Midnight hour

The so-called cosmic 'midnight hour' is the term that refers to a phase in the process between death and new birth, and represents the pivotal point in the spirit world between the ascending rise of the soul through the planetary spheres and the spirit world after death, and the descent back towards a next incarnation.

Rudolf Steiner coined this term in his last Mystery Play 'The Soul's Awakening' as 'the Midnight of the World' or 'the midnight hour 'in the spiritual life of Man between death and a new birth, and used it consistently throughout his lecturing to describe this phase whereby Man develops the urge to descent back to a new life on Earth.

It is sometimes also called the 'cosmic twilight'.

Aspects

term 'cosmic midnight hour' as the middle of postmortal life (1912-10-27-GA140 and 1913-08-31-GA147, 1914-04-10-GA153)
impact of the Christ impulse - see Christ Module 20 - After death#1914-04-14-GA153
at the cosmic midnight hour
- the spiritual figure of the human head is formed out of the forces of the rhythmic and metabolic-limb subsystems of the previous life (1923-11-14-GA231)
- common destiny is formed in mutual work: spiritual relationships arise that allow him to find other people in the next life (1923-11-14-GA231)
- we have the strongest inward life but we are unable to know anything about any other being except our own (as we no longer have within us the creative soul-force enabling us to illumine our spiritual environment) (1914-04-13-GA153)
loneliness increases and consciousness grows dim upto the cosmic midnight. When Man has combined with Christ in the previous life, he can keep up the memory of the I upto that point. Around the cosmic midnight a re-awakening by the Holy Spirit takes place: Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus (1914-04-13-GA153). Having absorbed the Christ Impulse, the human being received abundant power that leads him beyond the cosmic midnight and strengthens the impuls by the Holy Spirit (1914-04-14-GA153)
nidanas work like strings drawing us ever and again down into existence
- nidana is an indian sanskrit term used in theosophy, meaning string or loop. The term is used by Blavatsky and Rufold Steiner uses it in his lecture of 1905-10-10-GA093, see Schema FMC00.512
at the cosmic midnight hour a reversal takes place and the will turns into the longing to become world (and combines with the hereditary line), the thoughts turn into the longing to become a human being. (1921-10-01-GA207)
comparison with pralaya 'reversal'

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.596: provides an overview and selection of statements related to the metamorphosis of the human being between two incarnations in the spirit world during the process between death and a new birth. This provides a synthetic summary for reference, the lectures on the right should be read to get context and full description.

Note: see also more in 1906-03-14-GA097.

provides an overview and selection of statements related to the metamorphosis of the human being between two incarnations in the spirit world during the process between death and a new birth. This provides a synthetic summary for reference, the lectures on the right should be read to get context and full description. Note: see also more in 1906-03-14-GA097.

Schema FMC00.512 provides an overview with description of the twelve forces which draw Man down again into physical existence, based on the Indian vedantic terminology of the nidanas.

Schema FMC00.389A is a simplified version of reference table Schema FMC00.389. It shows the akashic record used by Clairvoyant research of akashic records in the middle, in amber.

On the right, it shows how the process in spirit world is transformative in the process between death and a new birth, and Rudolf Steiner describes corresponds to a type of pralaya between incarnations. For higher spiritual beings, this process also takes place but at even higher worlds, as shown on the right. More on this reversal on Christ Module 7 - Cosmic dimension

Lecture coverage and references

Blavatsky - Secret Doctrine

on the Nidanas in theosophy - see also theosophy.wiki for nidana, and Schema FMC00.512

The twelve nidanas or causes of being. Each is the effect of its antecedent cause, and a cause, in its turn, to its successor; the sum total of the nidanas being based on the four truths, a doctrine especially characteristic of the Hînayâna system. They belong to the theory of the stream of catenated law which produces merit and demerit, and finally brings karma into full sway. It is based upon the great truth that re-incarnation is to be dreaded, as existence in this world only entails upon Man suffering, misery and pain; Death itself being unable to deliver Man from it, since death is merely the door through which he passes to another life on earth after a little rest on its threshold - the spirit world or devachan.

and

Q. Are Nidana and Maya (the great causes of misery) aspects of the Absolute?
A. Nidana means the concatenation of cause and effect; the twelve nidanas are the enumeration of the chief causes which produce the severest reaction or effects under the karmic law.
Although there is no connection between the terms nidana and maya in themselves, maya being simply illusion, yet if we consider the universe as maya or illusion, then certainly the nidanas, as being moral agents in the universe, are included in maya. It is maya, illusion or ignorance, which awakens nidanas; and the cause or causes having been produced, the effects follow according to karmic law. To take an instance: we all regard ourselves as Units, although essentially we are one indivisible Unit, drops in the ocean of Being, not to be distinguished from other drops. Having then produced this cause, the whole discord of life follows immediately as an effect; in reality it is the endeavour of nature to restore harmony and maintain equilibrium. It is this sense of separateness which is the root of all evil.

1905-08-14-GA091

freely translated

For the human being, the meaning of the outer earthly life gets its clarity in the middle of the spiritual world [devachan].
... it is in the middle between two incarnations that one needs to search for, or gets, the explanation or meaning of what is incarnating.
...
what comes out in the spirit world in the case of human being, is the human manas

1914-03-19-GA063

[Slow decay upto the midnight hour]
However, then a time comes when one feels the inner force of light decreasing. This happens when one approaches the middle of the time between death and new birth. There one experiences in such a way that one feels: now the inner force of light decreases more and more; now you can light up less and less what is round you. The light becomes fainter and fainter, and the time approaches, when those times become more significant in which the inner experiences become more intensive. The inner experience becomes wealthier; the survey becomes darker and darker until the middle of the time between death and rebirth where one experiences what I have called the spiritual midnight in my mystery drama The Soul's Awakening (The Soul's Probation). Since you experience a time where you are fulfilled with the spiritual world where you wake, but wake at “night” where you experience yourself as concluded in the spiritual world.
It is a feeling of the most intensive experiencing-in-yourself in the middle between death and rebirth.
This experiencing-in-yourself produces a condition which is intolerable for the soul in the long run. It is knowledge of a knowledge that is intolerable that you do not want to have because it is only knowledge. You feel in yourself: you bear a world in yourself that you experience only knowingly, while you know that you are concluded by it in the reality; you have lost the force of light. Night enters in the spiritual world.
However, in this condition we have the experiences that are mentally passive, otherwise, in the physical body. Now they become something active. While you settle more and more in the twilight and, finally, in the night of the spiritual world, the longing for an outside world becomes bigger and bigger.
While the longing, the desire for the world of the life on Earth is something that must find its satisfaction from the outside, is that what one experiences at spiritual midnight like a longing for a force which develops with us as under suitable conditions the electric or magnetic forces develop. It is a longing in the soul that bears a new force that is able to conjure up an outside world before the soul again.
The soul has settled more and more in a spiritual inside world; this has become bigger and more tremendous. However, the longing lives in it to have an outside world around itself again. This longing is an active force, and the outside world, which it creates, is a quite peculiar one.

