Anthroposophy, A Fragment
GA 45
IX. The Higher Spiritual World
If it is now supposed, as we have done above, that the formative forces for the life organs and the dispositions for the forces of the sense organs lie in the lower spiritual world, then, for the forming forces within this world, a natural distinction appears between those forces that presuppose an interiorized substance and those forces that form their organs to receive substance from outside. It is easily seen that the latter are a prerequisite of the former, since, if substance had no inherent possibility for interiorization, it could not become effective within itself. Therefore, the forces at work within substance must be forces that allow it to call up counter-effects from what is external to itself. Indeed, the content of the previous Chapter points to such counter-effects of substance upon itself. The inverted senses of life, self-movement, and balance carry within themselves the concealed possibility of their becoming active, as substance itself, to call forth interior formative development, but without making use of inner formative principles as such. They are active outside, not just within, the scope of these formative principles. If we now imagine these three inverted sensory activities acting in a way that does not impinge on an inwardly molded organ, while still remaining within the inherent nature of their sphere of effectiveness, they arrive at a limit where they must return back into themselves. At this limit, substance would throw itself back into itself; it would constrain itself in itself. What is present at this limit could be called substantiality within substantiality.
This would point to the possibility that those organs requiring inner substance come about out of a world in which substance outside becomes substance inside. This world would have to include the first dispositions for both those life organs that are supplied with interiorized substance and those that require outer substance. Within those forces that interiorize outer substance, this interiorization would have to be already present. Just as the forces in the life organs themselves point to a world of other forces out of which the life organs are shaped to begin with, the life organs with substance streaming within them point to dispositions in a still higher world out of which they are formed. We are thus led to point to an exterior world that can engender an exterior world through the antipode of the senses of life, self-movement, and balance. This world can be called the "higher spiritual world."
What could be looked for in this world? Not forces that ultimately shape the life organs, but those that implant the disposition to become life organs into their configurations. We must imagine these forces, however, as the antipodes of the senses of balance, self-movement, and life. If these forces are held back before they reach the limit of their sphere of effectiveness by inner formative processes in organs already in the process of being formed, they fashion the organs for the senses of hearing, tone, and concept out of these latent organs. What happens when these forces reach the limit of their natural, inherent activity? If the inverted sense of life were not to encounter anything to transform in the organ of concept, then it would obviously lead the experience of concept back into itself. And it would encounter itself directly as it rays back. This would then be the same process that is present in a sense experience, but it would lead an independent existence, without being based on an underlying sense organ. Something similar could be said of the inverted senses of self-movement and balance. In the higher spiritual world we would thus have to look for sensory experiences that are sufficient unto themSelves. They are related to the sensory experiences closest to the human being's I in the physical world—namely, the experiences of the senses of concept, tone, and hearing. In the case of these higher experiences, however, it is not, as it were, as if there were a human I standing before them and taking them in. Rather, it is as if a being were standing behind them, creating them in its own activity.