Sub nature:Electricity-Magnetism - 3.Power
Electricity "What is the light? It decays, and the decaying light is electricity. What we know as electricity is light that self-destructs within matter", (B001, 1.10.1911). There is a sphere of nature, the realms of the spiritual world, which are above sphere of nature and a sphere below that of nature, the so-called sub-natural or sub-physical world. The light is the carrier of the spiritual from higher spheres. When the light is condensed, hardened and materialized then it becomes matter and when this light condensed to matter is further compressed then it becomes electricity. In this way electricity is light compressed to the heaviest degree. In the sphere of the subphysical world the light ether is reflected as electricity, the chemical ether as magnetism and the life ether as the so-called terrible destructive force. "If you push the chemism even further down than under the physical plan, into the bad lower devachanic world, magnetism arises, and if you push the light into the sub-material, that is, one step lower than the material world, electricity arises ... Question: What is electricity? Answer: Electricity is light in a sub-material state. There the light is compressed in the heaviest way", (B001, 1.10.1911, question answer). To learn to understand the behaviour of electricity is therefore to learn to understand light. "On the phenomenology of electricity: such a phenomenology exists only indirectly, in that the phenomena of light are reflected in the totality of electrical utterances and the phenomena of chemistry in magnetic phenomena". (see 113, p.24). The type of technology developed by mankind in the 19th to 21st centuries is a technology based essentially on the use of electricity and magnetism. Man uses his mental powers to deal with the realms of the subphysical world. „... cultural activity of man gradually not only into the lowest parts of nature, but down under nature. Technology becomes sub-nature", (B051, 183. Guiding Principle). It is interesting to see how today's natural science imagines the origin of man exactly the wrong way round, as if man descended from animals and not vice versa. In the same way it thinks the world originated from material energy and electricity and not that matter and electricity originated from the slow compression and hardening of the spiritual. From the spiritual science the atoms can be understood in the workings of different forces (see chapter "The physical world"). The atoms in which the electricity is in a different state, that of matter. "It is thought that this physical atom behaves to the force of electricity in the same way that a lump of ice behaves to the water from which it is frozen", (B103, 16.12.1904). But if one neglects the other effective spiritual forces and reduces everything to energy and electricity, the view goes only to the adversary effect. If the human development of the will of the limb movement is not sought in the will and the spiritual forces of the ego but purely in electrical impulses, one succumbs to such error. "... a short time before we are born, another, we would say according to our terminology today, an Ahriman spiritual being permeates us. This is as much in us as our own soul. . . In the 19th century, science discovered that the nervous system is permeated by electrical forces. She was right, this natural science. But if she believed, if the naturalists believed, that the nervous power that belongs to us, that is the basis for our imaginative life, is somehow related to electric currents that run through our nerves, then they are just wrong. Because the electric currents, those are the forces that are put into our being by the being I have just described, they do not belong to our being at all: We also carry electric currents within us, but they are purely of Ahriman nature", (B014, 16.11.1917). Today, electricity can easily be found and used in the most technically demanding applications. The other forces, those of the higher worlds, are still waiting to be found and used in a justifiably wiser way.
Download (german) from the book "Mensch"(PDF)