The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture Nine

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

[ 2 ] There are also other worlds both within and beyond these, but we will not be addressing them in these lectures. Moreover, they lie beyond all human perception. Only the most advanced initiates can have the faintest inkling of them. Here, we will focus solely on planetary evolution within our solar system.

[ 3 ] The physical plane confines us to the brief span of existence that lies between life and death. Between two incarnations, we move on the astral plane and in Devachan. But the core of the human being remains unchanged. It is reborn, yet not for all eternity, for the cycle of incarnation and reincarnation has begun and will also come to an end. The human being has a beginning and an end.

[ 4 ] The astral world is not a place, but a state of being. It surrounds us; we are constantly immersed in it here on Earth. We live in it like people born blind, feeling our way forward. Give them their sight through surgery: they will still be in the same rooms, but for the first time they will perceive colors and shapes within them.

[ 5 ] Likewise, the astral world opens up through clairvoyance. This is a different state of consciousness. In Goethe’s scientific works, there is a remarkable passage on the nature of light, viewed as the language of nature. “In fact,” he states, “we attempt in vain to express the essence of a thing. We perceive effects, and a complete account of these effects would, at best, encompass the essence of that thing. We strive in vain to describe a person’s character; but if, on the other hand, we compile their actions and deeds, a picture of their character will emerge before us.

[ 6 ] Colors are acts of light, acts and sufferings. In this sense, we can expect the same insights regarding light. Although colors and light are in the most precise relationship to one another, we must conceive of both as belonging to nature as a whole; for it is nature as a whole that thereby seeks to reveal itself in a special way to the senses of the eye.

[ 7 ] In the same way, the whole of nature reveals itself to another sense. Close your eyes, sharpen your hearing, and from the faintest breath to the wildest noise, from the simplest sound to the most sublime harmony, from the most vehement, passionate cry to the gentlest words of reason—it is nature alone that speaks, revealing its existence, its power, its life, and its relationships, so that a blind person, deprived of the infinite visible world, can grasp an infinite vitality in what is audible.

[ 8 ] Thus does nature speak downward to other senses—to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses; thus does she speak to herself and to us through a thousand phenomena. To the attentive observer, it is nowhere dead or silent; indeed, it has given the inert earth a confidant—a metal—in whose smallest particles we should perceive what is taking place in the entire mass.”

[ 9 ] Let's now try to describe the astral world. To do so, one must get used to an entirely different way of seeing.

[ 10 ] The first thing one must realize is that it shows us everything that exists as if in a mirror—that is, everything is reversed. So if you read the number 365 in astral light, you must read it backward: 563. When an event unfolds before us, it occurs in the reverse order of how it happens on Earth. In the astral world, the cause follows the effect, whereas in our world, the effect follows the cause. In the astral world, the effect appears as the cause. This proves that the effect and the cause are identical phenomena, operating in the opposite sense depending on the sphere of life in which we find ourselves. Clairvoyance thus experimentally resolves the teleological problem that no metaphysics could solve through abstract thought.

[ 11 ] Another application of this contrasting correspondence of things on the astral plane is that it teaches people to know themselves. On this plane, emotions and passions are expressed through plant and animal forms. When a person begins to perceive his passions on the astral plane, he sees them in animal forms, but he sees these forms—which emanate from him—in reverse: as if they were leaping at him. This is because, in the state of visual perception, he is already outside of himself; otherwise, he could not see himself. It is here alone, on the astral plane, that a person learns to truly recognize themselves by observing the images of their passions in the form of animals rushing toward them. Thus, a feeling of hatred that one has harbored toward a being in the external world appears as a demon rushing toward us.

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

[ 13 ] True initiation does not cause mental disturbance, but the premature, sudden intrusion of the astral world into the human organism can induce madness. For in a state of clairvoyance, a person detaches from his physical body. Consequently, this can pose dangers to the mind and brain of anyone who lacks mental balance and the necessary training.

[ 14 ] The entire Rosicrucian path of initiation was based on a training program specifically designed to help a person view themselves objectively and to develop an objective sense of self. It begins with seeing oneself objectively. This perception of oneself allows the astral body to detach itself from the physical body.

