The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] Anthroposophical wisdom has its deepest impact on human life by pointing to the most comprehensive cosmic mysteries—the mysteries of the entire world—which are, in fact, united once again in a microcosmic form within the human being. But in all that which can thus become clear to us from the cosmos, which can become illuminated, there lives something that shines not only into the daily, but even into the hourly aspects of human life; something that, by addressing human life in terms of its destiny, its karma, shines into that which lies immediately close to the human heart—and, as I said, is close to us hour by hour. And so, drawing on a wide variety of perspectives, I would like to speak to you specifically in the coming days about the anthroposophical foundation of those ideas, those spiritual images, that can bring us closer to human karma.

[ 2 ] We know, of course, that in human life—as it unfolds between birth and death—there are, so to speak, two moments that differ fundamentally from all other moments of this earthly human life. This is the moment—it is, of course, not a moment in the literal sense, but you will understand—in which the human being, as a spiritual-soul being, descends into earthly life, takes on a physical body as an instrument for their activity on earth, and not only clothes themselves in this physical body but, so to speak, transforms themselves into this physical body in order to be able to act on earth: the beginning of earthly life, birth, and conception. The other moment is when a human being departs from earthly life by returning to the spiritual world through the gate of death.

[ 3 ] If we focus first on this latter moment, we see that in the first few days after death, the physical human form is preserved to a certain degree. But we ask ourselves: How does that which remains as the physical human form relate to nature, to the existence that surrounds us in earthly life within the various realms of nature? Are these realms of nature—is all of external nature—capable of relating to the remnant of the human being in such a way that it can sustain this remnant in its formation? No, nature is not capable of this. Nature is solely capable of destroying that which has been built up as a human-physical form since entering physical earthly life, and with death begins the dissolution of the form that the human being regards as his earthly form. Whoever allows this—admittedly quite obvious—truth to sink deeply enough into their soul will realize how simply the physical human form itself serves as proof against all that is material. For if the material were true, one would have to be able to say that nature builds up the human form. One cannot say this, for nature can only destroy the human form, not build it up. And a powerful impression can radiate from this thought. It does radiate; it is just that very often it is not given the proper form of thought. It lives in the unconscious of the human soul; it lives in everything we feel regarding the mystery of death. Yet there it leads an energetic existence. And anthroposophy seeks nothing other than to bring such mysteries—which present themselves to the unbiased human mind in the context of life—to that degree of resolution which “is, in turn, necessary for the proper guidance of life.” And so it must first simply direct the unbiased human spirit toward what the moment of death actually is.

[ 4 ] On the other hand, it can point to the moment of birth. But one can really only form a conception of this moment of birth that corresponds to the idea of death if one engages a little in unbiased self-observation. This self-observation must focus on human thinking. Human thinking extends to everything that happens in the physical, sensory world of the Earth. We form thoughts about what is happening in the world. We could not be human at all if we did not form these thoughts; for it is through the formation of these thoughts that we distinguish ourselves from all other beings that surround us in the earthly realm. But when we observe our thoughts through unbiased self-observation, they do indeed seem quite distant from everything else that otherwise surrounds us as reality. One need only properly imagine how inwardly abstract and cold we become when we give ourselves over to thinking, compared to how we are when we devote ourselves to life with our soul. There should be no doubt whatsoever in the unbiased mind that thoughts, as such, initially have something cold, abstract, sober, and dry about them. But it should be part of the anthroposophist’s first meditative experience to observe our life of thought in the right way. Then something will dawn on them regarding this life of thought that may seem very similar to the sight we have of a corpse. What, then, is characteristic of the sight of a corpse? There it lies before us, this corpse. We say to ourselves: A human soul, a human spirit, once lived within this form; that human soul, that spirit, is gone. A human corpse lies there like a shell of the soul and spirit, yet at the same time providing us with proof that nothing in the non-human world could ever have produced this form, that this form could only have emerged from the innermost, spirit-endowed human nature itself, that it is a remnant of something that is no longer. The form itself shows us: The corpse is, after all, no truth; it is merely a remnant of a truth; it has meaning only when soul and spirit dwell within it. Now, in the form that remains, it has indeed lost much, but just as it is, it shows precisely that soul and spirit once dwelt within it.

