The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. Reflections of Consciousness: The Superconscious and the Subconscious

[ 1 ] Today and the day after tomorrow, my task will be to discuss some of the more important facts regarding consciousness and karmic connections.

[ 2 ] Essentially, I would like to pick up where the discussions left off in yesterday’s public lecture. It is simply the case with us that in public lectures for a larger audience, certain things must be discussed differently than is possible in branch meetings, because the members of a branch, through their longer collaboration and their longer engagement with the subjects, are prepared in a completely different way to receive and understand these things than is possible with a larger audience. We saw yesterday that we can speak of hidden aspects of human soul life, and we must contrast these hidden aspects of human soul life with the facts of ordinary, everyday consciousness.

[ 3 ] If you were to take even a cursory look at what lives within our soul from the moment we wake in the morning until we fall asleep at night—at the mental images, moods, impulses of will—and if you also include, of course, everything that reaches our soul through external perceptions—then you have everything that can be called the objects of ordinary consciousness. Everything that is present in our life of consciousness in this way is, in our ordinary consciousness, dependent on the instruments of the physical body. You have, after all, the most obvious, self-evident proof of what has just been said in the fact that a person must wake up in order to live within these facts of ordinary consciousness. But this means for us that a person must immerse what is outside the physical body during the state of sleep into the physical body, and their physical body with its tools must be at their disposal if the facts of ordinary consciousness are to unfold. Now, of course, the question immediately arises: In what way does the human being, as a spiritual-soul being, make use of his physical instruments—the sense organs, the nervous system—in order to live in everyday consciousness? — For there is, of course, the belief prevalent in the materialistic world that the human being actually possesses within his physical instruments that which brings forth the facts of his consciousness. I have often pointed out that this is not the case, that we must not form a mental image of the sense organs or the brain producing the facts of consciousness in the same way that, say, a candle produces a flame. The relationship of what we call consciousness to the physical instruments is quite different. It is such that we can compare it to the relationship of a person who sees himself in a mirror to that mirror. When we sleep, we live in our consciousness just as if we were simply walking straight ahead in a room. When we walk straight ahead in a room, we do not see ourselves; we do not see what our nose looks like, what our forehead looks like, and so on. The moment someone steps in front of us with a mirror and holds it up to us, we see ourselves. Then what was already there before comes to meet us; it is then there for us. So it is with the facts of our ordinary consciousness. They live continuously within us; as they are, they actually have nothing to do with the physical body, just as little as we ourselves have to do with a mirror.

[ 4 ] In this area, materialist theory is nothing but nonsense. It is not even a plausible hypothesis. For what the materialist claims can be compared to nothing other than someone asserting: Because he sees himself in the mirror, the mirror brings him into being. — If you wish to succumb to the delusion that the mirror produces you, because you only perceive yourself when the mirror is held up to you, then you might as well believe that the parts of the brain or your sensory organs produce the content of your inner life. Both would be equally “ingenious” and equally “true,” and just as true as the claim that mirrors create people, so too is it true that brains create thoughts. The facts of consciousness exist. It is only necessary for our organization that we can also perceive these existing facts of consciousness. For this, we must encounter what is the reflection of factual consciousness in our physical body. So that we have, within our physical body, something we can call a reflective apparatus for the facts of our ordinary consciousness. Thus the facts of our ordinary consciousness live within our spiritual-soul being, and we perceive them by having the mirror of physicality held up to that which is within us but which we cannot perceive soul-wise—just as we do not perceive ourselves when no mirror stands before us. That is the fact. Only, in the case of the body, we are not dealing with a passive mirroring apparatus, but with something in which processes take place. You can therefore form a mental image of what would happen if the mirror were not occupied in order to produce the reflection: all sorts of processes would take place on the other side. The comparison suffices to truly characterize the relationship of our spiritual-soul being to our body. So let us bear in mind that for everything we experience in everyday consciousness, the physical body is the corresponding apparatus of reflection. Behind—or, if you will, beneath—these ordinary facts of consciousness lie the things that well up into our ordinary soul life and which we designate as the facts that live in the hidden depths of the soul.

[ 5 ] The poet and the artist experience some of this; for if they are true poets and true artists, they know that what they express in their poetry does not come to them in the usual way—through logical reasoning or external perceptions— but rather knows that these things emerge from unknown depths and are truly there, without first being assembled by the forces of ordinary consciousness. But other things also emerge from these hidden depths of the soul’s life. With this, we have then those things which, without our really knowing their origin in ordinary life, play a part in ordinary consciousness.

