Supplements to Member Lectures
GA 246 — 4 February 1911, Elberfeld
36. The Connection of Life in the Physical World with Existence in the Astral World and in the Devachan
Little is understood about the connection between our physical world and the neighboring worlds. The view is limited to the world of the senses and the intellect. Those who do not like to concern themselves with it ask: Why should I concern myself with other worlds? The better we work in this world, the better we will be afterwards. Others say: People of other kinds, pastors and so on, take care of it. And they let others take care of it.
The evidence for this, i.e. for what is said about the other worlds, is not believed, it cannot be proven. It is significant how man stands in the physical world, in connection with his destiny in the astral world and in Devachan.
Fate after death depends on three powers of the soul - thinking, feeling and willing. The will in ordinary life serves only to satisfy personal needs. Many powers of thought are used for material needs. Another will goes beyond this, whereby non-personal things are willed. What comes from the spiritual world changes the will completely. Only in this way can we help people to bring spiritual things into their souls. Then we do the will of the gods, the spiritual beings! It is important to want the will of the gods.
A compassionate millionaire often makes people worse because he cannot respond to the souls of those he wants to help. Helping through associations is as convenient as possible, more convenient than looking directly at misery. The society in which we are placed after death depends on the way the will works. If we live only to satisfy ambition and personal desires, then we will come together in Kamaloka with beings of a lower kind. This becomes torture and torment for us. It is a spell that forces us to remain in this society. But if we are devoted to the ideas and tendencies of the spiritual world, then we come together with higher beings after death.
It is difficult for the spiritual researcher to find this or that personality after death; he descends into the lower regions with reluctance. Our will determines our stay in the Kamaloka, especially in the beginning. Great historical personalities with only personal ambition and urges of sympathy and antipathy are confined after death with the lowest beings of the most terrible kind. If they were only exposed to this confinement, they would have blocked their path to further development - which is not even possible - man is not yet evil enough for this. He can improve his fate in later times. The spiritual karma of the world still gives us the opportunity to feel something of how we can be constricted. This is how we are brought into solitude before death.
In another way, man determines his fate through mental concepts. We have concepts only of what is in the physical world - our age is pushing towards it. They would prefer to see the Lord God in physical form, they want to have everything only in the physical world. Light images direct the eyes to the physical and sensual. They want to see, to grasp something.
Man reads in the secret science about the warmth of Saturn, the warmth of blood. The materialist attaches himself only to the physical-sensual object. Even the gods could not depict Saturn in a sensual image (in the skiopticon). Saturn is also a body of heat today. Even gods can only symbolize Saturn through what it is not. Thus a person who thinks only in the physical will know after death that the spiritual world is there, but without perceiving it, in perpetual darkness, without awareness of it. But supersensible thoughts form the organs to perceive the spiritual world, otherwise the spiritual view is clouded, darkened. Through light images people now want to have something for their eyes so that they are blind in the spiritual world. Then man is immersed in the lower world, which he cannot even perceive. This is the kind of loneliness we are only vaguely familiar with on earth. This gives rise to fear and hatred. Hatred has something consuming about it. This is what happens to people who don't want to think about the supersensible world.
The third thing is feeling. This is also twofold in people who allow themselves to be guided by the physical, who are pleasantly or unpleasantly touched by things of the sensual world. There are fewer and fewer people who can feel something for what is above the sensual world. Art in some form gives a feeling for that which is not directly related to the sensory world. There is a spiritual mood that cannot be carried along on stage. There it is on a slippery slope. In this way, one can retain a feeling for that which cannot be seen in the sensory world. Classical German poets awaken delight in the spiritual world. Realistic art on the stage only shows what can be seen by the senses. The stage has only three walls, but in realistic art one pretends that there are four real walls. [...] Everywhere is the opposite, in order to prepare the ground for true art. True art is an imprint of the spiritual world, but need not be schematic. Works such as Raphael's Disputa and the Sistine Madonna are exceptions. They have an inkling of what lies behind the sensual.
The helical line around the flower stem: the staff of Mercury is in every flower. Planets also advance in helical lines. When not only the planets are at work, but the sun itself, it conjures up the blossoming. Thus a flower is an image of the macrocosm, of the spirits of movement. The dynamis - or virtues - are in the individual plant. Linn& organized the plants according to the inner organs, he still had an idea of this. St. John's wort has stamens in three clusters; spiritual forces act as a trinity. The yellow flower of St. John's wort has many points of light in the leaf. [...]
So you can feel your way into the spiritual, which flows down from heaven, lives through the earthly, illuminates it; it appears in every single little stamen. In this way, one can rise from the merely sensual to the spiritual.
Faust goes through the whole bitterness of clinging to the commonplace, from pleasure to desire - but also vice versa, by rising into the spiritual world. Schiller says in the poem “The Artists”: “Only through the morning gate of beauty do you enter the land of knowledge.” And Goethe writes about Schiller: “Behind him, in the insubstantial appearance, lay that which tames us all, the common.” - Anyone who has learned to feel such beauty in spiritual form has done a lot.
In the “Secret Science”, the development of Saturn and the sun are described differently, even in the length of the chapters. The coherence of the whole should be felt. A learned “non-scientist” found faults in the dissimilar style. The manner of presentation is an artistic shaping of knowledge. The way we feel is determined by sensual images and by what we do not see: to spread out ideas in broad areas. The urge after death depends on this, in order to consciously enter the devachan through our own strength. Feelings should also go after the concrete spiritual. Many people are proud of their pantheism. This comes from education and from scholarship, from the science of our time, also from the way people speak of the general spirit. These people were often incarnated in red skins. - In his diary, Hebbel wrote the story of the student who did not understand Plato because [the student] was the reincarnated Plato. - Scholars are not reincarnated Platos and Aristoteles.
Pantheism is reminiscent of the “Great Spirit” among the Redskins. These are those who do not seek spirituality in all thoughts as it manifests itself in particular. One should live into concrete thoughts that the deity had before the earthly state, should glow for the depiction of Saturn, sun, moon; should feel their glory in the warmth of the sun, be pressed into oneself by the warmth of Saturn. The sun is like life that sprouts out on all sides. Spreading sun is in the description of the sun in the secret science. Through internalization and through egoism in the moon: becoming sensible and in sensibility the possibility of egoism. Then we prepare ourselves not only to be drawn like a sack, but through feeling and sensations for the spiritual world. Then we look out of the Kamaloka into the free blue heavenly space, through the intuition of the Devachan, into which we are transferred. Otherwise there is terrible torment, even in devachan. (This probably means that one cannot be conscious in devachan.)
“A useless life is an early death.” Then it goes back to the sensual world as soon as possible to get the tools to procure organs. Only in the physical world is it possible to educate oneself. The earthly world is the school for consciousness in the spiritual world. In our time, many people are preparing themselves to be as blind as possible in the spiritual world. All things depend on man himself.