Astral world

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In the astral world (also called astral plan, world-astrality, soul world, astral light or imaginative world; the lower regions of the astral world, which overlap with the etheric world, are also called the elementary world), desire and suffering, affection and hatred, urges and desires are just as really present as the outer material objects are in the physical world. One can rightly speak of an independent soul substance - only the term substance must not be misunderstood in the physical-material sense. The world of the soul necessarily remains hidden from the physical senses; it only opens up to the imaginative gaze of the soul. Sympathy and antipathy are the two poles between which the soul forces dynamically unfold.

What is the astral world?

„We can say quite precisely what the astral element is in man. It is that which causes all human beings who have such an element in them to let something happen in them which we call pleasure and displeasure in the broadest sense. Pleasure and displeasure is something that occurs in our body and in the bodies that are similar to us in an astral relation, and which cannot be brought about by chemical and physical substances. Take a crystal or any other physical substance composed of chemical substances. Everything can happen to it that otherwise happens in the physical, but not desire and displeasure. This is only to be found in man himself and in those beings which are organised like man. These beings are interspersed with an element which can feel pleasure and displeasure. If you strike a stone, it will fly on or strike somewhere and make an impression. If you impress such a natural object in this or any other way, you can see it from the outside; you can even subject it to a process that destroys it, but it will never feel pleasure or displeasure. Pleasure and displeasure reach as far as the astral world reaches. And just as I belong to the outer world through the processes of a chemical and physical nature that take place within me, so I really and really have all the different nuances of pleasure and displeasure within me, and through these different nuances and appearances of pleasure and displeasure I belong to a world that permeates and sails through our corporeal world and that is just as much outside me as within me. In space there is not only air that sustains the bodily physical life, but space is also interspersed with an astral world in which we human beings participate just as we participate in the outer physical world. And just as we could not live as physical beings without letting the physical force flow through our organism, so we could not live as pleasure and displeasure beings, as astral beings, without participating in what goes on in the astral world, what lives and weaves in it, and what continually pervades and inspires us. Just as we are separated from the physical world by our skin and thus individualised, so we are also closed off in the general astral world. We are individualised within it as single astral entities and participate in this astral world around us.“ (Lit.:GA 88, p. 24f)

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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