[ 6 ] But we saw yesterday that one can descend even deeper, into the realm of semi-consciousness, the realm of dreams, and we know that dreams bring up something from the hidden depths of the soul’s life that we cannot bring up in a simple, ordinary way through the effort of our consciousness. When something that a person has long since buried in their memory appears before their soul in a dream image—as happens time and again—it is because, in the vast majority of cases, the person would never be able to bring these things up from the hidden depths of the soul’s life through mere recollection, precisely because ordinary consciousness does not reach down that far. But what is no longer accessible to ordinary consciousness is very much accessible to the subconscious. And in that semi-conscious state present in dreams, many things that have, so to speak, remained, that have been stored away, are then brought up; they surface. Only those things surface that have not actually taken effect in the way that what has otherwise sunk from experience into the hidden depths of the soul usually takes effect. We become healthy or sick, out of sorts or cheerful, but not in the way we experience it in the ordinary course of our lives; rather, it is a physical state brought about by what has sunk down from our life experience—things that can no longer be recalled, yet which work down there in the life of the soul and shape us into who we become over the course of our lives. Many lives would become very understandable to us if we knew what has sunk into the hidden depths in the course of life. We would be able to better understand many people in their thirties, forties, or fifties; we would be able to know why they have this or that disposition, why they feel so deeply unsatisfied in this or that relationship without being able to say what causes this discontent, if we could trace such a person’s life back to childhood. We would then gain an insight into how parents and the wider environment have affected the child, what has been evoked in terms of suffering and joy, pleasure and pain—things that may be completely forgotten but continue to shape the person’s overall disposition. For whatever rolls and surges down from our consciousness into the hidden depths of the soul’s life continues to work there below. Now, the peculiar thing is that what works in this way first works upon ourselves, that it does not, so to speak, leave the sphere of our personality. Therefore, when the clairvoyant consciousness descends there—and this already happens through imagination, through what is called imaginative insight—to where, in the subconscious, the things now described are at work, then the human being actually always finds themselves. They find what is surging and living there within themselves. And that is good. For in true self-knowledge, a person must come to know themselves in such a way that they truly observe and come to know all the driving forces at work within them.

[ 7 ] When a person with clairvoyant consciousness delves into the subconscious through the exercises of imaginative cognition and fails to realize that there, at first, they encounter only themselves—with all that they are and all that is at work within them—then that person is exposed to the most manifold errors; for in no way does one become aware, through any means comparable to ordinary states of consciousness, that one is dealing only with oneself. At some stage, the possibility arises—let us say—of having visions, of seeing figures before oneself that are entirely new compared to what one has otherwise come to know through life experiences. This can occur. But if one were to have a mental image of these being things of the higher worlds, one would be committing a grave error. These things do not present themselves in the same way that the phenomena of inner life appear to ordinary consciousness. If one has a headache, that is a fact of ordinary consciousness. One knows that the pain is located in one’s own head. If one has stomach pain, one perceives it within oneself. When one descends into the depths we call the hidden depths of the soul, one can certainly be entirely within oneself, and yet what one encounters may present itself as if it were outside of us. Let us take a striking example: suppose someone has the most ardent desire to be the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. I have already mentioned that I have counted twenty-four Magdalenes in my life. But let us also assume that at first he does not admit this desire to himself: after all, we do not need to admit our desires to our higher consciousness; that is not necessary. So someone reads the story of Mary Magdalene in the Bible, and it appeals to him immensely. Now the desire to be Mary Magdalene can immediately arise in his subconscious. In his conscious mind, there is nothing other than a fondness for this figure. In the subconscious—that is, without the person being aware of it—the desire to be this Mary Magdalene takes root immediately. Now this person goes through the world. As long as nothing else happens, Mary Magdalene remains pleasing to his conscious mind—that is, to what he knows. In the subconscious lies the burning desire to be Mary Magdalene herself; but he knows nothing of this. So this does not bother him either. He acts according to the facts of his ordinary consciousness; he can go through the world without having to carry in his conscious mind such a terrible fact as the desire to be Mary Magdalene. But let us suppose that such a person comes to achieve something in his subconscious through some use of one or another occult means. Then he descends into his subconscious. He does not need to perceive this fact—“in me is the desire to be Mary Magdalene”—in the same way one perceives a headache. If they were to perceive the desire to be Mary Magdalene, then they would be able to act rationally. They would relate to this desire as one relates to pain and would seek to get rid of it. But when an irregular intrusion occurs, it does not present itself in this way; rather, this desire presents itself as a fact outside the person’s personality, the vision presents itself: You are Mary Magdalene. — It stands there before the person; this fact projects itself. And then, given the state of human development today, a person is no longer able to control such a fact with their ego. With proper, sound, and absolutely meticulous training, this cannot occur; for then the ego accompanies the person into all spheres. But as soon as something occurs without the ego accompanying it, it appears as an objective external fact. The observer believes they are recalling the events surrounding Mary Magdalene and feels identified with this Mary Magdalene. This is certainly a possibility.

