Who are you, Destiny? I am the one who walks by your side, the guardian of your life’s journey, guiding you—until you know how destiny’s wisdom weaves.
We don’t incarnate here on Earth just this one time. We’ve already had many experiences of previous incarnations. When we take up this knowledge and insight, it expands our consciousness. We can then better understand events that seem to happen by chance. We notice: destiny is precise. Every moment, the consequences of deeds and experiences from past incarnations affect our everyday lives. Events only seem to occur by chance. In fact, they are connected, but we only experience their coordinated contexts when we acknowledge that there are guiding beings of destiny behind the scenes. Karma, as the law of cause and effect, gives a form and stamp to every moment. We become aware that there is a wisdom leading us along our path of destiny, our school of life.
Previous earthly lives seem to lie deep in the past. But the effects of our actions in these past lives are inscribed in the world ether and have their effects in the here and now as karmic shadows or karmic doppelgangers.
The Karmic Doppelganger
Experiences and events of past earthly lives are not accessible to contemporary waking consciousness. And yet they do have an unconscious influence on our present character and habits of thought and sensations. A life as a monk leads to a habit of devotion, introspection, and dedication to greater spiritual themes. A life as a knight creates a posture of discipline and orientation to achieving one’s goals. A former king naturally presumes that he will be listened to graciously when he makes extravagant speeches. For a former farmer or miller, everything still seems difficult today. A princess naturally wants to be seen and served. A violent death experienced in the past casts doubt on the positive outcome of a situation. A former beggar has the habit of begging ingrained in him. When brought to the light of consciousness, habits and inclinations imprinted on the etheric body can be reclaimed and transformed.
Karma: The Law of Cause and Effect
By studying the lawfulness of re-embodiment and karma, our experiences become enriched with the sense of a spiritually guided social process. The psycho-logical expands to include the karma-logical.
When we begin to see, hear, and sense the phenomena of destiny in our surroundings, we increasingly experience ourselves in a new world, one more real than before. We begin to reflect on the consequences of our actions, how they affect us and our fellow human beings, and we incorporate these reflections into our decision-making. We acquire new ways to observe destiny. We create an open middle ground between observing and evaluating a situation, and learn to refrain from making hasty judgements. We cultivate the virtue of abstaining from judgment. A moment of destiny can be blocked, or it can be redeemed through our actions. If our actions are evaluated in a more nuanced way before we make a decision, we develop our ability to take responsibility for our actions. We develop a new “sense organ for destiny” with which we can make judgements from a whole new level of awareness. So-called mistakes become paths to insights and steps in a learning process. The joy of knowledge steps into the foreground of experience, while guilt and atonement recede into the background. We learn more naturally how to forgive and thus, how to love—and that these are actually capacities we’re able to cultivate.
Pioneer
A task of our times is to develop a new understanding of how to experience and comprehend the karmic background of human beings. Rudolf Steiner calls on us to exercise and implement our knowledge of karma as a soul-spiritual cognition in our encounters and coexistence with our fellow human beings. Beneficial social conditions are only possible in the future if we incorporate karmic knowledge, karmic experiences, and karmic backgrounds. One can go so far as to say that incorporating karmic backgrounds into partnerships, families, or enterprises promotes social health. Rudolf Steiner’s central message is that consciousness of reincarnation and karma opens the way to perceiving the spiritual world.
How Come?
After death, at the end of a “day of life,” human beings are still able to think and feel even in a bodiless state. They immediately survey in their consciousness the so-called “life panorama,” in which they perceive their whole life simultaneously in one image. This pictorial life review gives the founding impulse to balance out the effects of our deeds and thoughts in our future earthly lives. Karma brings about the events and circumstances that give us the possibility to strike this balance. Every person and all human beings together are brought into an ordered arrangement corresponding to the lawfulness of the cosmos. This only succeeds through the help of our heavenly friends, the angels, who collaborate in weaving the threads of destiny.
Within this grand image of our past karma, the moment of our death stands as a threshold. When we inwardly cross this threshold, our overarching consciousness helps us find new spaces of understanding.
Practical Karma Exercises
Practical work on karma involves expanding our faculty of memory. In the act of remembering, we initially experience an atmospheric feeling. Images arise, and we apply the corresponding concepts. This is an etheric astral process. The astral body forms images in the soul with the help of the etheric body. The images are clearer when our feelings are calm, and they recede or dissolve when we’re restless. Relaxation exercises are therefore a good prerequisite for clear inner images. A feeling that corresponds to the image allows us to relive the memory. Expanding our ability to remember requires calm, taking our time, being well-rested, and maintaining concentration.
Images that are actively formed in the soul strengthen the ‘I’. The capacity for karmic vision and the understanding of destiny steadily grow. Through work with karmic memory pictures, an individual experiences wholeness and thus personal and social healing.
