The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Higher Worlds and Humanity’s Role in Them

[ 1 ] Thoughtful people might perhaps take an event that occurred quite unexpectedly in recent days as proof that there may be many unknown things in the space in which we all find ourselves, from which we suddenly perceive effects without having had any prior inkling of their existence. You have probably already guessed that I am referring to an event that took place last week: On a beautiful afternoon—it was last Saturday—all telegraph lines in France suddenly stopped working; it was impossible to send a telegram or make a phone call to any place in France, and no physicist could fathom what had caused it. By evening, the power was back to normal. This disruption was felt all over the world. No one had any idea beforehand that something like this could happen on our planet—that all telegraph lines would suddenly come to a standstill. Science will surely find the cause. But we must realize that there may be a force constantly at work in the world that we cannot even imagine—connections of which we know nothing, whose mode of operation we cannot foresee.

[ 2 ] We humans belong to the astral world just as much as we belong to the physical world. We also belong to other worlds, but we can only understand the existence of these worlds when we see what forces are at work from the higher realms. For those whose eyes are opened to the astral world, a new reality unfolds: the world in which we see all our drives and instincts, all our passions and temperaments, just as clearly as we see the things around us in the physical world. This astral world, however, is not the highest. It is the one that lies one level higher than our physical world; it is a finer world that permeates our entire world. Then our world is also permeated by an even higher world, the actual spiritual world, which we in Theosophy call the devachanic or mental world and which, once we have opened our eyes to it, enables us to see thoughts—those not interwoven with feelings and desires, that is, pure thoughts—as if they were things. These are the three worlds to which human beings belong; these are the three worlds through which they pass in their lives from incarnation to incarnation. Thus, the astral world is not the highest world we are dealing with. A special lecture will be devoted to the spiritual world.

[ 3 ] We shall now consider this intermediate world, which, because it lies closest to our physical world, is of particular importance to us. We attribute what is known as psychic vision to those whose eyes are open to this sphere. Not only do physical things appear to them, but everything that lives within human beings as instincts, desires, and passions also appears to them as things. This astral world is graded. It is so magnificent that our physical world cannot be compared to it. I can only give a sketchy description of it. Those whose eyes are open to it see things that the ordinary person does indeed perceive, but which they cannot yet unravel. This is psychic vision.

[ 4 ] But there is an even higher form of vision: spiritual vision. This relates to psychic vision much like the view from the top of a mountain—that is, from an elevated vantage point—or from the slope of a mountain down to the places and objects lying in the valley. Imagine a village, a city, and its surroundings, but seen from below, from the ground on which you stand; this is comparable to the physical vision of the average person. If you climb the mountain and stop somewhere near the middle, the view you have from there can be compared to psychic vision. If you climb all the way to the top of the mountain, then you can compare the view with spiritual vision. Only a few people in our age possess this spiritual vision. Later, there will be more people who do. Those who possess it are those who have acquired it through previous incarnations by leading a pure, mental life—those who, in the realm of thought, have sought the paths of pure, crystal-clear perception of the world. The person for whom the pursuit of pure moral action was as natural as it is for the average person to pursue their daily activities, pleasures, passions, and instincts—the person for whom life in pure thought was a matter of course—will then bring with them into the next life the ability to view these things to which they devoted themselves in former lives just as other people view physical things. He sees through the world; he looks, as it were, from above not only into the physical world but also into the one I have described as the astral world. He can describe it—in broad strokes, admittedly—as it appears from above, but he can describe it more clearly than one who possesses only psychic vision.

[ 5 ] Parts of psychic vision are what we experience through hypnotism and magnetism. Somnambulistic vision is also part of psychic vision. Nevertheless, if we remain on the psychic plane, we are not at the summit. Error is still possible there. Only those who possess spiritual vision can survey the world in its entirety. Only those who see things from above have a clear view of the things of the psychic world. The one who is able to look into this psychic world knows as a fact that the origin of the human being, its beginning, does not lie within the physical world. He knows that what is found in the human being as a physical body has been chosen by a higher body, by something that existed before the physical body.

[ 6 ] Two perspectives are possible: the materialistic and the spiritual. The materialistic perspective is the one that believes that human beings create their physical existence out of physical substances and that, according to this view, these material substances then give rise to the spiritual. This view then examines some material phenomenon, asking, for example: What is happening in the organism, what is happening in the subtle functions taking place in the brain, when a feeling or an idea arises within us? The one who possesses psychic vision knows that this body did not construct itself; he knows that the body has been chosen by his own higher self, which dwells within him. “Creating” does not mean what we today call creating, but rather it means choosing. That is to say: the human soul, the psyche, which comes from other regions, has chosen this body so that it may serve as an instrument for pursuing those goals that originate from a higher world.