[ 8 ] I am emphasizing this possibility today because I want you to see that, in fact, only the care taken in one’s training—only the care with which one approaches occultism—can save one from falling into error. If one knows: You must first see a whole world before you, must perceive facts around you, not something you relate to yourself, something that is within you but appears as a world tableau—if one knows that it is wise to regard what one first sees merely as the outward projection of one’s own inner life, then one has a good safeguard against errors on this path. This is the very best approach: to regard everything at first as facts that arise from within ourselves. Most often, these facts arise from our desires, vanities, and ambition—in short, from the qualities linked to human egoism.

[ 9 ] These things are projected primarily outward, and you may now ask: How does one escape these errors? How can one save oneself from them? — One cannot actually save oneself from them through the ordinary facts of consciousness. The error arises precisely because, so to speak, while one is actually confronted with a tableau of the world, one cannot step outside oneself, but is completely entangled within oneself. From this you can already infer that what really matters is that we find some way to step outside ourselves, to learn to distinguish in some way: here you have one vision and here another. Both visions are outside of us. One may be merely the projection of a wish, the other a fact. But they are not as different as they are in ordinary life, when someone else says they have a headache and when you yourself have a headache. Projected out into space, one’s own inner self is just like that of another. How do we arrive at a distinction?

[ 10 ] For within the occult realm, we must learn to distinguish; we must learn to tell the true impression from the false one, even though they are all intermingled and all present themselves with the same claim to truth. It is as if we were looking into the physical world and found fantasy trees placed alongside real ones: we would not be able to tell them apart. Just as there are true and false trees side by side, there are real facts that exist outside of us, and facts that arise only within our own inner being. How do we learn to distinguish between these two realms, which are intertwined?

[ 11 ] At first, one cannot distinguish between them through one’s consciousness alone. If one remains solely within the realm of imagination, there is actually no possibility of distinction; rather, the possibility lies only in the slow occult education of the soul. As we go further and further, we also come to truly learn to distinguish—that is, to do in the occult realm what we would have to do if imaginary and real trees were standing side by side. We can walk right through the imaginary trees; we bump into the real ones. Something similar, though now of course only as a spiritual reality, must confront us in the occult realm as well. Now, if one proceeds correctly, one can learn to distinguish the true from the false in this realm in a relatively simple way—not through mental images, but through a decision of the will. This act of will can come about in the following way: When we survey our lives, we find in this life of ours two clearly distinguishable groups of events. We often find that this or that, which we succeed or fail at, is simply connected in a very regular way to our abilities. We therefore find it understandable that, because we are not particularly skilled in a certain area, we do not achieve anything special there. Conversely, where we assume we have the necessary abilities, we also find it quite understandable that we succeed in this or that. Perhaps we do not always need to perceive so clearly the connection between what we accomplish and our ability. There is also a more vague way of perceiving this connection. If, for example, someone is plagued by this or that stroke of fate in their later life, they can look back and say to themselves: I was a person who did little to make an effort—or: I was always a reckless fellow. — On the other hand, they may also say to themselves: It is not immediately clear to me how my failure is connected to the things I have done; but it does make sense to me that a careless, lazy person cannot succeed in everything as well as a conscientious and diligent one. — In short, there are certain things where we find it understandable that they play out as our failure or success just as they do, but with others it happens that we do not see the connection, that we say to ourselves: Even though we actually possess this or that ability, by virtue of which we should have succeeded in one thing or another, it simply did not work out. There is also a type of success or failure where we cannot initially see how it relates to our abilities. That is one thing. The other is that, in the face of certain things that otherwise strike us externally in the objective world as strokes of fate, we can sometimes say: Well, it seems fair to us, because we actually provided all the preconditions for it. — But regarding other things, we may hold the view: They occur without us being able to identify anything we can cite as a cause. — We thus have two types of experiences: those that originate from within ourselves and in which we recognize the connection to our own abilities; and the other type, which we have also characterized. And again, with external experiences, there are events where we cannot say that we brought about the conditions for them, as opposed to others where we know: We brought about the conditions.

