The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophy and Rosicrucianism IV

[ 1 ] Since we have the task today of pursuing the destinies of man through the spiritual world, it will be helpful if we first form an idea of what is actually meant by a world in the spiritual-scientific sense.

[ 2 ] Our perception of the world around us depends on the abilities and organs we have for perceiving it. If we had different organs, the world would be quite different for us. If, for example, humans had no eyes to see light but an organ through which they could perceive, say, electricity, then you would not perceive this room as bright and flooded with light, but you would see electricity flowing in the wires that run through the room; you would see it twitching, flashing and flowing everywhere. So what we call our world is dependent on our sense organs.

[ 3 ] So is the astral world nothing more than a sum of appearances that man experiences around him when he is separated from his physical and etheric bodies, and when he can use these forces within himself to see what he otherwise cannot see. This is precisely the case when he has shed his physical body and etheric body. The organs of perception for the astral world are the organs of the astral body, analogous to the sense organs for the physical body. Let us now take a look at the astral world.

[ 4 ] The spiritual seer can perceive this astral world through the methods that we will discuss later, even here in the physical body. This astral world differs considerably from our physical world. First of all, you can form an idea of what is around you in the astral world by calling to mind the last remnant that a person has of his former clairvoyance in ancient times, that is, the dream life. You all know this dream life from experience, and you know it as a world of chaotic images. But why do we dream at all? We know that during this dream-life in bed the physical body and the etheric body are lying there, while the astral body hovers above them. During a full, deep, dreamless sleep, the astral body is completely removed from the etheric body; during dream sleep, filaments of the astral body are still embedded in the etheric body, and through these, the person perceives more or less confused images of the astral world. The astral world is as permeable as the images in a dream, it is as if it is woven out of dreams. But these dreams differ from ordinary dreams in that these images are a reality, just as real as the physical world. The nature of the perception is very similar to the perception in a dream: it is also symbolic. You all know that the dream world is symbolic. Everything that is absorbed from the outside world into sleep is symbolized in dreams. I will give you some typical examples of dreams, and from these you will be able to see how dreams are symbolized on the basis of simple external impressions.

[ 5 ] For example, you dream that you are catching a tree frog. You feel the slippery tree frog very clearly: when you wake up, you feel that you are holding the cold corner of the bed sheet in your hand. Or you dream that you are in a musty cellar full of cobwebs; you wake up with a headache. Or you see snakes in your dream and, when you wake up, you notice that you have pain in your intestines. Or an academic dreams a long story of a duel from the beginning of the jostling to the end of the fight in the pistol challenge: the shot is fired – then he wakes up and notices that the chair has fallen over. From the entire course of this last dream image, you can also see that the time conditions are quite different. Not only that time is constructed backwards, so to speak, but also that the whole concept of time loses its meaning in the dream experience. You dream an entire life in a fraction of a second, just as our whole life passes before our mind's eye in the moment of a fall or drowning. But what is particularly important in all the dream images mentioned is that they represent images that have a cause. This is the case in the astral world in general. And we have reason to interpret these images. The same astral experience always appears as the same image; there is regularity and harmony in this, whereas ordinary dream images are chaotic. One can eventually find one's way around in the astral world just as one can in the sensual one.

[ 6 ] The astral world is woven out of such images, but these images are the expression of soul entities. After death, all human beings are clothed in such images themselves, which are sometimes very rich in colors and forms. So too, when a person falls asleep, his astral body can be seen in flowing and changing forms and colors. All astral entities appear in colors. If a person has astral vision, he perceives these astral entities in a flowing sea of colors.