[ 5 ] Then we can turn our spiritual gaze toward the life of thought. It will also appear to us—albeit from a somewhat different perspective—as if it were something corpse-like. Human thought, when we observe it impartially within ourselves, can in fact no more exist through itself than the human form can exist in a corpse. The latter has no meaning, and the human thought, as it perceives external nature, has no meaning at all—just as a corpse has none. For external nature is, after all, always something that can be grasped by thoughts, but can never give rise to thoughts. Otherwise, there could be no logic that, independent of all natural laws, discerns what is intellectually right and wrong. When we perceive thought here in the earthly world and truly see through it, it must appear to us as a corpse, as a spiritual corpse, just as what remains of a human being after he has passed through the gate of death appears as a physical corpse. We can only understand the human form if we regard it as a remnant of what a living human being has left behind in death. Just imagine for a moment that there were only a single human being on Earth and that person had died, and a Martian came down and looked at this corpse: he would not understand it at all. He could study all the forms in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and still would not comprehend how this form, lying there dead, could have come into being. For it contradicts itself, and it contradicts the entire non-human, earthly world. It reveals within itself that it has been abandoned by something, for it could not be as it is if it had always been left to its own devices.

[ 6 ] It is exactly the same with our thoughts. They could not possibly be as they are if they were brought about solely by external nature. They are a corpse of the soul, comparable to the physical corpse. If there is a corpse, something must have died. What has died? What has died is the form of thinking we possessed before we descended into the earthly world. There, what is dead in abstract thought was alive. The thinking of the soul, which did not yet have a body, relates to the thought we now have in the same way that the animated and spiritualized human being relates to a corpse. And we humans in our physical bodies are the grave in which the living soul life of our pre-earthly existence has been buried. Thought was alive in the soul. The soul has died to the spiritual world. We do not carry living thought; we carry the corpse of thought within us.

[ 7 ] This is what happens when we move toward the other side of earthly life—the side opposite to death—when we move toward birth. We say to ourselves: In a certain sense, the spiritual aspect of the human being dies through birth; the physical aspect of the human being dies through death. — Then we speak more accurately about these facts than is usually the case in our time.

[ 8 ] If we first seek the gateway to anthroposophy by turning our soul with deep feeling toward death, and thus come to understand how the human mind is a corpse in comparison to pre-earthly thinking, then our view of the human being expands beyond earthly life, and only through this do we prepare ourselves to receive the anthroposophical teaching, the anthroposophical wisdom. It is precisely because people do not view in the right way that which is still present in earthly life—albeit as a corpse—that is why it is so difficult to find the natural path to anthroposophy. Today, people overestimate thinking, but they do not really know it; they know it only in its soul-corporeal nature.

[ 9 ] Well, if one directs one’s thoughts in the way I have tried to direct them before you, then one is strongly drawn to the two aspects of the eternal life of the human soul. After all, stemming essentially from human hopes, we have only one word in modern languages for the half-eternity that now begins and never ends. We have only the word “immortality” because people of our age are primarily interested in what happens after death. They are here now, and knowing what happens after death is intertwined with all their interests in life. But there were times in human development when people were interested in something else. Today, the more self-centered person says to himself: What follows death interests me, for I want to know whether I live on beyond death; what came before birth or before conception does not interest me. — For the human being is here, and so he does not reflect on pre-earthly life quite in the same way as he does on life after death. But these two aspects—immortality and pre-birth existence—are part of the eternal nature of the human soul. Older, primordial mystery languages of humanity, which, in keeping with their era, still perceived the supersensible world, also had a corresponding word for pre-birth existence. We must first wrest this understanding from ourselves by directing our thoughts in such directions. Through this, however, we are also led to a lawfulness entirely different from the natural law as it exists in human beings: to human destiny.

