The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] Today's lecture will deal with the conditions that human beings must fulfill if they want to develop the powers and abilities that lie dormant within them and gain their own experience and observation of the higher worlds. In the articles “How does one gain knowledge of the higher worlds?”, you have been given a picture of some of the things that human beings must fulfill if they want to walk the path of knowledge, if they want to ascend to the higher worlds. However, these articles can only provide details. Even if they were three times or ten times longer, there is still an infinite amount to say about everything in this field! It will therefore always be useful to provide further explanations in this or that direction. One can only illuminate things from a certain angle at any given time, and one must adhere to the principle of supplementing what one has gained from one angle by illuminating it from another angle. Let us set ourselves the task today of sketching some of the conditions of the path of knowledge, the conditions of the ascent into the higher worlds, from a certain point of view.

[ 2 ] You will remember the hints given in the interpretation of Goethe's “Fairy Tales.” It is about the fact that human beings have soul forces of various kinds and that, on the one hand, their development—that is, thinking within oneself, feeling within oneself, and willing within oneself—determines the ascent, and on the other hand, that human beings bring these three into the right relationship to one another through the method of exercises. Willing, feeling, and thinking must always be developed in exactly the right measure in recognition of the individual spiritual goals of life. For a certain goal, for example, the will must recede, while feeling must come to the fore; for another goal, thinking must recede, and for yet another goal, feeling must recede. All these soul forces must be developed in the right proportions through occult exercises. The ascent into the higher worlds is connected with the development of thinking, feeling, and willing.

[ 3 ] Above all, it is a matter of purifying and cleansing the thinking. This is necessary so that thinking is no longer dependent on external sensory observation, which can be gained on the physical plane. But not only thinking, but also feeling and willing can become powers of knowledge. In ordinary life, they follow personal paths. Sympathy and antipathy follow paths tailored to the individual personality. However, they can become objective powers of knowledge. This may sound unbelievable to modern science. It is easy to believe this about thinking, especially about imaginative thinking directed toward sensory observation, but how could people admit that feeling could become a source of knowledge when they see how one person feels one way and another feels another way about the same thing? How could one assume that something so fluctuating, so dependent on personality as sympathy and antipathy, could become decisive for knowledge and that it could be disciplined to such an extent that it could grasp the innermost essence of a thing? That thought does this is easy to understand; but that even when we are confronted with a thing and this thing arouses a feeling in us, that this feeling can exist in us in such a way that it is not the sympathy or antipathy of the individual that speaks, but that it can itself become a means of expression for what is present in the innermost being of the thing, seems difficult to believe. Furthermore, that the power of the will and desire can become a means of expression for the inner self seems at first glance to be downright frivolous.

[ 4 ] But just as thinking can be purified and thereby become objective, so that it becomes a means of expression for facts in both the sensory and higher worlds, so too can feeling and willing become objective. However, this must not be misunderstood. The way feeling is in ordinary life for people today, in its immediate content, does not become a means of expression for a higher world. This feeling is something personal; the occult exercises that the student receives are aimed at cultivating this feeling, that is, at changing and transforming it. As a result, the feeling becomes something different from what it was when it was still personal. Now, however, one must not believe that when one has reached a certain stage on the occult path through the training of feeling, one can then say from the point of view of the knowing human being: I have a being before me and I feel something of this being — and that what one feels there is a truth, a knowledge. The process is much more intimate and inner, transforming the feeling through occult exercises. This is expressed in the fact that those who have transformed their feelings through the exercises arrive at imaginative knowledge, so that a spiritual content is revealed to them in symbols that are expressions of what exists in the astral world in terms of facts and beings. The feeling changes, it becomes imagination, so that astral images appear in the human being, expressing to him the events of the astral realm. The human being does not see as in the physical world, for example, a rose covered with colors, but in symbolic images, and indeed everything that is presented to us in occult science is presented in images. Such as the black cross decorated with roses. All such symbols are intended to express a certain fact and correspond to astral facts just as what we perceive in the outer physical world corresponds to physical facts. So one develops the feeling, but recognizes it in the imagination.

[ 5 ] The same applies to the will. Once one has reached the stage that can be attained through training the will to a certain degree, one does not say, when a being appears before one, “It awakens a capacity for desire within me”; rather, when the will is developed, one begins to perceive that which is the subject of the sounds in Devachan.

[ 6 ] The feeling is developed within us, and astral vision in the imagination is the result. The will is developed within us, and the experience of devachanic events in spiritual music, in the harmony of the spheres, from which the innermost nature of things resounds to us: that is the result. Just as one develops thinking and thereby attains objective thinking, which is the first stage, so one develops feeling, and a new world opens up at the stage of imagination. And in the same way, one develops the will, and the knowledge of the lower devachanic world arises in inspiration, and finally the higher devachanic world opens up before the human being in intuition.