The first what we experience, after we have reached the middle between death and rebirth, is that an outside world places itself before us which is, however, again none. We face pictures if we awake from the loneliness which appear from our preceding life on earth. Therefore, an outside world that is, nevertheless, again our past outside world is around us, and the longing that is an active force has led us to it. We face our experiences on earth as an outside world for a while and we face them judging. While we have experienced them, we were within them; now we face them.

There a second longing originates to compensate the defects and imperfections of the former earth-lives compared with the new consciousness. Now the time enters in which the soul feels what it has to do concerning the thoughts that have hastened away from it. It receives the sure knowledge now that awakes in the second half of the life between death and new birth: your experiences of thought have run ahead of you; you can find them only on the detour of a new life on earth. From this second experience, that compared with the old life on earth and the knowledge that one can only find his thoughts which have run ahead if one calls back them again to a new life on earth, from there the instinctive drive for a new life on Earth originates. It cannot be judged according to the last life on Earth. At the specified time, the soul regards it as a matter of course to unite again with that what as thoughts has gone away from it and what it can only find on the detour of a new earth-life where it finds the possibility only to correct imperfections and defects at the sight of the past earth-life.

1914-04-13-GA153

As we thus live on further during the first half of our life between death and rebirth and approach the middle of the period between death and rebirth, we feel the solitary life grow richer and richer and at the same time the vision of our spiritual environment becomes dimmer and more restricted. This continues until we arrive at the middle of the period between death and rebirth, which in my last Mystery Drama, The Soul's Awakening, I have endeavoured to describe as the Midnight of the World.
That is the period when

we have the strongest inward life, but

we no longer have within us the creative soul-force enabling us to illumine our spiritual environment.

Here, one might say,

infinite worlds fill us inwardly, spiritually,

but we are unable to know anything about any other being except our own.

That is the central point in our experience between death and rebirth, it is the Midnight of the World.
Now the time begins when there develops within us the longing for a positive creative power; for although we have an infinite inner life, there awakens within us the longing to have an outer world again. And so different are the conditions of the spiritual world from those of the physical world, that whereas in the physical world longing is the most passive force (when there is something for which we long, this something is what determines us), the reverse is the case in the spiritual world. There, longing is a creative force; it transforms itself into something which, as a new kind of soul-light, is able to give us an outer world, an outer world which is yet an inner world, inasmuch as it reveals to us a vision of our previous earthly incarnations. These now lie outspread before us, illumined by the light that is born of our longing. In the spiritual cosmos there is a power which comes from longing, which can illumine this backward survey and enable us to experience ourselves.
But to this end one thing is necessary in our present age. I have said that during the whole of the first half of our life between death and rebirth we alternate between inner life and outer life, between solitude and spiritual companionship. At first the conditions in the spiritual world are such, that each time we return to our solitude in the spiritual world, to our inner activity, we call up before our soul again and again what we have experienced in the outer world. Thereby a consciousness is aroused which expands over the whole of the spiritual world; with the swing of the pendulum this again contracts during the period of solitude.
There is one thing, however, which exists there and which we must retain, no matter whether we expand into the great spiritual world, or withdraw into ourselves. Before the Mystery of Golgotha took place, it was possible, through the forces connecting man with primeval times, to preserve a connection with that which gave him the feeling of ‘I’. It was possible not to lose this connection, for he could preserve a clear remembrance of one thing in the previous earthly life, namely, that in this life on the earth he had lived as an ‘I’; and this remembrance continued both through the periods of solitude and of companionship. Before the Mystery of Golgotha the forces of inheritance took care of this. Now, it can only be accomplished through the fact that the soul-content, which we may have through Christ having entered into the earth aura, remains connected with that which we have released from us as the treasure we have brought from the earth, which we perceived withdraw immediately after leaving the physical body. This is the permeation with the Christ-substance, which after death gives us the power to maintain the remembrance of our ‘I’ up to the time of the world-midnight, in spite of all expansion and in spite of all the contraction into solitude. Thus far does the impulse proceeding from the power of Christ extend, that through it we do not lose ourselves. Then from our longing must spring a new spiritual power, a power that only exists in spiritual life and by which, through our longing a new light may be kindled.
In the physical world there is Nature and the Divinity which pervades Nature, from which we are born into the physical world. There is the Christ-impulse which is present in the earth's aura, that is, in the aura of physical nature. But the power which draws near to us in the Midnight of the World, through which our longing is enabled to illumine the whole of our past, this power exists only in the spiritual world where nobody can live. When the Christ-impulse has brought us as far as to the Midnight of the World, and when the Midnight of the World is experienced by the soul in spiritual loneliness, because the soul-light cannot yet stream forth from us, when world-darkness has come upon us, when Christ has led us thus far, then in the Midnight of the World there emerges something spiritual from our desire, creating a new world-light which illuminates our being and by means of which we enter anew into worldly existence. We learn to know the Spirit of the spiritual world which awakens us, because out of the Midnight of the World a new light shines, the light which illuminates the whole of our human past.
In Christ we have died; through the Spirit, through the bodiless Spirit for which the technical expression Holy Ghost is used, i.e., the Spirit that lives without a body — (for this is meant by the word Holy, namely, a spirit without the weakness of one that lives in the body) — through this Spirit we are reawakened at the Midnight of the World. At the World-Midnight we are awakened by the Holy Ghost: PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS

1914-04-14-GA153

L6: Inner Nature of Man: Lecture 6: Pleasures and Sufferings in the Life Beyond

Synopsis

At the ‘world midnight’ our inner experience is most intense, and our spiritual companionship is least. We begin to long for action and we look back at our past life. We see our past pleasures and we have the alternative of creating out of them something that may be useful or allowing ourselves to degenerate in the past pleasures. We have become debtors to the world. But we become aware that the transformation will take many incarnations. Some almost animal pleasures give intense pain to the spirit-world. Pain suffered on the physical plane gives spirit strength and will power towards creativeness on the spirit plane.
Before and after the ‘world midnight’ we see again the friends we met on earth; but after the midnight we learn what we must do for them in the next incarnation. Concrete example of a lie and its result. The action of certain elementals who hinder a good resolution.