The Realization of Karma in Seven Steps
Coenraad van Houten developed a seven-step path to karmic self-awareness. He writes:
“When we understand our destiny and its causes in our past life and start to read there our tasks for the future, we begin to live consciously in this reality. Without understanding our tasks, without the knowledge of why events and encounters occur in our destiny in this particular way and for what purpose, we do not live in reality, we deceive ourselves about ourselves, and we make inaccurate judgments about our fellow human beings. For who can judge a fellow human being and his actions accurately if he knows nothing about his karmic connections? Who can come to true self-knowledge without knowing their own karmic origins?”1
Step 1
Choose a momentous situation, a destiny moment, and describe it. Describe the exact order of events. Is the location outside in nature or inside a room? Include the time of day, season, atmosphere, weather, other people present, their clothing, their demeanor, the topic of conversation, the mood, the way people spoke, the volume and tone of voice; then also, the floor, windows, doors, furnishings; or, if outside, the landscape and light. It’s important to examine and identify the external atmosphere in relation to your own feelings; compare and contrast.
Give this situation a “title,” such as: The Surprise, The Oppressed, The Unseen, The Helpless, The Attack, The Eternally Rejected, The Subordinate, His Eminence, The Devotedly Waiting, The Trailblazer, etc.
Step 2
Bring the title, or we could say the overall gesture, into an image in the distant past using your imagination. To do this, it is helpful to take your time in a relaxed manner and, with calm joy in your heart, quietly holding any pain that belongs to the situation, wait to see what images arise. In this process, you remain in the role of observer. What gesture is that person making? What is their landscape like? The gesture you found is now personified, and you can ask: Is it male or female? What is its age, clothing, material and color, hair color, skin color, posture, and bodily gesture? What does the environment look like? What situation or activity is the person in?
Questions arising from the situation lead further. Just as a screenwriter develops a story or a film, the course of the karmic situation unfolds. When making your first attempts, it can be helpful if a friend or experienced companion assists you with questions to help the images emerge and come together as a whole. If the work takes place in a group, each member of the group can offer one or more images. The narrator then chooses the one that seems most coherent to them.
Step 3
Now describe the course of the life of the person who developed from this personified gesture. Ask, or have your companions ask, for precise details: How did you get into this situation? How long have you been in one place or on the move, and with what goal? You can also jump in time to childhood or old age with question: Who were your parents? Were there any siblings? What were the living conditions like? You can also ask about the destination of outings or trips and where the person came from.
Each step needs time. It is often astounding how precise the answers are.
At the end of the work, the situation of dying is addressed with appropriate questions. How old did you become? It could be from illness, sudden death due to an accident, or death due to old age. It is important and good to live through this situation. Initially, you connect with the karmic person and lie down with them on their deathbed, or you go to the abyss into which the karmic person has fallen. Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you; on the contrary, you will experience how the body releases the soul. Take your time, relax a little, and let the soul breathe out of the body with your karmic person. The soul becomes light and bright, and you experience deep peace. From this peace and in the lightness of the light, you look back on the life you have just experienced in the image. You can go through the individual stages backwards.
Step 4
From these experiences, now ask: What was important? What experiences will I take with me? What was the task to be learned in that incarnation? What cultural lifestyle do the characteristics of the “karmic being” point to? How does this differ with Indigenous peoples, Asians, Americans, or Europeans? It makes a difference whether the person was a soldier, farmer, nun, housewife, priestess, missionary, clergyman, troubadour, advisor, craftsman, scholar, sick person, or something else in their past life.
Projections of today’s morals back onto our behavior in previous lives are irrelevant and should be avoided. The lesson in that incarnation is compared with present-day behaviors. How do I behave? Is my behavior influenced by experiences in my past incarnation? Which behaviors are appropriate, and how can I react more freely and with greater coherence in today’s situation?
In most cases, a sense of relaxation sets in, along with the ability to observe things from a greater distance. One’s attitude toward events that previously caused fear or uncertainty becomes more flexible and freer. We learn that our destiny is to be accepted and further shaped.
Step 5
Gradually, we realize that a continuous learning process takes place across various incarnations. That we are guided by something higher. This “higher power” is connected with the guides of destiny. Who guides us from one life to another? It can be described as a “higher self” that has its origin in the creative world and carries within it all our shortcomings and achievements, our past and future. It extends far beyond our normal consciousness of ourselves. This more comprehensive being gives us the force and imagination to consciously deal with the shadow being we have found, to affirm it and transform it. It supports us in proceeding on the path on which we learn and develop new capacities from our weaknesses.
We must follow the first three steps precisely, but now we can continue learning freely, exploring, trying, and observing. After getting to know the karmic being, a certain friendship develops with it, and the former fears and delusions, tensions and euphoria that it caused slowly disappear. It becomes a part of our being, a significant part of the will of our ‘I’, a constant companion. The transformation can begin. This “karmic friend” becomes an advisor, because this karmic being shows how it can be redeemed.
Step 6
There is a growing ability to realize the web of destiny and to become aware of how meaningful life is structured.
Step 7
The goal and result of the seven steps of the karmic learning process is the ability to act and react more freely in moments of destiny that life presents to us, and to better understand the karmic network of such moments. We can experience the moment differently, creating an open space for alternative approaches.
In a community that applies this karmic work—be it a family, a partnership, a team, or a collegium—a mutually liberating coexistence develops in which every destiny is recognized. As if from a creative source, a conscientious approach to healing action in the sense of a free Christian deed is formed.
The question remains: How to get started with karma work? You can begin as an individual by visiting an instructor in karma work or a seminar on karma awareness.
More Akademie Vaihingen
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Images Cornelia Friedrich, Mandala Sketches, 2012
