The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Let us continue with our reflections, which are intended to bring us ever closer to an understanding of the nature of the human being and his purpose in the world from a deeper perspective. You will recall that in one of the branch lectures held here this winter, we spoke of the fourfold manner in which illness is possible in human beings in the first place, and that it was indicated at that time that we would return later to discuss what might be called the actual karmic cause of illness. Today we would like to address, at least to some extent, this karmic cause of illness.

[ 2 ] We explained at that time that this division of the human being into four members—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I—also offered us the opportunity to gain a certain overview of the symptoms of disease, namely by pointing out that each of these human members finds its expression in certain organs and organ complexes of the physical body itself. Thus, the ego finds its essential expression in the physical body through the blood; the astral body through the nervous system; the etheric body through what we call the glandular system and all that pertains to it; and the physical body expresses itself as the physical body. We then described the diseases that originate in the “I” as such and which therefore manifest physically as irregularities in blood functions. We have pointed out how that which has its cause in irregularities of the astral body finds its expression through irregularities in the nervous system, and how, in turn, that which has its origin in the etheric body is expressed in the glandular system; and that we must then recognize in the physical body those diseases that have primarily external causes. However, in doing so, we have directed our attention to illness only insofar as it relates to the individual course of a human being’s life between birth and death. Now, anyone capable of viewing the course of the world from a spiritual-scientific perspective senses that illness in human beings must also, in a certain sense, be connected to their karma—that is, to that great law of causality which represents the spiritual connections between the various incarnations. But the paths of karma are very intricate, very manifold, and one must delve into the subtle intricacies of karmic relationships if one is to understand at all how these things are connected.

[ 3 ] Today we would like to discuss some of the things that are of primary interest for people to know, namely, how illnesses are connected to causes that were set in motion by the person themselves in past lives. To this end, we must now briefly return to the workings of the law of karma in the course of human life. We will have to mention some things that most of you already know from other lectures, but we must bring it very clearly before our souls: how the effects of karmic causes are carried over from one life to the next. To do this, we must briefly revisit what actually happens spiritually to a person in the period following their death.

[ 4 ] We know that when passing through the gate of death, a person first experiences what arises from the fact that, with death, they find themselves for the first time in a situation they have never been in throughout their entire life. They are connected—through their ego and astral body—to the etheric body, without the physical body. They have, so to speak, shed their physical body. During life, this occurs only in exceptional cases, as we have often mentioned. During life, in the sleeping state—when a person has shed their physical body—the etheric body is also shed, so that this connection between the “I,” the astral body, and the etheric body exists only for a short time after death—a period measured in days. We have also mentioned the experiences that follow immediately after death. We have pointed out that the person feels as if they were growing larger and larger, as if they were outgrowing the space they had occupied and encompassing all things. We have mentioned how the image of the life that has just passed unfolds before them like a vast tableau. Then, after some time—which, for the individual, is measured in days and varies from person to person—comes the shedding of the second body, the etheric body, which is then absorbed into the general world ether, with the exception of those cases we mentioned when discussing intimate questions of reincarnation, where the etheric body is preserved in a certain way for later use. But an essence of this etheric body—as the fruit of what we have experienced, lived through, and endured in life—remains behind. We now continue to live the life that is conditioned by this union of the “I” with the astral body, without the human being being bound to the physical body. Now follows the period that has come to be called the “Kamaloka period” in spiritual scientific literature—a period we have also often referred to as the time of growing out of, or weaning oneself from, the connection with the physical body or with physical existence in general.

[ 5 ] We know that when a person has passed through the gate of death, he initially still possesses in his astral body all the powers he had in that body at the moment of death. For he has cast off only the physical body, the instrument of enjoyment and action. He no longer has that, but he still has the astral body. He still possesses the vehicle of passions, drives, desires, and instincts. After death, he craves exactly the same things—out of habit, one might say—that he craved in life. Now, in life, a person satisfies his desires and cravings through the instrument of the physical body. After death, he no longer has this instrument; therefore, he lacks the means to satisfy all of these. This then manifests as a kind of thirst for physical life until the person has become accustomed to living solely in the spiritual world as such, possessing what can be obtained from the spiritual world. Until the person has learned this, he lives in what is called the period of weaning, the period of Kamaloka.

