The difference between Christian hell and the Eighth Sphere is that fallen beings from the ranks of the hierarchy also have fallen into this realm and exert much pressure on souls to turn away from the spirit and look solely to the material plane and the sub-natural plane below them – the realm of hell.

This is a realm where many of the dead get caught by their materialistic vices and are imprisoned in their insatiable desires. Fallen light, in the form of electromagnetism, helps construct this sub-earthly plane that pulls angels and humans into a dark realm devoid of spirit.

It is a realm of living death, frustration from addictions, and a cold immoral hell made of the cast-off dross of the material world.

The Eighth Sphere is a subterranean layer beneath the earth where demons from many realms try to immorally consume human willpower as their means of incarnating into the material world. Thus, it is also called the “hell realm of hungry ghosts.”

Perhaps love is like a resting place
A shelter from the storm
It exists to give you comfort
It is there to keep you warm
And in those times of trouble
When you are most alone
The memory of love will bring you home

Rudolf Steiner, the great spiritual scientist, helps us understand the nature and mechanisms of sleep, dreams, and death. He also gives indications on the psychological, mental, and psycho-kinetic aspects of the stages of dreams. He clearly describes the differences between the sleep and dreams of materialists compared to spiritual scientists (aspirants and initiates). Steiner has given us more information about sleep and dreams than modern science.

Individual humans began to have free thoughts, independent of the transcendental, divine world. Christ then incarnated on Earth in a physical body, once and only once, to bring to birth the personal ego of every free human being from that time forward. With further spiritual development of the personal ego, each liberated human ego can rise into the astral light (Spirit Self), lower devachan (Life Spirit), and higher devachan (Spirit Man) to reclaim the three higher egos that reside in the three supersensible realms where our older siblings, the Angels, Archangels, and Archai, live and help sustain the human astral, etheric, and physical bodies.

Ultimately, the free human individual, acting freely out of the impulses of Christ’s love, returns to the place whence they have come, but now with the gifts of personality and individualization that make each person a unique facet of the divine.

Conscience is often seen as the “highest moral and logical authority” and evaluates information to determine the quality of an action: good or evil, fair, or unfair. Consequently, conscience usually ranks higher than consciousness and, in addition, has the ability and the authority to decide how information will be used, either for good or for ill. Conscience can determine our final decisions for action after evaluating, in a split second, all of the varying parameters. It also seems to be able to predict the outcomes of some actions.

The Spiritual Hierarchies described by Rudolf Steiner, and many others, are nine ranks of beings who work together as one being with three part, — the first, second, and third hierarchy. The Holy Trinity works through the “threefold” set of hierarchical beings as the Father God rules the first/highest rank of the hierarchy – Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; the Son God of the Holy Trinity (Christ) works through the second, middle rank of the hierarchy – Dominions/Spirits of Wisdom, the Mights/Spirits of Movement, and the Powers/Spirits of Form; and the Holy Spirit works through the third/lowest rank of the hierarchy – Angels, Archangels, and Archai.

This inherent “trinity in a trinity” does not make the Christian Holy Trinity and Celestial Hierarchy a form of pantheism or deity worship because a “threefold” Divine being manifests Itself through a “threefold” set of hierarchical aspects, virtues, qualities, forces, beings, and levels of consciousness congealing over four ancient periods of development of the Earth to create a human being on the Earth today.

The self is the focus of development and yet the self has many names, elements, and components: the “I Am”, ego, lower self, Adam Kadmon Self, the Angelic Self, the doubles of the lower self, the higher self, Spirit Self (Manas), the self of Life Spirt (Buddhi), the Christened Self, the selfless self, and ultimately the highest self which is found in the Spirit Human (Atman).

All of these facets of the human self – from inception to fulfillment of spirit potential – are part of the biography of the “I Am.”