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cosmology based in Eastern and Egyptian esoteric traditions containing a great deal of content generally
unknown to Western scholarship at that time.
Steiner agreed to undertake leadership of the German section of the Theosophical Society but only under
special provisions where he didn't limit himself to Eastern cosmologies or Madame Blavatsky's accounts of
her seership. In fact, he insisted on speaking only out of the content of his own experiences in seership and
even then only on content he had repeatedly viewed and was determined by him to be genuine. Sometime
later when various groups in the theosophical society attempted to promote the child religious prodigy
Krishnamurti as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, Steiner broke with the Theosophical Society entirely.
After 1900 till 1925 Steiner gave numerous lectures on the most varied topics from optics and astronomy, to
yoga, from philosophy to details about angelic hierarchies. A recurring theme in many of his works was the
creation of the Earth as processes of progressive densifications of originally fine proto-matters which were
extensions of what he considered to be spiritual dimensions.
Volume and complexity of Steiner's work Steiner literally gave thousands of lectures during his life. In his last 3 years he gave as many as 3 lectures a
day on completely distinct topics as seen from the Anthroposophical perspective. The type of work Steiner
did, its complexity and vast scope, has made any type of actual scholarship since nearly impossible even
from within the ranks of the Anthroposophical society. This was in spite of the fact Steiner had a very
careful and clearly articulated epistemology that supported much of his later work. He considered his books,
"The Philosophy of Freedom," and "A Theory of Knowledge, Implicit in Goethe's World Conception" to be
works on epistemology appropriate for scientifically trained readers.
My interest in Steiner's work and the scope of this paper My interest in Steiner is due to his fascinating takes on cosmology and the big questions about life and death.
I've read some 2500 of Steiner's lectures, most at least twice. I've also done personal comparative studies of
his work, comparing him to various philosophers and with various philosophical and religious systems both
in the west and east. This is because it's my view that one can't fully begin to know a system of thought
merely based on its propositions and stated values alone unless one also has a clear idea of alternative views
to that system.
By studying Steiner's views I gained what I discovered to be fruitful insights into other perspectives on
knowledge like physics, biology, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, cognition studies, various
thinking work we have to do as human beings. It's only through intense and natural feelings of wonder that
we gain the right counterweight to turn the labor of knowledge into a joyful living process.
Science and Religion and their combination into Spiritual Science Human beings have developed many paths to knowledge. Each of these paths served the necessities of the
times and places in which persons lived. When times changed people changed in their experiences of the
world and in the ways they related to those experiences. What may have been directly self-evident at one
time to a group of people in a particular place and culture no longer served for later generations. This is
obvious because thinking is an individual action requiring individual efforts. Social customs and writing
convey the knowledge of previous generations but only to a limited degree, because each newborn has to
reacquire that knowledge through individual efforts and interests.
In the dim recesses of ancient history we only have very limited written records and some of these
cosmologies belonging to various cultures. These cosmologies related how the universe was created and the
various genealogies of god(s) and their eventual creation of human beings. Today many hold these ancient
accounts to be mere mythologies or simply the efforts of various peoples to explain their world using the
various tools and means of comprehension available to them at the time. Typically today these cosmologies
are considered to be only beliefs because they concern things we can't rightly measure or even witness to be
true.
With the rise of material sciences and the ability to measure and predict some natural phenomena in
generally consistent ways the emphasis has shifted from stories handed down to us from the dim recesses to
the unique properties of things which can be verified and worked with or manipulated. Increasingly religious
beliefs and their cosmologies have in contemporary times been jettisoned in favor of what practical sciences
and technologies can give us.
But while religious beliefs in contrast to verifiable sciences can't in general be measured, they do offer
something to people that science can't. Some varieties of beliefs may be disproved by observations and
measurements, but certain types of beliefs concern things that can't be disproved because they concern things
like life and death and what lies beyond them. Materially based sciences for example have no insights into
what's beyond death and can only remain mute about such issues or simply attempt to deny the assumptions
implicit in them.
Religion on the other hand tells stories that address the yearnings in people's hearts and gives them some idea
and feeling that their existence and the existence of those they love extends beyond the body's lifetime.
Typically religious cosmologies are very different than scientific cosmologies because they focus on
This change in living things from the invisible to the visible and back again is found throughout the world.
Is the person we talk to today who is full of dreams, thoughts, and aspirations etc., really to be found entirely
in the fertilized zygote? Certainly their germinal form is but the person is so much more than that. Neither
is that person to be found anywhere when they die. The now stiffening body has lost its animating principle.
Also significantly without the aid of scientific instruments the zygote remains invisible to normal vision.
