The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. The World of the Soul

[ 1 ] On several occasions in these lectures, I have taken the opportunity to point out that the Theosophical worldview does not, as is so often claimed by its opponents, lead people away from the work in the sensory, immediate realm that is essential to human existence, nor does it lead them into fantastical, illusory realms. I have repeatedly refuted this. But this must be emphasized once again, especially today, as we seek to enter that world—in our consideration of the fundamental theosophical concepts—which the human being must traverse between death and a new birth; for the opponents of the theosophical worldview will all too readily be inclined to dismiss everything I describe in this realm as something imaginary, as something entirely fantastical. And yet, it is precisely in these worlds that lie beyond the sensory world, in these supersensory realms, that those capable of casting a deeper gaze into the nature of things perceive the true essence, the very foundation of all beings. Just as no one is capable of constructing a steam engine if they do not know the nature of steam, so no one is capable of understanding and explaining what takes place all around our sensory organs if they do not know the nature of the soul and the spirit. The causes of the physical lie in the supersensible, in the superphysical. Just as it is true that we ascend to the higher realms, so it is true that we seek to grasp this supersensible essence solely in order to be able to act here in this world. We must know the essence of the supersensible in order to carry it into the world of our senses. I say this must be emphasized in particular because we are entering realms that are completely hidden from the sensory eye. To sensory observation, the human being is dead at the moment when the soul-spiritual has separated from the physical. No eye and no ear can provide insight into what the human being’s fate is during the time in which, after death, he or she is heading toward a new incarnation.

[ 2 ] Let us consider this destiny between death and rebirth. To this end, let us delve into the two realms of our existence that are part of our lives—realms that belong to our lives just as much as the sun and the moon, and as all things that are upon our earth. Yet the human being, equipped only with physical senses, knows nothing of these higher worlds. He lives within them; but living in a world and knowing about it are two entirely different things. The German philosopher Lotze and the poet-philosopher Hamerling have beautifully expressed time and again that if humans had no eyes or ears, the entire world around us—which appears in sounds and colors—would be dark and silent. It is only because we possess these sensory organs that the world shines with colors and resounds with sounds. We must say of this world that we know only as much of it as is accessible to us through our sensory organs.

[ 3 ] An interesting book has just been published that tells us about the inner life of a woman—Helen Keller—who became deaf, mute, and blind at the age of one and a half, yet went on to develop a far-reaching, almost genius-level inner life. Let us clearly imagine how the world, which glows with colors and resounds with sounds for other people, must appear to such a person, and let us imagine how, for someone born blind who has since undergone eye surgery, the world—which was previously devoid of color and light—begins to shine and is enriched with new qualities; then we have a picture of the person who awakens from sensory perception to spiritual perception, who is surgically brought out of darkness into light. Above the ordinary world lies a spiritual world that is a reality for those whose spiritual eye is opened. This spiritual world is also called the astral world in theosophical literature. Many objections have been raised against the term “astral world,” because it was believed to reflect a medieval prejudice. But it is not without reason that this world has been called “astral” by those who possess spiritual vision. For just as colors and sounds appear to the physical senses, so do all those phenomena that we summarize with the terms: desires, instincts, passions, drives, wishes, and feelings—appear as true realities in this astral world. Just as a person digests, sees, and hears, so does he desire, so does he have passions, so does he have feelings. He lives in the world of passions, drives, and desires, of feelings and wishes, just as he lives in the physical world. And just as the physical eye, when it encounters another human being, sees their physical characteristics, so the opened spiritual eye sees what we summarize as soul characteristics. Just as the physical senses can distinguish electricity from light or light from heat, so the spiritually opened eye can distinguish between an impulse or a desire present in another’s soul and the feeling of love, devotion, or religious piety. Just as heat and light are distinct, so love and religious piety are distinct in the world of the soul. And because these qualities shine forth to the spiritually open eye like color phenomena imbued with the astral, they have been called astral.

