On the Astral World and Devachan

GA 88 — 28 October 1903, Berlin

1. The Mystery of Birth and Death

If a snail were to crawl through a hall in which Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was being played, the snail would probably hear nothing of all that from which the people who are in the same hall are moved into the most beautiful sensations. The tones of the symphony are expressed in the air waves of the hall, these air waves spread to all sides; they are the outer expression of the magnificent tonal coherence. This sound connection goes through the organism of the snail as well as through the organism of the human being. In the human being it evokes sensations of the highest kind, the snail remains untouched by it. It is in the same medium, in the same oscillating tonal vein as the human being, but it knows nothing of what is going on around it. A world is around it, and it is in this world, but it has no idea of this world. And nevertheless, this world of the sound-weight is not in another place, where the snail is not, but in the same place, where also everything is, what the snail needs. The space in which the snail is located is thus filled by the facts which the snail can perceive, but it is also filled by a sum of facts which the snail cannot perceive.

We have thus established that appearances can live around a being without the being having any idea of them, and we can raise the question whether we humans do not perhaps also live in a world which is filled with facts and appearances of which we initially perceive nothing, of such facts and appearances which relate to our world in the same way as the tonal texture of the Ninth Symphony to that which a snail is able to perceive. The question must therefore touch us, whether that, what we feel and perceive in a space, in which we are, is everything, what occurs in our environment. There could be facts in our environment which are not there for us simply because we have not developed the organs for the perception of these facts. There could be beings in our world or we humans ourselves could develop into beings who are able to perceive far more than what is in our world around us. There could be comparatively a similar relationship between more or less developed people, as between the snail and the people.

This is the question which must awaken in us conjecture upon conjecture about the unknown worlds surrounding us, and this is also the question which is to be answered by the theosophical movement. It is essentially the task of the theosophical movement to acquaint us with worlds that surround us daily and hourly, with worlds within which we live, but of which we know nothing under ordinary circumstances. Theosophy does not want to acquaint us with worlds that lie beyond ours, not with worlds that are to be found in places inaccessible to us, but with those worlds that continually project into our world, that always surround us, but that remain unknown to us because our organs are not open to them. At first we can only speak of these worlds. We can only point to them and invite you to take part in the work by which man's senses are opened to these higher worlds, so that he is able to perceive them as he is able today only to perceive the ordinary world. I would like to speak to you about such worlds in the next lectures.

First of all I would like to speak of the world which we call in Theosophy the astral world. It will show itself to us as a world which is not far from us, which is everywhere where we are. In the space where we are at present, it is just as real as the world you see. The astral world is a higher world, which with its appearances surges and waves through the world, in which you are, just as the symphonic tone-wave surges through the world of the snail, but is not perceived by it. So we are not talking about something that is to be found outside our world, but we are talking about something that permeates our world in every point of its existence. The theosophical view teaches us to recognize various such worlds; it teaches us first of all to recognize that world which is known to us from everyday life: the physical world - that world, therefore, which every human being is capable of feeling with his sense organs, the world which we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, the world in which we find the objects of nature, the minerals, the plants and the animals. This world is interspersed, interspersed, if I may so express myself, by a higher world, by the so-called astral world, which we now want to get to know. Just as one fluid mixes with another, finer fluid, so that one fluid interpenetrates the other in all parts, so the astral world interpenetrates our world of the physical; and this astral world is in turn interpenetrated by a still higher world, which we call the mental world, which is the spiritual world proper. Thus three worlds are interlocked, one always interspersing the other, but man with his present organs perceives only the physical world. Gradually to open the sense for the invisible and under ordinary circumstances inaudible worlds, that is the task of theosophy.

