showing how both humanity and world originated from a divine-
spiritual cosmos in which everyone could acquire knowledge of higher
worlds.
Basic to Steiner's philosophy, indeed to theosophy, are the laws of
karma and reincarnation by which the human spirit for its ethical de-
velopment must live repeated lives on earth, the deeds of earlier lives
bearing fruit in later incarnations. Introduced in the Upanishads as the
great secret that solves the problem of human destiny, karma was seen
as expressing the inexorable law of moral causation: whatsoever a man
soweth, that shall he also reap. As the unerring law of the universe, the
source, origin, and font of all the other laws in nature, it was considered
the unfailing redresser of human injustice.Theosophists considered the
great social evils, the apparently unjust distribution of classes in both
society and the sexes and the unequal distribution of capital and labor,
all to be due to karma, concluding that caritas was a better remedy than
kicking against the pricks. As for reincarnation, they believed the
human spirit to be no more created anew when it begins its earthly life
than a person is newly created every morning and that any God who
would create a soul for only one brief span of life, whether to animate
a happy man or a poor wretch who had done nothing to deserve such a
cruel fate, could be rather a senseless fiend than a God.
Steiner taught that the highest spiritual development of humanity
leads progressively to the ego's control of the astral, etheric, and physi-
cal bodies; that the spiritualization of matter was the goal of humanity.
For gurus, Steiner had little use, preferring that people learn by their
own efforts, considering himself no more than a brotherly teacher. His
anthroposophy emphasized freedom, "freedom from the machinations
of occult lodges or the Mahatma hierarchy." Unlike the Easterner's
pursuit of nirvana, Steiner's spiritual science was directed at modifying
this world: it aimed at developing the spirit for the upbuilding of both
humanity and the world, leading to an increased, not a decreased, val-
uation oflife in the physical now. Many former theosophists flocked to
his Anthroposophical Society to absorb Steiner's "spiritual science," a
philosophy they have kept alive and have widely developed since his
death in 1925.
joyce
(Joyce)
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