{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 28/l11/p001","lang":"en","edition":"APC1928","edition_basis":"Marie Steiner edition (posthumous)","is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"At the close of this first stage of my life it became a question of inner necessity for me to attain a clearly defined position in relation to certain tendencies of the human mind. One of these tendencies was mysticism. As this passed in review before my mind at the various epochs in the evolution of humanity – in Oriental Wisdom, in Neo-Platonism, in the Christian Middle Ages, in the endeavours of the Kabalists – it was only with the greatest difficulty that I, with my different temper of mind, could establish any relationship to it. The mystic seemed to me to be a man who failed to come into right relation to the world of ideas, in which for me the spiritual has its existence. I felt that it was a deficiency in real spirituality when, in order to attain satisfaction in one's ideas, one plunges into an inner world void of all ideas. In this I could see no road to light, but rather a way to spiritual darkness. It seemed to me a powerlessness in cognition when the mind seeks to reach spiritual reality by an escape from ideas, which, indeed, the spirit does not actually reside, but through which it enters into human experience. And yet something attracted me toward the mystical strivings of humanity. This was the character of the inner experience of the mystics. They desire living contact with the sources of human existence, not merely a view of these, as something external, by means of ideal observation. And yet it was also clear to me that one arrives at the same kind of inner experience when one sinks down into the depths of the soul accompanied by the full and clear content of the ideal world, instead of stripping off this content when thus sinking into one's depths. I desired to carry the light of the ideal world into the warmth of the inner experience. The mystic seemed to me to be a man who cannot perceive the spirit in ideas and who is therefore inwardly chilled by ideas. The coldness which he feels in ideas drives him to seek through an escape from ideas for the warmth of which the soul has need.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"Chapter XI","site_heading":"Mysticism versus Ideal Knowledge in Spiritual Perception","site_heading_note":"A heading the site wrote for this unit from a summary of it; not in the edition, and not the words of Rudolf Steiner or of the translator. Cite the unit by its title and locus, never by this heading, and do not quote it.","date":null,"location":null,"word_count":371,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/28/l11/p001","alignment_confidence":"low","alignment_reason":"count_diverges","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":null,"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["APC1928"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":"Marie Steiner edition (posthumous)","is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/28/l11/p001"},{"lang":"en","edition":"APC1928","edition_basis":"Marie Steiner edition (posthumous)","is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/28/l11/p001"}],"paired_german":{"status":"no_paragraph_pairing","note":"No paragraph pairing exists for this paragraph, so no German text is given. The German paragraph of the same number is a different passage or an unestablished one. Read the German unit (german_unit.fetch_unit) and find the place by its content.","german_unit":{"lang":"de","edition":"original","unit_locus":"GA 28/l11","paragraph_count":12,"fetch_unit":{"ga":"28","lecture":"l11","lang":"de","edition":"original"},"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/28/l11","json_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/ga/28/l11?lang=de"},"pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"nearest_pairs":{"after":{"de":[8,9],"en":[6]}}},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":1.15,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":1331,"original_word_count":1154,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}