What is the astral world? When we speak of the astral world, the quickest way to understand it is to seek out, among all the world views that have recognized a spiritual world in addition to the physical, those that have spoken of the astral world and its relationship to man. The Christian worldview also knows this astral world. In the first centuries of Christianity, not only two natures were distinguished in man, as later and more superficially: body and soul, but three were distinguished: body, soul and spirit. Soul and spirit have always been regarded as the components of man in all deeper world views since ancient times. Go back to those peoples who lived in our regions long before the Germanic tribes. If you look at the temples of those ancient Celtic peoples, you will find that they had an altar in the center surrounded by three circles of columns. These three pillar circles signified nothing other than the threefold nature of man: Body, Soul, Spirit. The physical nature is known. By the soul nature was understood in all deeper religions and world views what we call in the theosophical world view the astral. Under the expression "spirit" one understood the actually eternal of the nature of the human being. Body, soul and spirit make up the threefold nature of man. Modern natural science has studied the body quite closely. Through it we are connected with everything that is around us. We are not single, self-contained beings. We could not live physically if our environment were different. If you think of the temperature of the physical world as being ten to twenty degrees higher than the temperature of our air circuit, man could not live in it. Not only does our life depend on what goes on within the confines of our skin, but also on the life of the phenomena in nature around us. In a certain respect, we are only a result of what is going on around us. If there were no plants in the world, we could not feed ourselves. Only by being able to maintain the physical metabolism, we are able to live physically. Man is completely dependent on his physical environment, that is, he is a physical being within the whole physical nature, he belongs to this physical nature. The materialists of the 19th century rightly saw it this way. Our body is the effect of the physical environment. We live in the physical world with the physical world.

Now you know that for this body a very definite moment occurs in which it no longer obeys those laws which it obeyed under the ordinary conditions of life, that is the moment of death. At the moment of death, the body that belongs to us no longer obeys the same laws that it has obeyed throughout life; and yet it is natural laws that it obeys. When we have died, our physical organism returns to the natural substances that acted in this body during our life. Chemical and physical forces work in our physical body during our life. Our digestion is a physical process, our breathing is a physical process. What goes on in our eye when we see is also a physical process; it is something very similar to the process on the photographic plate when you have your picture taken. We are physically a confluence of physical and chemical forces, but we cease to be a confluence of chemical and physical forces when we succumb to death. This body then no longer holds together; it flows over into the stream of general physical phenomena. But the human body as such cannot possibly be only a chemical and physical composition, because at the same moment when the chemical and physical forces are left to themselves, they go completely different ways, they join the stream of the general chemical and physical processes. They no longer generate the processes of seeing, hearing and thinking, but they enter into completely different processes. So something must have been there, which called them to build up an organism during our life. This organism is composed of no other substances one hour before death than one hour after death. The physical composition is exactly the same, but the life element is no longer there. That is no longer there which calls these physical substances to a powerful action, as they would never work if they were left to themselves.

This leads us to see that this physically and chemically constructed body, because it is an impossibility in only physical and chemical respect, must be lived through and flowed through by a higher principle, which organizes, sails through and lives through the lower one. The next principle that lives through our body is that which prevents its parts from falling apart while we are still alive; and that which causes this is what we call the astral element in man.

We can say exactly what the astral element in man is. It is that which causes all people who have such an element in them to let something happen in them, which we call pleasure and displeasure in the broadest sense. Pleasure and displeasure is something that occurs in our body and in the bodies that are similar to us in astral relation and that cannot be caused by the chemical and physical substances. Take a crystal or any other physical substance composed of chemical substances. Everything can happen to it that otherwise happens in the physical, but not desire and displeasure. This is to be found only in man himself and in those beings which are organized like man. These beings are interspersed with an element which can feel pleasure and displeasure. If you bump a stone, it will fly on or strike somewhere and make an impression. If you impress such a natural object in this or any other way, you can see it from the outside; you can even subject it to a process that destroys it, but it will never feel pleasure or displeasure. Pleasure and displeasure reach as far as the astral world reaches. And just as I belong to the external world through the processes of a chemical and physical nature which take place within me, so I really and really have all the various shades of pleasure and displeasure within me, and through these various shades and manifestations of pleasure and displeasure I belong to a world which permeates and sails through our physical world and which is as much outside me as within me. In space there is not only air that sustains physical bodily life, but space is also interspersed with an astral world in which we humans participate just as we participate in the outer physical world. And just as we could not live as physical beings without letting the physical force flow through our organism, so we could not live as pleasure and displeasure beings, as astral beings, without participating in what is going on in the astral world, what lives and weaves in it, and what continually pervades and spiritualizes us. Just as in the physical world we are separated by our skin and thereby individualized, so we are also closed in the general astral world. We are individualized within it as individual astral entities and participate in this astral world around us.

