Printed in the Spring 2024 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Savinainen, Antti "Rudolf Steiner on Karma" Quest 112:2, pg 36-39
By Antti Savinainen
The law of karma is a central teaching in the Eastern religions, Theosophy, and Anthroposophy. Moreover, it would be impossible to understand reincarnation without karma. The Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) delivered many lectures on karma from the perspective of his system of spiritual science (which included the development of abilities such as clairvoyance). Steiner emphasizes that his karmic examples come from the research of spiritual science.
Steiner’s last long lecture cycle, from 1924, dealt with karma in the context of the past lives of various people, some quite well-known at the time. However, this article chiefly addresses Steiner’s earlier lectures on karma. I will first discuss karma and its relationship with certain illnesses. Next, I will describe karma exercises aimed at enhancing understanding and acceptance of personal karma. Finally, I will address Christ as the Lord of Karma.
Karma and Illnesses
According to Steiner, karma works on many levels, since individuals, humanity, the earth, and the universe are all intertwined (Steiner, 1910). Although it is possible to observe a kind of instant karma in everyday life—for instance, someone can be caught lying and has to face the immediate consequences—the karmic consequences Steiner addresses are much slower, long-term processes.
In Steiner’s view, a person may need a certain disease to overcome a personality trait and develop healing forces that foster her spiritual growth. Thus karmically generated disease is not just about amending old digressions through suffering but an opportunity to develop forces that balance and refine the character. In this sense, a disease can be a great teacher.
Karmic effects can go on for several lifetimes. Steiner provides an example of a self-centered person who in kamaloka (the afterlife state in the astral world) has to live through her actions’ impact on other living beings. This experience imprints certain tendencies which, in the next incarnation, cause weakness in the inner character. A superficial character in one life causes a tendency to lie in the second life. Moreover, the tendency to lie causes incorrectly formed organs in the third life. In these cases, the moral weaknesses have reached all the way to the etheric body.
A weak I-consciousness and low level of self-reliance will affect the next incarnation as well, in Steiner’s view. This kind of person will unconsciously look for conditions, such as epidemics, which help to overcome this karmic weakness. More precisely, Steiner says this can be done by contracting cholera. On the other hand, one can compensate for an overbearing I-consciousness by contracting malaria.
The person disregarding the external world, with too strong a concentration on the inner life, can end up with a weakness of the soul that in the next incarnation exposes the body to an attack of measles late in life. This is a physical, karmic consequence of unbalanced concentration. In addition, there is also a psychic karmic effect: the next-life personality is subject to self-deception. On the other hand, if the person has developed the soul forces needed to overcome the tendency toward self-deception, there is no need to contract measles at a later age.
Preparatory Karma Exercises
Steiner formulated several exercises aimed at developing conscious encounters, objectivity, and understanding of other people and life events. In addition, he offered exercises that can help individuals recognize the forces of destiny in their biography and eventually reawaken memories of previous lives. Luigi Morelli (2015, 73) notes that Steiner did not bring these exercises to their ultimate form, as he did with the spiritual exercises offered in his masterpiece, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment (Steiner, 1918). Morelli organizes karma exercises provided by Steiner in three groups: preparatory karma exercises (Morelli calls these “preludes to the karma exercises”), lesser karma exercises, and greater karma exercises.
The first preparatory exercise is gratitude. Steiner advises us to look back at our lives and see the part played by our parents, relatives, friends, teachers, and other figures in our lives. This will lead us to realize how much we owe to others. When this exercise is repeated over time, an impression of important people in our lives will emerge, pointing to their deeper being.
Another version of this exercise involves bringing before the mind’s eye images of people who have acted, directly or indirectly, as hindrances and opposition. This exercise will develop an objective sense of our indebtedness. The point is to give space to another individual within our souls without emotional response. Admittedly, this is a demanding exercise, since feelings of hurt and anger are easily aroused when we are reminiscing about people who have opposed or wronged us.
The second preparatory karma exercise is learning to look back at an event in our lives as if we were spectators of ourselves. This will free us from the images that bind us to the past and unravel identification with our life experiences, which can sometimes be a heavy burden. Success in this exercise demands repeated practice.
Although Steiner does not say so in this context, the preliminary exercises seem to require forgiving others and oneself for all errors and wrongdoings. Forgiveness is an essential skill in the spiritual path. Moreover, genuine forgiveness has profound, even cosmic consequences: renouncing the recompense due to the iron law of karmic necessity liberates forces of the higher hierarchies, which will help Christ as a Lord of Karma (Prokofieff, 82–83). I will discuss Christ as a Lord of Karma later in this article.
