Author Description

Steiner begins these three lectures by explaining how our good and bad deeds in earthly life are mirrored back to us in other souls between death and rebirth. If we have done deeds out of love, the result in the next incarnation will be deep joy streaming towards us. And if this love continues, the result in the next incarnation after that will be an ability to see deeply into the world and to understand it. But when our deeds are motivated by hatred, the result in the next incarnation will be dullness. Eventually, education will learn how to heal this dullness by seeking out those in the environment who were hated and inculcating acts of love towards that person on the part of the child who is dull. He ends the lecture by discussing what it means to be a contemporary, and the sad fact that we would not have tolerated those with whom we did not share incarnations.Lecture Eight is devoted to health and illness. At birth we receive a model of our physical body from our ancestors. The normal sequence is for us to resist and transform this model beginning at age seven. If the ego is weak, it will continue to replicate the physical model. Our dependence on this model is a consequence of the Fall. We choose our parents because we love them, and want to emulate their form. Childhood friendships that are broken are an especially illuminating case study.The final lecture begins with Steiner painting a picture of the threefold human being, which can be articulated into the head, rhythmic, and metabolic organisms. These correspond to thinking, feeling, and willing, which correspond in turn to waking consciousness, dreaming sleep, and dreamless sleep. Human memory is very different from the usual conception. The lecture ends with an extraordinary evocation of the Hierarchies, who must emulate our deeds, and thus are in a certain way even dependent on us.