Factors of Karma

In effect, notably in the first seven years of life, when the physical body is developing, forces are working in (or rather, about) the physical body—forces which come not from the vocational aspect of our former incarnation, but from the way in which we lived with other human beings. In our former incarnation we stood in this or that relation to this or that human being. (I mean now, not in a particular part of our life—for that belongs to a different chapter—but throughout our life.) All this we assimilate. We carry it through the gate of death, and through these forces we bring ourselves once more into a certain family, a certain situation or set of circumstances. Thus we may say: That which places our physical body into life and works on through our physical body—that is what shapes the situations of our life. (It goes on working, of course, through our succeeding lives.) And now it receives a counter-force through the Ego. The Ego works so to annul the given situations of our life. It battles against all that determines our circumstances. Thus we may say: The physical body works so to create life's situation; and the Ego works to re-create it. In the working together of these two-battling one with another—another stream of Karma enters our life. For? there is always present in man on the one hand what strives to maintain him in a certain situation, and on the other, what strives to lift him out of it. Thus I would say, primitively speaking, 1 and 4, and 2 and 3, work upon one another. (See the diagram at the end.) And in manifold other ways the four strings play together. The way we come into connection with fresh human beings in a given life according to our Karma, depends on 1 and 4 and their connections. And this leads back in turn to our relationships of life in former lives. The way we find our connections in calling, work and occupation depends on 2 and 3 and on their mutual interplay.