[ 7 ] So we can say: as man rises to the next stage of existence, images arise for him, but we no longer use them in the same way as our thoughts, so that we ask: how do these images correspond to reality? Instead, things appear to him in images consisting of colors and forms, and through imagination man himself must unravel the essences that reveal themselves to him in such a symbolic way. In inspiration, things speak to us; we do not need to ask questions or unravel concepts, which would be a transfer of the theory of cognition from the physical plane. Instead, the innermost essence of things speaks to us. When we encounter a person who expresses their innermost essence to us, it is different from when we encounter a stone. We have to unravel the stone and think about it. With people, there is something we do not experience in this way, but rather we experience their essence in what they say to us: they speak to us. This is how it is with inspiration. It is not conceptual, discursive thinking, but rather listening to what things say; they express their own essence. It would make no sense to say: When someone dies and I meet them again in Devachan, will I know who I am meeting, since the Devachanic beings must look different and cannot be compared with what is on the physical plane? In Devachan, the being itself says what kind of being it is, just as when a human being not only tells us his name, but continually lets his essence flow toward us. This flows to us through the music of the spheres; misunderstanding is no longer possible.

[ 8 ] Now, this provides a certain clue for answering a question. It is very easy to fall into misunderstandings due to the various descriptions in the spiritual sciences, and one might easily believe that the physical, astral, and devachanic worlds are spatially distinct from one another. We know, however, that where the physical world is, there are also the astral and devachanic worlds; they are intertwined. Now one might raise the question: If everything is intertwined, then I cannot distinguish the three worlds as in physical space, where everything exists side by side. If the hereafter is contained within the here-and-now, how do I then distinguish the astral and devachanic worlds from one another? - One distinguishes them in this way: as one ascends from the astral to the devachanic, the sum of images and colors becomes resonant in their forms to the same degree that one ascends into the devachanic. That which was previously spiritually luminous now becomes spiritually resonant. There is also a difference in the experience of the higher worlds, so that the one who ascends can always recognize, through certain experiences, whether he is in this or that world.

[ 9 ] Today we will characterize the differences between the experience of the astral and Devachanic worlds. It is not only through imagination that we recognize the astral world and through inspiration that we recognize the Devachanic world, but we also know which world we are in through other experiences.

[ 10 ] One link in the astral world is the period that human beings have to go through immediately after death, which is called the Kamaloka period in spiritual scientific literature. What does it mean to be in Kamaloka? We have often tried to describe what it means to be in Kamaloka. I have often used the characteristic example of the gourmet who craves the enjoyment that only the sense of taste can give him. The physical body is stripped away and left behind at death, as is most of the etheric body, but the astral body is still present, and the human being is in possession of the qualities and powers that he had in life within the physical body. These do not change immediately after death, but only gradually. If a person has longed for delicious food, this longing, this craving for enjoyment, remains, but after death he lacks the instrument to satisfy it, for the physical body with its organs is no longer there. He must do without enjoyment, and he craves something he must do without. This applies to all actual Kamaloka experiences, and these consist of nothing other than life in the state within the astral body, where the person still longs for satisfactions that can only be fulfilled by the physical body. And because he no longer has this, he is compelled to deny himself the striving and longing for pleasures: this is the time of weaning. Only then is he freed from it, when he has torn this longing out of the astral body.

[ 11 ] During this entire Kamaloka period, something lives in the astral body that can be called deprivation, deprivation in various forms and nuances and differentiations; this is the content of Kamaloka. Just as light can be differentiated into red, yellow, green, and blue tones, so too can deprivation be differentiated into various qualities, and the characteristic of deprivation is the hallmark of a person who is in Kamaloka. But the astral plane is not only Kamaloka, it is much more comprehensive. However, a person who has only lived in the physical world and experienced only its contents would never be able to experience the other parts of the astral world, whether after death or by other means, if they had not prepared themselves. At first, they can only experience the astral world in deprivation.

[ 12 ] Those who ascend to the higher worlds and know that they are deprived of this or that, and that there is no prospect of obtaining it, experience the content of consciousness of the astral world. Even if someone could be given occult means as a human being so that they could enter the astral plane out of their body, they would always have to suffer deprivation in the astral world.

[ 13 ] How can one train oneself so that one not only gets to know the part of the astral world that is expressed in deprivation, the phase of deprivation, but that one experiences the astral world in the best sense, that one experiences that part which truly expresses this world in the good and best sense? By training in the opposite of deprivation, human beings can enter the other part of the astral world. Therefore, the methods that awaken in human beings the forces that are opposed to deprivation will be those that bring human beings into the other part of the astral world. These must be given to them. These are the forces of renunciation. Just like deprivation, renunciation is also conceivable in many different nuances. With the smallest renunciation we impose on ourselves, we take a step forward in the sense that we evolve toward the good side of the astral world. When we deny ourselves the most insignificant things, we are cultivating something that contributes significantly to experiencing the good sides of the astral world. That is why the occult traditions place so much emphasis on the student withdrawing this or that on a trial basis, on practicing renunciation. This gives them access to the good side of the astral world.

