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Rudolf Steiner's Vision - A very brief and philosophically architectonic introduction

Do not seek to follow the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.

Basho 1644-1694

Boris Alexander Kiriako

A brief biography Rudolf Steiner was a philosopher and seer who created several movements in contemporary culture at the

turn of the 20th century. He started the Anthroposophical Society and related movements like Waldorf

education and Biodynamic farming. The latter two movements however where kept separate from the main

goals of the Anthroposophical Society itself which was involved with communicating the content of Steiner's

general philosophy and seership.

Steiner himself was quite unusual in that his philosophical interests included both the sciences and seership

of the structure of the universe. He said that to do seership he had to consciously shift gears from

experiencing physically to seeing spiritually. He described this transition as similar to opening a door

walking through and closing the door to go from one room to another.

Until 1900 he was primarily focused on questions of science and philosophy earning his PhD on a

dissertation in critical epistemology entitled the "Study of Knowledge." After his dissertation but before

1900 Steiner worked for 8 years as an editor at the Goethe archives in Weimar. During that time he also

worked as an editor for a magazine on contemporary cultural issues.

I consider his book "Nature's Open Secret" to be a tour de force exposition of Goethe's germinal philosophy

of natural science. Another book the "Philosophy of Freedom" was Steiner's own elaboration of his studies

in epistemology and a characterization of his three general stages of philosophical development in Western

culture as based on ideas implicit in Goethe's writings on natural science.

Post 1900 At about 1900 Steiner was asked by members of the Theosophical Society to give talks on Theosophy in

private gatherings and in public lectures. In 1904 he was asked by the leaders of the Theosophical Society to

lead the German section of the Theosophical Society which was an esoteric European movement based in

Eastern religious cosmologies started primarily by the seer Madame Blavatsky and some others. Madame

Blavatsky wrote a massive masterwork titled "Isis Unveiled" which presented a very robust and rich


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

philosophers, computer design and AI, Buddhism, Vedanta, shamanism, psychology, Christianity, yoga, art,


and mythology. But the reverse was also true, because by studying many of these systems on their own

terms I was also able to gain far greater insight into Steiner's views than if I had studied him alone.

The ability to do such comparative studies of Steiner's work is possible only because Steiner himself was a

philosopher who commented on many figures in both western and eastern philosophy and religions as well

various sciences. These included persons such as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Copernicus,

Giordano Bruno, Nicolas de Cusa, Plato, Aristotle, Brentano, Einstein, Roger Bacon and many others. They

also included numerous talks on Buddhism, Vedanta, Christianity and a number of other systems of

knowledge and beliefs common to great numbers of people through history.

Steiner himself however, wasn't focused on simply doing comparative studies in philosophy and religion.

His primary scholarship as mentioned was at the Goethe archives in Weimar. It was only after 1900 that he

became focused on bringing his own researches into the cosmological foundations of reality to the public in

addition to private gatherings. He strongly felt that the contents of his research both scholarly and through

seership, would be immensely fruitful for human life into the future.

Here I've constrained myself to give merely the briefest condensed outlines of the architectonics of Steiner's

views. This architectonic approach isn't necessarily the best approach for everyone. The approach here is

meant for those who have already done research into how varied philosophies and even those in contention

with each other don’t require a "winner." Instead I see the architectonic approach to be about how

philosophical systems are built up like individual buildings and take up their own shapes based on the

types of assumptions, questions, problems and solutions they seek to address.

Epistemology

Steiner's epistemology in my view is simple but exceptionally profound. He said our human experience is

generically composed of both percepts and concepts. The percept is about the individual sense experiences

we have of the world and of ourselves. The concept is about what the sense experiences are in themselves

and in their working relationships to each other. The key point for Steiner is that what we experience as two

different realms – sense experiences and thoughts about sense experiences are actually one natural whole,

but due to our human constitution we initially encounter them as 2 distinct parts.