By means of early death, forces are accumulated before the ‘midnight hour,’ which after the ‘midnight hour’ are used so that, in that person's next incarnation, he has more will and more character than otherwise.

Full lecture (still to be parsed)

In this, my last lecture, I should like to continue from where we left off yesterday. We were speaking of what I described as the great ‘Midnight Hour of our spiritual existence between death and rebirth’, that Midnight Hour when our human inner experience is most intense and when that which we may call spiritual companionship, our connection with the outer spiritual world, has reached its lowest ebb, so that in a certain respect during this Midnight Hour of our spiritual existence spiritual darkness surrounds us. We said also that the longing for the outer world again becomes active within us, that this longing arises through the Spirit which works in spiritual worlds, and that it enkindles a new soul-light in us, so that it becomes possible for us to see an external world of a particular kind. The external world we then see is our own past, which has run its course through previous incarnations, and the intervening periods between deaths and re-births: this we then survey as an outer world, through looking back upon what we have received from, and enjoyed in worldly existence, and upon that for which we are indebted to the world. When we thus survey our previous experiences, two things come before us with particular intensity. We have enjoyed certain things and this is shown us by spiritual vision; we have had certain joys and sorrows in life. We can survey these joys and sorrows, but we see what we have experienced in such a way that it is its spiritual value which appears to us; we see it with respect to what it has made of us.
Let us take a concrete example. We look back upon some enjoyment, some satisfaction we have had at some time in our past life. We then feel: this is not something that is past; the time when we enjoyed it does indeed lie behind us, but it is not something that is absolutely past. It is something which continues its activity into all future time and it continues it in such a manner that it still awaits what we are going to make out of it. When we have experienced some enjoyment, some satisfaction, in our soul we feel somewhat as follows when we survey it: ‘This must become a force within thee, a force in thy soul, and thou canst allow this force to act within thee in two ways. In this spiritual existence in which thou art after the Midnight of the World two things are possible; the spiritual world simply gives thee the power to bring about one of these possibilities; thou canst change this past enjoyment, this past inward satisfaction into a capacity, so that through the past enjoyment thou art able to develop a certain power in thy soul, whereby thou canst accomplish something in the world, small or great, that is of value to the world. That is one thing. The other we may express to ourselves thus: ‘I have had the enjoyment, I shall be satisfied with it, I shall take it into my soul and refresh myself through this past enjoyment.’ When we do this with much of what we have enjoyed and has given us pleasure, we produce a power within us through which we gradually degenerate and suffocate spiritually. This is one of the most important things we can learn in the spiritual world, that through enjoyment, through that which has given us pleasure, we have also become debtors to the world. There rises before our spiritual eyes the prospect of our suffocating in the after-effects of these past satisfactions and enjoyments, if we do not decide at the right time to create capacities from them which can produce something of value to life. From this you see once more, spiritual events interact with what takes place on the physical plane.
When a person fills himself more and more with the knowledge of Spiritual Science as outlined in the lecture before the last, this will pass into the instinctive life of his soul and in respect to the pleasures he has upon the physical plane will develop a feeling, like the stimulus of an inner conscience, that he must not give himself up to certain enjoyment, pleasure or joy for its own sake, but he must fill this joy with a feeling of thankfulness to the universe, to the spiritual powers of the universe; for he will know that through every pleasure, through every enjoyment he becomes a debtor to the universe. We arrive most easily and most certainly at the right attitude, in the transformation of those enjoyments and pleasures which are of a spiritual nature. Enjoyments and pleasures which can only be satisfied through the body, or through having a body on the physical plane, confront us in this period between death and rebirth as something that must be transformed if we do not wish to be slowly suffocated in them. We feel the necessity for this transformation, but we also feel that in the first place it will require many incarnations, that we must be in the spiritual world again and again between these incarnations, so that at length we may be able to bring about this transformation.
Then we discover something else in the spiritual world. We find that in our present cycle of humanity we have enjoyments and pleasures on the physical plane in which our soul-spiritual nature is entirely submerged, that the enjoyment or the pleasure, assumes a sub-human, I will not say animal character; for pleasure and enjoyment may assume a sub-human character. We find that with enjoyments such as these, we really prepare infinite pain for certain beings in the spiritual world with whom we only meet when we enter this world. And the sight of the pain we cause these beings is so extremely disturbing, so oppressive, filling our soul with such forces, that we cannot well arrive at the harmonious upbuilding of the things necessary for our next incarnation.
As regards what we experience in a different way, as pain and sorrow, it is seen on the spiritual plane that the pain and sorrow we have borne on the physical plane work on and permeate our soul with such force on the spiritual plane that this force becomes will-power. Our soul thereby becomes stronger, and we are able to transform this strength into moral power which we are able to bring back with us again to the physical plane, in order that we may not only have certain capacities, through which we are able to produce something of value to the world around us, but that we may also have the moral power to develop these capacities into character.
We have experiences such as these and many others, directly after the spiritual Midnight Hour of existence. We feel and experience what our value has become through our previous life; we also feel and experience to what capacities we may attain in the future. And after we have lived for a time longer in the spiritual world, there appears from the twilight of our spiritual environment a clear vision, not only of our own past life, but also of all the human beings with whom we were closely connected in that life; people appear in spiritual relations, with whom we have been connected in some way in former stages of existence. It is not as if we had not been with these human beings before — we are always together with those who have been near us in life, in by far the greater portion of the time between death and rebirth — but now, when we meet them again after the Midnight Hour of our spiritual existence, we see clearly in these human beings what we owe to them or they to us. Our point of view is now not merely: such and such was thy relation to these people at such and such a time — we knew this before — but these people are now for us the expression of the compensation for our previous experiences with them. By the manner in which they come before us, we see by what new experience on the physical plane we may have to repay that for which we are indebted to them, or such like. When we confront the souls of these human beings we see, as it were, the activities which in the future must reproduce the relationships we have had with them in the past. This will be best understood if we take an example which is as concrete as possible, an application of what has already been mentioned in previous lectures.
Let us again suppose that we have lied to some one. Then comes the time, when in the spiritual world the possibility arises of our being tormented by the truth, the opposite to our lie. Our relation to this person to whom we have lied so changes during this time, that as often as we see him (and we see him often enough with our spiritual eyes) he causes the truth, the opposite to the lie we have told, to rise within us and this torments us. Thereby arises from deep down within us a tendency which causes us to say: ‘Thou must meet this person again on the earth below and thou must do something that will compensate the wrong thou hast done in telling the lie; for here in the spiritual world thou canst not compensate what has been brought about through thy lie, here thou canst only see quite clearly the effect of a lie in the cosmos. What has been done upon the earth in this way must be made good again upon the earth. We know that in order to make compensation we need forces which can only develop in us when we again possess an earthly body. From this a tendency arises in our soul to take once more on ourselves an earthly body which will give us the opportunity to perform the actions whereby the imperfections we have caused upon earth may be repaired; otherwise, when we have gone through death once more this person will again appear to call forth the torment of the truth.
