8. The Mystery of Death and the Riddle of Life
GA 68b/1908-02-01/p021
·1908-02-01
·
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.
We have now followed the human being to the point where only the ego remains, with the purified parts of the astral and etheric bodies. Now a purely spiritual state occurs, which is called devachan. The human being is stripped of his covers; he is a purely spiritual being. We now still have the I before us. It has sprung out of the bodily sheaths and has become spiritual in itself. The I in man is almost like a plant that has been enclosed in crevices and has been freed and unfolds freely. The I unfolds in all directions when the astral corpse has fallen away. It feels a bliss of the deepest kind.
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