The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] From your reflections on the very nature of a factor in human life such as one’s profession—or everything in life connected with it—you will have realized that it is difficult to analyze these matters, because there are an extraordinary number of factors to consider. We must bear in mind that everything brought into human life through the course of the laws of destiny—of karma—depends on a great many factors, and that the diversity of human life is based precisely on the fact that so many factors come into play. A special remark must be made when the term “profession” is used to summarize individual human aspects of one’s life destiny. One should not, in fact, confuse what can be called a person’s “profession” with what is referred to as a person’s “office” in the broadest sense. For, of course, one would immediately run into all sorts of confusion if one were to focus one’s attention on what this or that person represents in their office and were to view it from the perspective that has been adopted here for professional life. Precisely because a person often—though not always—has to carry out his or her profession within an office, it follows that the most diverse external factors can in turn come into play in human life and that, in a sense, other karmic threads become intertwined with one’s professional karma.

[ 2 ] We still live today in an age that, while slowly undergoing a certain transformation, is in many respects still such that the factors we are about to mention regarding vocational karma are by no means the only determining factors in placing a person in this or that position in life. We know that even today, in many respects, vocational karma is thwarted by the karma of entire social strata, classes, and so on; that within groups of people, ambition, vanity, prejudices—both one’s own and those of others—play a role in the way a person is placed in their position in life, along with many other factors. All these factors, which, so to speak, exert an influence from the outside on vocational karma, make it possible for Ahrimanic influences to continually intrude into the course of human activity. A person who has been placed in a certain position in life—that is, who has become a minister, a state councilor, or something similar through various circumstances that are well known and need not be enumerated—a person who has been placed in such a position need not necessarily have the vocation for that position. He may hold a high office, yet his vocation may be nothing more than that of a scribal soul; perhaps not even that. But one must not then believe that his position is not being filled. This, precisely, is the peculiarity of our time, which—in the materialistic interpretation of the legitimate Darwinian principles—has brought forth such a doctrine of life as that of the “selection of the best,” which Oscar Hertwig, Haeckel’s student, now so strongly criticizes—that this era, which has given rise to this doctrine, at the very same time quite clearly selects precisely the worst, far more so than was ever the case in the entire context of life in any other age. Here one need not take the position of simply denouncing one’s own era like a pessimist and invoking the “good old days”; rather, one is truly standing on the basis of a fact: On the one hand, one takes credit for the doctrine of selecting the best; but this era, which takes particular pride in this doctrine, is in reality dominated by the tendency to select precisely the worst for the seemingly most important positions in life.

[ 3 ] This is a bitter truth for the present, but one that would be recognized if the present were not so thoroughly under the influence of a belief in authority that extends as far as possible and a self-serving opportunism that goes as far as possible, and if what is today called public opinion—public opinions are, after all, private follies in the view of a 19th-century philosopher—did not prevail. I say that people would understand what is at stake if they were not so heavily influenced by public opinion, which today is fed from such murky sources. One must therefore be clear about this: our age must, above all, be educated toward a more intense conception of life by recognizing that one-sidedness—the selection of the worst—exists, even if these very worst are idolized by the aforementioned public opinion.

[ 4 ] These roles are often filled by Ahriman-Mephistopheles, and you can see precisely from the course of the Faust plot how Mephistopheles carries out his duties. Only at the end of his life does Faust manage to free himself from Mephistopheles. Faust arrives at the imperial court. He even makes an invention of extraordinary importance for the past few centuries; namely, he invents paper money. But in reality, it is Mephistopheles who invents paper money. Then Faust is led back into the ancient world by the homunculus; but the homunculus comes into being through Mephistopheles’s assistance. Faust even becomes a general and wages wars, but it is precisely from the portrayal Goethe creates in this act that one can see that it is actually Mephistopheles who wages these wars. Only at the very end do we see how Faust gradually frees himself from Mephistopheles. Even if Faust, in a sense, merely wanders through the world without holding a specific office after leaving the professorship he previously held, one must still say: The way in which Mephistopheles stands by his side is very much like the way the Mephistophelean force often plays a role in human life today. That is the one thing that must be taken into account.

