7. How Do We Understand Illness and Death?

GA 68b/1907-01-21/p015 ·1907-01-21 · 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.

What is an independent soul? Look at the universe, the cosmos. Look at the living beings! They are all connected to their environment; this connection becomes looser the higher we go in the evolutionary scale. The living beings become more independent, and humans are the most independent of all. He confronts the cosmos as a being that can act independently. But he, too, has outgrown this universe. Is it not the case that we can make the whole thing clear to ourselves through a very simple comparison? Take a glass of water; there are many drops in it. Each drop is contained in this mass of water without us being able to distinguish it from the mass. But if you single it out, if it becomes independent, then it presents itself as something independent of the whole, and if it were to develop forces within itself, then we could compare its position to the position of man in the cosmos. As long as the drop is in the whole of the water in it, it expresses those currents that come out of the mass. Having become independent, it has an effect back, like an opposing force on the mass.

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Cite: GA 68b/1907-01-21/p015 · edition English