Purpose
To acquire a certain conception of reincarnation and karma; that is able to bring about a kind of inner certainty that the real soul-spiritual kernel of being within us comes over from earlier lives and passes on into later lives.
Steps
- Look back over your life and ask yourself:
- What kind of person have I been?
- Have I been a person with a strong inclination for reflection, for inner contemplation; or am I one who has always had more love for the sensations of the outer world, liking or disliking this or that in everyday life?
- Was I a child who at school liked reading but not arithmetic, one who liked to hit other children but did not like being hit?
- Or was I a child always bound to be bullied and not smart enough to bully others?
Especially ask yourself:
- Was I cut out for activities of the mind or of the will?
- What did I find easy or difficult?
- What happened to me that I would like to have avoided?
- What happenings made me say to myself:
“I am glad this has come to pass”
And so on.
- Based on the results of the previous step,
Create a clear picture of those things in your life which have pleased you least.
- And we must now try to live into a very remarkable conception: we must desire and will everything that we have not desired or willed. Imagine to yourself:
What should I actually have become if I had ardently desired everything that in fact I did not wish for and which really went against the grain in life?
In a certain sense we must here rule out what we have succeeded in overcoming, for the most important thing is that we should ardently wish or picture ourselves wishing for the things we have not desired, or concerning which we have not been able to carry out our wishes, so that we create for ourselves, in feeling and thought, a being hitherto unfamiliar to us. We must picture ourselves as this being with great intensity. If we can do this, if we can identify ourselves with the being we have ourselves built up in this way, we have made some real progress towards becoming acquainted with the inner soul-kernel of our being; for in the picture we have thus been able to make of our own personality there will arise something that we have not been in this present incarnation but which we have introduced into it. Our deeper being will emerge from the picture built up in this way.