[ 10 ] At first, this human fate appears to us only in such a way that it strikes us, so to speak, as if by chance, and unfolds as if by chance. We do this or that out of one impulse or another, and we must admit to ourselves in the context of ordinary life: In countless cases, it happens that those who are good are dealt difficult, painful, and tragic life experiences, whereas those who have no good intentions at all are not dealt bad experiences, but rather good ones. As is well known, with our ordinary consciousness in everyday life, we do not perceive the connection between what emanates from us spiritually and what befalls us as a matter of fate. We see how the good can be struck by the worst blows of fate, while the evil need not be struck by anything other than—as is often the case—a relatively good fate. In the workings of nature, we see the necessity of effects following causes; we cannot see this in the spiritual realm in which our moral life is woven. And yet, when we look at life with an open mind, we also see fate unfolding in such a way that we must say to ourselves: fate flows on in a way that we ourselves have sought.

[ 11 ] One should simply be completely unbiased toward oneself. At any point in life that one has reached in this incarnation, let us look back on one’s past life. Let us say someone has reached the age of fifty and looks back with an unbiased gaze over these fifty years, all the way back to childhood; then one sees how, through an inner impulse, one has actually moved toward everything that has come one’s way. It is unpleasant to observe this; but if one traces things backward, one sees how one must admit, regarding what is decisive in life: One has moved toward these events in life in time, just as one sets out toward a point in space. — The fateful element flows from within ourselves. That is why it is entirely understandable when such people, who have now also become somewhat fatherly, like Goethe’s friend Knebel, say to themselves: If one considers this human life, it seems quite deliberate. Certainly, this plan is not always such that, when one looks back on it, one always says to oneself: Looking back this way, I would do it again just the same. — But nevertheless, when one looks at the specific actions one has taken, one always sees: One has added what followed to what came before out of inner impulses, and so it came to pass that this or that event occurred in our lives—in this way, one comes to realize that a completely different law is expressed through our moral life of the soul than in natural life. Through all of this, one can then create the frame of mind necessary to encounter the spiritual researcher, who—drawing on his insight into the spiritual world—is able to describe the shaping of destiny just as the natural scientist describes the laws of nature based on natural processes. And it is precisely this grasping of spiritual laws in the universe that is the task of anthroposophy in the present age.

[ 12 ] To begin with, a few introductory words on this: You may recall that I have mentioned, for example, in my Occult Science and also described in other contexts how that which shines down on us from the sky as the Moon was once connected to the Earth, how the physical body of the Moon detached itself from the Earth, separating from it at a very specific point in time. The Moon will reunite with the Earth in the future. But it was not only the physical Moon that separated from the Earth; certain inhabitants who were on Earth when the physical Moon was still connected to it also separated from the Earth. If we consider what lives as spiritual assets within human development, it is only through such contemplation that we increasingly come to realize that, although present-day humanity is immensely intelligent—almost all people today are immensely intelligent—it is not wise. Gifts of wisdom—albeit not in an intellectual form, but rather in a poetic, imagery-rich form—once existed at the dawn of human development, scattered among the people of our Earth by great teachers, by primordial teachers who were among humanity. These primordial teachers of humanity did not dwell in a physical human body; they embodied themselves only in an etheric body, and interaction with them was somewhat different from that between physical human beings. These teachers wandered the Earth in an etheric body. The person whom they guided felt their presence within their soul. They felt something enter their soul that was like an inspiration, like an inner illumination of truths and insights. They taught in a spiritual way. But at that stage of Earth’s development, a distinction was made between people who could be seen and those who could not be seen. People did not claim to want to see those who could not be seen, for they had the gift of receiving their teachings even without seeing them. They heard these teachings emerge from the depths of their souls and said to themselves: When these teachings come, then a great Primordial Teacher of humanity has drawn near to me. — Nor did one have any external perceptions of these primordial teachers; one encountered them through spiritual vision. One did not physically shake their hands, but one did meet them and felt something like a spiritual handshake.