The Lesser Karma Exercises
The first lesser karma exercise invites us to look back to one single event of life that seems to be due to chance. Another possibility is looking back to an event we did not wish to happen. The aim is to picture the event as something we had planned before our birth as if it had been designed by what Steiner calls the “second person in us.” Initially, this second person appears to be artificial, but with repeated practice, she grows and evolves within us. The exercise helps us remember that we actually wanted this event—for instance, an accident—to happen. This practice will develop peacefulness, acceptance, and a sense of purpose in life. We will learn to take responsibility for our destiny and cease to blame others for unpleasant events and failures.
Steiner’s karma exercise on joy and happiness is a bit peculiar. He states that it is erroneous to believe that joy and happiness are somehow earned; furthermore, this kind of thinking will lead to feelings of shame. By contrast, realizing that we have not earned happiness will lead to “a new feeling of peaceful security in the spirit and thankfulness toward the guiding powers of humanity.”
In the exercise of “contrary being,” we take a retrospective look at life and observe which tendencies have come naturally for us and which have not. What could not develop within us despite our desires to the contrary? What could we not avoid? With this exercise, the image of the “contrary being” is formed, and Steiner asks us to immerse ourselves in this being. This will help us to realize what is not the outcome of this life but comes from previous incarnations.
A related karma exercise concentrates on situations in which we were spared from something serious. Perhaps our departure was delayed by a few minutes, saving us from an accident. This exercise develops an ability to perceive chains of events guided by karmic forces.
In an extended lesser karma exercise, Steiner advises observing everything that has occurred over the last weeks or months. All unpleasant events are observed, with no thought of injustice caused to us or with any self-justification of our shortcomings. We take full responsibility for everything that has happened to us. This will create a new relationship with the spiritual world and lead to the recognition of the role of the second person in arranging the events in our life. Although Steiner does not say this, keeping a diary before starting the extended lesser karma exercises could be helpful.
The Greater Karma Exercises
Morelli calls the first greater karma exercise the Moon/Saturn/Sun exercise. It can be about oneself or another person. All the layers of personality will be peeled away one by one in meditation. First, one disregards all external activity, profession, and living conditions. Second, the meditation concentrates on temperament, mood, and way of thinking. This will make transparent everything working in the will. Behind this, the spiritual Moon will start to shine.
In the next stage, everything coming from emotions and temperament will be disregarded. The focus is on the way a person thinks. This will make the rhythmic system transparent, and the spiritual Sun will start to shine. In the final stage, a person’s thinking will be disregarded, and the impulses from Saturn will be revealed. One begins to see the individual as a spiritual being and starts perceiving the karma of that individual. Perhaps it would be best to apply this exercise only to oneself, since knowing another person’s karma seems to require a specific reason.
The second greater karma exercise lasts for four days and three nights. This exercise is about “spiritual painting” of a life event by recreating all the impressions received by our senses in the greatest detail. If another person is related to the event, she will be recreated as well, including the way she moved, the tone of her voice, words, gestures, smells, and so on. Next, the event will be taken into sleep, where the astral body will give it a shape. This is repeated the following two days. This way, the image will be imprinted into the etheric body, which will continue to work on the image.
Steiner describes how the person will experience this memory as walking in a cloud, giving rise to the feeling of being part of the picture itself. The feeling will grow an objective picture that is related to the event in a previous incarnation that was the root cause for the event in this incarnation.
All of these karma exercises, especially the greater ones, require a great deal of concentration and skillful meditation. The aim of the lesser karma exercises is to take responsibility for our lives and accept all events, pleasant and unpleasant alike, as part of our biography. Indeed, according to Steiner, we did this joyously before we were born, when we had a preview of the main events and difficulties waiting for us. The greater karma exercises aim to gain knowledge from our personal karma.
Christ as the Lord of Karma
The karmic powers are known as the Lords of Karma or the Lipikas in Theosophy (Steiner was a member of the Theosophical Society between 1902 and 1912). Intriguingly, Steiner (1911, lecture 3) said, “Occult clairvoyant research tells us that in our epoch Christ becomes the Lord of Karma for human evolution . . . so that in the future it will rest with Him to decide what our karmic account is, how our credit and debit in life are related.”
This is a remarkable occult pronouncement, about which Theosophy usually remains silent. There is, however, one exception: the Finnish Rosicrucian Theosophist Pekka Ervast (1875–1934) talked about the same thing.