Thus you see the whole spiritual technique; how in the spiritual world there is produced within us the impulse karmically to make compensation for various things. These compensations occur also in other connections; but of course I should have to enumerate many thousands of cases if I were to speak of all that comes into consideration in respect of this important subject of karma. For example, let us take the following case: Let us suppose we are in the period after the Midnight Hour of existence in the spiritual world, so that we look back at certain pleasures we have had and say: ‘We can change the effects of these experiences into capacities to which we can give expression when we are re-embodied.’ But the following may also happen. We may observe that when we are changing these past experiences into capacities, in this our present condition, certain elemental beings disturb us (this can happen); these elemental beings do not allow us to acquire these capacities. We may then ask ourselves: ‘What can I do now? If I yield to these elemental beings which approach and will not suffer capacities to arise in me, I shall not be able to develop these capacities. But I must develop them. I know that I shall only be able to give the service due to certain people in my next incarnation if I have these capacities.’ As a rule in such cases we decide to acquire these capacities; but we thereby injure the elemental beings which are around us: in a certain way they feel that they are attacked by us. When we acquire these capacities, they feel that their own life is thereby darkened, as if something were taken away from their wisdom. One of the consequences often springing from this is, that when we are reborn we find that one or more human beings are possessed by these elemental beings and are inspired with particularly hostile intentions towards us.
Think how deeply this enables us to see into human experience, how profoundly it teaches us to comprehend human life and really to acquire the right instinct to comport ourselves correctly on the physical plane. But this does not mean that we should ever say, when on the physical plane: ‘At that time I had to protect myself. I have thereby made this person a sworn enemy; I must now give in to him.’ The case might arise where it would be good to yield, but, on the other hand, it might happen that if we yield, these hostile elemental beings who act through one person or another might, through what they now do on the physical plane, compensate themselves abundantly for the loss they suffered through our self-protection. They might go beyond what was taken away from them, and the consequence of this would be that we should not be able to save ourselves from them, when we again enter the corresponding period in the stream of time between death and rebirth, and they would then give the death blow to certain of our capacities.
The world becomes ever more and more complicated when we get real insight into it; but we cannot wonder at this. I might give you other examples of the karmic connections between life on earth and life between death and rebirth. Let us take the case of a person who through illness dies earlier than another who enters into ‘time’, as it were, after a normal length of human life. His illness brings him to an early death; but he really retains certain forces within him which he would have expended if he had reached the normal length of human life. The man would have used these forces, which remain within him as a reserve of strength, if he had not died early, and when the life after death is examined, the spiritual investigator finds that these forces are added to the man's forces of will and feeling, strengthening them. Such a person is in the position so to use, after the Midnight Hour of existence, what has accrued to him through these forces before the Midnight Hour of existence, that he enters earthly life as a man of stronger will and of much more character than if he had not died so early. It is, however, previous karma that determines this and naturally it would be the greatest folly if a person were to think that he would gain what has just been described by bringing about an early death artificially; he would not gain it thus. What happens when an early death is brought about artificially, you will find described in my book Theosophy, so far as it is necessary to explain it. I also referred there to the case where a person meets with an early death through an accident. When he is torn away from the experiences of the physical plane through an accident, while his forces would have still been sufficient to enable him to reach old age, there remains to him a surplus of force and when the Midnight Hour of existence has passed he can use this to strengthen his intellectual powers. We find through spiritual investigation that great inventors are often people who in former incarnations died through an accident. If we really wish to survey these things with understanding, we have to realise that in the spiritual world the standpoint of life is really quite different from what it can be in the physical world.
It will grow more and more comprehensible to you, that in order to understand the spiritual worlds one has first to acquire the necessary conceptions and ideas, because the spiritual worlds are so very different from the physical world. Hence no one should wonder when something relating to the spiritual worlds is described, that when the ideas of the physical world are directed to this description, it should at first be felt to be unsatisfactory. For example, it is a fact, which is confirmed by spiritual investigation into many cases, that if a person dies a thorough materialist, with a materialistic frame of mind, and leaves others behind who are also materialistically inclined, he at first suffers a certain loss in the spiritual world. When he has passed through the portal of death without spiritual inclinations, and wishes to look back at his loved ones on the earth, he cannot see them directly if in their souls there is no spiritual thought; he has knowledge of them only up to the time when he passed through death. His spiritual eyes cannot see what they are now experiencing below upon the earth, because there is no spiritual life in their souls; for only spiritual experience throws light up into the spiritual worlds. Before such a person can see the matter quite clearly, he has to wait until in the spiritual world itself he has developed the necessary forces with which to see clearly that the souls he has left behind are materialistically inclined because they have succumbed to Ahriman. Were he to experience this immediately after death he would be unable to bear it. He has first to grow into the knowledge that materialistically inclined souls are possessed by Ahriman; then he may begin to have vision of these souls, until they have passed the portal of death and in the spiritual world have liberated themselves from their materialistic tendencies. It is only later that he experiences union with them.
Someone might say: These conditions which you describe as taking place after death are not at all consoling. That, my dear friends, is an idea which is gained on the physical plane; it is not an idea that is filled with the understanding of the spiritual worlds. A person living between death and rebirth, comes to a point where he says: ‘Oh, how impossible, how comfortless it would be directly after death to see those souls who are materialistically inclined!’ How infinitely better it is for these souls to pass first through this period of probation! They would lose themselves, they would be unable to reach what they ought to reach if the matter were not arranged in this way. The point of view becomes entirely different when the things of the world are considered from the spiritual side, and a time will come when it will be necessary for man, while still on the physical plane, to have a correct understanding of the truths of Spiritual Science.
