Steiner's name for the higher world where elapsed time is read as distance, and past events stand side by side in space rather than behind us.
The Akasha World (Time Become Space) in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the condition of the higher world that appears once ordinary memory has been transformed into what he calls the higher memory. He describes it in the tenth lecture of Macrocosm and Microcosm (GA 119), given in Vienna on 30 March 1910. In everyday consciousness a person looks backwards along a line of time to recall yesterday. For the spiritual investigator that line is walked rather than looked along: past events stand side by side, still present, and the duration that has elapsed is estimated as a distance. Steiner calls the resulting perception reading in the Akasha Chronicle, and names the world it discloses the Akasha World, set beside the physical world as its counterpart. In the same lecture he states that the higher memory carries the investigator out of three-dimensional space into a Space with a fourth dimension.
The Akasha World is not a place the soul travels to. It is what the higher world looks like once memory has stopped running backwards. Steiner's pupil does not recall a past event, but moves along the line of time as though it were a corridor in space, arriving beside the event and reading it where it stands. Elapsed duration is judged as distance.
In Steiner's Own Words
Memory has become an essentially new faculty. We see something belonging to the past as though it were still there in the immediate present; the length of time that has elapsed is estimated according to the distance. The past presents itself to the pupil as something placed side by side in space. When this form of memory has been attained, it is actually a reading of events that have remained. This is reading in the Akasha Chronicle; it is a world in which Time has become Space. Just as our own world is known as the physical, so the world in which Time has become Space can be termed the Akasha World. This alters the whole attitude of the true mystic, for what in everyday life is called Time, no longer exists in this form in the higher world.
What it Means Today
Eighteen months before Steiner spoke in Vienna, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski addressed the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians at Cologne on 21 September 1908, in the lecture published as Raum und Zeit. His claim was that space alone and time alone were finished as independent quantities, and that only a union of the two would keep any reality. From that lecture came the four-dimensional continuum physicists still call Minkowski spacetime, where an event is not something that happens and is gone but a fixed point with coordinates. Minkowski died in January 1909. Steiner, lecturing on 30 March 1910, reaches the same geometry from the other side, not as a coordinate system but as something an organ perceives: he tells his Viennese audience that the investigator can draw a line from today back to five days ago, that no such line exists in ordinary space, and that this is Space with a fourth dimension. He had already lectured on four-dimensional space in Berlin between 1905 and 1908, collected as GA 324a.
Minkowski's lecture has a philosophical descendant, the block-universe position in the philosophy of time, which holds that past, present and future are equally real and that passage belongs to the observer rather than to the world. Thalira synthesis: the block universe is the Akasha World described from outside the equations, and Steiner's own contribution is the claim that something can stand inside it, since a geometry in which the past is still there stays an abstraction until a faculty is able to walk to it and read.
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