The Rudolf Steiner Archive

54. On the Purpose and Home of Man

[ 1 ] It was only through Pasteur that science was able to prove that life can never arise from non-living matter: The air alone is full of germs of life; if one passes it through embers, no life remains. “All life arises from the living,” says modern science. However, it still believes that the spiritual can arise from the physical. Through Theosophy, we know that the soul never arises in living beings without the addition of the soul seed.

[ 2 ] In the flow of evolution, the inanimate gives rise to the inanimate; for the living to come into being, a new flow must arise containing the seeds of life. But for the soul to come into being, a new flow containing the seed of the soul must arise. The inanimate is thus the ground and the setting within which the living comes into being; it is never its cause. The living is always merely the setting within which the spiritual comes to fruition; it is never its cause. This is what leads us to the great law of reincarnation; we must seek the causes of everything we find in the soul within the spiritual self.

[ 3 ] A species is born where external conditions are suited to it. If they are not, the individual perishes; the species survives. So it is with the soul, which, having lived a crude life throughout its entire past, immediately begins to flourish. The soul is emotionally connected to its surroundings; among those who are alike, the soul retains a tendency to return to its former habits.

[ 4 ] The physical, kamic, and mental bodies are composed of matter governed by corresponding laws. The same law returns after the matter has been shed and the body has unfolded in Devachan; however, it attracts a related law in its new accumulation of matter. This is the law of karma: Every past life remains as a cause for subsequent lives, and the mental characteristics of subsequent lives will be determined by those of past lives, the kamic characteristics by those of past lives, and the physical characteristics by those of past lives.

[ 5 ] The greatest difficulty begins with incarnation into the physical body. Only in life can there be an interaction among the three bodies; the physical body must become an instrument. We know that the virtues that strive upward and downward in human life interact with one another. The “struggle for existence” leads to the lowest level of Kamaloka. “Pleasure-seeking,” “aimlessness,” and “delusion” bring people into the second, third, and fourth divisions of Kamaloka.

[ 6 ] Purification in the three upper levels consists of those elements that constitute the negation of the three higher qualities: confusing the symbol with the thing itself; reading the [illegible] word in the Bible instead of the Spirit; literalism and the worship of symbols find their purification in the fifth region of Kamaloka.

[ 7 ] True piety is devotion to the spiritual. It can be directed toward the temporal or the eternal in the spirit. Those who revel in the realm of the spirit and pursue the fine arts as a pleasure are purified in the sixth division. In the seventh division are the idealists who seek God in nature, the theoretical materialists. Vices are nothing more than the shadows of the Kama world in our physical world.

[ 8 ] The sense of justice that draws Kama-Manas toward Manas must still be purified, but in Devachan, since it leads to unity. The desire to extend this sense of justice beyond the boundaries of one’s immediate surroundings is awakened in the first region of Devachan. The virtue of detachment from worldly matters and devotion to the Spirit develop on the second level of Devachan. People who are pious in the ordinary sense. — Active participation in life and the outward expression of steadfastness are purified in the third realm of Devachan. People who take the initiative and do not let themselves go.

[ 9 ] Wisdom—anyone who can master the physical world from within—leads to the fourth stage. Leaders and guides of humanity in external culture—musicians, educators.

[ 10 ] [For those who] are drawn to the Eternal, [it] becomes a symbol. The height of self-restraint: true beauty. - When a person allows themselves to be guided by the Eternal rather than by the transitory, we have piety, a life of spiritual steadfastness. Prudence elevated is wisdom. The seventh virtue of Manas is [gap in the transcript].

[ 11 ] Just as the scales of Manas can tip, so [can they] give rise to desire and more serious vices. In Kama, everything is interconnected; whoever is entangled in it has no further struggle to wage; the entities that desire it come to him. — When the addiction to pleasure intensifies, then the person no longer lives within himself but in the external world: devotion to pleasure—the fifth vice. Epidemics—lust... When a person is completely determined by external forces, loses all sense of direction, and is consumed by desire, we encounter the sixth vice, which brings them almost to the point of destroying their own being: instability. When they surrender to any and all delusions, fail to see through anything with wisdom, and when delusion dissolves into dullness, we have the final vice.

[ 12 ] The personality, then, holds everything together; it stands between life and death. When it falls away, the two sides—one pushing upward and the other downward—remain. The extent of one’s vices leads one to Kamaloka—the others to Devachan. As long as the personality holds together the struggle for existence and justice, the human being oscillates—when it falls apart, he is drawn in both directions. The balance lay in the personality. Without the personality, virtues or vices revert to their own realms, their own laws. Plant—salts—seed.

[ 13 ] Now we must bear in mind that all human virtues have developed within the realm of desire. As long as a being lives in the lower realm, it remains attached to the lower realm; it cannot live in the higher realm. Everything in a human being that is attached to Kama must be surrendered to Kamaloka; only then can he ascend to Devachan. As long as something physical clings to the plant, it must live in the physical realm. — Kamaloka is the place where what was desire in man must be satisfied; man must live out his virtues there, whereas in sensual life the physical shell was able to hold them together. — Thanatos, Sisyphus.