[ 6 ] We have already described the very peculiar course of this phase of life. We have seen that during this period, a person’s life proceeds in reverse. This is something that is initially difficult for the beginner in spiritual science to understand. A person passes through the period of Kamaloka—which takes up about one-third of the time of an ordinary life—in reverse. Suppose a person dies at the age of forty; in that case, they relive all the events they experienced during their life in reverse order. So first they relive the events of their thirty-ninth year, then come the thirty-eighth, thirty-seventh, thirty-sixth, and so on. It is indeed the case that they retrace their life in reverse all the way back to the moment of birth. This underlies the beautiful passage in the Christian message that describes when a person actually enters the spiritual world or the kingdoms of heaven: “Unless you become like children, you cannot enter the kingdoms of heaven!” This means that a person lives backward to the time when they experience the moments of their childhood, and then, having gone through everything in reverse, they can enter Devachan or the Kingdom of Heaven and spend the rest of their time in the spiritual world. This is difficult to imagine because we are so accustomed to thinking of time, as it unfolds on the physical plane, as something absolute, so that it takes some effort to become accustomed to these ideas. But it will happen.

[ 7 ] Now we must bring to mind what a person actually does in the Kamaloka. Of course, we could elaborate on many and varied aspects of this. Today, however, we shall focus only on what is most relevant to our question regarding the karmic causes of illness. Therefore, what is said here must by no means be regarded as the sole type of experience in the Kamaloka, but rather as one among many.

[ 8 ] To begin with, we can illustrate how this Kamaloka period is used by a person in terms of the future by imagining that a person who died at the age of forty had, at the age of twenty, done something that harmed another person. When someone does something in the course of a lifetime that harms another person, this has a certain significance for the entire course of human life. Such an act—which a person commits to the detriment of their fellow human beings, or of other beings, or indeed to the detriment of the world—represents an obstacle to the person’s development, a hindrance to progress in that development. This is, in fact, the very purpose of the human pilgrimage on Earth: that the fundamental force of the human soul—which passes from one incarnation to the next—is always oriented toward progress and strives for upward development. And this development proceeds in such a way that human beings, so to speak, place obstacles in their own path time and time again. If the fundamental force—which is, after all, the very force in the soul intended to lead that soul to re-spiritualization—were to act entirely on its own, then only a very brief time on Earth would be necessary for human beings. But then the entire course of earthly evolution would have unfolded quite differently; moreover, the purpose of earthly evolution would not have been fulfilled. One must not think in such a way as to say: it would be better for human beings if they did not place obstacles in their own path. It is precisely by placing obstacles and hindrances in their own path that they become strong and gain experience. It is only by eliminating and overcoming the obstacles they have placed in their own path that they will ultimately become the strong beings they are meant to be at the end of Earth’s evolution. It is entirely in keeping with the purpose of Earth’s evolution that they place these stumbling blocks in their own path. And if he did not have to muster the strength to remove the obstacles again, then he would also lack the strength he would need to do so. That is to say, the world would be deprived of this strength that he develops through this process. We must completely set aside any consideration of what is good or evil associated with such obstacles and hindrances. We must focus solely on the fact that, from the very beginning of human development on Earth, the wisdom of the world has aimed to offer human beings the opportunity to place obstacles in their own path, so that they may remove them and thereby acquire the great, strong power needed for what lies ahead in the world. One might even say: The wisdom governing the world has allowed human beings to become evil, has given them the capacity for evil and harm, so that—in making amends for the harm, in overcoming evil, and in the course of karmic development—they may become stronger beings than they would otherwise have become if they had reached their goal as if by themselves. Thus, one must recognize the significance and justification of these hindrances and obstacles.

