7. How Do We Understand Illness and Death?

GA 68b/1907-01-21/p022 ·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.

Imagine there is a piano here, a player is playing, and a deaf person is sitting next to it. They cannot hear anything that the player draws from the strings. But there is a method of making them perceptible to him, these things that are happening. You put paper tabs on the strings, they are thrown off by playing, and he can get a certain idea of what the others hear. The relationship between the world of sounds as perceived by the deaf man, who can only hear them indirectly through the little tags, and the world of the hearing, is the same as that between what is investigated within the material world and what can be experienced by those with higher organs. And the only thing that this claims as its assertion is the truth that there have always been people who had such higher organs and saw another world. Not through speculation, but through a higher perception, spiritual science comes upon what it now calls the life body or ether body, similar to the speculated life force. This is what brings the inanimate substances, the mere chemical-physical processes, to life and what man has in common with the plant and animal world.

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Cite: GA 68b/1907-01-21/p022 · edition English