[ 4 ] Here I must introduce some occult concepts. By these we mean those ideas that relate to the supersensible realm, which can only be grasped by those whose spiritual and soul senses are open. Nothing is absolutely hidden. Desires, cravings, and passions are hidden only from those whose soul organs are not open. With our soul organs, we can perceive what a person possesses of the qualities of the soul world. Just as a person approaches us with a certain physical appearance, so too does every person approach us with a certain soul appearance. And just as they have a physical body, so too do they have a body that shines in the light of the soul, which is larger than their physical body, in which they are enveloped as in a cloud of light that glows and shimmers in the most varied colors. I mention both intentionally, for both are present. Of the qualities relating to thoughts and ideas, some are seen to shine, others only to glow. This cloud of light, invisible to the ordinary eye but visible to the seer, is called the human aura. It contains all that which I have described as soul qualities. We can clearly distinguish between those qualities that the soul possesses because it is inclined toward the sensory, because it clings to the sensory, the desires that arise from the fact that the human being craves the sensory, and that which relates to selfless devotion, to feelings of love, or to religious piety. When the aura is permeated by feelings arising from the lower instincts associated with material life, these flow through the soul in various forms—in lightning-like or other figures—in blood-red, reddish-orange, or reddish -yellow colors, while everything connected with nobler feelings and nobler passions—such as enthusiasm, piety, and love—appears in the human aura in beautiful greenish, greenish-blue, blue-violet, and violet-reddish colors.

[ 5 ] Thus, on the one hand, the human soul points toward the material, desiring the material, clinging to it; and on the other hand, this soul is endowed with the opposite pole, through which it rises to the noble and is repeatedly illuminated and permeated by the noble. The life of the soul is divided between these two qualities. Those who live out their lives in the green, blue, and violet colors go through many reincarnations in order to acquire these nobler qualities. At first, the soul is indeed endowed with the lower qualities—drives, desires, passions, instincts. It must possess these, for if the soul did not have what we in occult philosophy call the desire for the sensual, the soul would not be able to act in the sensory world. The fact that human beings are active in the sensory world, that they acquire possessions, and that they fashion tools for their lives from the materials of the sensory world, stems from the fact that human beings have desires for the sensory life. This desire is, at first, for the still undeveloped soul—during the times when it undergoes its first reincarnations—actually the sole driving principle. Only through this is the youthful soul set into action. As the soul then progresses through rebirths, it increasingly rises to act not merely out of desire, but out of knowledge, devotion, and love. Thus the soul continues on its pilgrimage through the world, moving from desire to love. This is the path the soul takes: from desire to love. The soul that desires clings to the physical and sensual. But the one that loves allows itself to be permeated by the Spirit, obeys the Spirit, and fulfills the Spirit’s commandment. This is the difference in the age of souls. The young souls are the desiring ones; the mature souls are those that love—that is, allow the Spirit to work within them. In the world of souls or in the astral world, we see this soul body of the human being shining forth in its various qualities, and through this we can discern the degree of maturity that a human soul possesses. All the qualities that we can observe in this soul body stem from devotion to the sensual or from devotion to the spiritual.

[ 6 ] Now we will also understand what “dying” actually means. Let us try to understand the concept, the idea of dying, using this newly acquired concept. What happens first when a person dies? That which, until now, in their physical body, has not only followed physical laws but has also obeyed the laws of the soul — the hand that moved in accordance with the feelings that stirred the soul, the gaze that looked out into the world because it was carried by the spiritual qualities in the soul, the physiognomy that took on different expressions depending on the form the soul gave it — all that which in life obeyed the soul in this way goes its own way after the death of the body. The human body, insofar as it is a complex of physical and chemical forces, no longer follows the soul’s impulses, but rather the physical forces of the world, which has now completely taken possession of it. From now on it belongs to the outer physical world, and no one who has concerned themselves only with those who have overlooked this can decide that the soul-spiritual, which formerly ruled the body, has vanished, for now the soul-spiritual is accessible only to the open eye of the clairvoyant. In the final sessions, which deal with the basic concepts of theosophy, we will hear how a person can already in this life have their eye opened to the higher life and thus become aware of what I have described. But you can see from the outset that the fate of the spirit after death can only be understood from the perspective of the supersensible. Someone who is concerned only with natural science is not qualified to discern anything about the spiritual. Human beings are endowed with physiological and chemical forces. He no longer has control over these after death; his “body” is then merely a soul-body. What lived within him in terms of desires, cravings, passions, love, enthusiasm, and piety was not bound by physical-chemical laws; rather, it drew these into its sphere of influence. The soul remains after death just as it was before, only unmingled with the physical body. If, as we have seen, a human being consists of spirit, soul, and body during physical life, then after death he consists of spirit and soul. And just as a human being lives out their life in the physical world, so too do they subsequently live out their existence in the higher world, in the soul or spiritual world. These are the realms that a human being must pass through: the realm of the soul and the realm of the spirit.

