Get started

WorkRudolf Steiner

How to Know Higher Worlds

A training manual in monthly instalments: the exercises by which, Steiner claims, anyone can learn to perceive a spiritual world.

by Rudolf Steiner292 passages held

  • German, the original language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?
First published
(aged 43)
Original language
German

Report a rights issue

Overview

Sixteen instalments in a monthly magazine, from June 1904 to September 1905, laid out an entire course of esoteric training. The magazine was Lucifer-Gnosis, which Rudolf Steiner had founded the year before and wrote almost entirely himself, helped by his secretary, Marie von Sivers. The series states its premise in its first sentence: every human being carries faculties, now asleep, through which knowledge of higher worlds can be gained. Occult schooling had always been kept secret, Steiner says, and he answers the suspicion that its teachers hoard knowledge for a privileged few by printing the method for anyone to read. The discipline begins with reverence, inner calm and the patient practice of watching things grow and wither. It is also moral before it is visionary: the text sets the rule that for each step taken towards hidden truths, the student should take three towards a better character. Steiner then describes what he holds the exercises produce: organs of spiritual perception, which he calls lotus flowers or by their Indian name, chakras; changes in dreams; and a consciousness that continues through sleep. He also warns that the training can split the personality. The course ends at the meeting with the guardian of the threshold, a frightening, ghostly being, in whose presence, Steiner writes, students discover that their thinking, feeling and willing have come apart. English readers had the first seven essays in 1908 as The Way of Initiation, a year before the series was gathered into a German book, and the rest in 1909 as Initiation and Its Results. It was translated again in 1947 as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and more recently as How to Know Higher Worlds.

Key concepts

What are the stages of preparation, illumination and initiation?

The book's outline of the whole path. Preparation trains attention on the sense world, on growing and withering, sounds and feelings, until the soul answers in new ways. Illumination, in Steiner's account, is the first dawning of spiritual perception, a light shining from within things. Initiation is the point at which the student can act and judge independently in that higher world.

What are the lotus flowers the book describes?

Organs of spiritual perception that, in Steiner's account, form in the student's soul body as the training goes on; Indian tradition calls them chakras. In untrained people, he writes, they are dark and still, and exercises in thinking, feeling and conduct set them turning. He links the sixteen-petalled flower near the larynx, for instance, with eight practices, among them right judgement, right speech and right action.

Who is the guardian of the threshold?

In the book's account, the being a student meets on crossing into spiritual perception, formed from the consequences of their own past deeds, good and bad, which had worked on them unseen until then. It shows them what they have made of themselves and must now take in hand. A second, greater guardian appears later and calls the student not to rest in their own liberation but to serve the rest of humanity.

What is continuity of consciousness?

The condition, as Steiner describes it, in which awareness no longer breaks off in sleep. First dreams become ordered and meaningful; then a clear experience of the spiritual world arises within dreamless sleep itself, until the student carries consciousness unbroken through day and night. He presents it as a late fruit of the training, never as something to be forced or hurried.

What does the book mean by the splitting of the personality?

The separation of thinking, feeling and willing, which in ordinary life are bound together by the body's organisation and act as one. The training loosens that bond, Steiner writes, so that each becomes independent and the student's own I must hold them together. A character too weak for this risks one-sidedness: a will without thought, feeling without judgement, or a coldly detached intellect.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Path Begins in Reverence

Where does a training in higher knowledge begin, if not with visions? The book's answer is reverence, inner calm and patient attention to things growing and withering, long before anything unusual is perceived.

The first condition, Steiner writes, is a mood of devotion: a student who cannot look up to what deserves veneration will not rise. Criticism is not forbidden but set aside for a time. Then comes inner calm, a few minutes each day in which a person looks back on their own experiences as a stranger would, separating what matters from what merely excites. The exercises that follow are patient attention to nature, watching a seed or a growing plant and then a withering one, until distinct feelings answer each.

  • spiritual practice
  • meditation
  • self-discipline
  • attention
  • patience
  • reverence
  • self-cultivation
  • nature
  • self-mastery
  • emotion
  • desire
  • thought

Enter a dialogue

Three Steps in Character for Each in Knowledge

Why should a training in seeing be moral first? The book's rule is that for every step taken towards hidden truths, the student should take three towards a better character.