[ 7 ] Now this astral world has a peculiarity that seems strange to someone who hears about it for the first time: everything in the astral world is present as if in a mirror image, and therefore you as a student must first get used to seeing it correctly little by little. For example, you see the number 365, which corresponds to the number 563. This applies to everything you perceive in the astral world. For example, everything that emanates from me seems to come towards me. It is extremely important to take this into account. Because when, for example, such astral images come about through illness, you have to know what to think of them. Such images occur very often in delirium, and such people can see all kinds of grotesque and pictorial figures coming towards them, because in such pathological conditions the astral world is open to people. These images naturally look as if the things were rushing towards the person, whereas in reality they emanate from him. The doctors of the future must know this, because such things will become more and more frequent in the future due to the suppressed religious yearning. The motif for the well-known painting 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony', for example, is also based on such an astral image experience. If you think about all this to the very end, it will no longer seem strange to you that time also reverses in the astral world. The experiences of 'dream' already give you a hint of this. Do you remember the example of the dreamed duel just mentioned? Everything here runs backwards, and so does time. Thus, in the astral experience, one can first follow the fruit on the tree, then the blossom, and back to the germ.

[ 8 ] And so it is after death – this is the time of disaccustomment – the whole life runs backwards through the astral world, and you relive your life again from back to front and complete it with the first impressions of your childhood. But this is much faster than here in the physical world and takes about a third of your life on Earth. You experience many other things as you go through life backwards. Let's assume that you died at the age of eighty and are now living your life backwards until the age of forty. For example, you may have slapped someone once, causing them to experience pain from you. Now it is so in the astral world that this sensation of pain also occurs as it were in a mirror image; that is to say: now you experience the pain that the other person experienced at the time of your slap. And the same is of course the case with all joyful events. — And only when a person has lived through his whole life does he enter the heavenly world. Religious documents are always truths to be taken literally. If you bear in mind what has just been said, you will readily see that a person can only enter the spiritual world – and by the spiritual world is meant what is referred to in the Bible as the “Heaven Realm” or “the Kingdom of Heaven” – when he has first relived his entire life backwards to childhood. And this is the true meaning of Christ's words: “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” When man has gone back to the stage of his childhood, he discards the astral body and enters the spiritual world.

[ 9 ] Now I must describe this spiritual world to you in the form of a story. This realm of the heavens is even more different from the physical world than the astral realm is. But since one can, of course, only describe it using expressions taken from this physical world, it applies even more than for the description of the astral realm above that all these descriptions can only be valid comparatively.

[ 10 ] In this kingdom of heaven, there is also a trinity, as here on earth. Just as we have the three aggregate states here: solid, liquid and gaseous, and then divide the earth into the continental, the oceanic and the aerial regions, so too in the spirit world, albeit only comparatively, three such regions can be distinguished; only the region of the continents is composed of something different from our rocks and stones. What is the solid ground of the ghost land there, that is the archetypes of all physical things. Everything physical has its archetypes, including man. These archetypes look like a kind of negative to the clairvoyant, that is, one sees space like a kind of shadow figure, and radiant light around it. But this shadow is, corresponding to the example of the blood and the nerves, not uniform, while a stone or a mineral in the archetype gives the appearance of a uniformly empty space, around which a radiance of light can also be seen. Just as you walk on solid rock on earth, you walk on the archetypes of physical things there. The land of this spiritual world is composed of this. When a person first enters this land, he always has a very specific vision: that is the moment when he sees the archetype of his own physical body. There he sees his own body lying there clearly. For he himself is spirit. In the case of a normal life on earth, this happens about thirty years after death; and one has the basic feeling: That is you. — Vedanta philosophy has coined the phrase “Tat tvam asi — That is you” as a fundamental insight based on this realization. All such expressions are deeply rooted in spiritual realization.

[ 11 ] The second area of the spiritual realm is the ocean area. Everything that is alive in the physical world, that is, everything that has an etheric body, is like a flowing element in the spiritual realm. Flowing, surging life thus flows through the spiritual realm. It also collects like in a sea basin, like the water in the sea, or rather like the blood that flows through the veins and collects in the heart.