Steiner stated that before entering kamaloka, the individual will meet Moses as a bookkeeper for the karmic powers, who presents their records of sins. This is changing or has already changed to some extent, since people will more and more meet Christ Jesus as their karmic judge. Moreover, Christ will help individuals in balancing karma in a new incarnation:
We shall then have to encounter events through which our karma can be balanced, for every man must reap what he has sown . . . The balancing must be arranged so as to be in the best possible accord with the concerns of the whole world. It must enable us to give all possible help to the advancement of mankind on earth . . . In the future it will fall to Christ to bring the balance of our karma into line with the general Earth-karma and the general progress of humanity. (Steiner, 1911, lecture 10)
Many diseases Steiner mentioned in his lectures on karma have already been overcome as a result of the advancement of modern medicine (for instance, the latest smallpox case took place in 1975, thanks to vaccination). Steiner anticipated this progress. He stated that people will become externally healthier because of medical science and general improvements in living conditions. This means that karmic balancing must be sought from elsewhere. This is not without consequences: there will be an increasing feeling of inner emptiness, and people will have fewer incentives for inner progress, accompanied by a stultification of the soul. Perhaps this is an occult explanation for increasing depression and hopelessness, which is prevalent, especially among young people.
Should one, then, decline medical care? Of course not, but it is important to realize that spiritual aspiration and self-education are crucial in this regard as well. They have the potential to foster inner forces that certain diseases could have brought forth.
A reader coming from outside Anthroposophical or Theosophical circles might be baffled by the talk of Christ in the context of karma and reincarnation. Assuming that the law of karma is real, why is it alien to traditional Christianity? According to Steiner, teachings on karma and reincarnation could not have been given to Western civilization before it was ready to receive these teachings. Steiner (1909, lecture 10) even states that “it would have been detrimental to evolution if the present content of spiritual science . . . had been imparted openly to mankind a few hundred years earlier.”
There were Gnostic streams teaching reincarnation within early Christianity (see, for instance, Bean, 2020), but ecumenical councils later condemned these as heretical. In addition, some passages in the Gospels could be interpreted in the light of karma and reincarnation (such as the man who was born blind, John 9:1–4). Of course, Christian theology easily supplies explanations that do not include karma.
Steiner’s karma exercises provide much food for thought. For instance, looking back at pivotal points and people in one’s biography helps to understand one’s destiny. One may also recognize how one’s own actions have affected the course of life of other people. Accepting one’s life as it is, including unpleasant events, is essential. This can be achieved by gratitude and forgiveness toward those who have helped us to find our way, even when they have acted negatively from our perspective. After all, we have wanted these things to happen to us in our higher consciousness before we were born. This is by no means easy to achieve, especially if we have had to endure serious hardships in our lives.
I will conclude my article with inspiring words from Pekka Ervast, who described the attitude toward karma and hardships held by an individual who has reached contact with the spirit within oneself, or the kingdom of God, as it is called in the Gospels:
And when one is impossibly rich [when the person has received the kingdom of God] then how could one be anything else than happy and grateful for even paying the debts? For what are they anymore to one? What are the sufferings anymore? . . . The debt means nothing to one. One’s soul is filled with joy and happiness and bliss and peace. The sufferings, misfortunes, humiliations, they are all sheer happiness to one. (Ervast, 2018)
Sources
Bean, James. “Reincarnation in Gnosticism: Let the Gnostics Be Gnostic.” Medium, Aug. 19, 2020.
Ervast, Pekka. The Inner God and Happiness: Lectures in Helsinki, 1922. Original Finnish title: Jumala ja onni. Translated by Lauri Livistö. Helsinki: Aatma, 2018.
Morelli, Luigi. Karl Julius Schröer and Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy and the Teachings of Karma and Reincarnation. Milton Keynes, UK: iUniverse, 2015.
Prokofieff, Sergei O. The Occult Significance of Forgiveness. Essex, U.K.: Temple Lodge, 2016.
Steiner, Rudolf. The Gospel of St. Luke: Ten Lectures in Basel, 1909. Available online at Rudolf Steiner Archive.
———. From Jesus to Christ: Ten Lectures in Karlsruhe, 1911. Available online at Rudolf Steiner Archive.
———. Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. 1918. Available online at Rudolf Steiner Archive.
———. Manifestations of Karma: Eleven Lectures in Hamburg, 1910. Available online at Rudolf Steiner Archive.
Antti Savinainen, PhD, is a Finnish high-school physics instructor who teaches both the Finnish national syllabus and for the international baccalaureate. He writes regularly on Theosophical and Anthroposophical themes, both in Finnish and English. He has been a member of the Finnish Rosy Cross, a part of the Finnish Theosophical movement, for over three decades.