The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture Nine

[ 1 ] What is meant by the astral plane, the other world? In occultism, a distinction is made between three worlds: First, the physical world—the world in which we live. Second, the astral world. It contains a realm that corresponds to purgatory. Thirdly, the spiritual world or, according to the Sanskrit term, the devachanic world. It corresponds to the Christian heaven.

[ 2 ] There are also other worlds on this side and beyond these, but we do not want to deal with them in these lectures. They are also beyond all human perception. Only the greatest initiates can have a distant inkling of them. Here we will concern ourselves only with planetary evolution within our solar system.

[ 3 ] The physical plane encloses us in the short span of existence that runs between life and death. Between two incarnations, we move on the astral plane and in the devachan. But the core of the human being remains unchanged. It is reborn, but not for all eternity, for the rhythm of incarnation and reincarnation has begun and will also end. Man has an origin and a goal.

[ 4 ] The astral world is not a place, but a state. It surrounds us, we are constantly bathed in it on this earth. We live in it like those born blind, who feel their way forward. Give them sight through an operation: they will still be in the same spaces, but they will perceive colors and shapes for the first time.

[ 5 ] Similarly, the astral world opens up through clairvoyance. This is a different state of consciousness. In Goethe's scientific works, there is a remarkable passage about the nature of light, considered as the language of nature. “Actually,” he says, "we are trying in vain to express the essence of a thing. We become aware of effects, and a complete history of these effects would probably encompass the essence of that thing. We strive in vain to describe a person's character; but if we compile their actions and deeds, a picture of their character will emerge before us."

[ 6 ] Colors are deeds of light, deeds and sufferings. In this sense, we can expect the same insights from light. Colors and light are in the most precise relationship to each other, but we must think of both as belonging to nature as a whole, for it is nature as a whole that wants to reveal itself to the sense of sight.

[ 7 ] In the same way, nature as a whole reveals itself to another sense. Close your eyes, sharpen your ears, and from the slightest breath to the wildest noise, from the simplest sound to the highest harmony, from the most violent passionate cry to the gentlest words of reason, it is only nature that speaks, revealing its existence, its power, its life, and its relationships, so that a blind person, who is denied the infinitely visible, can grasp the infinitely living in the audible.

[ 8 ] Thus nature speaks down to other senses, to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses; thus it speaks to itself and to us through a thousand phenomena. To the attentive observer, it is nowhere dead or mute; indeed, it has given the rigid earth a confidant, a metal, in whose smallest parts we should become aware of what is happening in the whole mass."

[ 9 ] Let us now try to describe the astral world. To do so, we must accustom ourselves to a completely different way of seeing.

[ 10 ] The first thing we must realize is that it shows us everything that exists as if in a mirror, so that everything is reversed. So if you read the number 365 in astral light, you have to read it backwards: 563. If an event takes place in front of us, it happens in the reverse order to how it happens on Earth. In the astral world, the cause comes after the effect, while in our world the effect comes after the cause. In the astral world, the effect appears as the cause. This proves that the effect and the cause are identical things, effective in the opposite sense, depending on the sphere of life in which we find ourselves. Clairvoyance thus solves, by experimental means, the teleological problem that no metaphysics could solve through abstract thought.

[ 11 ] Another application of this opposite correspondence of things on the astral plane is that it teaches people to know themselves. Feelings and passions are expressed on this plane through plant and animal forms. When humans begin to perceive their passions on the astral plane, they see them in animal forms, but they see these forms, which emanate from them, in reverse: as if they were attacking them. This is because, in the state of image experience, they are already outside of themselves; otherwise, they could not see themselves. Here alone, on the astral plane, humans learn to truly recognize themselves by observing the images of their passions in the form of animals that pounce on them. Thus, a feeling of hatred that one has harbored against a being in the outside world appears as a demon that pounces on us.

[ 12 ] This astral knowledge that one gains about oneself occurs in an abnormal way in those who suffer from mental illness, causing them to see themselves constantly pursued by animal-like beings and distorted figures. They do not realize that what they see is only a reflection of their emotions and passions.

[ 13 ] Genuine initiation does not cause mental disorder, but the premature, sudden intrusion of the astral world into the human organism can cause madness. For in the state of clairvoyance, the human being detaches himself from his physical body. This can pose dangers to the mind and brain of those who lack mental balance and the necessary training.

[ 14 ] The entire Rosicrucian path of initiation was based on training that aimed precisely at making people objective toward themselves, at developing an objective ego in them. It begins with seeing oneself objectively. This conception of oneself allows the astral body to detach itself from the physical body.

[ 15 ] What happens at the moment of death? When, after death, the etheric body, the astral body, and the human ego have detached themselves from the physical body, only the corpse remains in the physical world. Shortly thereafter, the etheric body and the astral body still form a whole. The etheric body imprints the entire memory of the life that has been lived onto the astral body, then slowly dissolves into its element, and the astral body enters the astral world alone.

[ 16 ] The astral body now contains within itself all the desires generated in life, without the means to satisfy them, since a physical body is no longer present. This creates in it a feeling of consuming thirst. This is the origin of the image of Tantalus' torments in Greek mythology. One also has the sensation of being immersed in a blazing fire. This corresponds to Gehenna, purgatory. The idea of fire, of purgatory, which materialists mock, truthfully expresses the subjective state of human beings after death. In contrast, the thirst for unaccomplished deeds gives the soul a feeling of coldness. The actual state is expressed in the coldness that emanates from the soul. It is the coldness that is born of deeds not realized on earth. Spiritualists also sense this in their mediumistic sessions. The soul bound to this astral body must detach itself from its physical relics and acquire new organs in order to learn to live in the astral world.