[ 9 ] So when a person relives his life in Kamaloka after death and comes to a point where he inflicts harm on another—as he did in his twentieth year—he experiences that harm just as he relives the joy and goodness he bestowed upon his fellow beings. However, they experience the pain they inflicted on another through their own astral body. So let’s suppose they struck someone or caused someone pain in their twentieth year of life; the other person felt it exactly as they did. During the review of past lives, the one who caused the pain feels it in his astral body exactly as the other person—to whom he inflicted the pain—felt it when it was inflicted. Thus, in the spiritual world, one objectively experiences everything one has oneself caused in the outer world. Through this, one absorbs within oneself the strength and the impulse to make up for this pain in one of the subsequent incarnations. It is the case that, when reliving the experience in one’s own astral body, one realizes: “This is exactly what I did back then!” And one realizes that one has thereby placed a stumbling block in the way of one’s further development. The obstacle must be removed! Otherwise, one cannot get past it. At that moment, one forms the intention—the impulse—to remove this obstacle as well, so that, once one has lived through the Kamaloka period, one actually arrives in childhood filled with intentions—namely, the intention to remove all the obstacles one has created in life. One is completely filled with nothing but intentions. The fact that one possesses these intentions as a force within oneself is what shapes the very unique course of future lives.

[ 10 ] Let us assume that B caused harm to A when he was twenty years old. Now he must experience the pain himself, and he carries with him the intention to make amends to A in a future life—specifically in the physical world, since that is where the harm was inflicted. The fact that he possesses this power—that is, the will to make amends—creates a bond of attraction between B and A, the one who suffered the harm, and this bond of attraction brings them together again in the next life. That mysterious force of attraction that draws one person to another in life stems from what was absorbed in Kamaloka and transformed into spiritual power. We are led in life to the people with whom we have something to make amends for—or with whom we have any connection at all—precisely because of what we have experienced in Kamaloka. Now you can imagine that what we have absorbed within ourselves as Kamaloka forces to balance out a lifetime cannot always be made up for in a single lifetime. It may well be, then, that in one life we have established relationships with a large number of people and that the subsequent Kamaloka period has given us the opportunity to be reunited with these people. Now, whether we are reunited with the other person as early as the next life depends, of course, on the other person as well. This is then spread out over many lifetimes. In one life we have to make amends for this, in another life for something else, and so on. It should by no means be imagined as though we could make amends for everything right away in the next life. This also depends entirely on whether the other person develops the corresponding bond of attraction within their soul.

[ 11 ] Now let us take a closer look at the workings of karma and examine a specific case. In Kamaloka, we form the intention to carry out this or that in our next life or in one of our subsequent lives. Whatever is implanted in our soul as a force remains there; it does not leave the soul again. We are reborn with all the forces we have absorbed within ourselves. This is absolutely inevitable. Now, in the context of karma, there are not only things to do in life that relate to making amends to another person, although what needs to be said may also pertain to that. We have placed many obstacles in our own path; we have lived one-sidedly, have not made proper use of our lives, have lived solely for this or that pleasure, this or that work, and have let other opportunities that presented themselves to us in life pass us by, thereby failing to develop other abilities. This, too, is something that awakens karmic causes within us from our life in Kamaloka. This is how we carry ourselves into the next life. Now we are reborn, at the age of zero. Let’s assume we live until our tenth or twentieth year. Within our soul lies everything we have absorbed in terms of Kamaloka forces, and when it has matured for life, it then emerges. For a certain period of our lives, an inner compulsion undoubtedly arises in some way to carry this out. So let’s assume that in our twentieth year, an inner urge, an inner impulse arises to perform some action, because we have absorbed this force in the Kamaloka. So we go along with it, because it is the simplest case: the inner impulse arises to make amends to a person. The person is there; the bond of attraction has brought us together with them. We could very well make amends for external reasons. But there may still be an obstacle: making amends might require an action on our part that we are not capable of performing due to our constitution. In our constitution, we are also dependent on hereditary forces. This always creates a disharmony in every life. When a person is born, they are, on the one hand, embedded within these hereditary forces. They inherit the qualities for the physical body and the etheric body that they can draw down from their ancestral line. This inheritance, of course, is by no means entirely without an external connection to what our soul has karmically prescribed for itself. For our soul, descending from the spiritual world, is drawn to the parental couple, to the family, where qualities can be inherited that are most closely aligned with the soul’s needs. But these traits are never entirely identical to the soul’s needs. That cannot be the case in our body. There is always a certain degree of discrepancy between the hereditary forces present and what the soul possesses within itself as a result of its past lives. And it is simply a matter of the soul being strong enough to overcome all the resistance present in the hereditary line, so that it is able to shape its constitution over the course of its entire life in such a way that it overcomes what is not suitable within it. In this respect, people are very different. There are souls who have become very strong through their previous life courses. Such a soul must be born into the most suitable body possible—not into the absolutely perfect body. It may be strong enough to nearly overcome everything that does not suit it, but this is not always the case. Let us examine this in detail and consider our brain in this context.