[ 12 ] Now we can take a brief look around at our lives. There is an experiment that is useful for everyone, which consists of the following. We could compile a list of all those things for which we cannot see the causes in life—that is, things we have succeeded at and about which we have to say: “It was just a fluke”—in other words, instances where we take absolutely no credit for the success. But we also include instances of failure that we remember. Then we consider external events that seemed to happen by chance, for which we have no idea of any underlying motivation. And now we conduct the following experiment: We construct, so to speak, an artificial person who is precisely of such a nature that he has brought about, through his own abilities, all those things for which we do not know why we succeeded. So if we have succeeded at something that requires wisdom, while we ourselves are actually foolish in that regard, we construct a person who is particularly wise in that area and for whom the matter must have succeeded. Or for an external event, let’s do it this way: Let’s say a brick falls on our head. At first we cannot see the causes, but we create a mental image of a person who brings about this “brick-falling-on-the-head” in the following way: First, he runs up onto the roof and loosens the brick there just enough so that he has only to wait a little while before it falls; then he runs down quickly, and the brick hits him. And this is how we handle certain events that we know full well we did not bring about ourselves according to our ordinary consciousness—events that even occur very much against our will.

[ 13 ] Let’s suppose that someone had hit us at some point in our lives. To make it easier to bear, we can place such an event in our childhood. Let’s imagine we somehow hired a person to beat us. So we would have done absolutely everything to deserve those beatings. We thus construct a person who takes upon themselves everything we cannot see the connection to. Yes, you see, if one wants to make progress in the occult, one must do certain things that run counter to what are considered ordinary facts. If one does only what usually seems reasonable, then one gets nowhere in occultism, for what pertains to higher worlds may at first appear foolish to the ordinary person. So it does no harm if the method itself appears foolish to the sober-minded observer. So we construct this person for ourselves. At first, it seems like a grotesque fact to construct this person as something whose purpose one may not understand, but anyone who tries it will make a strange discovery about themselves, namely that they no longer want to let go of this person they have created, that this person begins to interest them. If you try it, you will see: you cannot shake off this artificial person; he lives within you. And strangely enough: he not only lives within us, but transforms within us and transforms very strongly, so that in the end he actually becomes something quite different from what he was before. It becomes something of which we cannot help but say to ourselves: It is, after all, something that lies within us. — This is an experience that truly anyone can have. One can say of what has just been described—which is not the person originally imagined, but what has become of that person—that it is something that resides within us. Now it is precisely this that has, so to speak, brought about the otherwise seemingly causeless things in our lives; so that one finds within oneself something that truly gives rise to what is otherwise inexplicable. It is, in other words, what I have described to you: the path not merely to gaze into one’s own inner life and find something, but rather a path from the inner life out into the environment. For what we fail at does not remain with us, but belongs to the environment. Thus we have drawn something from the environment that does not correspond to the facts of our consciousness, yet presents itself as if it were within us. Then one gets the feeling that one does indeed have something to do with what seems so causeless in real life. In this way, one gains a sense of one’s connection to one’s destiny, to what is called karma. Through this soul experiment, a real path is provided for experiencing karma within oneself in a certain way.

[ 14 ] You might say: “Yes, I don’t really understand what you’re saying.” — But when you say that, you don’t actually fail to understand what you think you don’t understand; rather, you fail to understand something that is actually child’s play to grasp—you just haven’t thought of it. It is simply not possible for anyone who has not carried out the experiment to grasp these things; only those who have carried it out can grasp them. Thus, these things are nothing other than the description of an experiment that one can perform and that everyone can experience. Everyone comes to realize that something lives within them that is connected to their karma. If someone knew this from the outset, there would be no need to give them a rule by which they might arrive at this realization. It is perfectly natural that those who have not yet performed the experiment do not grasp this. However, this is not a matter of comprehending a statement about something our soul is capable of doing. When our soul follows such paths, it becomes accustomed not merely to living within itself, in its desires and longings, but to relating external events to itself, to taking real external events into account. This is how our soul becomes accustomed to it. It is precisely the things we did not wish for ourselves that we have constructed into the very essence of what was at stake. And when we further come to face our entire fate in such a way that we accept it with serenity, that we think of what we usually grumble about and rebel against: We gladly accept it, for we have brought it upon ourselves—then a state of mind develops such that, when it comes to distinguishing the true from the false as we descend into the hidden depths of the soul, we can distinguish the true from the false with absolute certainty. For then it becomes clear with a wonderful clarity and certainty what is true and what is false.