[ 17 ] Therefore, it now begins to unravel its life from the end to the beginning: from the end to childhood. Only when it has gone through the purifying fire in reviewing its life up to birth is it ready for the spiritual world, for Devachan. This is the meaning of Christ's words to the apostles: “Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

[ 18 ] When a person descends to incarnate on Earth, they are driven by their own desire, and this desire has a good reason. It is the intention to learn. We learn through all our experiences, and we enrich our wealth of experience. But in order for a person to learn on Earth, they are necessarily attracted by sensory enjoyment.

[ 19 ] When the soul arrives on the astral plane after death and relives its life in reverse, it is, on the contrary, a matter of leaving sensory pleasure behind and processing only the experience. Its passage through the astral plane is thus a purification through which it loses its attachment to physical pleasures.

[ 20 ] This is the purification in the Kamaloka of the Indians, in the consuming fire. Man must wean himself from having a body.

[ 21 ] Death first produces in him the effect of an immense emptiness. In the case of violent death and suicide, these feelings of emptiness, thirst, and burning are even more terrible. The astral body, unprepared to live outside the physical body, tears itself away from it in pain, whereas in natural death the mature astral body detaches itself easily. In violent death, which is not caused by the will of the human being, the detachment is nevertheless less painful than in the case of suicide.

[ 22 ] A kind of spiritual death can also occur during life, caused by the premature separation of spirit and body when the astral plane and the physical plane become confused. Nietzsche is an example of this. In his work “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche, without knowing it, brought the astral plane down to the physical plane. This resulted in confusion and a reversal of all concepts, and subsequently in error, madness, and death.

[ 23 ] The twilight state of a large number of mediums is an analogous phenomenon. The medium inevitably loses their orientation between the different worlds and can no longer distinguish between true and false.

[ 24 ] Lying on the physical plane leads to destruction on the astral plane. Lying is murder on the astral plane. This phenomenon is the origin of black magic. The commandment on the physical plane: Thou shalt not kill! — can therefore be translated for the astral plane as: Thou shalt not lie! On the physical plane, a lie is only a word, an idea, an illusion. It can cause a lot of harm, but it destroys nothing. On the astral plane, all feelings and thoughts are visible entities, living forces. On the astral plane, lying causes a clash between the false and the true form; they kill each other.

[ 25 ] The white magician wants to give other souls the spiritual life that he carries within himself. The black magician thirsts to kill, to create emptiness around himself in the astral world, because this emptiness around him creates the field in which he can unfold his selfish passions. To do this, he needs the power that he seizes by snatching the life force of all living things, that is, by killing.

[ 26 ] Therefore, the first law of black magic is: one must defeat life. For this reason, certain schools of black magic teach their students the abominable, cruel practice of stabbing living animals with knives, specifying the exact location on the animal's body that will awaken this or that power in the person performing the sacrifice. Outwardly, one can see similarities between black magic and vivisection. Today's science, as a result of its materialism, is dependent on vivisection. The counter-movement against vivisection springs from deeply moral reasons. But science will not succeed in abolishing vivisection until medicine has regained its higher vision. It is only because it has lost its clairvoyance that medicine has had to resort to vivisection. When we have reconquered the astral world, which has withdrawn from us, clairvoyance will enable the physician to immerse himself spiritually in the inner state of diseased organs, and vivisection will be abandoned as superfluous.

[ 27 ] The knowledge of life in the astral world will lead us to the fundamental realization that the physical world is the product of the astral world.

[ 28 ] One example among thousands can be cited. It is taken from the interrelationship between human sins and events in the astral world, as well as the repercussions of sins committed in the astral world on the earthly world: the epidemics that raged mainly in the Middle Ages. Leprosy is the result of the terror caused by the invasions of the Huns and Asian hordes among the European population. In fact, the Mongolian peoples, descendants of the Atlanteans, were carriers of the seeds of decline. Contact with them first caused fear in the human astral body as a moral defect; the substance of the astral body decomposed, and this field of spiritual decomposition became a kind of breeding ground on which bacteria developed that caused diseases such as leprosy on earth.

[ 29 ] What we cast off from ourselves onto the astral plane today will appear on the physical plane tomorrow. What we sow on the astral plane, we will reap on Earth in future times. We are therefore reaping today the fruits of the narrow-minded materialistic mentality that our ancestors sowed on the astral plane.

[ 30 ] From this we can see the fundamental importance of spiritual truths. If science were to accept the gifts of spiritual science, even if only as hypotheses, the world would change. Materialism has plunged humanity into such darkness that it will take an unprecedented effort to pull humanity out of it. Human beings are falling under the influence of diseases of the nervous system that are developing into veritable psychic epidemics. What we call feelings on earth and what is found on the astral plane returns to earth as reality, as actual events. Nervous disorders that exhaust people come from the astral plane.

[ 31 ] For this reason, the occult brotherhood has decided to come forward openly and reveal the hidden truths about humanity. For humanity is going through a crisis and needs help to regain its health and balance. And this health, this balance, can only be regained through spiritual science.