Spiritual Science has come into the world because the evolution of humanity requires that the knowledge of the spiritual world and its conditions should enter more and more into human souls, instinctively at first, then consciously. I will draw your attention to a purely external thing which is very important, in order that you may see how we shall be able more and more to judge the true contents of our life on the physical plane through understanding the laws of spiritual existence. It is something external and as an external thing is extremely important. When we consider nature, the remarkable spectacle is presented to us of a small number of seeds being used in every case to continue the same kind of life, but that an extremely large number of seeds come to nothing. We observe myriads of fish eggs in the ocean, a few only of which become fishes, the rest perish. We look out over the fields and see vast quantities of grains of wheat, only a few of which grow into plants, the rest are ground up into flour for human food and for other purposes. A great deal more has to be produced by nature than really becomes fruit and again seed in the regular course of existence. This is a wise regulation of nature; for in nature order and law exist and demand that what thus deviates from its own deeply founded routine of existence and fruiting, should be so used, that it serves the other continuing stream of existence. The various creatures would not be able to live if all seeds actually bore fruit and attained the development possible to them. Beings have to exist, which are used to form the ground-work from which other beings can grow. It is only in appearance that anything is lost, only in maya; in reality nothing is lost in the works of nature. Spirit rules in nature and the fact that something is apparently lost from the continuous stream of evolution is based upon the wisdom of the spirit, it is a spiritual Law, and we must consider this matter from the standpoint of the spirit; we then soon find that what apparently is turned aside from the straight forward stream of events, has its own well justified place in existence. This is founded in the spirit. Hence it may also be of value on the physical plane, in so far as we here live a spiritual life.
Let us consider a case which concerns us very closely. Public lectures have to be given on the subject of Spiritual Science. These are given to a public that is gathered together simply through advertisement. Something happens here which is somewhat similar to the case of the seeds of corn, a part only of which are used in the straight forward stream of existence. One must not be discouraged when, in such circumstances, one has to bring the stream of spiritual life apparently without choice before many, many people, and when only a few separate themselves and really enter into this spiritual life, become anthroposophists, and join the direct stream. Under these circumstances, it still happens that these scattered seeds come to many who, after a public lecture, go away and say, for example, ‘What mad nonsense the fellow talked!’ Seen with respect to external life, this is like the germs — shall we say — like the fish-germs that come to nothing in the ocean; but from the standpoint of a deeper investigation it is not so. Souls who through their karma come to a lecture and who then go away and say: ‘What foolish nonsense the fellow talked!’ — these souls are not yet ready to receive the truth of the spirit; but it is necessary for their souls in their present incarnation to feel the approach of the power contained in Spiritual Science. However much they may scold, it remains a force in their souls for their next incarnation. Thus the germs have not been lost; they find a way. Life with respect to spiritual things is under the same laws, whether we follow the spirit in the order of nature, or in the case which we consider to be our own.
Now let us suppose we wished to carry this over into external material life, and were to say: ‘But this is just what happens in outer life.’ Yes, my dear friends, it is exactly because this is happening, that I say that we are living towards a future when this will appear in ever greater degree. More and more articles will be produced, more and more factories will be built. No one now asks, ‘How many articles are needed?’ as was formerly the case, when the tailors in the town only made a suit when someone ordered it. The need then determined the numbers to be made; but now they are produced for the market; the various wares are piled up as much as possible. Production works entirely according to the principle upon which nature works. Nature is carried into the social order, and this will at first gain the upper hand more and more. But here we are considering the material realm. The spiritual law has no application in external life, simply because it is suited only to the spiritual world; and something very remarkable results. As we are speaking among ourselves we may say these things, but at the present day the world will not agree with us in this. Things are now produced for the market regardless of the amount required, not according to what was explained in my essay on Theosophy and Social Life — all that is produced is piled up in warehouses and governed by the money market, and then the producers wait to see how many are bought. This tendency will grow greater and greater until it destroys itself and when I say the following you will know the reason. One who spiritually observes social life, sees the germ of frightful social abscesses springing up everywhere. That is the great social problem confronting those who understand life; that is the frightful fact which is so depressing and which — even if we could suppress all our enthusiasm for Spiritual Science and the impulse which makes us long for it — yet makes us cry out for the remedy for this world disease that is already so far advanced and which will become ever worse and worse. That which in one field, in one sphere, must work as nature works, is seen by one who seeks to spread abroad spiritual truths to become a cancer when it enters the sphere of culture, as we have just described.
It will only be possible to recognise this and find the remedy, when Spiritual Science lays hold of and fills the hearts and minds of men. When one sees these things, one would fain fill one's words with the most intense fire, so that the attention of as many of our contemporaries as are able to understand them may be attracted to the times we are approaching. We can perceive these things when we make ourselves acquainted with the different points of view that exist in one and another spheres of life. These different points of view confront a person, when experiencing the life between the Midnight Hour of existence and rebirth, for it is from them that he must work creatively on himself.
When he has formed the tendencies for the fulfilment of his karma in respect of his more intimate experiences, others rise before his soul which are not so intimate. He experiences the religious and other societies to which he has belonged in such a way that they reveal to him certain things he must do in his following incarnation in order not to become one-sided. In short, this life flows on in such a way that it still alternates between spiritual companionship and spiritual solitude, but its essential task is that the human being then constructs the archetype for his new earthly life in a purely spiritual form.
Long, long before the human being descends to earthly life he has constructed out of the spiritual world the spiritual etheric archetype, which has within it forces, which we might call spiritual magnetic forces. These draw him down to parents in respect of whom he feels that they give him the hereditary attributes which enable him to enter upon a new earthly life. I have already mentioned that the normal time for this is when we have the feeling that we are uniting with that which withdrew from us as the fruit of our last earthly life. But the human being does not always reach this point. When we do come to this point the course of our life is such that we fully feel the connection between the bodily part and the spiritual part, but often the man enters into life too soon. Most people are prematurely born, spiritually, and this is only compensated for later through experiences with which we feel entirely in harmony.
[section that follows is the 'pendulum' extract on the impact of the Christ Impulse , see link below]
One thing is of very special importance which I mentioned in the last lecture. When our longing for an outer world has reached its greatest intensity because we have entered most deeply into solitude, then it is that the spirit, which only lives and moves in spiritual worlds, approaches us and changes our longing into a kind of soul-light. Up to this point we must keep our connection with our ‘I’. We must, as it were, preserve the remembrance: Upon earth thou wast this ‘I’; this ‘I’ has to remain to thee as a memory.
That Man is able to do this in our age depends upon the fact that Christ brought into the Earth's aura the power by which we can maintain our memory up to the Midnight Hour, when we again have this ‘I’. Otherwise this could not at the present time have been brought over from our earthly life.
If the Christ-impulse had not entered the earth, an interruption would have occurred, a break, in the middle of the period between death and rebirth which would have made our existence inharmonious. Long before the Midnight Hour we should have forgotten that we were an ‘I’ in our last life; we should have felt connection with the spiritual world, but we should have forgotten ourselves. We have to develop our I so powerfully on Earth, that we gain this I-consciousness ever more and more. This has become necessary since the Mystery of Golgotha. But because on Earth we attain to an ever great consciousness of our I, we thereby exhaust the forces we have need of after death in order that we should really not forget ourselves up to the Midnight Hour of existence. In order to be able to retain this remembrance, we have to die in Christ. For this the Christ-impulse is necessary. It preserves for us up to the Midnight Hour of existence the possibility of not forgetting our ‘I’.