[ 15 ] If one looks at any vision with the inner eye and can make it vanish—as it were, by the mere act of gazing—simply by dispelling all the forces one feels within oneself and has come to know, then it is a mere phantasm. But if one cannot dispel it in this way, but can at most dispel what resembles the external sensory world—that is, the merely visionary aspect—while the spiritual remains as a fixed fact, then it is true. But one cannot make this distinction until one has done what has been described. Therefore, without the training described, there is no certainty in distinguishing between the true and the false on the supersensible plane. The essential point of the soul experiment is this: with ordinary consciousness, we are actually always present with what we desire. Through this soul experiment, we accustom ourselves to regard as willed by us that which we do not desire at all in ordinary consciousness, that which we usually actually find repulsive. One may have reached a certain degree of inner development; but if one does not counter what lives in the soul as desires, as cravings, as sympathy and antipathy, through such a soul experiment with our connection to what we have not desired, then one will make mistake after mistake everywhere. The greatest mistake, particularly in the realm of the Theosophical Society, was indeed first made by H. P. Blavatsky in that she directed her spiritual gaze toward that field where Christ is to be sought, and because in her desires, in her longings, in short, in what was in her higher consciousness, she constantly harbored an antipathy, even a passionate aversion toward all things Christian and Hebrew, while she had a preference for everything in spiritual culture spreading on Earth except the Christian and the Hebrew. And because she never went through what has been described today, a completely false mental image of Christ arose before her, and that is quite natural. And from her it passed on to her closer disciples and has been carried on to this day, only coarsened into the grotesque. These things extend up into the highest spheres. One can see many things on the occult plane, but discernment is something other than mere seeing, mere perception. This must be strongly emphasized.

[ 16 ] Now the question is this: When we delve into the hidden depths of our souls—and every clairvoyant must do this—we first encounter ourselves, essentially. And we must come to know ourselves by truly making that transition, in that we first have before us a world of which Lucifer and Ahriman constantly promise us that they will bestow upon us the realms of the world. That is to say, our inner self is presented to us, and the devil says: This is the objective world. — That is precisely the temptation that even Christ did not escape. The illusions of one’s own inner self were set before him. Now, through his own power, Christ was strong enough to recognize at first glance that this is not a real world, but that it is within. It is only through this inner world—in which we must distinguish two elements, one of which we can set aside—namely, our inner self—while the other remains—that we emerge through the hidden depths of our soul life into the objective supersensible world. And just as our spiritual-soul core must make use of the mirror of our physical body for external perception, for what are the ordinary facts of consciousness, so must the human being, in relation to his spiritual-soul core, make use of his etheric body as a mirroring apparatus for the spiritual supersensible facts that first confront him. The higher sense organs, if we may call them that, appear in the astral body; but what lives within them must be reflected in the etheric body, just as our spiritual-soul aspect, which we perceive in ordinary life, is reflected in the physical body. We must now learn to handle our etheric body. And since our etheric body is usually unknown to us, yet it is what actually animates us, it is only natural that we must first get to know it ourselves before we can learn to recognize what enters us from the supersensible outer world and can be reflected in this etheric body.

[ 17 ] What we experience in this way—as we enter the hidden depths of our inner life and first encounter, so to speak, ourselves, the projection of our desires—is very similar to the life commonly referred to as the Kamaloka. It differs from life in Kamaloka only in that, whereas in ordinary life we advance to the point of being imprisoned within ourselves—for that is what it must be called— our physical body is still there, to which we can always return, whereas in Kamaloka the physical body is gone, and even a part of the etheric body is gone—the part that can initially reflect us at all. But it is the general life-ether around us that serves as the reflecting instrument, and in which everything that is within us is reflected. The time in Kamaloka is such that our inner world—which consists of all our wishes, desires, and everything we feel and are filled with inwardly—builds itself up around us as our objective world. It is important that we realize that Kamaloka life is characterized, first of all, by our being imprisoned within ourselves, and that this imprisonment within ourselves is the prison—all the more locked at first because we cannot return to any physical life to which our entire existence relates. Only when we live through this Kamaloka life in such a way that we gradually come to realize—and one does indeed come to realize this only gradually—that everything that exists cannot be removed from the world except by perceiving oneself in a different way than through mere desires and so on, only then is our Kamaloka prison shattered.

