42. Blood is a Very Special Fluid

GA 68b/1906-11-30/p007 ·1906-11-30 · 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: «Da keine professionellen Stenogramme vorliegen, handelt es sich oftmals um notizenhaft festgehaltene Zusammenfassungen oder Berichte.» (Since no professional shorthand transcripts exist, these are often summaries or reports kept in the form of notes.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68b). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

When we look at a person, we first see their physical appearance, their body; but we not only suspect, we know that a spiritual essence dwells within this body. We see the spiritual being revealed through the physical; the physical shows what moves the person at the bottom of their soul. We see their joy in their smile, their suffering in their tears. The entire physical aspect is a testimony of the spiritual. The spirit has built up the body: a lovely appearance as the image of a lovely soul; a brutal physical appearance, built up by a brutal spirit. We call the soul-spiritual the “upper”, the physical is the “lower”. Plato spoke of the “upper” as the archetype of things. Everything that surrounds us is the image of a spiritual reality. The world of archetypes is the “upper world”. Just as the shadow on the wall is the image of the object, so the lower world is the faithful reflection of the upper. Those who look at the world with spiritual eyes see not only the material; they see not only the eye and the ear, the body and its limbs, in the human form; they also perceive a soul behind it.

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Cite: GA 68b/1906-11-30/p007 · edition English