[ 12 ] And thirdly, we have the air region of the ghost country, which is formed by all passions, instincts, feelings and so on. All this you have up there as external perception, like the atmospheric phenomena here on earth. All this roars through the atmosphere of Devachan. As seers, you can perceive in the spirit world what has been suffered here on earth, and what joy prevails here. Every passion, every hatred and the like has an effect in the spirit world like a storm. A battle, for example, has the effect that the seer experiences a thunderstorm in the Devachan world. Thus the entire spiritual realm is permeated with both wonderful joys and terrible passions. And so one can also speak of spiritual ears. When you have progressed to the point of gaining insight into this devachan world, then these surging phenomena can be seen and heard by you, and what is heard is the harmony of the spheres.

[ 13 ] This is how we have characterized the spiritual realm up to this level. But there is still a fourth realm in Devachan. We have seen so far:

[ 14 ] There is now something in human life that cannot be created in the outside world, and the spiritual content of this forms the fourth area of devachan. This includes every original idea, right up to the creativity of genius. Everything that is original, that is, everything that a person brings into this world, thereby enriching it, all these archetypes form the fourth region of devachan. This concludes our description of the lower regions of devachan.

[ 15 ] Beyond that, there are three higher regions, which, however, a person can only reach here during their lifetime through higher initiation – that is, only the initiate – and which, after death, can only be perceived by highly developed individualities. But if such an advanced initiate is able to enter this next higher region of Devachan, what does he experience there? First of all, something that is referred to in esoteric science as the Akasha Chronicle. Everything that happens and has ever happened in the world is preserved as an impression in a subtle, imperishable materiality. I would like to make this somewhat clearer to you with an example: I am speaking to you now; but you would not hear me if my voice could not set the air in vibration. So everything that is spoken by me is expressed here in the air in subtle forms of motion. These forms of motion naturally fade away; but in that fine, spiritual substance that we experience when we come to that higher world, everything that happens here is imprinted, and that remains forever. Every word, every thought, everything that has ever happened in humanity can be read in this Akashic Chronicle. This requires either initiation or the moment when a person, after death, enters the realm of Devachan. That is, when he has developed to such an extent that after death he is able to perceive this, after all, high realm of Devachan. Then he can see into the past. This Akashic record is a writing in which everything that has ever happened is stored. It is not really writing in the physical sense, but images. For example, you see Caesar in all situations of his life; not what he actually did, but the inner impulses that led him to his actions. These Akashic images have a high degree of life, and if they are not interpreted in the right way, they can be the cause of great deception. For example, they are a source of many spiritual aberrations – namely when an Akasha image appears during the sessions. If you quote Goethe, for example, and the Akasha image of November 25, 1797 appears and provides you with information about a question: it answers it in the way that Goethe would have given the answer at the time if the question had been put to him on November 25, 1797. Only someone who is very familiar with the spiritual world can recognize whether it is reality or a mere shadow in such a case. From such descriptions, you can see what these higher realms of the spiritual world look like.

[ 16 ] The first experience is therefore the perception of one's own body; all other experiences originate from this one. The human being experiences a strong sense of liberation from the physical shells, for it is indeed the happy moment when he has discarded the last of the corpses, the astral corpse. Just as a plant wedged in a crevice would experience it as bliss if it were freed, so this feeling of bliss becomes a basic human sensation. This bliss then also permeates and transfigures the more earthly feelings experienced earlier, for example those of friendship, which may have been subject to certain transformations here and are deepened and purified over there. Such a purification also takes place in the love of a mother for her child, and vice versa: the original animalistic feeling of connectedness, which has already become a moral one here, unfolds in Devachan into an even higher moral power. All bonds formed here on earth are deepened in the spiritual realm, permeating each other. Here, through love, man already works his way up out of the narrowness of selfishness into the comprehensiveness of world experience. But there, nothing is closed off or separated from each other. Each works for the other, because work is also the element that sustains, promotes and connects souls there, and love is the inexhaustible source of all life.