Reincarnation and Karma
Rudolf Steiner, 1903
Where does a gift come from that neither father nor mother had? In 1903 Rudolf Steiner took the law of biology, “the living is born only from the living”, and applied it to the soul. So he arrived at reincarnation and karma, and explained why yesterday’s deeds become today’s fate. This book follows his reasoning step by step and honestly shows where science ends and his philosophy begins.
Who it is for
For those who wonder where a person’s character and talents come from, and why fate turns out one way and not another, and who want to follow the reasoning of one of the most unusual thinkers of the early twentieth century.
My yesterday’s deeds are my today’s fate.
Where in you does what your parents lack come from?
Picture a family where three children grew up in one house, ate the same food and heard the same fairy tales. One has counted everything since childhood, another draws in the margins of her exercise books, and the third argues with everyone about justice. Nose and eye colour are easy to trace to a grandmother or grandfather. But where each child’s main passion comes from, nobody in the family can explain.
Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher, created a teaching called anthroposophy. In 1903 he wrote two short essays on exactly this subject: “Reincarnation and Karma” and “How Karma Works”. His answer is bold. In Steiner’s view, what makes a person one of a kind comes neither from heredity nor from nowhere. It comes from earlier lives of the same soul, and present deeds become its future fate. He calls the first “reincarnation” and the second “karma”.
What is striking is where he draws this from. Not from Eastern teachings, but from the logic of the natural sciences of his own time. Steiner takes a rule that scientists have proved for living nature and asks why we hesitate to apply it to the soul. Let us be honest: this is Steiner’s philosophical position, not a scientific fact, and modern science does not confirm reincarnation. But his line of thought is worth following, because it makes us look differently at a question we usually walk past.
Ahead of you are worms and mud, the lion and Schiller, and the step that Haeckel forgot. Then come the morning after sleep, ice-cold water and a match.
Worms do not arise from mud
In the seventeenth century scientists were sure that worms, insects and even fish could arise by themselves from lifeless mud. This belief had a name of its own: spontaneous generation. The Italian naturalist Francesco Redi claimed the opposite: even the simplest animals appear only from parents. In Steiner’s account, the scientific world of the time considered Redi a dangerous heretic, and he narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.
Two hundred years later Louis Pasteur put an end to the question. He reliably sealed the substances in which tiny creatures usually appeared against the entry of germs, and no trace of life showed up there. Living things arise only from living things, and every biologist agrees with this today. Redi was right. He simply knew the truth two centuries before the proof.
Steiner sees himself in Redi’s position. He claims the same about the soul: the human “I”, talents and inclinations cannot arise from chemical processes alone inside the skull, just as a worm does not arise from mud. If science continues in the direction it has taken since the seventeenth century, one day, in his view, it will reach this conclusion itself. Ideas like this are still punished today, only differently: not with fire but with mockery, by declaring the author a dreamer.
What Steiner does not do is important too. He does not try to prove his conclusions by means of natural science. His argument lies elsewhere: his view, as he writes, is born of the same way of thinking as the view of a true scientist. Nature serves him as a visible example. It is easy to imagine that a plant changes when moved to another place, or that animals go blind after living long in dark caves. From such clear pictures it is easier to move to laws that cannot be seen with the eyes.
It is like a pupil who has understood a rule on a simple problem but is afraid to apply it to a hard one. This, according to Steiner, is how his contemporaries behave: they have learnt the rule for worms, but do not dare to apply it to themselves.
About the author
Rudolf Steiner, Austrian philosopher and founder of anthroposophy, was born in 1861 and died in 1925. His ideas underlie the Waldorf schools and biodynamic farming.
All books by this author: Rudolf Steiner
Terms from the book
- Newton
- Schiller
- Darwin
- Galileo
- karma
- Goethe
- Kentucky
- Kant
- anthroposophy: The teaching of Rudolf Steiner about the spiritual nature of the human being and of the world, which he called spiritual science. It is not recognised as a scientific discipline.
- reincarnation: The return of one and the same soul to new earthly lives, in new bodies. In the book this is Steiner’s central idea, not an established fact.
- Haeckel: Ernst Haeckel, German zoologist of the nineteenth century, a fervent supporter of Darwin, author of “The Natural History of Creation”.
- spontaneous generation: The old idea that living creatures can arise on their own from lifeless matter, for example worms from mud. It was refuted by experiments of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
- Redi: Francesco Redi, Italian physician and naturalist of the seventeenth century, who showed that even small animals come from parents, not from filth.
- Bruno: Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher, burned by the Inquisition in Rome in 1600.
- Pasteur: Louis Pasteur, French scientist of the nineteenth century. His experiments finally refuted the spontaneous generation of microorganisms.
- Strauss: David Friedrich Strauss, German theologian and philosopher of the nineteenth century, author of “The Old Faith and the New” (1872), in which he builds faith on natural science.
- Topinard: Paul Topinard, French anthropologist of the nineteenth century, author of “Anthropology”.
- Lamarck: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, French naturalist of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the first to propose a theory of the evolution of living beings.
- Reinke: Johannes Reinke, German philosopher, professor at Greifswald. Steiner quotes his book on psychology.
- Maeterlinck: Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian writer and dramatist, author of “The Blue Bird”, Nobel Prize laureate in literature in 1911.
- kamaloka: A Sanskrit word meaning “place of desires”. For Steiner, the state after death in which unfulfilled desires fall silent.
- valet: A servant who looks after the master of the house: dresses him, keeps his things and rooms in order.
- devachan: A word from the theosophical dictionary meaning “place of bliss”. For Steiner, the state in which the experience of a life turns into the seeds for the next one.
All terms
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