The Origin and Goal of the Human Being

GA 53 — 10 November 1904, Berlin

The Soul World

In these lectures, I have repeatedly taken the opportunity to point out that the theosophical worldview does not lead away from the work in the sensual, immediate realm that is assigned to human beings, that it does not lead up into fantastical, illusory realms, as is so often claimed by the opponents of this worldview. I have repeatedly rejected this. But today, in particular, as we seek to enter the world of theosophical concepts, which human beings must pass through between death and a new birth, this must be emphasized once again; for the opponents of the theosophical worldview will be all too inclined to declare everything I describe in this realm to be imaginary, something completely fantastical. And yet, it is precisely in these worlds that lie above the sensory world, in these supersensible realms, that those who are able to look more deeply into the nature of things recognize the true essence, the true reason for all beings. Just as no one is able to construct a steam engine without knowing the nature of steam, so no one is able to understand and explain what is happening around our sensory organs without knowing the nature of the soul and spirit. The causes of the physical lie in the supersensible, in the superphysical. As true as it is that we ascend to higher realms, it is equally true that we seek to comprehend this supersensible essence only in order to be able to act here in this world. We must know the essence of the supersensible in order to carry it into the world of our senses. I say that this must be emphasized in particular because we are entering realms that are completely hidden from the sensory eye. For sensory observation, the human being is dead at the moment when the soul-spiritual has separated from the physical. No eye and no ear can provide information about what the fate of the human being is in the time between death and a new incarnation.

Let us consider this fate between death and rebirth. To this end, let us delve into the two realms of our existence that belong to our life, that belong to our life just as much as the sun and the moon and all things that are on our earth. Only, human beings, equipped with only their physical senses, know nothing of these higher worlds. They live in them, but living in a world and knowing about it are two completely different things. The German philosopher Lotze and the poet-philosopher Hamerling have expressed very beautifully, time and again, that if human beings had no eyes or ears, the whole world around us, appearing in sounds and colors, would be dark and silent. It is only because we have these sensory organs that the world shines in colors and resounds in sounds. We must say of this world that we know only as much of it as is accessible to us through our sensory organs.

An interesting book has just been published that tells us about the inner life of a woman — Helen Keller — who became deaf, blind, and mute at the age of one and a half, yet still managed to develop a far-reaching, downright brilliant inner life. Let us imagine, in clear mental image, how the world, which shines in colors and resounds in tones for other people, must appear to such a person, and let us imagine how the world, which was previously colorless and lightless, shines and is enriched with new qualities for someone who was born blind and then had eye surgery; then we have a picture of the person who awakens from sensory perception to spiritual perception, who is operated out of darkness into light. Above the ordinary world lies a spiritual world that is a reality for those whose spiritual eyes are open. This spiritual world is also called the astral world in theosophical literature. Many objections have been raised against the term astral world, because it was believed to be a medieval prejudice. But it is not without reason that this world has been called astral by those who have spiritual vision. For just as colors and sounds appear to the physical senses, so too do all those facts that we summarize with the terms desires, instincts, passions, drives, wishes, and feelings appear as true realities in this astral world. Just as humans digest, see, and hear, so too do they desire, have passions, and have feelings. They live in the world of passions, urges, and desires, of feelings and wishes, just as they live in the physical world. And just as the physical eye, when it encounters another human being, sees their physical characteristics, so the opened spiritual eye sees what we summarize as soul characteristics. Just as the physical senses can distinguish electricity from light or light from heat, so the spiritually opened eye can distinguish between an instinct or desire present in the soul of another and the feeling of love, devotion, or religious piety. Just as heat and light are different, so love and religious piety are different in the world of the soul. And because these qualities shine like colors that are tinged with the astral for the spiritually open eye, they have been called astral.