In the normal course of affairs from an early age we find the "things in themselves" as given to us in sense

experience are separated out from the concepts that relate and organize sense experiences for us. We have

sense experiences but must acquire and relate concepts to them as individual actions in ourselves in order to

understand what we're experiencing and to connect them up in our understanding.


For Steiner this separation between sense experience and concept is not in the nature of the things

themselves. It occurs only due to our peculiar way of knowing the world as human beings that what is whole

is initially experienced by us as broken asunder into two separated parts. We then have to work to associate

the right concepts with the content given to us in our sense experiences.

In other creatures like for example, animals the world isn't broken apart to such a degree. A dog or a cat for

example appears to experience percepts and their related concepts conjoined together. They don't think like

human beings do and because of that they appear more naturally at home in the world to that extent. But the

downside for most animals is they're also less free in the world and we reflect this when we observe they act

more or less instinctually. The wonderful lack of self-consciousness that many animals have which we

typically lack as human beings, is also in animals an inability to know the world from an individually free

perspective.

It's due to our peculiar cognitive evolution as human beings that we receive the given world in pieces and

must constantly work to bring those pieces together. However it's exactly because the parts aren't already

fully determined for us that we have the space or freedom to determine how they fit together.

It's only through the process of laboriously bringing sense experiences together through thinking that we

might see that percepts and concepts aren't inherently separate. For Steiner an object already contains its

concept within it as it. But our method of knowing something new doesn't usually penetrate beyond the

immediate surface. As a consequence we tend to think the concept we work through is solely a human

function and possession. Why we feel that is because we have to put real effort into thinking about the

otherwise hidden relationships between the things we sense. That effort initially forces us to believe we

create and own connecting concepts as our individual possessions. But the fact is the conceptual work we do

is usually more about bringing what we see into alignment with the full reality of the thing seen.

All of these considerations indicate our knowledge process in terms of things new to us is really a process of

discovery and rarely one of direct apprehension of the full concept of the sensed thing. We discover what

the world is because we don't always immediately know it directly. But this human limitation also allows us

a certain degree of freedom in determining what we make of it. By laboring to come to knowledge we also

have an opportunity to put our individual stamp on that knowledge. We can choose the path we take to

knowledge of what is – but not of the content of what's given us because we didn't create the world.

Steiner's most well-known work the Philosophy of Freedom was an exploration of this process as a series of

stages in terms of human cognitive development. For Steiner that process is condensed into the single word

"wonder" because it's only through a strong sense of wonder that we maintain the right feeling for the


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


questions of life begetting life and how persons can come to know the world as acts of creation by life rather

than life as a byproduct of the workings of inert matter.

Both science and religion in their own ways have sought to be the sole source of truth and knowledge for all

human kind. But the truth is both science and religion claim different spheres of interest for people. Science

concerns the consistently measurable and religion is concerned with what connects us most intimately to the

entirety of living existence. The fact is many but not all of us need some form of science and/or religion in

our human lives.

We need to both understand and deal with the visible material world and we need to be able to adjust

ourselves and our beliefs and desires to the immaterial or invisible worlds beyond the scope of our daily

material experiences. Simple and compelling daily experiences show us how little we know about the

workings of the world and even our own human nature. The unknown perpetually becomes the known and

frequently what may be well known is forgotten with succeeding generations.

Steiner recognized these two needs and promoted an overarching cosmological vision that included both

spiritual values and scientific values which he called Spiritual Science. He recognized that a cosmology was

needed that didn't divide the world into the competing cosmologies of science and religion. For him it wasn't

acceptable to have one cosmology vanquishing the other or of both agreeing to stay clear of each other's

territory. Instead he had a vision of how each sphere of activity – both the inert material and the living

(whether material or non-material) are part of a broader spectrum of dimensional possibilities.


The visible and the invisible dimensions Most of Steiner's cosmological work addresses how the visible material world is an expression and extension

from worlds that can't be seen when we're only using our materially based eyes. This is a commonplace even

in science, where the electromagnetic spectrum contains many phenomena that can't be seen with the

unaided eye.

