1. The Nature and Significance of Karma in the Personal and Individual; and in Humanity, the Earth and the Universe

In ordinary life a person does not seek a connection between cause and effect, because he takes only short periods into consideration. So when something happens to him in later life, he does not look for the cause in his earlier life; yet he could do so if he were only observant enough and investigated everything. He could do it with the consciousness which as memory-consciousness is at his disposal, and if through recollection he strove to make the connection, in a karmic sense, between earlier and later events, he would arrive at the following conclusion: ‘I see, of course, that certain experiences that come to me would not have occurred unless this or that had happened to me in earlier life, and I must now suffer for the wrong way in which I was brought up.’ But if he also looks into the connection, not for what he has done wrong, but for the wrong done against him, that will be a help to him. He will more easily find ways and means to neutralise the harm which has been done to him. The recognition of such a connection between cause and effects in our different periods of life which we can scan with ordinary consciousness may be of the utmost use to us in life; for if we acquire this knowledge we may perhaps do something else. Without doubt if a person having arrived at the age of eighty looks back and sees that the causes of the things happening to him now are to be found in his earliest childhood it will then perhaps be very difficult for him to remedy the ill that has been done to him; and if he then begins to study the teaching it will not help him very much. But if he lets himself be taught before, and looks back in, say, his fortieth year on the wrongs that have been done to him, he might then have time to take measures against them.