[ 14 ] What does this achieve? Let us first consider the experiences in Kamaloka. Let us imagine that someone leaves the physical body through death or other means. They will then lack the physical instruments of the body. As a result, they will inevitably lack the tools for any kind of satisfaction. Deprivation immediately sets in, and this appears as an imaginative image in the astral world. For example, a red pentagon or a red circle appears. This is nothing other than the image of what enters the field of vision of human beings and corresponds to deprivation in the same way that an object on the physical plane corresponds to what one experiences in the soul as an idea of it. If you have very base desires, very deep cravings, then horrible animals appear to you when you are out of your body. These terrifying animals are symbols of these lowest desires. But if one has learned renunciation, then at the moment when one is out of the body through death or initiation, the red circle is transformed into nothing because one permeates the red with the feeling of renunciation, and a green circle arises. In the same way, the animal will disappear through the forces of renunciation, and a noble form of the astral world will appear.

[ 15 ] Thus, human beings must first transform what is objectively given to them, the red circle or the hideous animal, into its opposite through the developed powers of renunciation, through self-denial. Renunciation conjures up the true forms of the astral world from unknown depths. Therefore, no human being should believe that if they want to ascend into the astral world in the true sense, the cooperation of their soul forces is not necessary. Without this, they would only reach a part of the astral world. They must renounce everything, including all imagination. Those who renounce, renounce, and that is what conjures up the true form of the astral world.

[ 16 ] In Devachan, one has inspiration. Here, too, there is an inner distinction between the parts of Devachan that humans cannot experience passively when they experience them after death. In Devachan, it is so that, due to a certain world connection, not so much harm has yet been done. The astral world has the terrible Kamaloka within it, but Devachan does not yet have this. This will only be the case in the Jupiter and Venus states, when black magic and the like will have caused the same thing to pass into a state of decadence. Then, of course, something similar to what is in the astral world today will develop in Devachan. Here in Devachan, therefore, the relationship is somewhat different in the current cycle of development.

[ 17 ] What first appears before a person when they ascend on the path of knowledge from the astral world to Devachan, or when they follow the path of the simple human being and are led upward after death? What do they experience in Devachan? They experience bliss! That which differentiates itself from the nuances of color into tones is, under all circumstances, bliss. In Devachan, at the present stage of development, everything is a bringing forth, a producing, and in relation to knowledge, it is spiritual hearing. And bliss is all producing, bliss is all hearing the harmony of the spheres. In Devachan, the human being will feel only bliss, pure bliss. When he is led upward through the ladder of human development by means of spiritual knowledge, by the masters of wisdom and the harmony of sensations, or, in the case of ordinary human beings, after death, he will always experience bliss there. This is what the initiate must experience when he has come so far on the path of knowledge. But it lies in the further development of the world that it cannot remain mere bliss. That would only mean an increase in the most refined spiritual egoism. The individuality of man would only ever absorb the warmth of bliss, but the world would not continue in this way. This would result in beings who become spiritually hardened within themselves. For the good and progress of the world, therefore, those who enter Devachan through the exercises must not only be given the opportunity to experience all the nuances of bliss in the music of the spheres, but they must also develop feelings within themselves that are the opposite of bliss. Just as renunciation stands in contrast to deprivation, so the feeling of sacrifice stands in contrast to bliss, the sacrifice that is ready to pour out what one receives as bliss and let it flow into the world.

[ 18 ] This feeling of self-sacrifice was felt by those divine spirits whom we call the Thrones when they began to take their part in creation. When they poured out their own substance on Saturn, they sacrificed themselves for the becoming humanity. What we have today as substance is the same thing that they poured out on Saturn. And in the same way, the spirits of wisdom sacrificed themselves on the old Sun. These divine spirits ascended to the higher worlds; they did not merely passively accept the experience of bliss, but learned to sacrifice themselves during their passage through Devachan. They did not become poorer through this sacrifice, but richer. Only a being that lives entirely in matter believes that sacrifice causes it to disappear—no, developing oneself higher and richer is linked to sacrifice in the service of universal evolution.

[ 19 ] Thus we see that man ascends to imagination and inspiration and enters that sphere where his whole being is permeated with ever new nuances of bliss, where he experiences everything around him in such a way that it not only speaks to him, but where everything around him becomes an absorption of the spiritual tones of bliss.

[ 20 ] The ascent to higher knowledge consists in the transformation of all the feelings that man has, and occult training consists in nothing else than that the rules and methods given to us by the masters of wisdom and harmony of feelings, which have been tried and tested through thousands of years of experience, that through these rules and methods the feelings and will of the human being are transformed and that this leads him up to higher knowledge and experiences. By gradually cultivating and transforming the content of his feelings and will in an occult way, the student attains these higher abilities.

[ 21 ] Those who are involved in the spiritual scientific movement must not be indifferent to whether they have been members for three, six, or seven years. This has meaning. The student must realize the feeling of participating in this inner growth through its inner laws. It is important that we direct our attention to this, otherwise its effects will pass us by.