5. Balance in Life

GA 169/1916-07-04/p019 ·1916-07-04 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
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.

This living together with outer reality, with all that is spread out throughout the universe, this feeling oneself at the right moment face to face with the eternal, is something quite different from learning out of books that this or that is an everlasting truth. No matter how often we abstractly impress upon ourselves that human life is a shadow of what happens to us in eternity, no matter how many beautiful ethical truths about the use of time we impress upon our memory, none of them will ever reach as deep as the finding of a right relationship between ourselves and outer reality. Then we will see a significance in the individual concrete fact, and only then will we find the balance in life we can never find by losing ourselves in the external world or by merely immersing ourselves deeply into our inner being. Mysticism is one-sided and luciferic; natural science is onesided and ahrimanic. But mysticism developed through observation of external nature or observation of nature deepened to mysticism, that is balance!

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Cite: GA 169/1916-07-04/p019 · edition English