Likewise without the right instruments of perception dimensions other than the physical remain invisible to
our normal vision. Also significantly there's another avenue of experiencing the zygote as for example the
mother's intimate awareness of all changes conception has brought. In any knowledge endeavor it should
always be kept in mind that external observation is not the only avenue of knowledge.
Stratas of material densities and their extensions into non-material strata So what is meant by strata within a dimension? Starting with the physical dimension which is most familiar
to us we can find numerous examples. The electromagnetic spectrum is a stratum of forces only some of
which we have direct senses for. There are also strata in the layers of the Earth's crust and there are strata in
the composition of the Earth's elements, where the earth is the densest strata, water is next dense and is
layered on earth, air is next dense and doesn't penetrate water or earth very far, and fire or heat energy that
rises above air.
In the material dimension that we live in we have at least 4 general levels of material density that were in the
older European cosmology called the 4 basic elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire. These comprise the
basic strata of the material dimension which we live within daily. We require air to breathe, water to
survive, earth to stand on, and fire for bodily warmth.
In spite of the un-reflective ideas of some modern scholarship that the ancients believed there were only 4
elements where elements are understood in the contemporary way relating to the periodic table, they actually
believed in four different dimensional densities or generalized strata of the material world.
These elements are not the same thing at all as those in the periodic table. In the context of what we require
as living beings it doesn't matter to us as living beings whether there are 50 or 118 elements in the periodic
table. These last are taxonomies for specialist uses. In themselves they're not specifically the entire basis for
being born and living on this planet. These elements are the compositional parts of life here but not life
itself, because individually they're none of them alive. In addition to strata there are also conglomerate
elements throughout strata where differentiations occur, like for example, in the Earth's crust where geodes
To the extent the Earth itself is a living being we can compare its flowing water ways to the blood flowing in
the capillaries and veins in animals or see the Earth's air to be our air that oxygenates our blood through our
lungs etc. These are far more than poetic observations, because all these processes are so inextricably
intertwined it's difficult to say where one ends and another starts.
In any ecosystem there are key factors so-called processes, rules or laws that support other dependent factors
or processes. Without these key factors the entire system collapses. When we consider a clod of dirt or a
stone we see that it's not alive while we are, animals are, plants are, etc. This differentiation between inert
mater and living matter is such a key factor for our existence on Earth.
However to find life itself unmixed with inert matter Steiner believed we have to consider the motive force
of life as of a different nature than purely inert matter. As a separate quality life is combined with the inert
material. After all when the motive force of life leaves the body the remaining materials are just as lifeless
as any others. Any foreign elements like parasites, bacteria etc., that were in the body, or outside it begin to
consume it because it can't maintain itself as an ecosystem any longer. If these other organisms also die then
we have nothing left but the external imprints of their activities. Life itself remains a wonder only
temporarily mixed with the clay of Earth.
So what types of issues does Spiritual Science work with? Steiner's spiritual science is a broad methodology that seeks to bring to awareness the connections between
seen and unseen dimensions in the full spectrum of human experiences. He sought principles that created
continuity between daily waking life and life outside the material dimension alone. His work had many
outcomes in a variety of ways.
Here I'll mention just one of his findings as an example; the big question about birth and death.
Steiner related that through trained seership it can be witnessed that human physical death is not the end of
human life. That a human life span continues in germinal form after death through other dimensions termed
spiritual dimensions and frequently but not always returns in a new germinal state back into this material
dimension. He further related that after we transition past death we retain the continuity of consciousness
but as it's no longer supported by the physical world it becomes dimmed as a consequence. Importantly he
also maintained that having useful concepts of the so-called spiritual dimensions allowed the continuity of
consciousness to remain bright rather than dimmed after death.
Steiner wasn't alone in these observations. Many other traditions even into contemporary times make the
same statements. For example, the Egyptians had their Book of the Dead and the Tibetans have their Book
of the Dead. These books weren't mere funerary recitations, but full on manuals of what the departed soul
could expect after death in its transitions through the afterlife. The intent of these manuals was the same as
stated by Steiner namely so that the soul could orient itself after its sojourn on Earth and retain in
consciousness the seeds of that experience into its new non-physical environment.
The Tibetan Buddhist traditions also go into vast details about the various Bardos (dimensions) other than
the physical which the soul goes through after death. The soul is held to go through many incarnations in
different bodies until it completes its unfinished efforts at self-knowledge (karmas). It Buddhism, when the
Bodhisattva Shakyamuni attained to Buddhahood he was held to have exhausted all his karmas, and to have
achieved continuity with the laws of the greater cosmos so that he no longer needed to incarnate into a new
individual consciousness. Varying views on reincarnation are also endemic throughout Asian cultures such
as Hinduism, etc.