[ 12 ] When we consider this instrument of our imagination and thought life, we inherit it as an external instrument from our ancestral line. It is shaped in its finer curves and contours in this or that way by our ancestral line. To a certain extent, the soul will always be able, through an inner force, to overcome what does not suit it and to adapt its instrument to its own powers; but only to a certain extent. The stronger soul can do this to a greater degree; the weaker soul to a lesser degree. And if, due to circumstances that may arise, we find it impossible to overcome the resistant tendencies and structures of the brain through our soul’s powers, then we cannot properly control the instrument. Then what we might call the impossibility of handling this instrument arises—in a certain sense, a mental defect, a mental illness, as it is commonly called. What is also referred to as a melancholic temperament arises because certain structures within us cannot be overcome by the powers of the soul, which are not strong enough for this purpose. So now, in the middle of the incarnation—at the beginning and end of the incarnation it is different—we always have within us a certain inadequacy of the instrument in relation to the forces of the soul. This is, after all, always the mysterious reason for the inner conflict and disharmony of human nature. Everything that people often think about the reason for their dissatisfaction is usually just a mask. In truth, the reasons lie precisely where it has just been indicated. Thus we see the relationship between the soul—that which lives from incarnation to incarnation—and what we receive through our hereditary lineage.

[ 13 ] Now let’s imagine that we have been reborn, and that in our twentieth year our soul is driven to make amends for this or that deed. The person in question is still there, but our soul is unable to overcome the inner resistance that would allow the deed to be carried out. After all, we must always mobilize our forces whenever we are to carry out any action. Most of the time, a person does not notice that something is happening within their being; at first, they need not be aware of it. The following scenario could very well unfold. A person lives in the world. Twenty years after their birth, their soul is driven by the impulse and urge to make amends for something. The possibility of achieving this balance would be there; the external circumstances would be in place. But inwardly, they are not capable of using their faculties in such a way as to carry out what they ought to do.

[ 14 ] People do not need to know everything that has just been said, but they will become aware of the effect. The effect now manifests as this or that illness, and here lies the karmic connection between what happened in a previous life and the illness. Given this spiritual cause, the entire process of the illness will now unfold in such a way that it leads to making this person capable—the next time the circumstances arise again—of balancing it out. So, in our twentieth year, we are incapable of carrying out this or that. But the impulse, the urge, is there; the soul wants to do it. What does the soul do instead? It struggles, so to speak, against its useless organ; it rages against its useless organ, and the result is that it shatters it, so to speak—it destroys it. The organ that should actually be used to carry out the action outwardly is destroyed under the influence of these forces, and the result is that a reactionary process must set in—what we now call the healing process—in which the organism’s forces must be mobilized to rebuild the organ. This organ, which has been shattered because it was not as it should have been for the human being to perform the corresponding work, is now, through the illness, built precisely as the soul needs it to carry out this action—for which it may already be too late under certain circumstances after the illness has passed. In return, however, the soul has now absorbed a completely different power within itself—namely, the power to shape this organ during the corresponding reincarnation, in its growth and overall development, in such a way that this task can be carried out in the next reincarnation. Thus, illness can be precisely what makes us capable in one life to carry out in another life what is karmically incumbent upon us.