He said there are different dimensions each with its distinct type of causality peculiar to that dimension. But

while these dimensions are distinct in their inner workings they're also continuous with each other and in

some cases their types of causalities are shared with other dimensions in part. Another feature is that only

some of these dimensions are directly next to each other, while others are 2 or more times removed from the

others.

For Steiner these different dimensions aren't simply hypothetical or proposed mathematical dimensions, but

actual dimensions that can be experienced. The requirements for experiencing a particular dimension are

that one has to have the appropriate means for experiencing that dimension. For example, to have physical

experience of the physical dimension we need senses that allow us to feel gravity, to see the world, to touch

it, and so on; otherwise we would have no experience of it. This means the ability of a living being to

experience a particular dimension is dependent on the particular workings or predominant laws of that

dimension and the senses that work with that dimension.

At the outset it needs to be stressed that these dimensions aren't completely independent of each other but

they are more like channels propagating their own structures of continuity. In addition within each

dimension there are differentiated strata of processes and structures following their own unique rules and

laws of causality.

I've worded it in the above way because the general principle is that what is in flow or change or alive

eventually at least partially becomes ossified into fixed structures. A river for example, is a flowing body of

water that deposits sands and debris at turns that build up and become solid ground. Likewise the soft matter

of the zygote changes through continual cell division and specialization to form more solid structures in the

body like the skeleton, or outside the body like the shell of an egg.

The changes in the growth process a zygote exhibits are changes in form but also changes of densities in its

bodily development. These changes in densities and compositions are what I mean by "strata." In fact

similar processes are true even in non-living physical matter where in geology and volcanology different

strata of the earth's crust correspond to the effects of different topical and internal heat processes in different

eras and areas of the Earth's development.


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

form within more uniform geological layers.


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.


Even though Steiner worked within the Theosophical movement for a time he didn't confine himself to

Eastern cosmologies but spoke of Christian and pre-Christian traditions like earlier Egyptian, Persian, and

Indian cultures. His views were synthetic and far ranging. For example, he considered the Buddhist

hierarchies of spiritual beings (different types of Buddhas) to be exactly the same beings as those described

by ancient Persian esoteric traditions. He also equated these same Buddhist avatars with exact equivalencies

in the spiritual hierarchies defined by Christian esotericism.

He considered the spiritual beings referred to in those separate traditions to be merely localized names for

beings generally described as angelic hierarchies in both the East and the West. He said seership allowed

him to interact with and observe some of these beings and to investigate their cosmological actions in the

development of our solar system and in the evolution of human beings on Earth. Similar accounts can be

found in Plato's Timaeus and other sources.

In addition to direct communications and observations of these beings and their activities as a seer he also

had another major source of information in what he called the Akashic Chronicles. These chronicles were

held to be the memory strata in another dimension of different ages of evolution in the cosmos connected

with the evolution of Earth.

His research process might be characterized as somewhere in between the work of an archeologist analyzing

midden and a scholar studying a book or reviewing film reels of earlier times. However these so-called

"inner film reels" weren't limited to the 1800's like physical film. Instead they were seen in the seer's mind's

eye and could be replayed over and over or followed in any number of directions dependent on the seer's

skills, interests and efforts.

A further crucial difference between these seer readings/visons and actual physical books or films was that

the content initially always presented itself in symbolic forms he called "Imaginations." But unlike standard

weak and fleeting imaginations these symbolic forms were so powerful and clear they could be seen

repeatedly and be accurately translated into sentences or images and conveyed to others who hadn't trained in

seership. Furthermore these Imaginations were animated and always in motion. Steiner distinguished very

carefully in numerous places between what he called Imagination as a first step in seership and things like

day dreaming, fantasizing, etc., as normal physiological processes based in the physical body.

For him Imaginations were only a preliminary step in trained seership and he went into considerable detail

about other general stages in seership he called Inspiration and Intuition. He always held that with good-will

and serious interest any person could conceptually understand the types of realities involved in the chains of

dimensions with their strata and their relationships.