continued see: Christ Module 20 - After death#1914-04-14-GA153

1922-11-19-GA218

When we are fully in the light, then comes the time between death and new birth which you will find described in one of the Mystery Plays as the midnight hour in the spiritual life of man. It is about the middle of the time between death and new birth. This is the time when our consciousness, amid the beings of the hierarchies in the spiritual world, is most steeped in spiritual light. Yet at this very time we also experience most deeply: Down yonder in the planetary sphere is the abiding record of all that you, man, did. You may not abandon it, you cannot leave it thus, — so say we to ourselves — nor can you ever alter it while you are here; you can change it only by going down to Earth. And so the urge arises, to descend again to Earth, — to resolve, as it were, between Moon and Saturn. The forces of the Moon are drawing for us once again and we resolve to follow them, so to set forth on our returning journey. If a man grew to adult life in his last incarnation, it will be centuries later.

Metamorphosis

1921-07-02-GA205

[heart]
Something is reflected from the surface of the heart that is no longer merely a matter of habit or memory but is life that is already spiritualized when it reaches the outer surface of the heart. For what is thrown back from the heart are the pangs of conscience. This is to be considered, I would like to say, entirely from the physical aspect: the pangs of conscience that radiate into our consciousness are what is reflected by the heart from our experiences. Spiritual knowledge of the heart teaches us this.
If we look into the inner aspect of the heart, however, we see gathered there forces that also stem from the entire metabolic-limb organism, and because what is connected with the heart, with the heart forces, is spiritualized, within it is also spiritualized that which is connected with our outer life, with our deeds. However strange and paradoxical it may sound to a person who is clever in the modern sense, the fact remains that the forces thus prepared within the heart are the karmic tendencies, they are the tendencies of karma. It is revoltingly foolish to speak of the heart as a mere pumping mechanism, for the heart is the organ which, through mediation of the metabolic-limb system, carries what we understand as karma into the next incarnation.
You see, if one learns to know this organization, one learns to differentiate it, and it manifests then in its connection with the entire life, which extends beyond birth and death. One sees then into the entire structure of the human being.
We have not been able to speak of the head, in speaking about transformations, for the head is simply cast off; its forces are fulfilled with this incarnation, having been transformed from the previous incarnation.
What we have in these four main systems, however — in lung-, liver-, kidney-, and heart-systems — passes in a form-building way through the metabolic-limb system and forms our head with all its tendencies in the next incarnation. We must seek within the organs of the body for the forces that will carry over into the next incarnation what we are now experiencing.
The human metabolism is by no means the mere simmering and seething of chemicals in a test-tube that modern physiology describes. You need only take a single step, and a certain metabolism is produced. This metabolism that is produced is not merely a chemical process, which may be examined by means of physiology, of chemistry, but bears within it at the same time a moral coloring, a moral nuance. And this moral nuance is, in fact, stored in the heart and carried over as karmic force into the next incarnation.
To study the entire human being means to find in him the forces that reach beyond earthly life. Our head itself is a sphere. Only because the rest of the organism is attached to it is this spherical shape modified. When we go through death we must, in the soul-spiritual organization that remains to us, adapt ourselves to the entire cosmos.
[out-breathing phase after death]
The entire cosmos then receives us. Up to the middle point of the period between two incarnations — I have called this point, in one of my Mystery Dramas, the Midnight Hour of Existence — up to this moment, if I may express myself in this way, we continue to expand into the environment. We gradually become identical with the environment, and what thus proceeds from us into the environment gives the configuration for the astral and the etheric of the next incarnation.
This is determined essentially out of the cosmos within the mother.
[in-breathing phase before new birth]
Through the father and fertilization comes that which is formed in the physical and what is in the I. This I, as it is then, after the Midnight Hour of Existence, actually passes over into an entirely different world. It passes over into that world through which it can then take this path through the paternal nature.
This is an extremely significant process. The period up to the Midnight Hour of Existence and the period following it — both periods between death and a new birth — are actually very different from each other.
In my lecture cycle in Vienna in 1914 (The Inner Nature of Man, Vienna, 1914, six lectures), I described these experiences from within.
[summary]
If we look at them more from the outside, we must say that

the I is more cosmic in the first half, up to the Midnight Hour, and prepares in the cosmos that which then enters the next incarnation indirectly, by way of the mother.

From the Midnight Hour of Existence until the next birth, the I passes over into what the ancient mysteries called the underworld. On the detour through this underworld it takes the path through fertilization.

There the two poles of the human being basically meet, through the mother and the father: from the upper world and from the underworld.

