Understanding Karma
by Floris Books • 6 May 2025 • Anthroposophy, Non Fiction, Religion • 0 Comments
Although belief in karma is widespread today, it is often misunderstood by both critics and believers. This fascinating and thought-provoking book draws on the work of Rudolf Steiner to present an old idea in a new way.
In Understanding Karma: Rethinking Destiny, Reincarnation and Free Will, Jens Heisterkamp argues that karma is an essential aspect of individual freedom, allowing us to take responsibility for our actions as part of our ongoing spiritual development. He also looks at how the idea of karma can enhance our encounters with others through an awareness of our deeper connections.
In this extract Heisterkamp explores how the idea of karma is viewed in the popular imagination, and outlines the aims and approach of the book.
Introduction
Do we live more than once? Have we lived other lives before our current one, and will there be others when this one is over? To consider this possibility raises many questions. Will I myself come back again? If so, how is that possible? Where will I exist between lifetimes? And why can I not remember anything from before this earthly life? If it is true, it will call into question a great many of our assumptions about our lives and the world we live in.
In the West, reincarnation has often been regarded as an exotic flower of Eastern philosophy or dismissed as a crazy, New Age belief. But over the years it has entered more and more into our culture. David Mitchell’s 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, which was later adapted for film, played with the idea that its protagonists return as different characters as the plot unfolds over many centuries – from the South Pacific in the eighteenth century to a distant post-apocalyptic, post-technological future. Other recent films, TV series and publications likewise touch on it. For example, an article in Focus Online in January 2022 carries the header, ‘How to Rid Yourself of Bad Karma’; a Frankfurt-based campaign to end child poverty in India calls itself ‘Karma Hero’; and Plan International, an organisation that works with children in over eighty countries to build a more equal world, created its first-ever animated Global Ambassador called Karma Grant, an aspiring musician who works to promote the education of young women in developing countries.
In other words, the idea of reincarnation and karma has become common currency, even if used in somewhat tongue-in-cheek way. According to a Statista survey carried out in Germany in 2017, 35% of those questioned were convinced they had lived before. Helmut Obst, a religious studies academic who wrote a book called Reinkarnation: Weltgeschichte einer Idee (Reincarnation: The History of an Idea), speaks of reincarnation as a trans-religious concept. Even mainstream adherents of Christianity subscribe to it, as the Protestant theologian Ruediger Sachau discovered in a survey of Swiss congregations in 1998. Today, it seems, more people believe in reincarnation than in the Resurrection.
But popularisation of the idea should not lead us to overlook the fact that this is by no means a simple or straightforward matter; many who feel sympathetic towards such an outlook may not necessarily realise its full ramifications. The idea of reincarnation and karma (or destiny) is still new and unaccustomed in Western culture, not least because it appears to contradict everything we know from empirical science. Many regard the idea as a refuge for those who cannot cope with the complexities of modern life and thus seek solace in a seemingly irrational belief system. Nor does it lend credence to the idea when advocates of reincarnation spend their time speculating about which important historical figure they may have been in a former life, or when they declare, with a total lack of feeling, that the misfortune of others can be explained by their conduct in a past life.
But none of this is implicit in the idea itself. In this book I want to show that there are very valuable grounds for discussing the idea of reincarnation and karma, and I would contest the view that we cannot take it seriously in our scientific era. Markus Gabriel, one of the most highly regarded modern philosophers, writes in his book Der Mensch als Tier (Man as an Animal):
Even the belief in reincarnation is not one that science can refute or exclude since the sciences only describe, explain and to some degree predict how processes and structures arise in the universe, yet no conclusion can be drawn from this that the processes and structures that the sciences investigate are the only ones that exist.
The idea of reincarnation and karma is not ‘provable’ in the everyday sense, but it is nevertheless one worth examining and testing. The aim of this book is therefore to ask how far we can get by examining the principle of reincarnation and karma from a rational standpoint. It is not concerned with satisfying anyone’s curiosity about the past lives of particular personalities, nor with tips as to how one might discover one’s own previous incarnations. Anyone wishing to pursue this must look elsewhere. Above all this means that I will endeavour to maintain transparent distinctions between philosophical phenomenology, conceptual conclusions and speculation. I will seek to differentiate between what I can ascertain through my own insights and what I have derived from other sources, most notably the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. Of primary importance in investigating where this idea can lead us is an open, questioning attitude.
But at the outset I believe I can already say this: the idea of reincarnation and karma possesses a hidden potential capable of altering everything we think about our world and ourselves.
About the author
Jens Heisterkamp has a PhD in modern history from the University of Bochum, Germany. He is editor-in-chief for the anthroposophic magazine Info3, and writes and edits books on history, spirituality and ethics. He lives in Frankfurt, Germany.