Steiner also steadfastly maintained that a clear and critical thinking combined with an open mind that

accepted there is more in addition to the laws of inert matter could make sense of these communications

about spiritual worlds. It was all a question of the correct context in interpretation of the phenomena of

experience.

While he held the material world arose from and was an extension of less condensed spiritual dimensions it

was also at the same time a real material experience. He stated in his lectures entitled "Human and Cosmic

Thought" that materialism as a philosophy is a fully fundamental and defensible stance in the spectrum of

viable cosmologies but also crucially not the only one.

Steiner didn't himself accept simplistic polarizations of principles like matter and spirit because he saw the

actual relationships to be far more complex than reductionist declarations could ever hope to address. He

characteristically called all such stances "one-sided views" of an inherently far more rich and complex reality

than could be accounted for by science or religion in separation.

While he was critical of scientific theories that are one-sided or reductionist, he was also was strongly critical

of empty spiritualism. For example, he was critical of persons who perpetually talked in glowing terms of

how spiritual some experience might be without ever offering up connections to the world we live in. He

stated wryly on more than one occasion that he himself had personally met some 23 actual persons who each

claimed to be the reincarnated Mary Magdalene.

With his training in the sciences Steiner stated that he never disagreed with the findings of the sciences but

only at times with the sometimes unsupportable reductionist hypotheses promoted to explain them. In short,

when one-sided only materially based theories are held to be sufficient to cover the far greater and radically

diverse dimensional realities their deficiencies are glaring to the philosopher seer.

This was especially the case with the reality of living beings in contrast to inert matter. The almost

universally promoted "scientific" belief that life somehow arises from non-living matter was just one such

example. The view of someone like Steiner is that we have the experience of life and the experience of inert

matter both and that we have to first investigate the sources of these two differentiations in our experience to

see how they're actually related to each other.

Steiner also related it was painful to hear people superstitiously attributing the actions of the gods as the

basis for the outcomes of contemporary human actions. He said that such talk was the product of an earlier

age when human beings weren't as mentally individuated as they are now but belonged to early tribal or

group cultures. Shaking one's fist at heaven is now only a personal gesture to the unknown.


In addition Steiner held that the actions of the "so-called" gods have their own unique contexts and workings

while those of humans play out in their own contexts. In his view each type of being for a time occupies a

station in the totality of dimensions with its own intrinsic freedoms and limitations. For him freedom

wasn't merely an abstraction but connected with either a daily personal attitude and/or with the direct

perception of a moral dimension.

Steiner considered the natural material world not to have morality built into it. There certainly is

accommodation and love within it – say in the world of animals, but human morality in his view arises

primarily as a reflection from a different dimension of existence than the simply material. And it's because it

arises in us only as a weakened reflection of another dimension and not as automatic instinct that it allows us

the freedom to choose whether to express it or not in this world.

In his view humans for example aren't inferior in freedom to so-called angelic beings because they each live

within different constraints related to the dimension (or body) they live in. Each enjoys a different set of

freedoms and constraints. Neither is a seer's life more important than one who’s not a seer. For Steiner each

person fulfills a different function in life that adds to the variety and interest in the world. Each person

fulfills the function they desire or at least attempts to fulfil it, even if they can't. That they desire it simply

attests to what they value and cherish, even if the greater realities don't allow for its immediate fulfillment.

In several lectures he declared that the ancient systems of blind trust in the guru or teacher of seership were

no longer to be followed and that the modern approach to so-called esoteric training as an adult was to regard

the teacher with the same type and level of respect that might be accorded to a university instructor. As a

consequence he didn't believe in training children to seership of other dimensions because they are still in a

process of active growth in the world and needed to focus on the wonders of the world instead to become

healthy in mind and in body.


The full spectrum of possibilities Steiner held the connections between different types of beings in different dimensions to be far more

complex than currently conceived by contemporary scholarship. For Steiner the material world is only one

dimension of density among others, much like one color of the rainbow is positioned in-between the other

colors of the light spectrum. It would be silly to delete any color from the color spectrum because one

considers it to be relatively material or relatively spiritual.

