42. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity II
GA 246/1911-06-06/p022
·1911-06-06
·
English
HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Nach zum Teil bruchstückhaften Mitschriften» (From transcripts that are in part fragmentary). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 246), which also speaks of "fragmentarischen Hörernotizen und Vortragszusammenfassungen". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
But from this emerges a thought that can have great practical importance, a thought that you know is expressed in the [New] Testament, in the Gospel; the words take on a very concrete form: “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdoms of heaven!” For what would be the highest ideal for man if what has now been said were true? To come closer and closer to consciously learning to master what one has unconsciously mastered in the first years of childhood! This is indeed something supreme that man prescribes for himself as an ideal: To bring over into conscious life and to let work in a conscious way that which works in the first years of childhood. This is a great ideal, an ideal so great that man can say the following to himself if he thinks seriously about himself.
Read this passage in another edition