[ 14 ] There are seven divisions in both realms, because for each vice or J. there must be a corresponding means of purification; these are the laws for the shedding of the seven disharmonious qualities, and the seven divisions of Devachan exist for the unfolding of the seven harmonious qualities. The three lower divisions are for the shedding of the coarse, lower qualities; the three higher divisions are for the purification of the struggle for existence; and the highest division is for the shedding of delusion.

[ 15 ] Everything acquired as a virtue in life finds its development in Devachan; the burden is carried up into Devachan. Everything that occurs in sensory life is the phenomenal, the appearance; it points us toward the noumenal, which lies behind things. We must view the personality in these two aspects. Herein also lies what we call free will, which is granted to us to wage this struggle. Let vice be purified through freedom—the school of incarnation. Ever-renewing interactions.

[ 16 ] Man’s true home is the Arupa region of Devachan. He descends into Rupa and becomes filled with the thought-body. In the Arupa region, he sees what his own Self is; he enjoys the direct contemplation of the Eternal. Now he must go through the school of existence. In Arupa, he would never come into contact with the world of separation. He must now [transform] the beholding of the Eternal into thinking about the separate.

[ 17 ] First: Human beings surround themselves with the substance of thought so that they may contemplate the eternal within the temporal. This brings them into the world of distinct existence according to Rupa.

[ 18 ] Second: The human being surrounds itself with astral substance so that it can sense the eternal within the temporal. — Kama, or the astral world.

[ 19 ] Third: The human being surrounds itself with physical matter so that it may will the eternal within the temporal. Now it has incarnated once more and is subject to the laws of the physical world until it takes the path upward again.

[ 20 ] This is what we call the soul’s pilgrimage through the three worlds. Only then does the higher world come—the formless world, which is the soul’s true home.

[ 21 ] All the ideas we extract from things must lie within those things. We call their specific, characteristic content “form”; but nothing can have form without having some kind of subtle matter. Thus, what exists as an entity is what we conceptualize as “thought-matter.”

[ 22 ] The three upper principles reside within, while the three lower ones form the outer shell. They exist both objectively and subjectively. The first three exist only subjectively. We cannot observe them. In the 4 Prana-Kama-Manas, thoughts arise; they appear as shadows. If Manas, the soul, were to harbor these thoughts, they would stand in such a relationship to Kama-Manas that they would constitute its realities. Depending on the level of consciousness at which a being stands, it designates something as real. When a person loses his physical body, he loses the physical principle. But when one principle is obscured, a new one emerges.

[ 23 ] It shines within the soul 8. If he loses Prana and Kamaloka, 9 occurs; [if he loses] Kama-Manas, then 10 occurs. What is it that becomes active there?

[ 24 ] When he loses Kama-Rupa, a new being enters the depths of his soul; this being is related to Kama-Rupa but is governed by a different law. This draws him into the world of the spirit. In occultism, it is called the spiritual fire. “There will come one who will baptize you with fire.” What enters the physical body is that which encompasses everything, which governs the physical realm with perfect wisdom. We call it “Mahat” or “cosmic wisdom.” It shines forth as we shed the physical body.

[ 25 ] The elements fade away; the laws become a higher principle. What becomes tendency and power shines forth again as a higher principle. When we let go of Kama-Manas—that which is actually our self in this world—our truest self emerges—through the fact that we are this being, our self-awareness. Now we address Manas as our body, the cosmic fire of thought that we carry within us. We address Manas as our objective self, just as we once addressed our physical body. When our self-awareness awakens, we feel ourselves to be a unified being, belonging to the whole. Augustine: We humans see things because they are; things are because God sees them.

[ 26 ] Viewed from a higher plane, we are thoughts of the World Spirit cast into form. In the soul life of the World Spirit, all things truly exist. When we shed our physical form, we are preserved in the soul life. What we call reality in the ordinary sense arises only because the higher principles become obscured and emerge in the world of particularity.

[ 27 ] As an individual, human beings are subject to the laws that govern the six higher realms—as personalities, they are subject to those that govern the four lower realms. That is why the lower realms must be renewed again and again. Human beings must die and be reincarnated because they live in a world subject to the laws of birth and death. It is not human beings who are subject to the laws of birth and death, but the lower worlds in which human beings incarnate from time to time.

[ 28 ] Day and night come and go, but the Law is eternal. We carry the Law upward; it shines in all its beauty once we have shed the physical. Humanity continually carries that which is united and eternal upward into the higher realm. It is humanity’s task to draw out from the lower world as much of the higher world as is hidden within it. That is why, in esoteric terms, humanity is compared to a bee. Humanity must lift up the temporal in order to unite it with the eternal. Because it cannot do this all at once, it does so through successive incarnations. Since the world does not incarnate all at once, but rather successively in epochs, humanity must do the same. The reason for reincarnation lies in the evolution of the world. Thus, by evolving, we redeem not only ourselves but also the world, and we fail in our duty toward the Eternal if we do not advance our own evolution.