Volume 135 of Rudolf Steiner's collected works, Reincarnation and Karma: Their Significance in Modern Culture, gathers five lectures delivered early in 1912, two in Berlin and two in Stuttgart, with a concluding Berlin address in March. Rather than presenting reincarnation as an exotic doctrine borrowed from the East, Steiner treats it here as a form of knowledge that the modern soul is ready to receive and, indeed, needs. The five talks work outward from a single question: how can a person alive today gain a genuine, first-hand conception of the being in the human being that passes through many lives on earth, and what happens to human conduct once that conception takes hold. The volume is short, but it sits at a hinge in Steiner's thinking, where cosmology becomes ethics.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1912 Steiner had spent years building the vocabulary of anthroposophy, and GA 135 marks the moment he asked what that whole edifice was actually for. He argues that reincarnation and karma should not remain the private conviction of a study circle but should enter general human awareness the way the Copernican picture of the cosmos once entered it. That comparison is deliberate and telling. Just as heliocentrism reorganised how people located themselves in space, Steiner expects the ideas of repeated earth lives and moral causation to reorganise how people locate themselves in time and in responsibility toward one another.
The volume also belongs to a wider cluster of 1912 lecture cycles in which Steiner returned again and again to the theme of karma, later expanded in the large karma cycles of the 1920s. Here the treatment is introductory and psychological rather than encyclopaedic. He is less concerned with cataloguing past-life connections than with the inner faculties a person must cultivate before such connections can be perceived at all. That emphasis on preparation, on the readiness of the soul, keeps GA 135 close to his practical books on inner development while pointing forward to the more detailed karmic studies that came later.
There is a further reason this small cycle matters within the collected works. Steiner is careful to distinguish the substance of anthroposophy from the society that had grown up around it. The knowledge itself, he argues, could in principle be made public and tested like any other knowledge; what requires a community is the newness of the ideas and the inner preparation they ask of anyone who takes them seriously. Reading GA 135 with that distinction in mind clarifies a great deal about how Steiner understood his own project. He did not want reincarnation to become a badge of membership or a matter of belief. He wanted it to become common human understanding, worked through by each person in the ordinary conduct of life, in the same unremarkable way that other hard-won truths eventually pass into daily awareness.
Themes and Structure
The opening lecture confronts the difficulty directly. Ordinary thinking, Steiner says, is bound to a single incarnation, shaped by the very organism given to us between birth and death, so it cannot reason its way to a proof of prior lives from external facts alone. The intellect can bring a person to the threshold of the question and no further. What is needed is a different kind of inner activity, and the following lectures set about describing it.
In the second lecture he introduces the idea of a feeling-memory, a maturing of the emotional and moral life that must develop before any direct experience of reincarnation becomes possible. Ordinary memory reaches back only across the present life; what Steiner describes is a deeper capacity, closer to conscience than to recollection, in which the soul learns to sense the weight of its own continuity. The third lecture turns practical, offering thought-exercises through which a person can strengthen the inner attention that reincarnation and karma require. These are not arguments but disciplines, ways of holding the mind so that a different order of experience can gradually announce itself.
The fourth lecture gives concrete examples of how karma works in the interval between two incarnations, tracing how the deeds and dispositions of one life prepare the conditions of the next. Steiner is cautious here, resisting any mechanical picture in which reward and punishment are simply tallied. The connections he describes are formative rather than penal: a tendency carried through death becomes a capacity or a limitation in the life that follows. The fifth lecture, delivered last, steps back to survey the whole. It presents reincarnation and karma as the fundamental ideas of the anthroposophical world conception and argues that their true fruit is the strengthening of the moral life.
That final movement is the heart of the book. Steiner insists that once a person genuinely accepts repeated earth lives, the feeling of responsibility widens dramatically, because what one does now becomes the seed of a future one will oneself inhabit. He puts the whole matter plainly:
"As far as the knowledge of reincarnation and karma is concerned, we must say exactly the opposite."
The remark comes as Steiner contrasts spiritual knowledge with ordinary science, where impersonal proof precedes conviction; with reincarnation, he holds, the moral illumination comes first and everything else follows from it. This reversal is the structural key to the whole cycle. In the natural sciences a person is convinced by evidence and only afterward, perhaps, changes how they live. In the domain Steiner is describing, a change in the moral life is itself the organ of perception, and understanding grows from within that change rather than preceding it.
Two consequences follow, and Steiner draws them out with care. The first concerns responsibility. Once a person grasps that they will themselves inherit the conditions their present deeds are preparing, the sense of accountability widens far beyond a single lifetime. What might otherwise feel like private morality becomes a form of provision for a future self and, through the shared web of karma, for others as well. The second consequence concerns culture. Steiner expects that as these ideas spread, they will introduce moral impulses into human life that earlier ages had no means of forming, gradually altering how people meet one another, how they think about heredity and circumstance, and how they weigh the significance of a single human biography.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The Thalira glossary draws on GA 135 in its treatment of the following term, which serves as the hub linking this volume to related entries across the codex:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the complete English translation of the cycle alongside the original German. For print editions and related secondary literature, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. When comparing sources, note that GA numbering refers to the German Gesamtausgabe, so a given English volume may carry a different title on its cover while corresponding to the same body of lectures.
Continue Your Study
These lectures open onto several threads worth following within the Thalira codex:
- Begin with the linked entry above, then browse the full glossary of Steiner terms to see how repeated earth lives connects to karma, the etheric body, and the life between death and rebirth.
- Explore the wider GA Work Library to place this 1912 cycle among Steiner's other treatments of destiny and human development.
- Read GA 135 as an entry point to Steiner's later, more detailed karma lectures, using the moral emphasis of the fifth talk as your orientation before turning to the fuller cycles.