32. The Origin of Man

GA 68b/1907-10-31/p055 ·1907-10-31 · English High

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.

But man [as a spiritual being], as an astral being, precedes all living beings. He is the firstborn as a spiritual being. [The other beings, the imperfect beings, descend] from him [as a spiritual being], who [from the very beginning] has all the potential for the highest perfection [within himself]. So man was there as a spiritual being before he was there as a physical [being]. [So where do we come from? From the world that man does not see]; man does not see the world in which the astral, etheric bodies are at home. In there is the world from which man really comes. Therefore, what is the highest link in man originally comes from him in a mysterious way, [the astral body, the etheric body and] as the last link, the physical body. Man descends from the Divine-Spiritual, [from the spiritual man descends. Only] then do we consider the appearance and descent of man in the right light, when [we] truly [elevate ourselves to spiritual-scientific contemplation. These spiritual-scientific insights can be explained in detail in the course of winter. What now appears as a program will become clear in its details. That will become clear... The physical is born out of the spiritual. The spiritual is something that permeates everything. This has always been felt above all by those who, through their good disposition and insight, had no materialistic mind and no materialistic habits of thought. From the laws that permeate and resound through the whole world as spiritual, from such laws, man appears to spiritual researchers as originating. Thus spiritual research is based on no other point of view than Goethe's, which we have recognized as a genuine spiritual researcher and which he has expressed in the most diverse forms, including in that wonderful series of poems entitled “God and the World” [is entitled], in which there is a beautiful poem, ‘Orphic Primal Words’, of which today we are particularly interested in the first stanza, because it shows us how Goethe was aware of the facts we have been talking about today. He wants to show us how that which is spiritual in man, which comes from higher laws [than from physical laws, which are explained by external sensory facts], cannot be fragmented by the powers of the temporal, cannot be fragmented by the forces of the sensual. [This is what he wants to express when he] connects an ancient, sacred idea to [his own dismemberment]: I and spiritual people are not bound to the physical laws of the body, which they themselves have produced, built, transformed, they are eternal and unchanging in their essence, in that they transform and remodel that which they themselves [as the ego and astral body] have produced.

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Cite: GA 68b/1907-10-31/p055 · edition English