15. The Essence of Sleep and Death

GA 68b/1910-02-26/p003 ·1910-02-26 · 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.

Human life alternates between waking and sleeping. At night, people sink into a state of unconsciousness or subconsciousness. If they want to consciously experience this, they must first be able to suppress the external sensory impressions. To do this, the soul must be artificially emptied of all external impressions. Then, through the will, powerful, strong thoughts must be evoked in the soul. They must flash through the soul. Without a third element, something like an earthquake would be experienced, a shock. Through the will, a state of complete calm, a state of complete stillness, must now be created in the soul. Then the spiritual researcher experiences something similar to what happens at a lower level to a person born blind, who undergoes an operation and gains sight. Color and light flow in. This is what the spiritual researcher experiences. This is the awakening or initiation for him. Now he can judge about what lies behind the sense impressions. These are not dreams of feverish souls. Thus the spiritual eye is opened, the spiritual ear. This is easily judged wrongly, somewhat like a shell when it is first seen in the limestone. It has not grown out of the rock, but has been created by a water shell animal.

Read this passage in another edition

DEoriginalENEnglish

Raw JSON: /v1/steiner/en/ga/68b/1910-02-26/p003.json
Cite: GA 68b/1910-02-26/p003 · edition English