[ 7 ] Let us take a closer look at these two. We can view this astral world or this mental world in the same way as our physical world. Just as there are a wide variety of natural forces in our physical world—such as heat, electricity, and magnetism—so too are there a wide variety of forces there. These can be divided into very specific groups, which we must first get to know, because only through this can we gain insight into the destinies of the soul after death. There we have the lowest group of soul qualities, the actual world of desires, which the occultist calls the world of so-called “desire-fire.” It is the world that is generated within our own soul by the soul’s lowest inclinations toward the physical body. All those feelings of our soul that arise from the soul’s desire for the physical are expressed in the world of desire. This is the lowest form of soul life, the heat of desire, which is why it has also been called in mysticism the burning fire of desire. Let us now take a preliminary look at the nature of contemplation; this will explain to you the difference between life in the body and life without the body when you consider this quality of the soul connected with the fervor of desire. What is desire for the soul living in the body? It is a downward striving of the soul’s longing toward a physical object, toward physical satisfaction. Only then does the color of the soul’s fiery passion change—which flows out of the soul just as an electric current flows from a tip that is electrically charged—when the desire is satisfied. The current changes immediately when the desire is satisfied. Then the fire of desire ceases to burn. This is an important, decisive moment for the soul researcher when a desire finds its satisfaction. To the observer of the soul, it appears as if a fire were being extinguished with water. The fact that this blaze of desire can be extinguished through satisfaction stems from the fact that human beings have a body. Sensual desire can only be satisfied sensually. There is the palate, which craves what tastes good. But the moment the palate is no longer there, it is impossible to satisfy the desire. The soul clings to sensation, to the sensory world. Desire can be satisfied only as long as the soul is connected to the body. The moment it is no longer connected to the body, it is impossible to satisfy the desire, and it suffers unspeakably from the impossibility of no longer being able to be satisfied. This is one of the states the soul must undergo in Kamaloka. To free itself, it must become acquainted with that state which, while allowing desire to remain, brings home to the soul the impossibility of its satisfaction. Then the soul gradually learns to shed desire. This is a concept that must be grasped if one wishes to understand what occurs between death and a new birth. However, we must first become acquainted with the subsequent processes once we have taken a close look at what we call the world of souls and spirits.

