55. The Mission of Devotion

GA 68b/1910-03-12/p039 ·1910-03-12 · English Medium

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.

The path that shows us, so to speak, in the mildest form, how man steps out of his ordinary physical abilities, as it were, and faces the outside world spiritually, is the path of what is called ecstasy. This is not really good. It does, however, lead a person to rise in a certain way above his physical seeing and hearing and grasping and understanding to a kind of spiritual vision of the external world, but this ecstasy, as it is so often described, obscures the direct consciousness of the self. The person is then out of himself; he does not carry his self into the world of spiritual experiences. Just as sleep spreads a veil over what we would experience to our detriment, because we would have to become selfish as a result, so the veil of external reality spreads over the spiritual world behind it, and this also occurs as a beneficial effect for the person who wanted to approach this spiritual world unprepared.

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Cite: GA 68b/1910-03-12/p039 · edition English