Pneumatosophy: The Riddles of the Inner Man

GA 224/1923-05-23/p017 ·1923-05-23 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
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What a person who lives entirely in the materialism of the language, so to speak, carries over in sleep into the spiritual world brings him, strangely enough, into a difficult relation with the world of the Archangels, the Archangeloi, into which he should enter each night between going to sleep and waking; while the one who preserves for himself the idealism of speech, and who knows how the genius of the language lives in it, comes into the necessary relation to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, especially to that Archangel to whom he himself belongs in the world between sleeping and waking. Indeed, this is expressed even in outer world phenomena. Why do people today seek so frantically for an outer relation to the national languages? Why did this frightful misfortune come upon Europe, which Woodrow Wilson has considered good fortune?—but he was a curious illusionist.—Why then did this great misfortune come upon Europe, that freedom is bound up with the convulsive desire to make use of the national languages, even of the smallest nations? Because in reality the people are frantically seeking externally a relationship which they no longer have in spirit: for in going to sleep they no longer have the natural relation to the language—and also, therefore, not to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi! And humanity will have to find the way back again to the permeation of all that pertains to language with idealism, if they do not wish to lose the way into the spiritual world.

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Cite: GA 224/1923-05-23/p017 · edition English