[ 15 ] Here we have a mysterious connection between the illness—which is essentially a process of upward development—and a karmic connection between the illness and this upward development. In order for the soul to develop the power to shape an organ as needed, that organ—which is unsuitable—must be broken down and rebuilt by the soul’s powers. This brings us to a law that already exists in the course of human life and that must be described something like this: Human beings must acquire their strength by overcoming resistance in the physical world, bit by bit. In essence, we have all acquired our powers by overcoming this or that resistance in previous lifetimes. Our present abilities are the result of our illnesses in previous lifetimes. Let us assume, to be particularly clear, that a soul is not yet capable enough to use the midbrain. How can it acquire the ability to use the midbrain properly? It can do so only by first recognizing its inability to use this midbrain, then shattering the midbrain and rebuilding it; and through this rebuilding, it learns precisely to acquire the strength it needs in this direction. We are capable of doing everything that we ourselves have once accomplished through destruction and reconstruction. This has been felt by all those who, within one religious tradition or another on Earth, have recognized destruction and restoration as having a very significant essence. In the Indian religious tradition, “Shiva” represents the ruling powers that destroy and restore. Here we already have one of the ways in which, karmically speaking, disease processes are brought about. For those processes in which it is not so much the individuality of the human being as the nature of humanity in general that is taken into account, such a mechanism already exists, causing diseases to occur more generally. We see, for example, childhood illnesses occurring quite typically at certain times. They are nothing other than an expression of the fact that, while going through these childhood illnesses, the child learns to master a certain part of its organs from within and can then master them for all subsequent incarnations. We should view illnesses as a process that makes a person capable. This brings us to a completely different way of thinking about illnesses. Of course, one must not conclude from this that if someone is struck by a train, this must be explained in the same way. All of that must always be sought outside of the illness itself, outside of what has just been described. But there is another case of karmic causation of illness that is no less interesting and that we can only understand if we characterize the circumstances of life in somewhat greater detail.

[ 16 ] Suppose you learn this or that in life—the kinds of things one learns in life. You have to learn them first, because the most important things you acquire in life are indeed learned first. The process of learning is absolutely essential. But that is by no means the end of the matter, for learning is also the most external of processes. Once we have taken something in, the fact remains that even after we have learned it, we are still far from having experienced everything that what we have learned is meant to do within us. We are born into life with very specific abilities, which we have acquired partly through our heredity and partly through our past lives. The scope of our abilities is, after all, limited. In every life, we increase our experiences and insights. What we experience there is not as closely connected to us as what we brought into life with us—such as our temperament, natural disposition, and so on. What we have learned during life—initially as memory and habit—is more loosely connected to us. It therefore emerges in life only in isolated fragments. Only after life does it emerge in the etheric body, in the great tableau of memories. We must now incorporate this into ourselves; it must become part of us.

[ 17 ] So let’s assume that we have learned something in this life and will be reborn. When we are reborn, it may well be that—due to heredity or other circumstances, or perhaps because our learning process was not harmonious and we learned one thing but failed to learn what we needed to reach the full potential of what we had learned—we develop what we learned in one direction upon rebirth, but not in another. Let’s assume we have learned something in this life that necessitated, in a subsequent life, a very specific part of our brain being organized in a certain way, or that this or that aspect of our blood circulation functions in a particular manner; and let’s now assume we did not also learn the other things that are necessary for this. But this is by no means necessarily a deficiency. A person must proceed in leaps and bounds through life and must experience and recognize that they have pursued something in a one-sided manner. Now they are reborn with the fruits of what they have learned, but they lack the ability to develop everything within themselves in such a way that everything can fully unfold, so that they can also put what they have learned into practice in life. It may be, for example, that a person was even, to a certain degree, initiated into the great mysteries of existence during an incarnation. Now they are reborn in such a way that these forces—which were implanted within them—seek to emerge. But let us suppose that they were unable to develop certain forces that could then bring about the corresponding harmony of the organs. At a certain point in life, what they learned earlier will indeed seek to emerge. But the organ necessary to carry this out is missing. What is the consequence of this? An illness must arise—an illness whose karmic cause may lie very, very deep. And, so to speak, a part of the organism must once again be shattered and rebuilt. Then, through this rebuilding process, the soul senses which are the right forces in a different direction and carries this sense—of which forces are the right ones—with it. If this stems from such learning or even from an initiation, it is usually the case that the fruits manifest themselves in that very life. So an illness arises, causing the soul to sense that it is lacking this or that. And then, for example, immediately after the illness, something may occur that one would not otherwise have been able to attain. It may be that in the previous life one could have risen to a certain level of enlightenment, but a “switch” in the brain did not click, and one did not develop the strength that could have caused this switch to click. Inevitably, this leads to the need for that “switch” to be shattered. This can then result in a serious illness. The affected part of the body is then rebuilt, and in the process, the soul senses the powers necessary to activate that “switch”; and afterward, one attains the enlightenment one is meant to have. Illnesses can certainly be viewed as very significant harbingers.