One might be tempted based on the above to consider Steiner's views primarily religious rather than
scientific, but that wouldn’t be fully accurate. Certainly his approach was more philosophy of science versus
science in the trenches, but the gathering of data is one thing and the conclusions that can be drawn from that
data are quite another. For example, Einstein worked by thinking through interesting phenomena in thought
pictures based on direct physical observations in daily experience. Through that process he inverted the laws
held sacrosanct in classical physics. He didn't arrive at his insights only by pouring through data. In fact he
didn't even possess all the mathematics needed to describe his theoretical visions and others had to do that
work.
Steiner worked with the big picture and the "interconnectedness" of things. He sought the universal
cosmological laws behind all phenomena whether as inert matter or as living in matter and he sought to
unravel them on their own terms. This type of approach must be fundamentally considered a scientific one
that doesn't limit itself purely to the material but extends into the normally unseen cosmological. Steiner also
lectured on the nature of warmth, Goethe's scientific writings, and on optics. His take on science was that it
didn't need to be limited to the inert material world only but that scientific methodology would be very useful
if applied to the rules of distinctly different dimensions than the purely physical.
The dimensions of spiritual evolutions leading to the material world We can only get a sense of what these dimensions are by going into their specifics and how they contrast
with each other. In this section we look at some of the cosmological views and consider how they have
many consistent themes not seriously addressed by the material sciences.
This image from a talk Steiner gave is a general schematic of just one way to view these dimensions. Here
he's talking about these dimensions as bodies relating to different forms of consciousness in terms of types of
beings. Again for him the terms Angel, Archangel, Archai etc., don’t belong to Christian views alone but
also apply to different types of Buddhas, for example the Dhayani Buddhas and as well those that were
incarnated like Gautama Buddha, etc. He simply used the Christian terms because they were the terms his
later audiences had more familiarity with.
Image from a series of lectures by Rudolf Steiner: The Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World.
The world as projections and superimpositions of felt qualities Collectively these dimensions aka bodies constitute a projection of perspective that propagates as far as the
densest body in the sequence which acts as the screen or reflector of what's propagated or projected
through each dimension. That's why Steiner talked about the "reflection" of these bodies or dimensions in
the physical world. Elements of these other dimensions are integrated into the physical dimension but mixed
up with physical elements into new forms than those found in their native dimensions.
These views are also consistent with Leibniz's Monadology where the co-inventor of modern calculus stated
the monad as body is windowless but still reflects its universe within itself. Leibniz said the monad
conceptual understanding per se and doesn't develop the connections of its type of seeing to the material
scientific viewpoint. By contrast it's Steiner's emphasis on a consistent scientific methodology that
distinguishes Steiner's approach from so many other systems of visionary knowledge. A fuller explanation
of what it means to be a seer and different types of seership is beyond the scope of this introduction.
The strata of Earth life as reflections of other dimensions One of the most primary dichotomies Steiner cited was that between the living and the non-living. Life and
inert matter are two inherently different dimensions of reality, yet in a science which got its start with and
continues to see the world primarily through the mechanical physics of "bodies" we confuse these and
believe that life somehow arises only from inert matter. To paraphrase Charles Sanders Peirce what is
living mind is actually less determinate (externally measurable) than inert matter.
In Steiner's view matter and life are mixed together in common experience but they also arise from two very
different dimensions which due to their intermixing we take to be only one dimension. Therefore for him
material science is absolutely correct when detailing the workings of non-living matter by means of
measurements but prone to seriously flawed interpretative errors when it seeks to explain living beings
exclusively using the same methods it uses for non-living matter.
Much of Steiner's work was therefore focused on critically showing that at times fundamentally different
rules apply to different dimensions and even to individual strata of being in the same dimension. We can
only give the correct conception and dignity to every form of existence when we can prepare the means to
see it as it is in its own internal constitution and not just externally and dimly from our own frequently
naively accepted perspectives.
We're now somewhat in a position to understand Steiner's claims at least structurally based on their own
terms. Not only is life itself a separate dimension than inert matter – both conflated and intermixed with it,
but it extends beyond the purely material dimension as its own spectrum of possibilities.
Different types of life like plant life have in Steiner's schema different numbers and types of extended bodies
with their own properties and laws than other strata of life do, like for example animals. Plants are relatively
simple reflections of an adjacent dimension he referred to as the life body. Animals in contrast to plants
have an additional influence acting upon them, the so-called astral body. Human beings in contrast to plants
and animals also have a third dimension working on them that individuates them. In Steiner's terms this is
the ego body. In a variety of Vedic and Buddhist systems this was known as the Ahamkara.