Lecture VII

In the lectures to-day and tomorrow I wish to give certain indications which will throw light, not only on the working of karma, but on the wider importance of karmic knowledge for our general knowledge of the history of evolution, especially in the domain of the spiritual life. We cannot understand the real working of karma if we merely consider the successive earthly lives of any one individuality. Certain it is that within this earthly life, being strongly impressed by the earthly career and history of one man or another, or maybe even of ourselves, we are most keen to know: How do the results of former earthly lives reach over into a later one? But the ways of the working of karma would never become clear to us if we stopped short at the earthly lives themselves. For between one earthly life and another man spends the life between death and a new birth, and it is there that karma is elaborated from what has happened in a former earthly life. There it is elaborated in co-operation with other karmically connected human souls who are also in their life between death and a new birth, and with the Spirits of higher and lower Hierarchies. And this elaboration of karma can only be understood if we can look to the world of stars beyond the earth. For we know that the realm of the stars as it appears to physical sight, reveals only its external aspect.