VII. Details from the Realm of Spiritual Science

By means of imagination, inspiration, and intuition supersensible cognition gradually reaches the regions of the spiritual world in which there are accessible to it the beings that participate in the evolution of the cosmos and man. Through this fact it is also possible for this cognition to follow up human evolution between death and a new birth so that this becomes comprehensible. There are, however, still higher regions of existence that can only be briefly alluded to here. If supersensible cognition has raised itself up to the stage of intuition, it then lives in a world of spiritual beings. These beings also undergo development. The concerns of modern mankind extend, so to speak, into the world of intuition. To be sure, the human being also receives influences from still higher worlds in the course of his development between death and a new birth, but he does not experience these influences directly; the beings of the spiritual world convey them to him, and if these are taken into consideration, we then have everything that happens to man. The affairs of these beings, however, what they need for themselves in order to lead human development, can be observed only through cognition that reaches beyond intuition. In this we have a hint concerning higher spiritual worlds that are to be thought of as being of such a character that spiritual matters, which on earth are the most exalted, belong there to those on a lower level. For example, within the earth region, reasoned conclusions are among the highest achievements, while the effects of the mineral kingdom are among the lowest. In those higher regions, reasoned conclusions approximate what are on earth mineral effects. Beyond the region of intuition lies the realm in which, out of spiritual causes, the cosmic plan is spun.