Here I must insert some occult mental images. By this we mean those mental images that relate to the supersensible, which can only be gained by those whose spiritual and soul senses are open. Nothing is absolutely hidden. Desires, cravings, and passions are only hidden from those whose soul organs are not open. With our soul organs, we can recognize what human beings have of the qualities of the soul world in themselves. Just as each person approaches us with a certain physiognomy, so too does each person approach us with a certain psychic physiognomy. And just as each person has a physical body, so too does each person have a body that shines in psychic light, which is larger than their physical body, enveloping them like a cloud of light that glows and shimmers in a wide variety of colors. I mention both deliberately, because both are present. Of the qualities that relate to thoughts and ideas, some can be seen shining, others only glowing. This cloud of light, which is invisible to the ordinary eye but visible to the seer, is called the human aura. It contains everything that I have described as spiritual qualities. We can distinguish precisely between those qualities that the soul has because it inclines toward the sensual, because it clings to the sensual, the desires that come from the fact that human beings desire the sensual, and those that relate to selfless devotion, to feelings of love or religious piety. When the aura is permeated with feelings that come from the lower instincts associated with material life, it flows through the soul in various forms, in lightning-shaped or other figures, in blood-red or reddish-orange or reddish-yellow colors, while everything associated with nobler feelings, with nobler passions, such as enthusiasm, piety, and love, appears in the aura of the human being in beautiful greenish colors. yellow colors, while everything related to nobler feelings, to nobler passions, such as enthusiasm, piety, and love, appears in the aura of the human being in beautiful greenish, greenish-blue, blue-violet, and violet-reddish colors.

Thus, on the one hand, the human being's soul is oriented toward the material, desiring the material, clinging to it, and on the other hand, this soul is equipped with the opposite pole, through which it rises to the noble and is repeatedly inflamed and permeated by the noble. The life of the soul is divided between these two qualities. Those who live in the green, blue, and violet colors go through many reincarnations in order to acquire these nobler qualities. At first, the soul is equipped with the lower qualities, with drives, desires, passions, instincts. It must have these, for if the soul did not have what we call in occult philosophy the desire for the sensual, the soul would not be able to act in the sensory world. The fact that human beings are active in the sensory world, that they acquire possessions and use the materials of the sensory world to form tools for their lives, springs from the fact that human beings have desires for sensual life. This desire is initially the only driving principle for the still undeveloped soul in the times when it undergoes its first reincarnations. Only in this way is the youthful soul set in motion. As the soul then progresses through rebirths, it increasingly rises to act not only out of desire, but out of knowledge, devotion, and love. Thus the soul progresses on its pilgrimage through the world from desire to love. This is the path the soul takes: from desire to love. The soul that desires clings to the physical and sensual. But the soul that loves allows itself to be permeated by the spirit, obeys the spirit, fulfills the commandment of the spirit. This is the difference in the age of souls. Young souls are those that desire, mature souls are those that love, that is, allow the spirit to work within them. In the soul world or in the astral world, we see this soul body of the human being shining in its various qualities, and we can thereby distinguish the degree of maturity that a human soul has. All the qualities that we can observe in this soul body stem from devotion to the sensual or from devotion to the spiritual.

Now we will also understand what “dying” actually means. Let us try to understand the concept, the mental image of dying, with this newly acquired concept. What happens first when a person dies? That which has not only followed physical laws in their physical body, but has also obeyed the laws of the soul — the hand that moved according to the feelings that swept through the soul, the gaze that looked out into the world because it was carried by the spiritual qualities in the soul, the physiognomy that played out according to the form given to it by the soul — everything that obeyed the soul in life goes its own way after the death of the body. The human body, insofar as it is a combination of physical and chemical forces, no longer follows the impulses of the soul, but the physical forces of the world, which now completely claim it. From then on, it belongs to the outer physical world, and no one who has only dealt with those who have overlooked this can decide that the soul-spiritual, which previously ruled the body, has disappeared, for now the soul-spiritual is only accessible to the open eye of the clairvoyant human being. In the last few lessons, which deal with the basic concepts of theosophy, we will hear how human beings can have their eyes opened to the higher life already in this life and thus become aware of what I have described. But you can see from the outset that the fate of the spirit after death can only be understood from the point of view of the supersensible. Someone who is only concerned with natural science is not called upon to discern anything about the spiritual. Human beings were equipped with physiological and chemical powers. After death, they no longer have control over these; their “body” is then only a spiritual body. The desires, passions, love, enthusiasm, and piety that lived within them were not bound by physical and chemical laws; rather, they drew these laws into their sphere of influence. After death, the soul is there as it was before, only unmixed with the physical body. If, as we have seen, human beings consist of spirit, soul, and body during their physical life, after death they consist of spirit and soul. And just as a person lives their life in the physical world, so too do they live their existence afterwards in the higher world, in the soul or spirit world. These are the places that a person must pass through, the land of souls and the land of spirits.

