4. The Beings of the Astral World

I would like to mention some details which will show you how some things which we otherwise find incomprehensible become immediately understandable. One can often see that certain people, when they stand at an abyss, show an insurmountable eagerness to plunge into it, although they resist it with all their strength. Or one can see what thoughts run through a man's soul when he has a knife in his hand. All these things have their deep foundation in the human astral body. They are based on the fact that in the astral we have a completely different being than we encounter in the human exterior. But they are subject to fate, to karma. Whoever has certain desires in life, has gone through experiences in a previous life, which can be deeply pushed into the background by the present mind. However, they are dormant in the astral body. Suppose someone has participated in a cruel war in a previous life; there you will see in his aura how, through his karma, all these cruelties have been built into his astral body, with which he now has to fight hard battles in the present physical life. Just as threads are spun between a previous life and the present, so threads are spun from the present to later lives. All this the seer sees. He sees how a person's karma is formed, and he also sees, for example, how a person out of prudence tries to suppress an inclination or how he represses feelings. The seer sees down to the bottom of the soul. Those who have the gift of seeing do not consider it a desirable gift that brings joy in all cases, mainly when people have feelings that they had better not have. And for the beginner, the chela, it is often fatal, because easily he is attracted by all that he now sees.