{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 157/1915-03-02/p031","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"Death on the battlefield is more intense, an event which works more powerfully in our time than a death occurring in other ways. It therefore works upon the soul which has passed through the Gate of Death as an enlightenment. Death is terrible, or at least may be terrible for the human being so long as he remains in the body. But when he has passed through the Gate of Death and looks back at death, death is then the most beautiful of all experiences possible in the human cosmos. For between death and a new birth this looking back to the entrance to the spiritual world through death is the most wonderful, the most beautiful, the most glorious event possible. While directly from our birth so little before our physical experience ever really remains—no man remembers his physical birth with the ordinary, undeveloped faculties—nevertheless the phenomenon of death is ever-present to the soul which has passed through the Gate of Death, from the moment of the sudden emergence of consciousness onwards. It is always present, yet it stands there as the most beautiful presence, as the “awakener.” Within the spiritual world, death is the most wonderful instructor, an instructor who can prove to the receptive soul that there is a spiritual world, because through its very being it destroys the physical, and from this destruction allows the spiritual to emerge. This resurrection of the spiritual, with the complete stripping off of the physical, is an event ever-present between death and a new birth. It is a sustaining, wonderful event, and the soul gradually grows in his understanding of it, grows in a totally unique way if it is to a certain extent “self-selected”—not, of course, in the sense of a man seeking his own death but by having voluntarily considered it. If he has of his own free will allowed death to come to him, this moment gains immensely in lucidity. And a man who has not hitherto thought much about death or has concerned himself little with the spiritual world, may in our time receive in his death a wonderful instructor. This is a fact of great significance, precisely in this war, regarding the connection of the physical with the spiritual world. I have already stressed this in many lectures about this difficult time; but what can be done through mere teaching, through words, does not suffice. Yet great enlightenment is in store for mankind of the future because there have been so many deaths. They work upon the dead, and the dead, in their turn, set to work on the future development of culture in humanity.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"X. The Three Decisions on the Path of Imaginative Cognition: Loneliness, Fear, Dread","site_heading":null,"date":"1915-03-02","location":null,"word_count":439,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/157/1915-03-02/p031","alignment_confidence":"low","alignment_reason":"no_original_to_compare","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"established","translator":"Alice Wulsin","identified_edition":null,"book_title":"Esoteric Development","publisher":null,"publisher_inferred":false,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/EsoDevel/19150302p01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line"},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/157/1915-03-02/p031"}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"other_renderings":{"loci":[{"locus":"GA 157/1915-03-02_02","ga":"157","lecture":"1915-03-02_02","kind":"renderings","relation":"another translation or transcription of the same lecture"}],"note":"The same lecture is also served at the loci listed, each with how it relates to this one. They are ONE witness, not independent attestations: quote the rendering you fetched, and do not cite another as corroborating it. Wording differs between translations, so a quotation found in one need not occur in the other."},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":null,"band":"no_original","note":null,"word_count":8238,"original_word_count":null,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"recorded","translator":"Alice Wulsin","identified_edition":null,"book_title":"Esoteric Development","publisher":null,"publisher_inferred":false,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/EsoDevel/19150302p01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line"},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}