[ 7 ] Having said this, let me briefly outline how human beings prepare for their earthly pilgrimage. Let me now show how human beings come into being, and at another time we will explore their cosmic origins. Today, I will focus only on what leads to human existence in our present era. I speak of facts, for as I have already said, anyone who speaks about the astral world must weigh every word, must examine it not once, but many times. Do not take my words as spoken casually, but rather as something for which I feel completely responsible. You may accept what I present as facts just as you would accept what the natural scientist presents as facts that he can observe with the telescope, the binoculars, and so on.

[ 8 ] Human beings are not merely living beings; rather, they live over and over again through many, many incarnations. Human beings often take on a physical body. This physical body is the outermost of the layers in which the true self is enveloped. This true human being, who passes from incarnation to incarnation, carrying guilt and atonement from one incarnation to the next, is referred to as the higher self. At birth, this higher self enters our body. After death, this higher self leaves the body, only to reappear in the world in a new incarnation in one and a half to two millennia. In the meantime, this higher self resides in the higher worlds, and, after this self has passed into a kind of state of maturity, it seeks to incarnate again. It lives within it, as it were, the desire to be active once more within material, earthly existence, to learn a lesson once more within earthly existence.

[ 9 ] Now we must consider a twofold, a dual process of human development. This consideration provides us with two sets of facts: one that takes place within our physical world, and the other that takes place in the higher world. For the time being, I will outline only this higher world.

[ 10 ] In the interval [between death and a new birth], the human being is in the purely spiritual world—the mental world or Devachan—a world that has two regions: a purely spiritual, higher world and a lower one. The higher spiritual world, which we also call the “Arupa Sphere,” is always entered by the human being between two incarnations. The undeveloped person stays there for a shorter time, the developed person for a longer time. Every human being must pass through this region. We will see later why. From this region, they must descend into the lower region, the one in which, for us, the subjective thought—the thought-substance—resides. In this region, the Self assumes a thought-body. It surrounds itself with thought-substance, so that we can follow this Self as it now enters the world of thought-substance from the higher region. These spheres are not actually superimposed upon one another, but rather interlocked. It is like a living organism, only this one is more active than our physical organism. After the Self has entered this region of thought and formed an organism out of thought-matter there, a desire drives it further down. It surrounds itself with matter from the astral or psychic world, so that the higher Self, before it enters the physical organism, is already a higher organism. Each of us was a higher organism in the higher regions. It was thought-substance, and this was in turn woven into the astral substance. We were such an organism before we entered the physical body. This astral world is just as clear and transparent to the seer who can explore the psychic sphere as the physical world is to the eyes of the physical researcher.

[ 11 ] In the physical world, we distinguish three types of existence, three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gaseous; in addition, there is what is known as the ether, the ethereal substance that is the reason light travels through space, heat, and so on. This is the finest state on the physical plane. It is exactly the same in terms of classification, but quite different in terms of quality and properties, in the astral world. In the astral world, we are dealing with various astral substances. Something penetrates into the world we know; something permeates all of us humans, and we call it the astral world. In the astral world, we see the astral substances without being able to fully grasp them. Even in the Middle Ages, people who knew something about this spoke of substances through which the drawing in of the self [into the physical] takes place, and they called these substances “humors.” What in our physical world are these various states of matter—solid, liquid, gaseous, and ethereal—are in the psychic world the four humors; but we can only name them according to their reflection, as they are within us, as they live within us. The physical states of matter—solid, liquid, gaseous, ethereal—correspond in the astral world to what we call the four temperaments. That which causes us to have this or that temperament corresponds to a very specific state of matter. In someone who has a choleric temperament in the astral body, the one of the humors that corresponds to the choleric state of matter—cholae—is particularly developed. Thus, in the astral world, we have the temperaments as counterparts to the four states of matter. Just as the ancients spoke of earth, water, air, and fire, so too did they speak of four states of matter in the astral realm, and these consist of astral substances. Depending on whether one or the other astral substance predominates, a person possesses one temperament or the other.