Let us take a closer look at these two. One can view these astral worlds or mental worlds in the same way as our physical world. Just as there are manifold natural forces in our physical world, such as heat, electricity, and magnetism, so too are there manifold forces in these worlds. These can be divided into very specific groups, which we must learn about, because only then can we gain insight into the fate of the soul after death. There we have the lowest group of soul characteristics, the actual world of desires, which occultists call the world of so-called desire-fire. It is the world that is created in our soul itself by the soul's lowest inclinations toward the physical body. All those feelings of our soul that come from the soul's desire for the physical are expressed in the world of desires. This is the lowest form of soul life, the fire of desires, which is why it has also been called the burning fire of desires in mysticism. Let us now take a preview of the nature of contemplation; this will explain to you the difference between life in the body and life without the body when you consider this characteristic of the soul, which is connected with the fire of desires. What is desire for the soul living in the body? It is a downward striving of the soul's longing for a physical object, for physical satisfaction. Only then does the color of the soul's burning desire, which flows out of the soul like electric current flows out of an electrically charged tip, change when the desire is satisfied. The current changes immediately when the desire is satisfied. Then the fire of desire ceases to burn. This is an important moment for the soul researcher, when a desire finds its satisfaction. To the observer of the soul, it appears as if a fire is being extinguished with water. The fact that this fire of desire can be extinguished by satisfaction is because human beings have a body. Sensual desire can only be satisfied sensually. There is the palate that desires tasty things. But the moment there is no longer a palate, it is impossible to satisfy the desire. The soul is attached to feelings, to the sensual world. Desire can only be satisfied as long as the soul is connected to the body. The moment it is no longer connected to the body, it is impossible to satisfy desire, and it suffers unspeakably from the impossibility of no longer being able to be satisfied. This is one of the states that the soul has to go through in Kamaloka. In order to free itself, it must become acquainted with that state which, while allowing desire to exist, demonstrates the impossibility of satisfying the soul. Then the soul gradually learns to cast off desire. This is a mental image that must be grasped if one wants to understand what happens between death and a new birth. However, we must first learn about the further processes after we have taken a close look at what we call the soul world and the spirit realm.

