7. How Do We Understand Illness and Death?

GA 68b/1907-01-21/p035 ·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.

While the etheric body of the human being works mainly within, enlarging the organs, working from [within] outwards in reproduction, the astral body is what is there to make the outside accessible to the inside and connect it to it. This happens all the time. Every ray of light, every piece of nourishment that a person takes in, is an interaction between the person's inner being and the outside world. The regulator is the astral body, and essentially the relationship is regulated by needs, by pleasure and pain, by desire. What a person desires, he appropriates, and the faculty of desire is the expression of the astral body. [This is what man demands of his environment.] You see, then, that man fulfills various tasks through his limbs. This now requires a significant distinction to be made with regard to the limbs in the whole of human life. This distinction will become clear to us when we consider the nature of sleep. When a person sleeps, all desire and suffering, all interaction with the outside world, everything that the astral body conveys, has sunk down. No sensible person will say that a person decays in the evening and is reborn in the morning. His astral body is there, but not as it is during the day. While during the day this astral body dwells in the physical body and allows the things of the outside world to flow out through the organs of the physical body and processes them, at night it is separated from the physical body, it does not touch the physical body. This is not the case with the etheric body. What it has to do continues during sleep.

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Cite: GA 68b/1907-01-21/p035 · edition English