[ 15 ] What happens at the moment of death? Once a person’s etheric body, astral body, and ego have separated from the physical body after death, only the corpse remains in the physical world. Shortly thereafter, the etheric body and the astral body still form a single whole. The etheric body imprints the entire memory of the life lived onto the astral body; then it slowly dissolves into its element, and the astral body alone enters the astral world.

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

[ 17 ] That is why she now begins to retrace her life backward: from the end all the way back to childhood. Only then, when she has passed through the purifying fire by looking back on her life all the way to her birth, is she ready for the spiritual world, for Devachan. This is the meaning of Christ’s words to the apostles: “Truly, I say to you: unless you turn around and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

[ 18 ] When a human being descends to incarnate on Earth, he is driven by his own desire, and this desire has a good reason. It is the intention to learn. We learn through all our experiences, and we enrich our store of experience. But in order for a person to learn on Earth, he is necessarily drawn to sensory pleasures.

[ 19 ] When the soul, having arrived on the astral plane after death, relives its life in reverse, the purpose is, on the contrary, to leave behind sensual pleasure and to process only the experience. Its passage through the astral plane is thus a purification through which it loses its attachment to physical pleasures.

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

[ 21 ] Death initially creates within him a feeling of immense emptiness. In cases of violent death and suicide, these feelings of emptiness, thirst, and burning are even more terrible. The astral body, unprepared to live outside the physical body, tears itself away from it in pain, whereas in the case of natural death, the astral body, having reached maturity, detaches itself easily. In the case of a violent death not caused by the person’s own will, the detachment is, at any rate, less painful than in the case of suicide.

[ 22 ] A kind of spiritual death can also occur during one’s lifetime, caused by the premature separation of spirit and body when the astral plane and the physical plane become confused. Nietzsche is an example of this. In his work Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche, without realizing it, brought the astral plane down onto the physical plane. This resulted in confusion and the reversal of all concepts, and consequently in error, madness, and death.

[ 23 ] The confused state of a large number of media outlets is a similar phenomenon. Inevitably, the media lose their bearings amid the various worlds and can no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood.

[ 24 ] A lie on the physical plane leads to destruction on the astral plane. A lie is murder on the astral plane. This phenomenon is the origin of black magic. The commandment on the physical plane—“Thou shalt not kill!”—can therefore be translated for the astral plane as: “Thou shalt not lie!” - On the physical plane, a lie is merely a word, an idea, an illusion. It can cause a great deal of harm, but it destroys nothing. On the astral plane, all feelings and all thoughts are visible forms, living forces. On the astral plane, a lie brings about a clash between the false and the true form; they destroy one another.

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

[ 26 ] That is why the first law of black magic is: One must conquer life. Consequently, in certain schools of black magic, students are taught the abhorrent, cruel practice of stabbing living animals with a knife, with precise instructions regarding the specific part of the animal’s body that will awaken this or that power in the one performing the sacrifice. Outwardly speaking, one can observe similarities between black magic and vivisection. Modern science, as a result of its materialism, is reliant on vivisection. The opposition to vivisection stems from deeply moral grounds. But science will not succeed in abolishing vivisection as long as medicine has not regained its higher vision. It is only because medicine has lost its clairvoyance that it has had to resort to vivisection. When we have once again conquered the astral world, which has withdrawn from us, clairvoyance will allow the physician to immerse himself spiritually in the inner condition of the diseased organs, and vivisection will be dispensed with as superfluous.

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

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

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

[ 30 ] From this, one can see the fundamental importance of spiritual truths. If science were to accept the insights of spiritual science—even if only as hypotheses—the world would change. Materialism has plunged humanity into such darkness that it will take an unprecedented effort to pull humanity out of it. People are falling prey to disorders of the nervous system that are escalating into veritable psychological epidemics. What we call “feelings” on Earth and what exists on the astral plane returns to Earth as reality, as actual events. Nervous disorders that exhaust people originate on the astral plane.

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