What is Devachan?

In anthroposophy, Devachan is a word for the spiritual world. It's where the human soul enters after visiting Kamaloca. It's also where the soul encounters the deeper forces, archetypes, and creative origins behind everything that exists on Earth. The word comes from Sanskrit and was used in earlier esoteric traditions, but Rudolf Steiner reshaped it into a precise description of the spirit-land the human being moves through between death and a new incarnation.

Devachan begins once the soul has fully released its earthly desires and habits, after completing its time in kamaloca.

What disappears from consciousness on Earth; the inner life of things, their meaning, their formative forces, becomes completely vivid here. Devachan is the world of archetypes: the spiritual templates or “blueprints” from which nature, life, emotion, and thought take their shapes from (mostly).

There aren't physical objects in Devachan. What was solid matter on Earth appears here as nothing. But the living forces, inner qualities, and essential meanings behind things appear as things. The soul perceives with spiritual organs rather than senses, experiencing things in ways much different than the physical. This is one reason why training and research are important before attempting to go here, because things can be quite disorienting and weird.

Steiner describes Devachan as having “lower” and “higher” regions.

  • The lower regions contain the archetypes of minerals, plants, animals, and the human soul,
  • The higher regions hold the spiritual seeds from which future lives are shaped.

It is here that the soul rests, grows, and gathers strength, getting ready for the next incarnation. Friendships and affinities also continue, in a transformed way.

The duration of the Devachan experience after death is vastly longer than the Kamaloca stage and often spans centuries.