Three psychic phenomena Steiner judged real but earthbound: they arise from the body and its formative forces, never from the immortal soul.
Telepathy, Telekinesis and Teleplastics in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's collective name for the three classes of phenomenon that psychical research was investigating in his own lifetime: thought perceived at a distance without the senses, force exerted in space without a physical intermediary, and fine substance shaped by thought into visible plastic forms. Steiner treated all three in the lecture Man in the Light of Anthroposophy, given at Christiania on 29 November 1921 and collected in The Reality of the Higher Worlds (GA 79). He did not dismiss them as fraud, and he accepted the laboratory records of Albert von Schrenck-Notzing as honest. His verdict was structural instead: the three phenomena proceed from the physical body and the body of formative forces, the part of the human being that stays on the bed during sleep and dissolves at death. They therefore reveal nothing of the immortal sentient and volitional being, and nothing of the world entered after death.
Telepathy, telekinesis and teleplastics were the three headline results of European psychical research when Steiner addressed them in Norway in 1921. Anthroposophy answers them with a question about origin rather than authenticity: which member of the human being is acting? Steiner's reply places all three in the perishable members, which is why he counted them as no evidence at all for immortality.
In Steiner's Own Words
During certain psychic conditions, thoughts can be perceived through telepathy without the ordinary instrument of the senses; indeed these thoughts can even be perceived at a distance. One also speaks of telekinesis, or of certain forces proceeding from the human being which manifest themselves simply through influences at a distance, without the physical intermediary of the human being, so that it appears as if it were possible to unfold will-power and to transmit it into space without the medium of the body. In scientific circles experiments have already been made with the application of scientific methods, experiments falling under the category of teleplastic, in which phantoms and apparently physical forms appear in connection with a person, or in his close proximity.
What it Means Today
The discipline that inherited these three questions is academic parapsychology, and its founding address is Duke University, where Joseph Banks Rhine built a laboratory inside the Department of Psychology in the early 1930s. Rhine's Extra-Sensory Perception (1934) put card-guessing statistics behind what Steiner had called telepathy, and the dice-throwing trials he began the same year renamed telekinesis as psychokinesis, the word the field still uses. What Rhine ran into by the end of that decade is the part that matters here. He had come to Duke through William McDougall's survival research, expecting laboratory proof of thought-transference to strengthen the case for life after death. It weakened it. Once you grant that living minds can gather information without the senses, any message a medium attributes to the dead can be credited to the living instead. Alan Gauld set the difficulty out at book length in Mediumship and Survival (1982), where it goes by the name super-ESP, and survival research has not closed it since.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner arrived at that same wall sixty years earlier from the opposite side, and took it as information rather than as a loss, because for him the inability of these phenomena to testify about immortality is itself an exact finding about where they come from.
Read practically, this converts a sitting-room question into a diagnostic one. The useful question about a telepathic impression is not whether it occurred but which layer of the person produced it, and Steiner's answer, the layer that stays on the bed during sleep, explains why so much of this material leaves people physically drained rather than instructed.
Where to Read More