[ 18 ] What does that mean? Let’s suppose someone dies with a specific wish. That desire is part of what projects out into the Kamaloka realm, forming structures around him. As long as that desire lives within him, it is impossible for him to open himself to Kamaloka life with that desire. Only when he realizes that this desire can be satisfied only if it is eliminated, if it is abandoned, if it is no longer desired—in other words, if this desire is torn from the soul, that is, if one behaves in a manner contrary to it—only then, along with the desire, is everything that imprisons us in Kamaloka gradually torn from the soul. Only then do we enter the realm between death and a new birth, which we have designated as the Devachanic, into which one can also enter through clairvoyance once one has recognized that which belongs solely to oneself. In clairvoyance, one attains it through a certain stage of maturity; in the Kamaloka, through time—simply because time torments us so much through our own desires that they are overcome by their very duration. Through this, that which is made to appear to us as if it were the world and its glory is shattered.

[ 19 ] The world of supersensible realities is what is commonly called Devachan. How does this world of supersensible realities present itself to us? Here on this Earth, a person can speak of Devachan only because, in clairvoyance, when the ego is truly overcome, we already enter the world of supersensible realities that objectively exist, and these realities coincide with what exists in Devachan. Now, the most important characteristic of this Devachanic world is that moral facts no longer differ from physical facts or physical laws, but rather that moral laws coincide with physical laws. What does that mean? Well, isn’t it true that in the ordinary physical world, the sun shines on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. One who has committed a crime may perhaps be put in prison, but the physical sun does not eclipse itself. That is to say, in the physical world there is a moral law and a physical one, and these follow two entirely different paths. It is not so in Devachan, not at all; but there it is the case that everything arising from the moral, from the intellectually wise, from the aesthetically beautiful, and the like, is such as leads to creation, and that that which arises from the immoral, from the intellectually untrue, from the aesthetically ugly, leads to decay, to ruin. Indeed, the laws of nature there are such that the sun does not shine upon the righteous and the unrighteous alike, but rather, if we may speak figuratively, it truly darkens before the unrighteous. The righteous person passing through Devachan thus has the spiritual sunshine there, that is, the influence of the fertilizing forces that propel them forward in life. The deceitful or ugly person passes through in such a way that the spiritual forces withdraw from him. There, an arrangement is possible that is not possible here. If two people walk side by side here—one righteous and one unrighteous—then the sun cannot shine on one and not on the other. There, however, in the spiritual world, it is absolutely the case that the quality of the person determines how the spiritual forces act upon him. That is to say, the laws of nature and the spiritual laws do not follow two separate paths there, but the same paths. This is the essential point: In the devachanic world, the laws of nature coincide with the moral and intellectual laws.

[ 20 ] This results in the following: When a person has entered the devachanic world and is experiencing it, everything that remains from the previous life—whether just or unjust, good or evil, aesthetically beautiful or ugly, true or false—is present within them. But all of this operates in such a way that it immediately takes hold of the laws of nature there. Thus, the law there is what we might describe in the physical world as follows: someone who has stolen or lied and goes out into the sun would not be illuminated by it, and would gradually contract an illness as a result of being deprived of sunlight. Or let us suppose that someone who has lied would be left breathless in the physical world. This would be comparable to what happens in the Devachanic world. To the one who has brought this or that upon himself, something of this nature occurs in relation to his spiritual-soul life, such that the natural law corresponds absolutely to the spiritual law. Therefore, as this person’s further development through the Devachanic world proceeds—as they gradually go further and further—such qualities will increasingly take root within them, so that what they then become corresponds to the qualities they have brought with them from their previous life. Let us suppose that someone has been in Devachan for two hundred years after having lied a great deal in a previous life. He lives through this Devachan, but the spirits of truth elude him. That which dies within him comes to life in another soul who has spoken the truth.

