2. The Tree of Life II

GA 162/1915-07-25/p011 ·1915-07-25 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: unknown. 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.

When you keep in mind that our whole everyday knowledge is really influenced by the fact of the Luciferic temptation, that our everyday knowledge is the fulfilment of our having eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, it will no longer appear to you so inconceivable if I now bring before you a fact to be known from many occult perceptions. This is the fact that our nightly sleeping non-knowledge, the darkness of sleep which spreads out over our consciousness, is simply the effect of the not-being-allowed to eat of the Tree of Life. Had we been allowed to eat of this Tree then something similar would have come to pass for sleep as for waking. But this was not to happen. And thus for the sleep condition an unconsciousness has entered.

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Cite: GA 162/1915-07-25/p011 · edition English