We have now pointed to a world which permeates and pervades and surges through our physical world, just as the sound world of the Ninth Symphony surges through the world in which the snail also lives. In ordinary life, man perceives the world through his senses, but he is not able to perceive that world which intersperses and weaves through him and constitutes his own astral organism. Now the fact that we do not perceive a world is no reason to say that this world is not there. Why do you perceive every other person sitting here as a physical being? Because your eyes are set up to perceive the physical light rays through your eyes. Your eyes can perceive the physical bodies of the other people around you. These physical bodies are real to you. They would not be there for you if your eyes were not there to see them. Likewise, in each of these other people, pleasure and displeasure are present in myriad shades. A world just as rich as the one you see with eyes is in each of you; it is a rich world of pleasure and displeasure. And just as real as your physical body, is a second body that permeates the physical body, by which this physical body is completely permeated. You must not

say that only what you see, what you can physically perceive, is real, because each of you knows that a world of desire and displeasure lives in it just as really as muscle flesh and nerve fibers live in it. Only because your spiritual eyes are not open, therefore you do not see these realities. If your eyes were open to it, then with every other human being, just as you perceive his skin color and his clothes, you would also be able to perceive him flowing through with forces and substantialities, with entities that are real, which we can call pleasure and displeasure beings. For the one whose sense is open to these realities, this world is as real as the physical world.

Thus, in every human being, apart from the physical body, there is also the astral body, which is so called because for the seer it shines in a bright light, which is an expression of his whole life of pleasure and displeasure, of everything that lives in him as feeling. Just as not only you yourself know that you consist of flesh and blood, but the other people can also perceive this, so the feelings of pleasure and displeasure are only there for you alone as long as not another person perceives them. Somewhat larger than your physical body is your astral organism, somewhat protruding above the same. Think of a hall in which a meeting is being held and in which the various speakers are speaking. When a clairvoyant looks through the hall with his seeing eyes, he not only perceives the words that are spoken, not only the sparkling eyes and the speaking physiognomies, he sees something else: he sees how the passions play over from the speaker to the other people, he sees how the sensations and feelings light up in the speaker, he sees whether a speaker speaks, for example, out of revenge or out of enthusiasm. In the case of the enthusiast he sees the fire of the astral body emanating, and in the case of the great multitude of people he sees an abundance of rays; these in turn call forth desire or dislike in the speaker. There is an interaction of the tempe raments which takes place openly and clearly before the seer. This is as real a world of which we are a part as the outer world in which we live.

Not in vain, not without purpose, has the theosophical movement pointed out to man these invisible worlds of which men are a part, into which we are continually sending our effects. They cannot speak a word, cannot grasp a thought, without feelings working out into space. As our actions work out into space, so do the feelings; they permeate space and influence people and the whole astral world. Under ordinary circumstances, man is not aware that a stream of effects emanates from him, that he is a cause whose effects can be perceived everywhere in the world. He is not aware that he can also cause harm by sending out into the world currents of desire and displeasure, of passions and urges, which can affect other people in the most harmful way. He is not aware of what he causes with his emotional life.

Our knowledge is not destined to a purposeless existence; it is not there merely to know, it is not there for its own sake. It has become a beautiful phrase of occidental scholarship that knowledge is there for its own sake. Whoever delves into Oriental wisdom finds something else than knowledge for its own sake. He knows that knowledge is about being active in the world in the sense of this knowledge. We get to know the physical world in order not to manage in the physical nature like in a chaos. And we get to know the higher nature in order to operate in this higher nature in a conscious way. He who knows and masters this higher nature learns to work in it consciously; he learns to control his thoughts and not to let them work haphazardly, not to let them go haphazardly either, but to keep them in check; he learns to control his inner life, to regulate his inner life so that it has a ennobling effect on the environment in the most ideal sense. Thus the higher worlds, which - let me emphasize this - are just as real as our physical world, indeed even more real, acquire an immense significance for the physical world. If you know that what is going on in the astral woe is much more important for the world process than what you are able to see and do in the physical world, you will also correctly estimate this world in its importance.