If I'm alive on a world where I see everything in shades of green, then how would I come across to someone

who sees the entire rainbow of colors when I insist there can only be the shades of the color I know? In fact

the rainbow colors are normally hidden within light phenomena and only appear when conditions are right

through the refraction of light through water vapor in the air. In addition they're only visible if we're

standing in a particular area with in a particular angle with relation to the rainbow and looking directly at it.

If we're not in the right position we won't see it even if others nearby do. What does that mean in terms of

the importance of the observer for scientific repeatability?

Unattributed internet image of rainbow

In fact Steiner likened some of the spiritual dimensions to be generally similar in kind to the physical

dimensions and extended into them. But the extensions aren't simple gradations. When we view a light

spectrum in the rainbow, red is a band of color and next to it is orange, and so on. There is some small

blending but in general the transitions between colors are narrower than the bands of colors themselves.

Orange is close to yellow but if we go further along the spectrum orange has no graded association with

violet. Likewise in considering diverse dimensions we find they're connected to each other, but that doesn't

mean they're all next to each other. Some are much further removed from others.


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


experiences the world through apperception which I consider to be like a two way mirror where we can see

outwardly but not inwardly into the nature of other monads.

In the case of human beings their most dense body is the so-called physical body and it’s the baseline onto

which all other bodies have their properties partially projected into. Everything that’s part of a human

being's makeup is simultaneously reflected into -- or from another perspective mixed into the strata of

density called one's physical body. For Steiner the physical body is a like a mirror that reflects our

consciousness – a consciousness which actually originates in another dimension than the physical.

An example here might be helpful in gaining a clearer picture of how dimensions reflect into each other.

In Vedanta there is the classical concept or thought picture of a series of buckets filled with water on the

ground with the Sun casting light onto them. In this thought picture the Sun stands for light as consciousness

and each physically independent person is likened to a bucket of water sitting on the ground.

The water held by the bucket has the light of the Sun shining on it and reflects it outwardly. The light

reflected from the water in the bucket carries with it the light imprint modified by the particular water itself

and is shaped by the form of the container. It is also infused by the colors of its container.

The bucket is not itself consciousness but a container for water which can reflect the light of consciousness.

Consciousness itself originates elsewhere. Consciousness is not the earth on which the bucket sits. Neither

is it the bucket itself which is hopefully a water tight container of some sort. Neither is consciousness the

water in the bucket which reflects the light of consciousness. Consciousness itself is the light of the Sun

reflected in water held by the bucket sitting on center of gravity.

To extend the thought picture further, the buckets or gourds are shaped into bodies of all different types and

features. Eventually too, the water that's in them evaporates. When that happens the light of consciousness

has lost its localized container that gave it a unique position and reflection onto its world. The light of

consciousness itself is not diminished or ended; only its particular container no longer reflects the light.

If we have insight into this thought picture we can see why contemporary consciousness studies are

completely flummoxed because they seek to explain consciousness as the result of material processes only.

Material processes are required but nonetheless only indirectly allow for consciousness to be self-

reflective. According to this view the level and type of human consciousness is only indirectly due to the

particular conditions of the container that holds the water or the clarity of the water itself that reflects

something "by which we see" which is not purely material in the sense of inert matter in this dimension.


The physical body is therefore the temporary alignment and reflector or transmitter of the activities of

several other less dense "bodies" belonging to other dimensions. As the highest level of density in the full

spectrum of living beings the physical body reflects back the other dimensions much like a movie screen

reflects back the light projected from a movie projector.

The origin and functions of thinking Thinking itself according to Steiner originates in a "spiritual" dimension which is why it allows for different

perspectives on human experiences. Because its focal point is in another dimension than that of inert matter

it can both measure and triangulate the relationships on a plane whether material or non-material. Thinking

then is one means of separating out and unraveling these superimpositions as mixtures.