[ 5 ] Another point that must be taken into account is that it is extremely difficult to properly investigate, within human nature, what actually operates in the course of karmic evolution. One might even say, in this area as well, that scientific development has reached a point where it must be supplemented by spiritual scientific consideration. Yet it is precisely when the natural-scientific approach ventures into the realm of the soul life that it commits the most terrible errors. We see, after all, how there is today a misguided scientific trend that ventures into the human soul life and seeks to examine it from a natural-scientific perspective—a trend that also admits that this human soul life does not merely unfold in what is present in consciousness, but that beneath the threshold of consciousness—as one says, in the unconscious or subconscious— there lies much that surges up into consciousness. In earlier discussions, we have cited concrete examples of things that truly lie in the subconscious and surge up into consciousness like clouds of smoke in the vicinity of a solfatara when one begins to burn up pieces of paper there. Much, indeed, lies in the depths of the unconscious down there. So one can say: Some people who wish to engage in the study of the soul today already suspect that one must bring dark, unconscious soul capacities and soul deficiencies into play to explain the life of the soul. But since these views are by no means yet willing to align with a more comprehensive spiritual-scientific worldview, they can only bring forth falsehoods. From this perspective of scientific psychology, one observes a human life as it has unfolded. One has, however, already moved away from the belief that what a soul feels and wills—what makes it happy or unhappy, joyful or sorrowful—depends solely on what it has directly retained in consciousness. One now attempts to interrogate the soul, trying, for example, to draw out from the soul what it has once experienced—the joys, sufferings, and disappointments in life that it has forgotten beyond the reach of its ordinary imagination. Yet, one tells oneself, what is forgotten has not therefore disappeared; it stirs in the subconscious.

[ 6 ] In particular, this subconscious is rife with desires that one once had, that were never satisfied, and that one has repressed. Let’s take a specific case: We are dealing with a woman in her thirties. At the age of sixteen, she fell in love and developed—as this scientific school of thought puts it—a rather erotic desire; but this erotic desire would have led her down some wrong path in life if she had given in to it, if it had been fulfilled. Under the influence of her upbringing and her parents’ persuasion, she repressed it; she, as one might trivially put it, “ate it away” emotionally. She carries on with her life. Fourteen years have already passed since that time. She may now have married a man of her own social standing. As far as her daily thoughts and feelings are concerned, it has long been forgotten, but what is forgotten has not disappeared. The soul is not limited to what it knows. It still exists in the depths of her inner life, and it manifests itself in such a way that the woman in question, despite appearing happy on the outside, suffers from an indefinable, pessimistic mood, a partial weariness with life, or something similar—so that she is, as they say, nervous, neurasthenic, or something of that sort. People then seek to incorporate this kind of psychology into medical science, and they attempt to heal such souls by catechizing them, by saying: Such experiences lurking in the depths of the soul—which seem to have been forgotten by the conscious mind—must be brought to the surface. If they are brought to the surface and one grapples with the matter under the guidance of a skilled therapist—who, of course, according to today’s views, must be a psychiatrist—then things improve. — One also achieves healings in this way, which are often more or less actual healings, although in the majority of cases they will be only apparent healings; but to what extent they are apparent healings is something we can discuss on another occasion. This is the kind of thing one seeks down there in the depths of the soul’s life.

[ 7 ] Another example: We are dealing with a man of thirty-five or forty who suffers from a certain weariness of life, from a lack of resolve. He does not know why, and those around him do not know why; he knows it least of all. Anyone who wishes to engage with such matters—as has been suggested—with this kind of psychology, now attempts to delve into the forgotten but not vanished depths of this person’s inner life and uncovers that the individual in question may have had this or that life plan in his fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth year, which failed. At that time, he had to turn to a different life plan that did not correspond to this earlier one. He has, admittedly, seemingly come to terms with this in what he feels, thinks, and wills on a daily basis; but that is not the entirety of the soul life—what one so consciously thinks, feels, and wills—rather, this failed life plan lives on as a force in the depths of the soul.

