Spiritual being
Above all, the higher hierarchies are regarded as spiritual beings, to which man, as the tenth and lowest level, is also to be counted, who, as the only spiritual being, also reveals himself in a closed sensual form at the same time. The spiritual beings also include adversary powers such as Lucifer, Ahriman and the Asuras.
The elementary beings who are directly active in nature, although they are certainly of a supersensible nature, cannot be counted among the spiritual beings in the proper sense, since they do not have an independent I, i.e. their own individual spirit.
All effects in the world ultimately emanate from spiritual entities that live in different Conditions of Consciousness. In their consciousness lies the original source and the actual substance from which reality is woven:
„It is good to note that basically there is nothing else in the universe but consciousnesses. Apart from the consciousness of any beings, everything else ultimately belongs to the realm of the Maja or the great illusion. You can gather this fact from two passages in my writings in particular, and also from others, but especially from two passages: first, from the description of the total evolution of the Earth from Saturn to Vulcan in the "Occult Science in Outline", where the progression from Saturn to the Sun, from the Sun to the Moon, from the Moon to the Earth and so on, is described, at first only in states of consciousness. That is to say, if one wishes to ascend to these great facts, one must ascend so far in world affairs that one has to do with states of consciousness. So one can actually only describe consciousnesses when one describes realities. From another passage in a book that appeared this summer, "The Threshold of the Spiritual World", the same thing can be gathered. There it is shown how, through gradual ascension, the seer's vision rises from what spreads out around us as things, as processes in things, how all this, as it were, disappears as a nullity and melts away, is destroyed, and finally the region is reached where there are only beings in some state of consciousness. So, the real realities of the world are beings in the various states of consciousness.“ (Lit.:GA 148, p. 305f)
Literature
- Rudolf Steiner: Aus der Akasha-Forschung. Das Fünfte Evangelium, GA 148 (1992) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
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