[ 18 ] This, however, brings us to matters that our mundane world today would turn its nose up at. Yet many have experienced something like a constant sense of dissatisfaction, as if there were something in the soul that cannot escape, something that makes life virtually impossible from within. Then a serious illness strikes, and overcoming this serious illness means that something entirely new enters one’s life—something that feels like a liberation—as if the knot has finally been untied and the organ can be used. It was simply because the organ was not functional. However, in today’s life cycle, people still have many such knots, and they cannot all be untied at once. We don’t always have to think of enlightenment right away; it also occurs in many lesser life processes.

[ 19 ] Thus we see that we are faced here with the necessity of developing this or that, and that here, too, the cause of illness lies in the karmic chain of causation. Therefore, we should never be entirely satisfied when we say, in a mere trivial sense: “If I am struck by an illness, I have brought it upon myself through my karma.”—For in this case we should not merely think of past karma—as if the illness were a conclusion—but we should even consider that the illness is, after all, only the second link—that in the illness we have the resulting cause for creative power and effectiveness in the future. We completely misunderstand illness and karma if we always look only to the past; this turns karma into something that, one might say, represents nothing more than a purely random law of fate. Karma, however, becomes a law of action, of the fruitfulness of life, when we are able to look from the present into the future through karma.

[ 20 ] All of this points us to a great law that governs our human existence. And in order to gain at least a little insight into this great law today—we will return to it later and describe it in more detail—let us look back to the time when human beings first emerged in their present form, the Lemurian epoch. There, humanity descended from the divine-spiritual existence into its present outer existence, first enveloping itself in physical bodies, thus embarking on the path of outer incarnations and progressing from incarnation to incarnation until the present day. Before human beings entered the cycle of incarnations, it was not possible—in the same sense as it is today—to bring about illness within themselves. Only when human beings acquired the ability to regulate their relationship to the external world were they able to err, thereby causing incorrect internal organ formations and bringing about the possibility of illness within themselves. Previously, it was impossible for human beings to bring about disease processes within themselves. When everything was still under the influence of divine powers and forces, when it was not yet up to them to lead their own lives, the possibility of illness did not yet exist. Then this possibility of illness arose. Where, therefore, can one best learn what the paths to healing are? One can best learn this by looking back to those times when the divine-spiritual forces worked within human beings and endowed them with absolute health, without the possibility of illness—that is, to the time before humanity’s first incarnation. This is how people have always felt whenever they knew anything about these matters. And now try, starting from this point, to take a deep look into a subject such as that depicted in the mythologies. I do not even wish to point you now to the source of true medicine in the Egyptian cult of Hermes; I wish only to point you to the Greek and Roman cult of Aesculapius.

[ 21 ] Aesculapius, the son of Apollo, is, so to speak, the father of Greek physicians. And what does Greek mythology tell us about him? His father took him to that mountain when he was still a youth, where he could become the student of the centaur Chiron. And it is the centaur Chiron who instructs Aesculapius, the father of medicine, in the healing powers found in plants and in other natural remedies on Earth. Chiron, the centaur—what kind of being is he? He is a being described to us as one of the kind that existed before the descent of humanity, before the Lemurian epoch: a being, half human, half animal. Hidden within this myth is the fact that, in the corresponding mystery, Aesculapius is shown those powers that were the great healing forces capable of bringing about health before humanity entered its first incarnation.

[ 22 ] And so we see how this great law, this great spiritual reality—which must be of such interest to us as humanity’s pilgrimage on Earth draws to a close—is also expressed in Greek mythology. It is precisely the myths that will reveal themselves for what they are—as images of the deepest connections of life—only once people have moved beyond the ABCs of spiritual science. It is precisely the myths that are images of the deepest mysteries of human existence.

[ 23 ] If life as a whole is viewed from this perspective, then life as a whole will also be placed within this perspective, and spiritual science will increasingly become—and this must be emphasized more and more—something that becomes an integral part of everyday life. People will live spiritual science, and only then will this be the realization of what spiritual science has actually strived for from the very beginning. Spiritual science will become the great impetus for humanity’s ascent, for true salvation and true human progress.