If you go up even further, you would find worlds that are even more important than the astral world. The Christian religion also speaks of this. What the latter calls the "soul" is the astral world, what it calls the "spirit" is what you know in Theosophy as the "mental plane". Why is the higher, the astral world so infinitely more important than the physical world? Because the physical world is nothing but the expression of this astral world, the effect of the astral world. I would like to give you, as an explanation, a phenomenon that will show you how infinitely more significant what goes on in the astral world is than what takes place in the physical world. What I have to say is called in the teachings of mysticism and in theosophy the mystery of birth and death. It is one of the greatest mysteries or mysteries of the world. We speak of seven world mysteries.

Those who think trivially - and today's world is only too inclined to think trivially - will easily accuse us of gushing and obscurity. But we Theosophists know what the three words mean, which were often mentioned in the first centuries of Christianity, when Christianity was still one of the deepest religions in the world: Perceive, Think, Assume. - These three words were mentioned next to each other. The fact that assuming was mentioned next to perceiving and thinking shows us that people were not as immodest in regard to knowledge as they are today. Yes, people today are immodest in regard to knowledge, immodest because they are dismissive of everything that their senses and intellect do not comprehend. Do you think that if the snail would dare to say that here in the hall there is nothing else than what it perceives, would we not have to say of this snail that it has a great immodesty with regard to knowledge? Make no mistake. In the worst sense of the word it is the same with the human being when he says: What my mind cannot perceive and cannot comprehend, that does not exist in this world. - Two things, perceiving and thinking, are what give us beauty, greatness and number in the world. But there is a third thing that makes us always humble, that makes us strive, that leads us deeper and deeper into the world: that is the supposition, the supposition that there could be something else than what we know.

The theosophical movement differs in this from all other cognitive movements. What does the ordinary scientist want, who is proud of his culture and immodest about his ordinary cognition? He wants to pursue all that he can perceive and recognize, and he wants to spread his knowledge on innumerable things. It is as if the snail crawls around in all directions and perceives what it can perceive - it would perceive nothing but what its snail organs can perceive. So it is also with the people. That is why the assumption has been added to the perception and the thinking, the assumption that - if we develop further - higher sense organs will open up to us, which will open up to us what is usually closed to us in the world. Thus, the attitude of the theosophist differs from that of the ordinary scientist in that he wants to develop himself, that he honestly and righteously believes in the development of his abilities, and that he makes an effort to work on himself. This, honored guests, is theosophical attitude: to work on oneself, so that higher organs open up to us, so that we are able to perceive something meaningful and important in what surrounds us. This must become more and more an occidental attitude, if occidental mankind does not want to be completely absorbed in the materialistic current. When this theosophical attitude becomes more and more widespread, then it will be understood that all those things which are external physical facts and phenomena are the consequences, the effects of deeper causes, which lie in the astral world or in still higher worlds. Usually the occidental science is satisfied with studying the body in all its components. But the theosophical mind asks: Did this body assemble itself? Where could be the reason for it? Can we believe that the forces outside in nature feel the need to assemble themselves into man? No. Whoever is able to see in the higher world knows that man, before he lives in the physical organism, lived in an astral existence before his birth. As true as we had an astral existence before our physical existence, before birth, so true we have an astral existence also after our birth, and this extends further than our physical body. All this is included in what we call the mystery of birth and death.

Theosophy understands the importance of the third word: supposing. What I suspect today may become knowledge tomorrow, and what I suspected yesterday became certainty today. Who trusts in the deeper of this supposition, does not believe in limits of knowledge; he says to himself: I do not believe that what I recognize at any time is the deepest. - And so we are clear that even in the most important phenomena of nature their laws, their essences are deeply veiled. "Mysterious in the light of day, nature cannot be deprived of the veil". Mysterious, mysterious, is nature, is the whole life, and to penetrate into it is the task of man. For to work with the mysteries is man's task.