[egyptian mysteries]
At least as far as I know, what I am now saying was an essential content of the Egyptian mysteries, coming out of the instinctive ancient knowledge. The Egyptian mysteries led particularly to knowledge of what they called at that time the upper and lower gods, the upper world and underworld of the gods; and it may be said that in the act of fertilization a polar equilibrium of the upper world and underworld of the gods is brought about.
The I between death and a new birth goes first through this upper world and then through the lower world. In ancient times there were not at all the strange connotations that many today connect with upper world and underworld. People of today nearly always look upon the upper world as the good and the underworld as the bad. These connotations were not originally connected with these worlds; they were simply the two polarities that had to participate in the general world formation. In directly experiencing the upper world, one perceived, beheld, it more,as the world of light, and the underworld more as the world of heaviness: heaviness and light as the two polarities, if one wishes to express it more outwardly. You thus see that things can be described concretely.
[Hallucinations]
Regarding the other organs, I have told you that the out-flowing of organic forces can become hallucinatory life, especially what is pressed out of the liver system.
If the heart presses out its contents, however, this is really a system of forces, pushed out and brought into consciousness, that call forth in the next incarnation that strange inclination to live out one's karma. If one observes how karma works itself out, it may be said from the human side that this living out of karma can only be described as a kind of hunger and its satisfaction.
This must be understood in the following way. Let us proceed first from the standpoint of ordinary life. Let us take a striking event: a woman meets a man and begins to love him. Now, as this is usually regarded, it is somewhat as if you were to cut a little piece from the Sistine Madonna — for example, a little finger from the Jesus boy — and were to gaze at it. You have, of course, a piece of the Sistine Madonna, but you do not see anything. Neither do you see anything if you merely consider the fact that a woman meets a man and begins to love him. The matter is not like that; one must trace it back. Before the woman met the man, she had been in other places in the world; before that she had been somewhere else, and still earlier somewhere else again. You can find all sorts of reasons that the woman went from one place to another. This conceals itself, of course, in the subconscious, but there is reason in it, there is an inner connection throughout, and by going back into childhood one can retrace the path.
The woman in question — and this is directed at no one in particular — follows the path from the beginning, which culminates in the event under discussion. The human being, when he is born, hungers to do what he does, and he does not give up until he satisfies this hunger. The pressing forward to a karmic event is a result of such a generalized spiritual feeling of hunger. One is driven to the event. It just so happens that the entire human being has such forces within him that lead to later events, in spite of the freedom that exists nevertheless but plays itself out in a different realm. The forces that manifest themselves as such a hunger, leading to karmic fulfillment, living themselves out in this way, are concentrated in the heart; and when they are pressed out and thereby come into consciousness in the present incarnation, they create pictures that form a stimulus, and then raving madness results. Raving madness is basically a premature living out in this incarnation of a force of karma intended for the following incarnation. Think how differently one must accustom oneself to look upon world events if these connections are understood. Of course, if a person suffered from raving madness in the present incarnation — or if one were that fellow who ruled Spain once — he would say that if God had permitted him to rule the world, he would have done it better! People thus ask questions such as, why did God create raving madness? Raving madness has plenty of good reasons for existing, but everything working in this world can appear at the wrong time, and the displaced manifestation, in this case brought about by Luciferic forces — everything that works prematurely in the world is brought about by the activity of Luciferic forces — the manifestation in this incarnation of karmic forces intended for the next incarnation creates raving madness.
You see, what is to be carried over and continued in another life can actually be studied in the abnormalities of a present life.
You can easily imagine what a strong distinction exists between what now rests in our heart through our entire incarnation and the condition in which this will be once it has gone through the long development between death and a new birth, then coming into appearance in the outer behavior of a human being in the new life.
However, if you look into the inner aspect of your hearts, you can perceive quite well — though of course only latently, not in a finished picture — what you will do in your next life. We need not confine ourselves to the general, abstract statement that what will work itself out karmically in the next life is prepared in this one, but we can point directly to the vessel in which resides the karma of the following incarnations. These are the things that must be penetrated concretely if one wishes to practice a real spiritual science.
You can imagine what enormous significance these things will gain when they are studied and made a part of the general education. What does modern medicine know of the possibility of a liver or heart disease when it does not know the most important fact of all, that is, the actual purpose of these organs? And this it does not know. It has not even discovered a correct connection between excitatory hallucinations and, let us say, the kidney system, nor does it understand that calm hallucinations, those that merely appear, are liver hallucinations, as it were. Hallucinations that appear as though crawling on a person so that the victim wants to brush them off come from the kidney system. These are excitatory hallucinations, which have to do with the emotional system, with the system of temperament. From such symptoms a much more sure diagnosis can be made than by the diagnostic means in ordinary use today. Diagnoses based upon purely outer evidence are very unsure in comparison with what they would be were these things studied.
Now all these things are connected with the outer world. The lungs, as inner organs or organ system, actually contain the compressed compulsive thoughts and everything that we take up in perceiving outer objects and concentrating these in the lungs. The liver relates to the outer world in an entirely different way. Precisely because the lungs preserve, as it were, the thought material, they are structured quite differently. They are more closely connected with the earthly element, with the earth element. The liver, which conceals hallucinations, particularly the calm hallucinations, the hallucinations that merely appear, is connected with the fluid system and therefore with water. The kidney system, paradoxical as it sounds, is connected with the air element. One naturally thinks that this ought to be the case with the lungs, but the lungs as organs are connected with the earth element, though not only with it. On the other hand, the kidney system — as an organ — is connected with the air element, and the heart system as an organ is connected with the warmth element; it is formed entirely out of the warmth element. This element, therefore, which is the most spiritual, is also the one that takes up the inclination for karma into these exceptionally fine warmth structures that we have in the warmth organism.
Since the entire human being stands in relationship to the outer world, you can say to yourself that the lungs have a particular relationship to the outer world in connection with the earthly element, and the liver in regard to the watery element. If you examine the earthly qualities of plants you will find in them the remedies for everything connected with diseases that have their origin in the lungs (this must be considered, of course, in its broadest implications). If you take what circulates in the plant, the circulation of the plant's juices, you will have therein the remedy for all disturbances connected with the liver organization. Thus a study of the reciprocal relationship of the organs to the environment offers, in fact, the foundation for a rational therapy.

1922-12-09-GA218 (ear)

see also here: Human senses#1922-12-09-GA218

1923-11-11-GA230

.. includes metamorphosis, and work of the hierarchies, but focuses on morality

Synopsis

The spiritual-moral has become convention today. Its real source is human understanding and love. Why do we see the opposite in actual life? Hatred and misunderstanding spring not from the spiritual but from the physical. The relation of the bone in man to hatred, and of the blood to misunderstanding and moral coldness. Terror in initiation in perceiving that the body is built of hatred and coldness, which always live in our sub-conscious.
We take the coldness and hatred, learnt from the body into the spiritual world at death, where they are taken from us by the third and second hierarchies. This enables us to meet the first hierarchy at the “midnight hour”.
Here Man's form dissolves from head downward, and a new spiritual form created which becomes the head of the future man. Thinking with the limbs.
Rhythmic and digestive organs by the second and third hierarchies.

lower Man -> head in GA231

see oa Metamorphosis#1923-11-17-A-GA231 2

transformation of charact qualities

love-joy,

hatred-suffering

1924-02-24-GA235

Metamorphosis of love into joy. Joy is the karmic result of out-going love: result of these two is then an open heart for the world. Suffering is the karmic result of hatred; both lead in the third life to dim understanding of the world.

1924-03-01-GA235

Karmic metamorphosis of spiritual interests into health and facial expression.

1924-03-15-GA235

How bodily characteristics are carried over from one incarnation into the make-up of the next.