[ 8 ] It is now believed, however, that healing is possible if one can bring this failed life plan to the surface through a catechizing process and the person in question is able to grapple with their catechist. But one also thinks that much else lies down there in the depths of the soul, without the conscious mind being aware of it. In short, one has come to realize that the conscious mind is a small circle, the life of the soul a larger circle, and that the conscious mind encompasses only a part of the life of the soul. But now people are also searching for what I would call the “non-spiritual” at the very bottom of the life of the soul—as, it seems, a theologian recently put it in a rather tasteless way: they are searching for the “animalistic sludge” of the soul. That is, disappointments, repressed desires, failed life plans—the “animalistic sludge” of the soul, that is, everything that is rooted in animal life—which comes, so to speak, from the flesh, from the blood, from the animal nature—and does not rise consciously from the depths of the soul, for consciousness would naturally resist this, and indeed does resist it. |

[ 9 ] There is certainly some truth to this theory of the “animalistic primal sludge.” For we see it time and again in life, how consciousness tells itself: “Oh, I want nothing more than this: I want to experience this or that, which is why I turn to this or that person.” — But then the “animalistic primal slime” of the soul’s life takes effect, and perhaps these are merely animalistic desires that are embellished and masked by what the consciousness says. Furthermore, this “scientific” school of thought claims— “scientific” must be said in quotation marks here, though in most cases they are actually goose-foot quotation marks—that in these unconscious regions one also finds what stems from the individual’s connection to the race, to the nation, to all sorts of other historical residues that play out unconsciously in the human soul, while consciousness behaves quite differently. In light of what is currently sweeping across the world, one cannot even say that these things cannot be substantiated by examples spreading far beyond the world. Who today could fail to see how many people set forth lofty ideals in their words regarding the justice and freedom of peoples, while in their souls what is truly at work is that which, stirring up the deep sludge of the soul, arises from the connections that psychoanalysis is analyzing—or at least seeks to analyze—in the direction indicated?

[ 10 ] Then — and I don’t know how the scientific psychoanalysts deal with the theological psychoanalysts, who do exist, after all — the theological psychoanalysts, in particular, also include the demonic in the subconscious of the soul, that which rises from even deeper depths, from entirely irrational depths, as they say. In particular, theological psychoanalysts take great pride in the fact that unknown demons are at work in the subconscious of the human soul, for example, to turn people into Gnostics or Theosophists. For when one psychoanalyzes the soul, when one delves down to the depths where the primordial mud also lies, one finds this. And Gnosticism is a demonic doctrine; psychoanalysis is a demonic doctrine—pardon me, not psychoanalysis itself. According to these men and women—for women are already involved in these matters as well—it is not included, but rather “theosophy and other things” that are also listed in this context. Well, I do not wish to engage in a critique of psychoanalysis today, but I merely wish to suggest, through what I have discussed, that there is, so to speak, something in this psychoanalytic direction that propels current research toward what lies beneath the conscious part of the soul—what is at work and weaving there. But since scientific prejudices inevitably lead to the most erroneous conclusions in this very field, and since people are currently unwilling to engage with spiritual scientific investigations in this area, they will never realize that what is found in the life of the soul cannot be properly analyzed unless one knows that human life unfolds over the course of repeated earthly lives. For in psychoanalysis, one seeks to explain everything that lies at the root of the soul solely on the basis of a single earthly life. No wonder, then, that one ends up viewing it in a very distorted light.

