse. So that the human being now develops his intellect at the expense of the generic soul of the horses. In the sixth round, he creates into the manasical-animalistic. He will give life himself, the qualities he owes to the horse will become activity and world karma in him. The horse carries him over, and it is thanks to the horse that he later becomes manasically creative. This is why Plato uses the image of the two horses that pull the soul; this is why there is Pegasus and the steeds of the sun chariot.