Before I describe the fates between death and another birth, I will describe precisely this group of soul qualities and soul processes that we find in the supersensible world. Desire was the first. The second is spiritual attraction, that which is not immediately desire. However, it is connected with the sensuality that surrounds us when we speak of human sensuality. It is the attraction that expresses itself in nobler colors, which signifies the joy of devotion to immediate sensuality; which allows the feeling to rise, to be uplifted by the color that surrounds us, by the form we experience, by the smell we sense approaching us. This devotion to the sensual, this weaving and living through the sensual organs in the environment, is what we call the power of spiritual stimulation. — Another area of spiritual life is the realm of desires. Desires relate to the soul's feeling of sympathy for what lives in its environment, and therefore directs its feelings in the form of desire toward this object in the environment. It no longer lives merely through the senses in the sensual environment, but fills itself with the feeling of love for this environment. However, this is still completely filled with selfishness, with egoism. In theosophical language, we call soul love that is still filled with egoism the actual quality of soul desires, the world of desires. With this, we have become acquainted with the third group of soul experience, the world of desires. The fourth group is that in which the soul is no longer directed toward something in the environment, but rather toward that which lives in its own body; where the feeling is directed toward that which takes place in its own body as well-being, as pain, as feelings of pleasure and displeasure. We refer to this inner surge of feelings in one's own existence, this self-pleasure, this pleasure in existence, as the fourth group of soul forces in every being. And a fifth group of soul forces leads us from the world of desire into the world of the soul pouring out through sympathy. Everything we have learned so far has been connected with desire, with the soul relating things to itself. Now we learn about things where the soul radiates its essence, where it sympathizes with other beings in its environment. There are two kinds of this. First we have to do with love for nature and then with love for our fellow human beings. We refer to these soul forces as the fifth group of soul facts with the name of soul light. Just as the sun radiates its physical light, so the soul radiates its light when it sympathizes with the world, when it envelops it, illuminating it with the light of its love. To those who have only organs for the physical, this seems illusory. But to those who have spiritual eyes and ears, it is much more real than the table and walls that surround us, much more real than the light of a physical flame. The sixth group of soul facts is what the occultist calls the actual soul force, that which fills the soul with enthusiasm for its task in the world, the loving devotion to duty that shines in beautiful violet and blue-violet colors. This forms the spiritual light that draws the drives and impulses for human activity from the soul. This is particularly developed in philanthropic people. These feelings accompany the great acts of devotion of the human soul in this physical world. These are the experiences of the sixth group. And the experiences of the seventh, the highest group, are the forces of the most essential spiritual life of the soul. This is where the soul no longer relates to the merely sensual with its feelings, but where it allows the light of the spirit to shine into it, where the soul sets itself higher tasks than it can achieve in the mere sensory world, where its love extends to that spiritual love which Spinoza describes at the end of his famous “Ethics,” where he speaks of the highest pouring into the soul and shining out again as God's ray.

We have observed and traced the soul in the human soul from selfish desire to spiritual universal love. These seven stages of spiritual reality meet the eye of the open-minded everywhere in the world. The world not only shines in colors and resounds in sound phenomena, but also shines in the world of desires, cravings, and passions, and shines in the world of the effects of love. All these are realities. And when the soul is removed from this scene, it is in another scene, which differs from the outer sensory scene in that this outer sensory scene offers only what the eyes and ears and the other senses can initially perceive. For the organ, the sensual veils the soul, because the soul expresses itself through the sensual. Thus, the soul appears only through the sensual. The soul hears through the sounds of language, feels through touch, and so on. The spiritual eye sees beyond this, sees the facts of the soul in their nakedness, in their nakedness. When the soul is removed from the scene of the senses, it lives in the soul world. These are the experiences of the soul in the soul world that it undergoes immediately after death. There it lives in a world free from all physical and chemical forces, in a world of suffering, desires, and drives. It must first develop everything that can be developed there. Without a shell, that is, without a physical shell, it is devoted to what floods toward it and flows through it. It gradually purifies itself through these qualities that flow through it, by getting to know the desires without having the possibility of satisfying them. There the soul learns to live without the physical body. There it learns to be a self without physical pleasure and without physical pain, without physical comfort and without physical discomfort. And there it no longer feels itself to be a self. The soul embodied in the body feels itself to be a self because it is in the body. The soul in the body says “I” to its body. But if it wants to say “I” after death, it learns to know the feeling of the body without the possibility of living it. When it gets used to this, it learns to feel itself as a soul. Man learns to feel himself as a soul in the fourth region, and the more often a person has passed through this region, the longer their soul's pilgrimage has lasted, the stronger their sense of soul self is developed, the more they know, when they are reincarnated, to say “I” not only to their body but also to their soul, the more they feel themselves to be a spiritual being. This is the difference between a person who has undergone many incarnations and a person who has undergone few. The highly developed person feels themselves to be a soul being. — Then the person also gets to know this higher region, which we have described as the soul light, the soul force, and the spirit soul. The person lives and weaves themselves into it. In theosophical literature, these highest parts of the astral realm are commonly referred to as the Summerland. This is the realm in which the soul gradually passes into the spheres of sympathy, where it learns to live in pure love for its surroundings and in pure love for colors. Only when the human soul has passed through these various regions after death is its spirit, the third and highest part of the human being, able to leave behind everything astral, everything soul-related that is filled with desires, cravings, and passions and still clings to the sensual. And only that which belongs to the spirit from the soul, that which the spirit has developed in the soul, lives on after the human being has shed its inclination, its desire for the sensual.