[ 11 ] For example, someone who discovers failed life plans deep within the soul would first have to examine what significance such a failure of a life plan holds in the context of a person’s entire life, which spans repeated earthly lives. They might then discover that certain aspects of this human life, lying dormant in the subconscious, have been at work—aspects that, as a matter of fate, have prevented the life plan in question from being carried out— and then he would realize that this failed life plan, which still lies in the depths of the soul, is not merely destined to make the person ill in this incarnation, but is destined to be carried through—once this life has ended, through the gate of death—to become a source of strength in the life between death and a new birth, so that it may finally play its proper role in the next earthly life. For such a failed life plan, it may indeed be necessary for it to be preserved initially in the depths of the soul during this life, so that it can gather strength, grow, and then take on the proper form between death and a new birth—so that it can assume the form predestined for it in the next earthly life, a form it was unable to assume in this earthly life precisely because of other qualities in the soul’s life.

[ 12 ] And as for the so-called—as I said, the expression is in poor taste—animalistic primal sludge of the soul’s life: Certainly, it is there; but recall what I have explained regarding the relationship between the human head and the rest of the organism. The rest of the organism is directly connected to a person’s earthly life—indeed, in many respects to their present incarnation—while the head is a result of earlier developments on the Earth plane and, above all, is also connected to their previous incarnations. If you consider this, you will understand that much arises from the rest of the organism—depending on the role it plays in the overall karmic context—that must have a different state of maturity than that which springs from the human head, from the brain and its nervous system. But anyone who, in psychoanalysis, initially analyzes only the primal sludge is completely mistaken; for whoever analyzes the animalic primal sludge is in the same situation as a person who wants to know what kind of grain will grow on a certain piece of land when it has not yet grown there; so he analyzes the soil and digs into it, finding a certain kind of manure that has been used to fertilize it. Now he says: “Yes, now I know the manure; the grain will soon grow out of it.”—The grain does not grow out of the manure at all, even though the manure must be there! What matters is what is embedded in this primal sludge; and what is embedded in this primal sludge is often destined to work its way through the gateway of death into the development of the next earthly life. The point is not to examine the animalic primordial slime, but rather that which is embedded in this animalic primordial slime as a soul seed.

[ 13 ] Psychoanalysis, in particular, offers an opportunity to study precisely where the prejudices of the present have a disastrous effect, because it deals with a field toward which contemporary thought is driven—a field that cannot be satisfied with what experience alone provides the soul, that is, with the soul’s experience of consciousness. One is already being driven toward the very place one is meant to investigate. But now those who have no guidelines for investigation—because they cannot understand spiritual science—are digging around in the areas assigned to them by their official positions or through their agitation, in the most clumsy manner, placing everything in the wrong places because they do not understand how to place things in their proper places. One could only do this if one were able to trace the actual karmic thread, as I have just shown you, at least in outline, with one example and another. Above all, this psychoanalysis proves to be so terribly unhealthy when it delves into the elemental realm—the very realm that is, however, important if one wishes to explore the continuous thread of a person’s destiny in its subtle, intimate manifestations. What takes place in a person’s conscious soul life—from waking up to falling asleep—actually reveals very little of what continues to influence us as a karmic current through the incarnations. What we consciously experience in waking life belongs for the most part to the present incarnation, and that is as it should be, for a person is meant to be effective in the present incarnation. But much of what is carried through the gateway of death as a seed—formed from the experiences, lessons, and training of the present incarnation—plays a major role in our lives from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, and this often finds its way into our dreams. One must, however, be able to interpret the nature of dreams correctly. When people say that dreams are reminiscences, this is often true, but they operate in our karmic current in a different way than in a direct one. They do not operate directly; they often operate by signifying, in terms of their direction of force, the opposite of how they manifest themselves. I would like to give an example from literature to illustrate what I mean.

[ 14 ] V-Vischer — His name is V-Vischer because it’s spelled with a V rather than an F —, the aesthete who wrote the novel Auch Einer, included a short, charming story in Auch Einer that I’m citing here because I’m speaking more broadly about professional life, that is, about matters related to people’s occupations. So I, too, would like to cite an example related to one’s occupation. In it, V-Vischer recounts a conversation between a father and his son. They are walking together, and after the father has asked him various questions, the son tells his father: “Look, the teacher told us that one should always ask a person what kind of occupation they have, because what matters is that a person has a decent occupation; that’s how you can tell whether they’re a decent person at all, whether they have a decent soul.” “Is that so?” says the father. “Yes, and later, after the teacher told us that at school, I dreamed I was walking over to that lake over there, and in my dream I asked the lake what its occupation was, and the lake said, ‘My occupation is to be wet.’ ‘Well, well!’ says the father.”