[ 13 ] These primordial teachers bestowed upon humanity the original great wisdom, which has been preserved only as an echo—even in such works as the Vedas and Vedanta philosophy. Even these great teachings of the East are, after all, merely echoes. There was once a primordial wisdom spread throughout humanity on Earth, which then perished so that human beings could, of their own accord and through free will, work their way back up to the Spirit. Human freedom would not have been possible if the Primordial Teachers had remained. Therefore, a relatively short time after the Moon separated from the Earth, they followed the Moon and established their dwelling place in this lunar colony. They have become the most important inhabitants of this lunar colony ever since that time, ever since they separated from the Earth and left humanity to its own devices. But even though we no longer encounter these great Primordial Teachers here on Earth since that time, we do encounter them—as human beings who pass from one earthly life to the next—in our life after death, and indeed very soon after we have passed through the gate of death. It has also been described that when a person passes through the gate of death, they experience how, after leaving the physical body, the etheric body expands more and more, becoming ever larger and larger, yet also thinner, and finally vanishes into the vastness of the universe. But then, then we do not feel our existence on Earth; rather, during those few days after death, after we have shed the etheric body, we feel our existence in the immediate vicinity of the Earth. A few days after death, we do not feel ourselves living on the Earth’s body, but we feel as if this Earth’s body were extended all the way to where the Moon orbits the Earth. We feel ourselves on an enlarged Earth, and we do not perceive the Moon merely as a separate body, but rather we perceive the entire sphere as one, the Moon’s orbit merely as the boundary of the sphere; the Earth simply enlarged to the extent of the lunar sphere and made spiritual. We are in the lunar sphere, and in this lunar sphere we now remain for a longer period after death. There, however, we first reunite with those spiritual beings who were the great primordial teachers at the very beginning of human existence on Earth. The first beings we encounter, so to speak, in the cosmos after our death are these first primordial teachers of humanity; we return to their realm. And it is a remarkable experience that we have.

[ 14 ] One could easily imagine that life after death—which lasts only a short while (I will speak more about this time later)—has a somewhat shadowy quality compared to earthly life. Earthly life, after all, seems so robust to us; we can grasp things everywhere, they are solid; human beings are solid, compact. We call something “real” when we can truly grasp it. Once we have passed through the gate of death, this robust earthly life actually seems to us like a dream. For when we enter the lunar realm in the manner described, we step into an existence that now appears to us much more real, much more saturated with reality, and this is because these primordial teachers of humanity, who continue their existence in the lunar region, permeate us with their very being and make everything appear much more real to us than how we, as earthly human beings, experience the things of the world here. And what do we experience?

[ 15 ] Well, you see, we actually experience life on Earth only in fragments. When we look back with our ordinary consciousness, it seems to us like a continuous stream. But how did we actually live? We lived in a shadowy way—one day, then a night follows. But ordinary consciousness does not remember this. Then comes another day, then another night, and so it goes on, and in our memory we simply string the days together. In true recollection, we must always interrupt the days with what we experienced at night; we must always break up the days with the nights. Ordinary consciousness, with a certain justification, does not do this because it is subdued during sleep. When we are among these lunar beings, who were once the primordial teachers of humanity, we experience precisely what we have gone through during the nights here on Earth. This also explains how long this form of existence in the lunar region lasts. Unless one is a sleep-deprived person, one sleeps through about one-third of one’s earthly life. But life in the lunar region lasts exactly that long: about one-third of an earthly life. If someone has lived to be twenty years old, it lasts about seven years; if someone has lived to be sixty years old, it lasts twenty years, and so on. There one lives among these beings, and they permeate one with their very existence.

