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An Outline of Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner

III. SLEEP AND DEATH

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The third region of the spirit-world is its "atmosphere." What is known in the physical world as "feeling" is also present there, permeating everything like the air on the earth. We must imagine a rushing sea of feeling. Pain and sorrow, joy and rapture, flow through this region, like wind and storms in the atmosphere of the physical world. Imagine a battle fought on earth. There confront one another not merely human forms, as seen by the physical eye, but feelings opposed to feelings, passions to passions; pain fills the battlefield just as much as do the forms of men. All that is seething there of passion, pain, and the joy of victory is not only perceptible in its effects as revealed to the physical senses; it may be seen with the spiritual senses as an atmospheric process in the spirit-world. Such an event in the spiritual world is like a thunderstorm in the physical, and the perception of these events may be compared to the hearing of words in the physical world. For this reason it is said that as the air envelops and permeates earthly things, so do "interweaving spiritual words" pervade the beings and events of the spirit-world.

And still further observations are possible in this spirit-world. What may be compared to light and heat in the physical world is there too. That which permeates everything in the spirit-world, as earthly things and beings are permeated by heat, is the world of thought itself. There, however, thoughts must be regarded as living and independent beings. What is understood by man in the manifested world as thought is but a shadow of what lives as a thought-being in the spirit-world. Imagine thought, as it now exists in man, raised out of him and as an active, energetic being, endowed with an inner life of its own, and you have a feeble illustration of that which fills the fourth region of the spirit-world. In the physical world between birth and death what man understands as thought is but the manifestation of the thought-world as it is able to mould itself by means of the instruments afforded by the bodies. All such thoughts cherished by man, that carry with them an enrichment of the physical world have their origin in this region. By such thoughts are meant not only the ideas of great inventors and men of genius; but those ideas found in every individual which he does not owe solely to the external world, but through which he, so to speak, transforms that world.

In so far as feelings and passions are concerned, the cause of which lies in the outer world, these feelings are perceptible in the third region of the spirit-world; but everything which so lives in a man's soul as to make him a creator,--influencing, transforming and fertilizing his environment,--is manifest in its original and intrinsic form in the fourth division of the spirit-world.

That which exists in the fifth region may be compared to physical light. In its archetypal form it is wisdom in manifestation. Beings who diffuse wisdom throughout their surroundings, as the sun pours light on physical beings, belong to this realm. Whatever is illuminated by their wisdom stands forth in its true meaning and significance for the spiritual world, just as the colour of a physical object is seen when the light falls upon it. There are still higher regions of the spirit-world, which will be described later in this work.

Into this world the ego is plunged after death, together with the results it carries with it out of physical life. And these results are still united with that part of the astral body which is not cast off at the end of the time of purification. In fact, only that part falls away which, in its desires and wishes, turned, after death, toward physical life. The plunging of the ego into the spiritual world, with what it has acquired in the physical world, may be compared to the planting of a grain of seed in the soil in which it can mature. As the grain of seed draws substances and forces from its surroundings in order that it may develop into a new plant, so the condition of the ego, when implanted in the spiritual world, is one of development and growth.