[ 12 ] Just as our physical existence is characterized by space with its three dimensions, there is also an astral space, which is, however, of a different nature than our physical space. And because it is of a different nature, it is difficult for the beginner to find their way there. There is also something in the astral realm that corresponds to the physical dimensions. Just as our physical space has height, width, and depth, there are also specific dimensions in the astral field. And now there is a curious connection between the dimensions in the astral realm and what we call “time” in physical life. Past, present, and future in the physical realm are merely projections, shadowy images of those dimensions that constitute the dimensions of the astral world. In the astral world, too, there is something like past, present, and future as dimensions. But what distinguishes the astral world from our physical one is that there is another dimension, unimaginable to our physical existence, which exists apart from the present, past, and future, and which is often counted as the fourth dimension. This is a figurative, but not entirely inappropriate, expression. No one who lacks an eye for it should speak of the fourth dimension.

[ 13 ] The astral world is confusing to those who glimpse it for the first time. It also differs from the physical world in that things are not solid, but permeable. We therefore also call it the region of permeability. For the astral eye, there are no bodily boundaries as in the physical world; the back of every body is just as visible as the front. In the astral world, we do not, in fact, see from the outside as we do in the physical world. You know that in the physical world we see things as they stand before us, so to speak; for example, we see the trees in an avenue leading away from us in perspective. Space offers us a perspective view. The more distant trees seem to have moved closer together, while the nearer trees seem farther apart. This way of seeing ceases entirely in the astral. There we see things from the inside. If you look at a cube from the outside, the sides of the cube appear to you in perspective. Astral vision is, so to speak, as if you were standing in the center of the cube and could view it from the inside on all sides. Leadbeater also said this in his *Astral Plane*. We can only provide a kind of symbol, a kind of projection of this. Our words refer only to the physical plane; we must therefore first translate what we see in the astral into physical language. When we say that we view things from the inside in the astral, this is merely a translation of what exists in the astral into the physical projection. For the beginner, this creates a kind of confusion because they see things from a different angle [than the one they are accustomed to]. Their perspective changes completely. All beginners share this experience. For example, if you see a number in the astral, say 265, you will, out of old habit, see it as you would from the outside in the physical realm. In the astral, however, your perspective is to view things from the inside. The number must be read as 562 in the astral, because the perspective is from the inside, and thus it must be read symmetrically reversed from the other side. These are the reasons for the confusion that initially arises among beginners whose eyes are opened. It is, however, a theosophical principle that no one’s eyes should be opened unless it is done by the hand of an adept, as we call those knowledgeable in this field. Those who are guided by Masters cannot possibly be exposed to such errors.

[ 14 ] This is the world in which the human being finds themselves before their physical incarnation, before their physical body has been formed. Let us now consider what comes from the physical world to meet the astral organism: the human being’s physical corporeality, which is brought into being by physical, physiological forces. I would like to draw your attention to a fact that concerns both the mystery of birth and death. By entering the physical world, by taking possession of the physical world and weaving physical matter into his being, the human being becomes subject to the laws of procreation, the laws of that birth and that death as we know them in the physical world today. There is, admittedly, another kind of birth and another kind of death; but the birth and death we know have existed only within our epoch of humanity, during the Atlantean period and part of the Lemurian period. These three epochs of humanity [root races] were preceded by two others, in which human beings did not have bodies as dense as ours. They had a fine, not yet gross-material body, and what we now know as the physical process of reproduction was not yet associated with this body. This first occurs within the third root race [during the Lemurian epoch]. Previously, there was a form of reproduction among living beings that is still reminiscent of the lowest natural beings today, which reproduce simply through cell division. A cell constricts and divides; this is asexual reproduction. During the first and second root races, [in the Polar and Hyperborean epochs], human beings reproduced through such a division of the etheric body. These two human races, which preceded the third, reproduced in such a way that one body allowed the other to emerge from within itself. This form of reproduction is now merely a remnant of those most ancient epochs.

[ 15 ] You may know that in ancient times there was a veneration of Adam Kadmon. You know this from Indian esoteric teachings, and you are also familiar with the dual creation story from the Bible. The first creation story tells us: God created humankind, and—as it literally states there—he created humankind male and female. — Sexual reproduction was not the first form of procreation. What is often perceived as a contradiction when viewing the Bible superficially—the two accounts of creation—is not a contradiction, for the first account speaks of those human races in which there was no sexual differentiation yet, who were still male and female. It was not until the third root race, in the Lemurian epoch, that the division of the sexes occurred, along with what we today call physical birth and death. But something else also emerged [during this time] that had not existed before: human beings did not yet possess the power of imagination [in the modern sense]. The fact that we can imagine an object today is something that only came about in the fifth epoch. I can create a mental image, for example, of a bottle. The [earlier humans] could not yet do that. The ability to imagine developed simultaneously with physical materiality.

