We all make mistakes, and we more than likely learn something from them. Even if no one else is aware of what we did, we suffer a bit; we hope to put it behind us; we hope no one ever finds out; we hope to avoid punishment. We cannot imagine that we would ever need to answer for every single little thing we do wrong.
Justice, both personal and cultural, often fails to manifest during our lifetimes. Sometimes, people who have done horrible things avoid punishment and people who hurt no one suffer the most. Life, examined even superficially, makes no sense in this regard; the seemingly haphazard dispensation of justice is one of the appalling aspects of being human. But an understanding of karma and reincarnation shows that no one “gets away with” anything.
Rudolf Steiner, a modern initiate, tells us that in the life after death, we face the good and bad, the wise and foolish of everything we’ve done in our lives. Ultimately, as we begin to prepare for the next life to come, we help to create the circumstances which can lead us toward our purest self. It turns out that we will embrace any suffering gladly because it helps us reach that goal. Knowing this now allows us to accept our fates with deeper understanding and equanimity.
Steiner spoke often about karma and reincarnation. We can study the things he has said while we work on ourselves to gain access to the spiritual world for ourselves. Today we will discuss one of the basic principles of karma referenced above: that we answer for absolutely everything in our lives.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
In earthly life… we do not like to suffer from our own foolish mistakes. We wish we had not made the foolish decision. But this really only applies to the one earthly life, because in effect, between the foolishness of the decision and the punishment we suffer in experiencing its consequences, only the self-same earthly life is intervening. It all remains continuous.
But between one earthly life and another it is not so. For the lives between death and a new birth are always intervening, and they change many things which would not change if earthly life continued uniformly. Suppose that you look back into a former life on earth. You did something good or ill to another person. Between that earthly life and this one, there was the life between death and a new birth. In that life, you cannot help realizing that you have become imperfect by doing wrong to another human being. It takes away from your own human value. It cripples you in soul. You must make good again this maiming of your soul and you resolve to achieve in a new earthly life what will make good the fault. Thus, between death and new birth you take up, by your own will, that which will balance and make good the fault.
Or if you did good to another person… you see it clearly in the life between death and new birth. If you have helped another person, you realize that he has thereby attained certain things which, without you, he could not have attained…
… It will never happen, under any circumstances, that a real insight into your karma will lead you to be dissatisfied with it… for, in the last resort, we ourselves are our karma. What is it that comes over, karmically, from our former lives on earth? It is actually we ourselves.
Excerpt from: Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies. Volume I, Lecture 3 by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach 1924.
We are eternal beings that keep evolving throughout our many incarnations as well as the time we spend in the spiritual world between our incarnations. Learning about karma gives us an impetus to keep working on ourselves in earnest long before death takes us across the threshold. With humility and gratitude, it is possible for us to learn to accept responsibility for ourselves while we are still living in this lifetime. We cannot erase the past, but we can create a better future for ourselves and everyone we know.