Supersensible world

The supersensible world, also called supernatural world or Super-Nature for short, is generally the totality of all higher realms of the world that cannot be directly grasped by the senses. This includes in particular the etheric world, the astral world and the actual spiritual world.

From the anthroposophical point of view, the so-called sub-sensible world must be clearly distinguished from the super-sensible world, which also eludes direct sensory perception and is essentially identical with the world of Ahriman, which underlies physical matter as a spiritual or counter-spiritual reality.

The sensual world, the world of the senses and the sensual mind, for which alone the consciousness of most people today is awakened, forms the narrow boundary layer between the super-sensible and the sub-sensible world.

In his Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, which Rudolf Steiner wrote down shortly before his death, he goes into more detail about the relationship of this Super-Nature to Sub-Nature. In the last essay entitled "From Nature to Sub-Nature" he states:

„Man needed the relationship to the merely earthly for his consciousness-soul development. In recent times there has been a tendency to realise everywhere in action that into which man must settle. By settling into the merely earthly, he meets the Ahrimanic. With his own being he must bring himself into the right relationship with this ahrimanic.

But in the present course of the technical age, the possibility of finding the right relation to the ahrimanic culture is still eluding him. Man must find the strength, the inner power of knowledge, in order not to be overwhelmed by Ahriman in the technical culture. The sub-nature must be understood as such. It can only do so if man in spiritual knowledge ascends at least as far to the extraterrestrial super-nature as he has descended in technology to the sub-nature. The age needs a knowledge that goes beyond nature, because it must inwardly come to terms with a dangerously effective content of life that has sunk below nature. Of course, we are not speaking here of returning to earlier cultural conditions, but of man finding the way to bring the new cultural conditions into a right relationship with himself and with the cosmos.

Today only a few people feel what important spiritual tasks are developing for man. Electricity, which after its discovery was praised as the soul of natural existence, must be recognised in its power to lead down from nature into sub-nature. But man must not glide along with it. In the time when there was not yet a technology independent of actual nature, man found the spirit in the conception of nature. The technology that was becoming independent made man stare at the mechanistic-material as that which was now becoming scientific for him. In this, everything divine-spiritual, which is connected with the origin of human development, is absent. The purely ahrimanic dominates this sphere.

In a spiritual science, the other sphere is created, in which the ahrimanic does not exist at all. And it is precisely through the discerning reception of that spirituality to which the ahrimanic powers have no access that man is strengthened to face Ahriman in the world.“ (Lit.:GA 26, p. 257f)

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26 (1998), ISBN 3-7274-0260-1 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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.