[ 16 ] Strangely enough, we now encounter one of those important historical facts that subsequently led to the founding of the Theosophical Movement in the present day. In the last two decades of the 19th century, natural science has come to form ideas about sexual reproduction, birth, and death that theosophists had already held centuries ago. The recent period we have all witnessed has shed light on the physical reproduction of humans and, consequently, of higher animals. Today, scientific research no longer holds the same view as it did twenty years ago, namely that the existence of two sexes is necessary. You can read this today in scientific works. Reliable and authoritative research has shown that the current mode of reproduction has a completely different purpose than the one previously attributed to it. For nature could have managed just as well with a single sex. It is now scientifically proven that two sexes are not necessary for reproduction, that something else was intended with sexual dimorphism, for one sex would have been sufficient for reproduction. So what is the purpose of sexual dimorphism? Here, science tells us: Sexual dimorphism arose so that a mixing of qualities could take place. Otherwise, there would be far less diversity in the physical body; later descendants would always exhibit the same type as their earliest ancestors. In order to mix as many substances as possible, to bring about this blending of qualities, nature brought about two sexes. A diversity was to be brought forth in the third human race. And that is also when the first animals came into being. Nature pursued the goal of bringing forth beings as diverse as possible, so that the entities descending from the spiritual and astral realms might find bodies as diverse as possible. Humanity was to find a new body that had undergone the most diverse mixture, so as not to remain the old type. You see, what has been researched here by natural science is precisely what theosophy has taught since ancient times.

[ 17 ] Now that we have seen both the descent of the spiritual and how the physical meets the descending spiritual, let us consider the process once more. What I am saying are facts; it is absolutely certain. I will describe the elements present in the process of human incarnation from both sides. First, in human incarnation we are dealing with the development of the embryo, which in the early days resembles a small fish. I need only sketch this embryo; it looks something like this. (It was drawn on the blackboard; the drawing has not been preserved.) Around the seventeenth day, the astral being comes to meet this embryo; and the psychic researcher knows this astral being as well as the physical researcher knows the physical. The seer sees many funnel-shaped figures in the astral realm. These are the human beings-to-be; these are the beings seeking their physical embodiment. Driven by the urgent desire to incarnate, these forms rush through the astral space at great speed, searching for physical matter. Anyone who has read the second part of *Faust* and remembers the scene with the homunculus will understand it only if they know that Goethe intended to depict this process. These astral forms have the most varied hues, of which we can scarcely form a conception. Within this astral body there is a streak that fades into the indefinite. It is a pale yellow color. This astral body unites with the physical body it has chosen for itself when the embryo has roughly the shape of a small fish. Then a change occurs. The beam of light splits into two parts, into two brightly shining streaks of light. This is the case for the majority of people, and this is how it would appear to you if you could observe human beings during their formation. Only in a few people does a somewhat different process occur. Only a few people exhibit a lasting bright strip, which, however, fades somewhat at the very moment when it disappears entirely in others, yet it remains nonetheless. These are the people who possess spiritual vision.

[ 18 ] We will first focus on the usual process in which the sliver of light divides. Now the astral form unites with the physical human embryo. Everything is permeated by a single droplet, as it were, of a pale yellow liquid. This later develops into the so-called sympathetic nervous plexus, which supplies the human physical nervous system. In addition to the brain and spinal cord system, we have another nervous system, the sympathetic system, which directs the lower functions. One drop flows through the sympathetic nervous system, the other through the brain and spinal cord system. This is how the human being is animated. In accordance with the laws of nature, the two cones of light pass into the physical realm and spiritualize it. In every human being, this radiance appears anew, permeating the brain in particular. When the moment arrives, what the human being has brought with them from their previous life and what they possess from the physical world are indeed united. Thus the two entities that constitute the whole human being come together.

[ 19 ] We have lived in previous incarnations; we have passed through the spiritual world; there we were spirits. The spirit descends through the astral world and surrounds itself with astral matter. This is what a person brings with them from their previous life and what they draw from the astral sphere. These are the two things that a human being brings with them: the spiritual and the astral. The radiance of light represents the abilities we brought with us from past lives. These take hold after the being has satisfied the burning desire to be connected to an astral organism. From now on, the human embryo grows not only through physical force but also from within. What it has gained in past lives now works from within to build the body. It is not your organism that builds your soul, but your soul that builds your organism. The human embryo is only a few days old when it is united with the soul. It is the only thing given to us from the outside. It is given to us through very specific laws. We will discuss them in greater detail.

[ 20 ] In fact, we can only understand a person’s birth and death if we know of the two entities of which they are composed and how these two entities have come together to form the whole person. It is therefore the case that we ourselves work on our external organs; they are not a product of the external world, but a reflection of what we have brought with us.