[ 21 ] Or suppose someone passes through Devachan with a pronounced quality of vanity that they have not shed. In Devachan, this vanity is an exceedingly foul-smelling vapor, and certain spiritual beings avoid such an individuality from whom the foul-smelling vapor of ambition or vanity flows around them. This is not merely a figure of speech. Vanity and ambition are extraordinarily foul-smelling vapors in Devachan, and as a result, the beneficial influence of certain beings—who then simply withdraw—does not come to pass. It is as if a plant were to grow in a cellar, whereas it can only thrive in sunlight. The vain person cannot thrive. Now he grows up under the effects of this trait. When he reincarnates, he lacks the strength to incorporate the good influences. Instead of developing certain organs in a healthy way, he develops them as a diseased organ system. How we therefore become as human beings in life is shown to us not only by our physical conditions, but also by our moral and intellectual ones. Only when we have left the spiritual plane do the laws of nature and the laws of the spirit exist side by side. Between death and a new birth, however, they are one; the law of nature and the law of the spirit are one, they form a whole. And implanted in our soul are the forces of nature, which have a destructive effect when they are the consequence of immoral deeds in previous lives, but which have a fertilizing effect when they are the consequence of moral deeds. This applies not only to our inner constitution, but also to what befalls us from the outside as our karma.

[ 22 ] The essential feature of Devachan, then, is that there is no distinction there between natural and spiritual laws. And this is also true for the clairvoyant who truly penetrates into the supersensible worlds. These supersensible worlds are quite different from the worlds that prevail here on the physical plane. It is simply not possible for the clairvoyant to make the distinction that the materialistic mind makes by saying: This is merely an objective law of nature. — In truth, behind this objective law of nature there is always a spiritual law, and the clairvoyant cannot, for example, walk across a parched meadow or a flooded area, nor witness a volcanic eruption, without thinking that behind these natural phenomena lie spiritual forces and spiritual beings. For him, a volcanic eruption is at the same time a moral act, even if the morality involved lies on an entirely different plane than one might initially imagine. People who always confuse the physical world with the higher worlds will say: “Yes, if innocent people are destroyed by a volcanic eruption, how can one assume that this is a moral act?” — Such a judgment would be as cruelly philistine as the opposite judgment would be, namely, if one were to regard the eruption as a punishment from God specifically for the people living around the volcano. Both judgments can only be made from the philistine standpoint of the physical plane. That is not the issue; rather, it may involve far more universal matters. The people who live on the slopes of a volcano and whose property is destroyed by it may be entirely blameless in this life. Compensation will then be provided for them later. This does not mean that we should be hard-hearted and not help them—that, in turn, would be a philistine interpretation of the facts—but the fact is that, for example, in the case of volcanic eruptions, certain things happen in the course of Earth’s development through human beings that hinder the entire development of humanity. And it is precisely the good gods who must work to bring about this compensation, so that in such natural phenomena, compensation is indeed sometimes created. The connection in this matter is sometimes only seen in the depths of the occult. In this way, compensation can be created for what is done by human beings themselves that runs counter to the spiritual course of the actual development of the human race. Every event, even if it is merely a natural phenomenon, is at its core also something moral. And it is spiritual beings in the higher worlds who are the bearers of this moral aspect that lies behind the physical facts. So if you simply create a mental image of a world in which it is not possible to speak of a divergence between the laws of nature and the spirit—a world, in other words, in which justice reigns as a natural law—then you have the Devachanic world. Therefore, in this Devachanic world, even non-punishable acts need not be punished by any arbitrary power; rather, with the same inevitability with which fire ignites combustible matter, the immoral destroys itself and the moral promotes itself.

[ 23 ] Thus we see that the innermost characteristic—the innermost nerve, so to speak, of existence—is quite different for the various worlds. We cannot form a mental image of the individual worlds unless we can grasp these peculiarities, which differ radically from one world to another. And so we can well characterize: the physical world, Kamaloka, and Devachan. The physical world is such that in it the laws of nature and the laws of the spirit are two parallel series of facts; the Kamaloka world is such that in it the human being is enclosed within himself as in the prison of his own being; the Devachan world is the pure opposite of the physical world: the laws of nature and the spirit are one and the same. These are the three characteristics, and if you consider them closely, trying to sense how radically different a world is from ours in which the moral, the intellectual, and the law of beauty are all at once natural laws, then you will have a sense of what it is like in the Devachanic world. When we encounter an ugly or a beautiful face in our physical world, we have no right to treat the ugly person as if they were somehow to be rejected spiritually or psychologically, just as we must not regard the beautiful person as if we were immediately required to elevate them spiritually or psychologically. In Devachan it is quite different. There we encounter no ugliness that is not deserved, and a person who, through their previous incarnation, has been compelled to bear an ugly face in some present incarnation, but who in this life strives to be truthful and honest—it is impossible for such a person to appear to us in Devachan with an ugly form; they have most certainly transformed their ugliness into beauty. But it is equally true that the one who is deceitful, vain, and ambitious wanders about in Devachan in an ugly form. Yet there is something else that is also true. We do not see that an ugly face in ordinary physical life is constantly taking something away from itself, or that a beautiful one is constantly giving something to itself. In Devachan, it is thus: the ugly is the element of constant destruction, and we cannot perceive anything beautiful without assuming that it is the work of constant nurturing, of constant fertilization. We must therefore feel quite differently toward the Devachanic or mental world than toward the physical world.