[ 16 ] But in order to understand what one is there, one must immediately penetrate into that which one becomes when one leaves the physical body. The initiate and the dead can speak of this, for the dead leave the physical body through the region of space. The moment one has left the physical body, one merges precisely into that which lies outside the physical body. If I am standing here and I leave my body, the first thing I find myself within is the table, and then everything that surrounds me. I am always within that which fills the world, and ever deeper within it—just not inside my own skin. What was previously my physical inner world becomes my outer world, and everything that was formerly the outer world becomes my inner world. In this way, the moral realm also becomes my outer world. Let’s imagine that, as a wicked person, I slapped someone else, and now, after death, I am reliving that moment in my fortieth year: that is when I hurt him. It was a terrible moral shock for him. I may have laughed about it during my lifetime. Now I am not experiencing what I experienced back then, but rather what he experienced in terms of physical pain and moral suffering. I am completely within him. In reality, I was already there every night; it just remains in the subconscious—one does not experience it there; it remains an image. Now we are permeated by the substance of the great primordial teachers who live on the Moon. There we experience it in a more intense way than here on Earth. What is like a dream here on Earth becomes a much stronger reality; we live through it. This intense reality is also experienced by those who, from a clairvoyant state of consciousness, continue to live on with a deceased person after death—by being able to rise to a state of inspiration and live with them through supersensory perception. There one experiences how people go through a more intense reality after death than before death. To truly experience what a person goes through after death has a much stronger effect than any earthly influences could ever have. Here is an example:

[ 17 ] Some of you are surely familiar with my Mysteries and, within them, the character of Strader. The character of Strader is modeled on real life. A person of that sort actually existed, and he interested me greatly. I followed the outward course of this person’s life, which is embodied in the figure of Strader—albeit, of course, poetically transformed. Now, as you know, I have written four Mystery Dramas. In the fourth, Strader dies. I experienced this fourth Mystery Drama, written in 1913, in such a way that I simply could not help but let Strader die. Why? Well, as long as the real-life model for Strader was living here in the physical world, my attention was also focused on that model. But in the meantime, that model had died. I was so fascinated by it that I continued to explore it. The impressions of life after death were so powerful that they completely overshadowed my interest in what he was like during his earthly life. It wasn’t that my interest had vanished, but that interest was insufficient compared to the overwhelming impressions of what he experienced after his physical death on Earth, once one followed that thread. I had to let Strader die because I could see before my eyes how his archetype continued to live on after death, and that was much stronger than his earlier life.

[ 18 ] You see, this actually came to fruition. Some friends figured out who Strader’s model was and, with a certain noble dedication, set out to investigate the estate of this model of Strader’s. They brought this news to me with immense joy. I had to, so to speak, involuntarily become a bit mischievous, for I wasn’t interested in any of it at all, because the moment the impressions of life after death arose in the face of these earthly remains, they erased everything that my friends had brought me from his earthly life. And this is precisely the point: that these impressions—brought about by the substance of the lunar beings entering into human beings—drown out everything one can experience in earthly life and make existence more real. Thus, one experiences the balancing, just act with greater intensity. What it means for the other person that one has inflicted this or that upon them is experienced more intensely than what one has done oneself.

[ 19 ] From this post-death experience, which we undergo in the sphere of the Great Primordial Teachers of Humanity, the first seed of karma is formed. There we resolve: What we have done must be balanced out by ourselves. This is where we first encounter the fact that intentions have effects in life. Here in the earthly world, good need not manifest as good, nor evil as evil. The moment we enter the extra-earthly world, what we resolve—within a world far more real than the earthly one—must become a living impulse within us: “You must balance what appears as the opposite of what you have done”—at that very moment, what we perceive within ourselves as an intention must become a real cause for the balancing in later life.

[ 20 ] I would like to describe to you how karma gradually takes shape—the karma that a person, upon reappearing after having passed through the period between death and rebirth, shapes into a new life. The initial period we experience after death is characterized by the fact that, through our interaction with the lunar beings, we form within ourselves the intention to carry out our karma. I would therefore like to describe to you in concrete terms the stages through which a person balances their karma between death and a new birth.