[ 15 ] It is a very witty story, one that reveals a great deal of wisdom about life on the part of the person who conceived it. For the father said, “Well, well!” simply because he naturally didn’t want to spoil his son and didn’t want to tell him what a silly thing the teacher had said. But the father must have had his own thoughts on the matter. He really should have explained things to his son more wisely than the teacher did; he should have said: “One shouldn’t judge in such a superficial way. It could be, for example, that one has formed a false opinion about a respectable occupation and therefore considers the person to be unscrupulous; or the person in question might be hindered by something else.” In short, the father should have instructed his son. In this case, however, he did not need to instruct him, for since we are dealing with a young person in the son, the dream can still have a beneficial effect. For the dream, which has indeed come to the son’s consciousness, is truly present as a force in place of instruction. This dream works in the subconscious, but it works in such a way that it eradicates from the soul the folly that the teacher has caused with his teaching. That is why, in the son’s subconscious—which is wiser than the conscious mind—the dream has taken such a form that, in a sense, a touch of the ridiculous spreads through the dream over the teacher’s folly. The lake says that being wet is its occupation, its calling. This is something that will have a healing effect, something that will drive out all the harmful consequences that can arise from such teaching. Here the dream is a reminiscence—the very next night the dream follows as a reminiscence—but at the same time it is a corrector of life. And this is indeed how the life of the astral body works in many ways, and one would find—besides the remnants of what is present in the soul from life experience—above all, sometimes, from a misguided upbringing—that there is a corrector present within the subconscious soul forces, which sometimes begins to work even in the same incarnation when it enters a young person, but which is carried above all through the gate of death and continues to work. There truly is a kind of self-corrector within the human being. We must certainly take this into account.

[ 16 ] My purpose in mentioning all these things was simply to draw attention to everything that exists within the human soul and thus carries over from one incarnation to the next. We are dealing with an entire complex of forces that carries over from one incarnation to the next. Now we must consider the relationship between this complex of forces and the human being, insofar as his life unfolds between birth and death. In this regard, the human being is indeed—I would say—an instrument with four strings, played upon by the aforementioned karmic complex of forces. The physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I are the four strings; karma plays upon them. Depending on whether one or the other—the etheric body, the astral body, or the etheric body together with the astral body, the physical body together with the astral body, or the physical body together with the “I”—is stroked to a greater or lesser extent by the bow of karma—if we may use the analogy of a violin, which also has four strings— individual human life arises. These four strings of human life can intertwine in the most manifold ways. That is why it is so difficult—if one wishes to speak not in general, empty abstractions but in concrete terms—to decipher the individual melodies of human life, because one can decipher them—or at least decipher them fruitfully—only if one can, so to speak, observe how the bow of karma plays upon the four strings of the human being. However, general perspectives do come into play here, and these must be taken into account.

[ 17 ] If one observes a person during those years of life in which, according to my little book The Education of the Child from the Perspective of Spiritual Science, the physical body and, in particular, the etheric body are primarily developing—if one observes a child’s development from approximately the seventh to the fourteenth year—approximately, since all of this is approximate—then one will find that it is precisely during this time that certain characteristics emerge in the child that particularly mark this period of life. One will notice that during this time, in a certain sense, certain things become consolidated. Indeed, some of these things do already appear during the first seven years of life, because everything is still in a state of flux, but they can only be observed more precisely and in greater depth from approximately the seventh to the fourteenth year of life. One will find that what emerges in the developing human being in a more definite way are what might be called the inner characteristics that are, so to speak, consolidated through physicality, through the entire manner of self-expression—but insofar as this self-expression is manifested in posture, in the gestural quality of physicality, and in one’s entire demeanor. What consolidates there—admittedly not everything, but a large part of what determines that a person has a stocky build, that they are short, or have a shorter or taller stature, that they carry themselves in a certain way, with a firm stride or a mincing gait, to mention radical opposites—in short, what is meant here is that which is connected to the physical aspect of one’s demeanor. As I said, not everything, but a large part of what manifests in the developing human being stems from the karmic effects of the profession in the previous incarnation. Very often, however, by disregarding what I have just said—in an attempt to be clever—people observe a person’s posture and, based on how he carries himself and presents himself, try to determine something about his profession. In doing so, one would make the mistake of wanting to place the person in question in a profession similar to the one they had in their previous incarnation. But that would not be beneficial for the person in question; for in this life, one sees the effects of the previous incarnation.