[ 24 ] And it is necessary that you distinguish between these feelings, that you see what is essential and what really matters, that you take in not merely the external description of these things, but that you also take in the feelings and sensations associated with what is described in Spiritual Science. When you try to rise to the feeling of a world in which the moral, the beautiful, and the intellectually true appear with the necessity of a natural law, then you have precisely the feeling of the devachanic world. And that is why we must, so to speak, gather so much and work so hard, so that we can ultimately fuse the things we have worked out into a single feeling. It is impossible for anyone to arrive with ease at a true understanding of what must necessarily be gradually made clear to the world through Spiritual Science. There are certainly many people today who say: Oh, why must so many things be learned in Spiritual Science? Are we to become students again? Surely it all comes down to the feeling. — It does depend on feeling; but it depends on the right feeling, which one must first work out! It is the same with everything. After all, it would be more pleasant for the painter if he did not first have to learn the individual techniques of his art and if he did not first have to slowly bring the picture onto the canvas, but merely had to breathe to have his finished work before him! Now the peculiar thing about our world is that the more things move toward the spiritual, the harder it is for people to realize that a mere breath is not enough! When it comes to music, hardly anyone will admit that anyone who has learned nothing is already a composer; there it is quite self-evident. In painting, it is still admitted to some extent, though somewhat less so. In poetry, even less so; otherwise there wouldn’t be so many poets in our time. For there is actually no era as unpoetic as ours, yet there are so many poets. One simply doesn’t need to have studied it; one needs—which, of course, has nothing to do with poetry—only to be able to write—albeit correctly—and to be able to express one’s thoughts properly! Well, and as for philosophizing, that requires even less! For the fact that everyone today can readily pass judgment on all manner of things pertaining to worldview and outlook on life is taken for granted; for everyone has their own standpoint. And there one experiences time and again that it counts for nothing when someone has, through every means of inner work, come to recognize and explore something in the world. Today it is taken for granted that the viewpoint of someone who has worked long and hard just to be able to say a little about the world’s mysteries is on equal footing with the viewpoint of someone who has simply decided to have a viewpoint. Therefore, in essence, everyone today is a person with a worldview. And now even a Theosophist! According to some views, even less seems to be required for this; for it is said to suffice simply to acknowledge not even the three principles of the Theosophical Society, but only the first of them—and that in its own way! But since this really requires nothing more than professing, with more or less sincerity, that one is a loving person—whether one actually is one is beside the point—then one is simply a theosophist and possesses the right sentiment! So that we continually descend as we begin to assess the standpoint and the capacity for judgment in music and through things that demand less and less, until we reach theosophy! For there it suffices—what one would not consider sufficient in painting—to merely breathe: We are laying the foundation for a universal brotherhood of humanity; there we are, theosophists! — There is nothing else one needs to learn! But this is what matters: that we work with all our energy so that what we have worked out may ultimately coalesce into sensations which, through their coloring, alone provide the highest, the truest knowledge. Strive, by working first, to attain such a feeling that leads to the impression of a world in which the laws of nature and spirit coincide. If you work earnestly—no matter how much effort you may have expended in working through this or that theory—it makes an impression on the devachanic world. If you have not merely imagined a sensation but have worked it out—if you have carefully cultivated it through years of work—then this sensation, then these nuances of sensation, possess a strength that carries you further than these nuances alone can reach; then they have become true through serious, diligent study. Then you are not far from the point where the nuance of sensation springs forth and what lies before you is truly Devachan. For when the nuance of sensation has been truly earned, it becomes the power of perception. Therefore, when work is done truly and genuinely outside of all sensation, based solely on honesty in our branches, and when it is practiced patiently, these workplaces are what they are meant to be: schools to lead people up into the spheres of clairvoyance. And only those who cannot expect this or do not wish to cooperate can hold a false view of these things.