Now the soul enters the region where it no longer has anything to do with the forces that go downwards. Because the spirit permeates it completely, it now enters the realm of Devachan, the actual spirit world. The spirit world that the soul experiences takes up by far the longest time of life after death. The time of purification in Kamaloka is relatively short. Afterwards, in Devachan, everything it has gained in experience in the earthly, physical world comes to free, unhindered expression, so that it can work in love in this physical world of the senses. It is not in the physical-sensual world itself that the spirit can find complete expression. We continually gain experience between birth and death. But these are trapped, like a plant trapped in a crevice in a rock. In the spirit world, the soul strengthens and fortifies itself. The next lecture will deal with this stay of the soul in the spirit world. It will show what the fate of the soul is in the far longer period it has to go through between death and a new birth. The astral world still appears as something oppressive, destined to strip away many things. The spirit world is one that cannot be feared. Nothing connects the spirit that flows through a soul with what draws it toward the merely sensual and material. The fate that he experiences there, which is supposed to reveal to us the true nature of human beings, will have to be drawn from the experiences in Devachan. Let me just mention one more thing. It might seem that the individual areas of the astral world lie on top of each other like individual layers or strata. That is not the case. They are to be understood more as different states of consciousness. It is not the place in which the human being finds himself that changes, but the state of consciousness. The soul world, the spirit world, is all around us. Everywhere there is a world of the soul and spirit around us, which shines like color and light when the soul becomes capable of using its spiritual eyes and ears. This is what causes the entire physical world to sink away for the soul. Just as you might see a veil and then, when the veil sinks away, see behind the veil, so too does the soul experience what is happening in the world of desires and cravings when it casts off the veil of sensual touch, sight, and hearing. Another world then spreads out around it, a world that was otherwise also there around it but had not been experienced, but which is now experienced. It is a different state of experience that the soul enters into. It is not different places, not different areas, it is a metamorphosis of human life. Step by step, human beings progress on their pilgrimage through life. This teaches us that we must seek the reasons for the sensual in the supersensible. We want to take this look into the supersensible in order to return to the real world strengthened, with the full awareness that we are not only sensual beings, but that we are soul and spirit beings. With this full awareness, we work in the world with more vigor, courage, and confidence than if we merely believed that we were only sensory beings. This is what the theosophical worldview directly brings. It should not make people incompetent, but more competent, courageous, powerful, and bold. Theosophy that detracts people from life is not true theosophy. We want to impart knowledge of the supersensible because the origin and essence of the sensible is to be found in the supersensible. All true seekers and genuine occultists have always said this, and it can also be found in all the inspired writings of the peoples of all times. And it sounds as true to us as it does to our own mystics from the wonderful, artistically perfect writings of the East. We find a passage in the Upanishads with which I would like to conclude this reflection today, which tells us so well how the sensory-finite relates to the supersensible, eternally lasting. It shows how the sensory-finite emerges from the eternally lasting, how the individual spark emerges from the flame. The flame remains a whole, it remains eternal, even when the sensual spark dies. The individual sensual phenomenon springs from the eternal and returns to the eternal. Thus say the Upanishads: “Just as sparks, similar in nature, spring forth a thousandfold from the well-kindled fire, so do manifold beings spring forth from the imperishable and return to it.”