Steiner defends printing the method against the charge that occult teachers hoard knowledge: the only safeguard needed, he argues, is the student's own maturity, which no secret can supply. So the conditions he lists are mostly moral: care for bodily and mental health, a sense of belonging to the whole of life, the conviction that thoughts and feelings act on the world as deeds do, steadfastness, gratitude. An idea that does not become an ideal, he writes, kills a force in the soul. The teacher advises and never commands; the student must stay free.

  • ethics
  • self-knowledge
  • judgment
  • education
  • esoteric training
  • initiation
  • knowledge
  • epistemology
  • language

Enter a dialogue

Organs of Sight and the Guardian

What does the training claim to produce, and what does it cost the one who undergoes it? Steiner describes new organs of perception, a consciousness that continues through sleep, and a frightening meeting at the threshold.

The results, as Steiner describes them, are organs of spiritual perception he calls lotus flowers, or chakras, which begin to turn as the student's soul is transformed; dreams become ordered, and in the end consciousness runs unbroken through sleep. He does not hide the dangers. Thinking, feeling and willing, held together in ordinary life, come apart in the student, and a weak character can split. The course ends at the guardian of the threshold, a ghostly being that, in his account, shows students what their own past deeds have made of them.

  • spiritual development
  • spiritual perception
  • perception
  • clairvoyance
  • etheric body
  • consciousness
  • sleep
  • spiritual experience
  • spiritual knowledge

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
292
distinct concepts
330
by passages held, corpus-wide
#255

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “meditation” and “spiritual perception”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
meditationspiritual perception11
self-disciplinespiritual practice9
perceptionspiritual development7
consciousnessspiritual development6
perceptionspiritual practice6
self-disciplinespiritual development6
knowledgespiritual perception5
consciousnessspiritual perception4
meditationspiritual practice4
spiritual developmentspiritual perception4
consciousnessperception3
knowledgespiritual development3
meditationperception3
meditationspiritual development3
perceptionself-discipline3
consciousnessspiritual practice2
meditationself-discipline2
consciousnessknowledge1
consciousnessmeditation1
consciousnessself-discipline1
knowledgespiritual practice1
perceptionspiritual perception1
self-disciplinespiritual perception1
spiritual developmentspiritual practice1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1891 Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie (Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre)

    A doctoral thesis and the groundwork for The Philosophy of Freedom, though most readers know it only through the 1892 book that absorbed it.

     DE
  2. 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit)

    The philosophical centre of Steiner's work, written in his Weimar years before any theosophy, and the book he kept sending later readers back to.

     DE
  3. 1895 Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit)

    Written between The Philosophy of Freedom and the Goethe book, while Steiner still counted himself among Nietzsche's allies and before his dealings with the Nietzsche Archive turned sour.

     DE
  4. 1897 Goethe's World View (Goethes Weltanschauung)

    The last book of Steiner's Weimar years and the summing-up of his work as Goethe's scientific editor; The Philosophy of Freedom supplied its theory of knowledge.

     DE
  5. 1901 Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens)

    The first book to come out of Steiner's lectures for the theosophists, still written in the voice of the naturalist philosopher of the 1890s; Christianity as Mystical Fact followed from the next course.

     EN
  6. 1902 Christianity as Mystical Fact (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums)

    The book that marks Steiner's turn from philosophy to esoteric Christianity, given first as lectures to the Berlin theosophists in the months before he became their leader.

     EN
  7. 1904 How to Know Higher Worlds (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?) you are here DE
  8. 1904 Theosophy (Theosophie)

    Begun two years after Steiner took charge of the German theosophists, and the systematic foundation that his later accounts of initiation and cosmic evolution build on.

     DE
  9. 1910 An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß)

    The fullest single statement of Steiner's cosmology, begun inside the theosophical movement and revised under anthroposophy through four prefaces from 1909 to 1925.

     DE
  10. 1911 The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind (Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit)

    Steiner's second book on the figure of Christ, nine years after Christianity as Mystical Fact, and one that carries the account far deeper into esoteric claims.

     EN
  11. 1919 The Threefold Commonwealth (Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft)

    Composed for the months after the German revolution, and Steiner's chief written statement on society; it reached English readers within a few years as The Threefold Commonwealth.

     DEEN
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works