74. The Riddle of Death as a Riddle of Life
GA 246/1916-03-03/p015
·1916-03-03
·
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.
That you belong as a building block to the whole universe, to the whole world, that is the feeling that arises from this contemplation, if I may say so, of the hollow space, the hollow space of our physical body. Here we have our physical body between birth and death filled with muscles, blood and bones. There we find precisely that which is filled here, hollow in the world, empty. And we know: This space is ours, it belongs to us. And that is a blissful thing. You know that you are incorporated into this whole world as something that has a meaning, a purpose in the whole world.
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