We speak of seven great mysteries of life. There are seven great mysteries that reveal to us the seven great phases of life. The "unspeakable ones" they are called. The fourth of these great mysteries, into which we shall be gradually introduced through these lectures, is the mystery of birth and death. It is not that we need to lift a veil to understand the mystery of birth and death. The body that lives between birth and death is visited by another body that lives only in the astral world. Our astral body exists before our physical body. It is the basic note of our sentient life, the basic note of our temperament and passions. This is what the seer sees in the astral world. Before the human being is born, this basic note, which each of us carries within us, builds up the physical body. Our physical bodies do not build our passions, desires and temperaments, but these come from another world and choose the corresponding bodies. Therefore, every human being is endowed with a very specific soul entity. Whoever is able to really study man knows that men differ from each other, that there are not two men who are the same with regard to passions, desires and physical body nature. In terms of physical body nature, they may be only slightly different from each other, but tremendously different are people in terms of their astral nature.

Before a human being is born, the seer sees flowing towards the place of birth the astral body of the human being, the sum of his desires, urges and passions, which later develop in the physical body and interact with the outer world. And within this astral body, as the innermost being of the incarnating man, is the actual higher spirit being of man. From a still higher world this higher spirit being of man descends, and within the astral world this higher spirit being of man surrounds himself with what we call desire substance, astral substance. Thus it rushes through the astral world with lightning speed. The seer sees it in the astral world long before he is born. It is present in a luminous bell-shaped form and descends upon the human body to spirit it through. What we say about such an astral substance today easily attracts the reproach of rapture, and it is natural that if we speak in this way in today's world, we may receive this reproach. We must therefore be all the more careful. We must not allow ourselves to speak of it in this way, nor should we speak of it unless we are as firmly and securely at home in this world as we are in the physical world.

I consider it a requirement of a teacher of Theosophy that he should advocate only so much of the teaching as he can in his best conscience answer for; that is, I require of every Theosophical teacher that he should say only that of which he himself has a direct knowledge, an immediate knowledge. Not a word should the theosophical teacher speak about these higher worlds if he is not able to research them himself; exactly with the same right as no one can speak about chemistry who has not studied it. Therefore, in the lectures I will say only what I am able to say with absolute certainty. No one is able to describe the astral world in its entirety; it is richer and more extensive than our physical world. I admit that also the spiritual researcher can err in the individual, just as one can err in the physical world, for example, if one wants to determine the height of a mountain. But just as such an error in the individual can not be a reason to deny the physical world, so a man can not be tempted to deny the reality of the astral world because of an error in the individual.

Before man is born for the physical world, he lives as a driving being with his "body of desire" in the astra-l world. In the astral world, there is not birth and death in the same sense as in the physical world. In the astral world the mystery of the so-called elective attraction is valid. It is the same as in this physical world with our desires and wishes. As one desire develops from another, so it is in the astral world. One being develops from another through an eternal procreation, without birth and death. The beings are subject only to the elective attraction, not to the birth and the death. Where does it come from that the physical beings are subject to birth and death? This is the question I wanted to point out today. Where do birth and death come into the physical nature? I have said that before man lives in the physical world, he lives in the astral world and there he is subject to the elective attraction; birth and death would not exist there. But now there is birth and death, because the astral forms the middle point between two other worlds.

Man is a citizen of two worlds. He points down to the physical world and up to the highest, the spiritual world. Through his astral nature, man connects the spiritual world in its eternity with the physical world. For a long, long time, through several cosmic epochs, man was a merely astral being. Today we stand in the fifth "root race", the post-Atlantean time, preceded by the fourth and the third. Only in the third "root race", in the Lemuri period, man became a physical being; before that he was closer to the astral world. But at that time, when man was still an astral being, he did not yet have the power of the spirit. The higher, the spiritual soul only united with the astral being at the moment when the spiritual united with the physical. And this united spiritual-physical requires birth and death for the physical. Therefore, because man is the locus of the highest spiritual, he must be born and die within the physical. The astral being is neither born nor dies. The spiritual being will preserve its eternity by destroying the physical being again and again from time to time in order to ascend again into the spiritual and then to descend again into the physical world. Goethe indicated this in his prose hymn "Nature": life is its most beautiful invention, and death is its artifice to have much life.

This interaction of birth and death, the mystery of the whole life, shall occupy us further in these lectures, and also the beings of the astral world, of which we have mentioned little so far, we will get to know, in order to realize that there are more beings than man in his present materialistic attitude can dream of.