The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Remarks on the relationship of what is described in this writing to the presentation in my Theosophy and Occult Science

[ 1 ] Names which are to express the experiences of the human soul in the elementary and in the spiritual world will have to be adapted to the peculiarities of these experiences. When giving names to these experiences, it will have to be taken into account that the experience in the elementary world already takes a completely different course than in the sensory world. This experience is based on the soul's ability to change and its observation of sympathies and antipathies. The naming will necessarily have to take on something of the changeable nature of these experiences. It cannot be as rigid as it must be for the sensory world. Anyone who does not take this into account, which is in the nature of things, will easily find a contradiction in the naming of this writing and that in my "Theosophy" and "Occult Science". The contradiction is resolved when one considers that in these two writings the names are chosen in such a way that they characterize the experiences of the soul which it has in its full development between birth (conception) and death on the one hand and between death and birth on the other. Here, however, the names are made with regard to the experiences which the clairvoyant consciousness has when it enters the elementary world and the spiritual realms. It can be seen from "Theosophy" and "Occult Science" that soon after the detachment of the physical-sensual body from the soul at death, that body is also detached from it, which in this writing is called the etheric body. The soul then first lives in the entity which is here called the astral body. After its detachment from the soul, the etheric body is transformed within the elementary world. It passes over into the entities which form this elementary world. The soul of the human being is no longer present during this transformation of the etheric body. However, the soul experiences the processes of this elementary world as its outer world after death. This experience of the elementary world from the outside is described in "Theosophy" and "Occult Science" as the passage of the soul through the soul world. One must therefore imagine that this soul-world is the same as that which, from the point of view of supersensible consciousness, is here called the elementary world. - If then the soul in the interim between death and birth - in the sense of what is described in my "Theosophy" - detaches itself from its astral body, it continues to live in the entity which is here called the "true I". The astral body then undergoes for itself, so that the soul is no longer present, that which has been characterized here as "forgetting". It plunges, as it were, into a world in which there is nothing of what can be observed with the senses, or what is experienced in the same way as the will, feeling and thinking that man develops in the sensory life. This world then lives through the soul that continues to exist in the "true I" as its outer world. If one wants to characterize the experience in this outer world, one can do so in the same way as it was done in "Theosophy" and "Occult Science" when describing the passage through the "spiritual realm". The soul experiencing itself in the "true I" then has around it within the spiritual world that which has formed in it as soul experiences during its sensory existence. Within the world, which is described here as that of the thought beings, the soul finds everything between death and new birth that it itself has experienced in its inner being through its sensory perception and through its thinking, feeling and willing in its sensory being.