[ 8 ] Before I describe the fates between death and a new birth, I will describe precisely this group of soul qualities and soul processes that we find in the supersensible world. Desire was the first. The second is the spiritual stimulus, that which is not immediately desire. It is, however, connected to the sensory realm that surrounds us when we speak of human sensuality. It is the stimulus that expresses itself in nobler hues, which signifies the joy of surrender to immediate sensuality; that allows the feeling to rise, to be lifted by the color that surrounds us, by the form we experience, by the scent we sense approaching us. This surrender to the sensual, this weaving and living through the sensory organs in the environment—this we call the power of the soul’s attraction. — Another realm of spiritual life is the realm of desires. Desires arise from the soul’s feeling of sympathy for that which lives in its environment, and thus directs its feelings toward this object in the environment in the form of desire. It no longer lives merely through the senses in the sensory environment, but fills itself with a feeling of love for this environment. However, this is still entirely filled with self-interest, with egoism. Soul love that is still filled with egoism is what we call, in theosophical language, the actual quality of soul desires, the world of desires. With this, we have become acquainted with the third group of soul experience, the world of desires. The fourth group is that in which the soul is no longer directed toward something in the environment, but rather toward that which lives within its own body; where the feeling is directed toward that which unfolds within the body as well-being, as suffering, as feelings of pleasure and displeasure. This inner surge of feelings within one’s own being, this self-love, this love of life, we designate in every being as the fourth group of soul forces. And a fifth group of soul forces leads us from the world of desire into the world of the soul pouring itself out through sympathy. Everything we have learned so far was linked to desire, was linked to the soul relating things to itself. Now we come to know things where the soul radiates its essence, where it sympathizes with other beings in its surroundings. There are two kinds of this. First, we are dealing with love for nature, and then with love for our fellow human beings. We designate these soul forces as the fifth group of soul realities under the name of the light of the soul. Just as the sun radiates its physical light, so the soul radiates its light when it sympathizes with the world, when it envelops it, illuminating it with the light of its love. This appears illusory to the person who possesses only organs for the physical. But it is far more real to the one who has spiritual eyes and spiritual ears than the table and the walls that surround us, far more real than the light of the physical flame. The sixth group of soul realities is what the occultist calls the actual soul force, that which fills the soul with enthusiasm for its task in the world, the loving devotion to duty that shines in beautiful violet and blue-violet colors. This forms the spiritual light that draws the drives and impulses for human activity from within the soul. This is particularly developed in philanthropic people. These feelings accompany the great, self-sacrificing deeds of the human soul in this physical world. These are the experiences of the sixth group. And the experiences of the seventh, the highest group, are the forces of the most essential spiritual life of the soul. It is there where the soul no longer relates with its feelings to the merely sensory, but where it allows the light of the spirit to shine into itself, where the soul sets itself higher tasks than it can obtain in the mere sensory world, where its love extends to that spiritual love which Spinoza describes at the end of his famous “Ethics,” where he speaks of the Highest pouring into the soul and radiating out again as a ray of God.

[ 9 ] We have observed and traced the spiritual aspects of the human soul, from selfish desire to universal spiritual love. These seven stages of spiritual reality are evident everywhere in the world to those whose eyes are open. The world does not merely shine in colors and resound in sounds, but also shines in the world of wishes, desires, and passions, and shines in the world of the effects of love. All of these are realities. And when the soul is withdrawn from this scene, it is in another scene, which differs from the external sensory scene in that this external sensory scene offers only what the eyes, ears, and other senses can initially perceive. For the organ, the sensory veils the soul, because the soul expresses itself through the sensory. Thus the soul appears only through the sensory. The soul hears through the sounds of speech, feels through touch, and so on. The spiritual eye sees beyond this, perceiving the facts of the soul in their nakedness, in their bare essence. When the soul is removed from the realm of the senses, it lives in the soul world. These are the experiences the soul undergoes in the soul world immediately after death. There it lives in a world free from all physical and chemical forces, in a world of suffering, desires, and instincts. It must first develop everything that can be developed there. Unclothed, that is, without a physical body, it is surrendered to what surges toward it and flows through it. It gradually purifies itself through these qualities flowing through it, by becoming acquainted with the desires without having the possibility of satisfying them. There the soul learns to live without the physical body. There it learns to be a self, without physical pleasure and without physical pain, without physical well-being and without physical discomfort. And there, at first, it no longer feels itself to be a self. The soul embodied in the body feels itself to be a self because it is within the body. The soul in the body says “I” to its body. But if it wants to say “I” after death, it becomes acquainted with the sensation of the body without the possibility of experiencing it. As it weans itself from this, it learns to perceive itself as a soul. A person learns to perceive itself as a soul in the fourth region, and the more often a person has passed through this region, the longer their soul’s pilgrimage has lasted, the more strongly their sense of the soul-self is developed; the more they then know, when they are reincarnated, to say “I” not only to their body but also to their soul; the more they feel themselves to be a spiritual being. This is the difference between a human being who has undergone many incarnations and one who has undergone few. The highly developed individual feels themselves as a soul being. — Then the human being also comes to know this higher region, which we have designated as the soul light, the soul power, and the spiritual soul. There the human being lives and weaves themselves into it. In theosophical literature, these highest regions of the astral realm are customarily referred to as the Summerland. This is the realm in which the soul gradually passes into the spheres of sympathy, into the spheres where it learns to live in pure love for its surroundings and in pure love for colors. Only then, when the human soul has passed through these various regions after death, is the spirit—the third, the highest part of the human being—able to leave behind everything astral and everything soul-related that is filled with wishes, desires, and passions and that still clings to the sensory. And only that which belongs to the spirit from the soul—that which the spirit has developed within the soul—lives on after the human being has cast off the inclination, the longing for the physical.

