14. How Can We Know About Supernatural Worlds?

GA 69d/1913-03-09/p024 ·1913-03-09 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: mixed sources. This volume draws on more than one kind of record (transcripts, notes, documents). Check the volume's own front matter before weighing a single passage. Evidence: «Im Anhang Notizen und Berichte von weiteren Vorträgen» (In the appendix, notes and reports of further lectures). Rudolf Steiner Verlag Gesamtverzeichnis 2022, volume subtitle. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

An important spiritual personality such as Charles Eliot of Harvard University emphasizes that he finds a spiritual reality behind the physical and sensory, that human beings are always distinct from their bodies. But when the spiritual researcher says that, after the self-education described, one comes to see individual spiritual beings that make up a cosmos, just as physical things make up a physical cosmos, this is rejected. If one were to say to Charles Eliot, when observing the plant world, with every plant or every substance in the laboratory: That is nature, that is nature, that is nature – nothing would be achieved by this. At most, spiritual science is forgiven for admitting spirit in general, but not individual beings and things of the spiritual world. But just as the world is specified by the sensory organs of human beings, so there are beings in the spiritual world who do not have physical bodies, and the spiritual world stands before human beings once they have recognized it.

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Cite: GA 69d/1913-03-09/p024 · edition English