[intro]
You will have seen that in describing karmic connections it is necessary to mention many details in the life and character of a human being which in the ordinary way might escape attention. In the case of Dühring, I pointed out how a bodily peculiarity of one incarnation became a particular trend and attitude of soul in the next. For it is a fact that when one presses through to the spiritual worlds in search of the true being of Man, the spiritual loses its abstractness and becomes full of force; on the other hand, the corporeality, all that comes to expression in the bodily nature of Man, loses, one may truthfully say, its materiality; it assumes a spiritual significance and acquires a definite place in the interconnections of human life.
How does destiny actually work? Destiny arises from the whole being of Man. What a Man seeks in life as the result of a karmic urge, and which then comes to him in the form of destiny, depends upon the fact that forces of destiny, as they pass from life to life, influence and condition the very composition of the blood in its more delicate qualities and regulate the activity of the nerves; to their working is due also the instinctive sensitiveness of the soul to this or that influence. We shall not easily find our way into the innermost nature of karmic connections if we do not pay attention — with the eye of the soul, of course — to the particular mannerisms of an individual.
Believe me, for the study of karma it is just as important to be interested in a gesture of the hand as in some great spiritual talent. It is just as important to be able to observe — from the spiritual side (astral body and ego) — how a man sits down on a chair as to observe, let us say, how he discharges his moral obligations. If a man is given to frowning, to knitting his brow, this may be just as important as whether he is virtuous or the reverse.
Much that in ordinary life seems to be quite insignificant is of very great importance when we begin to consider destiny and observe how it weaves its web from life to life; while many a thing in this or the other human being that appears to us particularly important becomes of negligible significance,
Generally speaking, it is not, as you know, very easy to pay real attention to bodily peculiarities. They are there and we must learn to observe them naturally without wounding our fellow-men — as we certainly shall do if we observe merely for observation's sake. That must never be. Everything must arise entirely of itself. When, however, we have trained our powers of attention and perception, individual peculiarities do show themselves in every human being, peculiarities which may be accounted trifling but are of paramount importance in connection with the study of karma. A really penetrating observation of human beings in respect of their karmic connections is possible only when we can discern these significant peculiarities.
...
[section]
And now, what is the connection? Man as he stands before us as a physical being in earthly life, is a threefold being.

He has his nerves-and-senses organism, which is concentrated mainly in the head but at the same time extends over the whole body.

He has his rhythmic organisation, which manifests particularly clearly in the rhythm of the breath and of the circulation of the blood, but again extends over the whole human being and comes to expression every where within him.

And thirdly, he has his motor organisation which is connected with the limbs, with the functioning of metabolism, with the reconstruction of the substances of the body and so forth. Man is a threefold being.

.
And then in regard to the whole constitution of life, we come to realise that on the journey through births and deaths ...
... what we are accustomed to consider in earthly life as the most important part of Man, namely the head, becomes of comparatively little importance shortly after death. The head that in the physical world is the most essentially human part of Man, really expends itself in physical existence; whereas the rest of the organism — which, physically speaking, is subordinate — is of higher importance in the spiritual world. In his head, Man is most of all physical and least of all spiritual. In the other members of his organism, in the rhythmic organisation and in the limbs-organisation, he is more spiritual. He is most spiritual of all in his motor organisation, in the activity of his limbs.
Now gifts and talents belonging to the head are lost comparatively soon after death.
On the other hand, the soul-and-spirit which, in the realm of the unconscious, belongs to the lower part of the human organism, assumes great importance between death and a new birth.
But whereas, speaking generally, the organism of Man apart from the head becomes, in respect of its spiritual form, its spiritual content, the head of the next incarnation, it is also true that what is of the nature of will in the head, works especially into the limbs in the next incarnation.
A man who is lazy in his thinking in one incarnation will most certainly be no fast runner in the next: the laziness of thinking becomes slowness of limb; and, vice versa, slowness of limb in the present incarnation comes to expression in sluggish, lazy thinking in the next.
Thus a metamorphosis, an interchange, takes place between the three members of the human being in passing over from one incarnation to another.
What I am telling you here is not put forward as a theory; it is based on the very facts of life. And in the case of Eduard von Hartmann, as soon as I turned my attention to the affliction of the knee, I was guided to his earlier incarnation, during which at a certain moment in his life he had a kind of sunstroke. In respect of destiny, this sunstroke was the cause that led in the next earthly life, through metamorphosis, to an infirmity of the knee — the sunstroke being, as you will realise, an affliction of the head. One day he was no longer able to think. He had a kind of paralysis of the brain, and this came to expression in the next incarnation as an affliction of one of the limbs. Now the destiny that led to paralysis of the brain was due to the following circumstances. — This individuality was one of those who went to the East with the Crusades and fought over in Asia against the Turks and Asiatic peoples, acquiring, however, a tremendous admiration for the latter. The Crusaders encountered very much that was great and sublime in the East, and the individuality of whom we are speaking absorbed it all with deep admiration. And now he came across a man concerning whom he felt instinctively that he had had something to do with him in a still earlier life. The account, so to speak, that had now to be settled between this and the still earlier incarnation, was a moral account. The metamorphosis of the sunstroke in one incarnation into the affliction of the knee in the next appears at first to be a purely physical matter, but when it is a question of destiny we are invariably led back to something that appertains to the moral life. This individuality bore with him from a still earlier incarnation the impulse to wage a fierce battle with the man whom he now encountered and in the heat of the blazing sun he set about persecuting his opponent. The persecution was unjust, and it recoiled upon the persecutor himself inasmuch as his brain was paralysed by the heat of the sun. What was to be brought to an issue in this fight originated in a still earlier incarnation when this individuality had been brilliantly, outstandingly clever. The opponent whom he encountered during the Crusades had suffered injury and embarrassment in an earlier incarnation at the hands of this brilliant individuality. As you see, it all leads back to the moral life, for the forces in play originated in the earlier incarnation.
Thus we have three consecutive incarnations of an individuality. A remarkably clever and able personality in very ancient times — that is one incarnation. Following that, a Crusader, who at a certain time in his life gets paralysis of the brain, brought about as the result of a wrong committed by his cleverness which had, however, in the next incarnation, caused him to acquire tremendous admiration for oriental civilisation. Third incarnation: a Prussian officer who is obliged to retire owing to an affliction of the knee, does not know what to do with his time, goes in for philosophy and writes a most impressive book, a perfect product of the civilisation of the second half of the 19th century: The Philosophy of the Unconscious.

1924-03-30-GA239

Qualities of character in an earthly life and their transformation into gifts or defects in subsequent incarnations. Examples: love — joy — understanding of environment; hatred — hyper-sensitiveness to suffering obtuseness and lack of understanding of surrounding world. Importance of interest in the environment. As a rule it is the case that illnesses arise from attributes of soul in a previous incarnation, but things appertaining to spiritual life must not be pressed too far. A stream of karma may also begin. Speaking generally, qualities of soul in one life are transformed into bodily traits in another incarnation, and vice versa.