[ 18 ] And when this period of life comes to an end—or even before that, as I said, when things begin to intertwine— then the astral body manifests in a very special way, and this astral body—if one understands the matter, if it is derived from spiritual science, then it can also be observed externally on the physical plane—has a retroactive effect on what has previously developed. It acts back in such a way that, through other karmic forces, it reshapes what has arisen from pure occupational karma between the ages of seven and fourteen. There are thus two forces within the human being that are in conflict with one another: one set shapes the person; these arise more from the etheric body. The other set works against these forces and partially paralyzes them, so that the human being is driven by these other forces—which arise more from the astral body—to reshape what has been imposed upon them by the vocational karma from the previous incarnation. We can therefore say: The etheric body has a formative effect—for what appears as posture in the physical body and as self-expression originates from the etheric body—while the astral body has a transforming effect. Through the interplay of these two forces, which are truly, one might say, locked in a fierce struggle with one another, much is expressed in the workings of vocational karma.

[ 19 ] However, this interacts with other karmic currents, for we must also take the physical body into account. For the physical body, what matters most during the first epoch of life is how a person positions themselves in the world through their karma. Even the kind of physical body we have depends on this, for through our karma we place ourselves within a specific family that belongs to a particular nation and so on. As a result, we receive a body of a very specific nature. But it is not only that we receive a body of a very specific nature; how much, do you think, depends on the course of our life, on the situation into which we place ourselves by entering a particular family? This already establishes the starting point for an infinite number of things in our life. And in fact, active within the physical body—or rather, around the physical body—during the period when the physical body develops most rapidly, in the first seven years of life, forces that do not stem from “the professional and vocational aspects of the previous incarnation,” but rather from how we lived together with people in the previous incarnation—by having been in this or that relationship with these or those people—not in just any part of life—that belongs to a different realm—but throughout the entire life. This is processed. Deep relationships do, after all, develop with our soul as we enter into relationships with people. We carry this through the gate of death, and through these forces we bring about our re-entry into a specific family, into a specific life situation. So that we can say: That which, in a sense, already places us into our physical body and works through our physical body—that is what shapes the life situation. This, of course, continues to have an effect in the following life, and it now encounters a counterforce through the “I.” The “I” has an extinguishing effect on life situations, but it acts in conflict with what is deterministic in the life situation. So that one can say: Physical body: creating the life situation; “I”: reshaping the life situation. Through the interaction of these two, through a struggle they bring about, a different karmic current will intervene in life. For there is always present within the human being that which seeks to preserve them in a particular situation, and that which seeks to lift them out of that particular situation.

1. Physical Body: Creating Life Situations
2. Etheric Body: Shaping
3. Astral Body: Transforming
4. Self: Recreating Life Situations.

[ 20 ] I would like to say: Primarily, 1 and 4, as well as 2 and 3, interact with one another; but these strings also interact with one another in a multitude of other ways. The way in which we, according to our karma, come into contact with new people in a given life depends on 1 and 4 in their interrelationships. However, this also leads us back, first and foremost, to our life connections in past lives. The way in which we find our professional life context, in terms of our occupation, is related to 2 and 3 and their mutual interaction.

[ 21 ] I would now ask you to think about this for the time being. We will continue this discussion shortly.