For example in the previous thought picture, the light being reflected from the bucket is constrained by the

quality and level of the water, the shape of the reflected light is changed by the shape of the bucket, and the

light itself carries with it a record of the colors of the water and bucket. The reflected light has other

additional elements within it in mixed forms as data.

Thinking and experimentations can show all these things. But the caveat with thinking is it can be focused

exclusively on habits of thought relating to only the material minutiae of physical existence "as naively given

to perspectival perception." Or thinking can also be purposefully refocused to reflect on other types of

observations relating to a multitude of dimensions. Thinking itself is an independent function which occurs

through consciousness reflected on the experiential particulars of a human being as a unique occasion and

perspective on a vast universe.

Image from the Max Planck institute Cyberneum, projected simulation


The basis of Steiner's seership architectonically rests on the fact that the content of some of the other

dimensions is already reflected into the material dimension in our normal daily experience, but in mixed

forms. Our perception and conception of the world however, can't easily discern the reflections of these

dimensions in our physical world because they're jumbled together to begin with. For Steiner it was never

a question of hypothesizing extra dimensions theoretically but of recognizing the hybrid nature of the

material one we already have in experience as consisting of conflated content from other dimensions that can

only be seen head on by us and consequently misidentified.

When seen correctly from a radically different angle and perspective the hidden dimensions and their

relationships become clear. For example by seeing the physical earth on edge where part of the land has

fallen away we can see its different geologic layers or strata. The fossil record is then revealed to us.

Seeing the fossil record is possible for the material strata of the physical world. But in order to see the

different dimensions themselves edgewise we need to be able to see in several dimensions at once.

However seeing these different dimensions alone isn't adequate to accurately correlate these dimensions in

our individual thinking. We also need to have minimally working concepts that accurately arrange their

properties and consequent relationships for us. Even if we're a trained seer in Steiner's sense of the term we

still need generally accurate working concepts about these dimensions in order to be able to learn how to see

them. We need these types of concepts so we can understand from our personal perspective how to relate

ourselves to what we're seeing.

This is why Steiner called the method he practiced "Spiritual Science" instead of what's commonly known as

shamanistic seeing which in order to be what it is has to start by at times firmly putting aside the naïvely

given perspective on the world. The result of the shamanistic method however is it also doesn't focus on


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.


According to Steiner human beings have an even broader spectrum of dimensional existence and continuity

than either plants or animals. The process of self-reflective identity aka consciousness is focused and can be

directed while a person is alive. But upon death of the body it separates out from the body and acts

independently of a physical body. Further it continues through a number of dimensions in-between episodic

lifetimes. After death the person's consciousness is no longer supported without the reflections of the

physical body and the person's Ahamkara (ego continuity) doesn't retain the memory of that lifetime for long

after death and doesn't remember it in a future physical life.

Various types of animals by contrast have what Steiner called a group soul which also acts independently

outside the purely inert-material dimension and so on. For example, these animal group souls were what

were symbolically depicted as the animal headed but human bodied gods of the Egyptian pantheons. The

human body without a distinguishing individual human head was symbolic of the reflecting mechanism that

gave continuity to the whole species. While the animal head without its animal body signified the group

soul of the species which rayed through the individual animals as their focused self-intelligence.

Unattributed internet image of the Egyptian god Thoth

Finally for Steiner the person who is going to die can only find meaning by progressively learning about and

accepting that this life is only a temporary staging ground in the broader spectrum of life comprised of

different dimensions of experiences.

As a focused center of consciousness daily returning to one's body in this material dimension one has to

determine the truth of these issues for oneself independently of any particular predispositions one may have.


It's only as a focused individual consciousness that one is in a position to actively decide to learn to connect

the memories needed for a greater self-continuity through the spectrum of life dimensions. This approach to

the questions of life and death is just one mystery out of a vast universe of wonders.

rudolf steiner's vision -a very brief and philosophically … · boris alexander kiriako...

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