[ 10 ] Now the soul enters the region where it no longer has anything to do with the forces that descend. Because the spirit permeates it completely, it now enters the realm of Devachan, the true spirit realm. The spirit realm that the soul experiences takes up by far the longest period of life after death. The time of purification in Kamaloka is relatively short. Afterward, in Devachan, everything it has gained in experience in the earthly, physical world is freely and unhindered lived out, so that it may work in love in this physical sensory world. It is not in the physical-sensory world itself that the spirit can find full expression. We continually gain experiences between birth and death. But these are constrained, just as a plant is constrained in a crevice. In the spirit world, the soul strengthens and fortifies itself. The next lecture will deal with this sojourn of the soul in the spirit realm. It will show what the soul’s destiny is during the far longer period it must undergo between death and a new birth. The astral world still appears as something oppressive, destined to shed much. The Spirit Realm is one such place where there can be no fear. Nothing connects the spirit that flows through a soul with that which is drawn toward the merely sensory-material. The destiny it experiences there—which is meant to reveal to us the true nature of the human being—we will have to draw from the experiences in Devachan. Let me mention just one more thing. It might easily seem that the individual regions of the astral world lie one above the other like separate layers or strata. That is not the case. They are to be understood more as different states of consciousness. It is not the place in which the human being finds themselves that changes, but the state of consciousness that changes. The realm of the soul, the realm of the spirit, is all around us. All around us is a world of the soul and the spirit that shines forth like color and light when the soul becomes capable of using its spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. This is what causes the entire physical world to fade away for the soul. Just as you might see a veil and then, when the veil recedes, see beyond it, so too does the soul experience what is happening in the world of desires and longings when it sheds the veil of sensory touch, sight, and hearing. Another world then unfolds around it—a world that was always there, but had not been experienced, and is now being experienced. It is a different state of experience into which the soul enters. It is not different places, not different realms; it is a metamorphosis of human life. From stage to stage, the human being progresses on their life’s pilgrimage. This teaches us that we must seek the reasons for the sensory in the supersensible. We therefore wish to take this look into the supersensible in order to return to the real world thus strengthened, with the full awareness that we are not merely sensory beings, but that we are soul and spirit beings. With this full awareness, we work in the world with greater vigor, courage, and confidence than if we merely believed that we were only physical beings. This is what the Theosophical worldview directly brings about. It is not meant to make people less capable, but rather more capable, braver, stronger, and bolder. That is not true Theosophy, which withdraws people from life. We therefore wish to impart knowledge of the supersensible because the origin and essence of the sensible are to be found in the supersensible. This is what all true sages and genuine occultists have always said, and it is also to be found in all the inspired writings of peoples throughout the ages. And it sounds just as true to us as it does in the wonderful, artistically perfected writings of the East by our own mystics. We find a passage in the Upanishads with which I would like to conclude this reflection today, one that so aptly expresses to us how the sensory-finite relates to the supersensible, the eternal and enduring. It shows how the sensory-finite emerges from the eternal and enduring, just as the individual spark emerges from the flame. The flame remains a whole; it remains enduring, even if the sensory spark dies out. The individual sensory phenomenon springs forth from the Eternal and returns again to the Eternal. Thus say the Upanishads: “Just as from the well-kindled fire sparks, of the same essence, spring forth a thousandfold, so do the manifold beings emerge from the Imperishable and return again into it.”