{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 70b/1916-01-12/p018","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"In earlier times, hundreds or even thousands of years ago, there were always people who penetrated into the spiritual worlds, though they proceeded along a different path and used different powers for their development, using methods that are no longer suited to humanity as it has evolved today. These methods have to be changed, just as the way we look at nature has changed during the course of time. Nevertheless, the observers of the spirit in the past also reached the point referred to here, where they were embraced by this living, weaving power of thought, the objective power of thought that permeates everything. And they described the moment when the soul can have this shattering experience as the soul's approach to the gate of death.—This whole experience makes us aware that having cultivated the activity of thinking to the extent that it has been transformed in the way I have described, we actually enter into this living state of thinking. Alone, we are faced with an inner—not a physical—danger. This is the danger of not being inwardly able to carry what is otherwise our normal everyday self-consciousness into the world we now experience. It is the danger of entering a world where we are powerless in our souls to take our self-consciousness with us, where at first we seem to lose ourselves so that we actually reach the state of approaching the gate of death. But in approaching it, it is as if we had left ourselves behind. This losing ourselves, this no longer feeling in possession of ourselves, is a shattering experience. And in becoming completely one with it, we get to know something further—that the self-consciousness that we have, which arises at the moment to which our memory stretches back, the moment when we are aware of ourselves as an ego, this self-consciousness is really more bound to the physical organism of the body than the other powers of the soul, so that when we loosen our connection with the bodily organism we face the danger of not being able to say “I” any more, of losing ourselves. We recognize what is taken from us when we go through the gate of death, when death really divides the spirit-soul nature from the physical-bodily nature. We really achieve what I would call a theoretical but living experience of what death is from an objective, spirit-soul viewpoint.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"III. The Supersensible Being of Man","site_heading":null,"date":"1916-01-12","location":null,"word_count":398,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/70b/1916-01-12/p018","alignment_confidence":"low","alignment_reason":"no_original_to_compare","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"established","translator":"Michael and Elisabeth Tapp and Adam Bittleston","identified_edition":null,"book_title":"Reincarnation and Immortality","publisher":null,"publisher_inferred":false,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/ReinImmort/19160112p01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line"},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/70b/1916-01-12/p018"}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"other_renderings":{"loci":[{"locus":"GA 70b/1916-01-12_02","ga":"70b","lecture":"1916-01-12_02","kind":"renderings","relation":"another translation or transcription of the same lecture"}],"note":"The same lecture is also served at the loci listed, each with how it relates to this one. They are ONE witness, not independent attestations: quote the rendering you fetched, and do not cite another as corroborating it. Wording differs between translations, so a quotation found in one need not occur in the other."},"paired_german":{"status":"no_german_served","note":"No German witness of this unit is served.","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":null,"band":"no_original","note":null,"word_count":8484,"original_word_count":null,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"recorded","translator":"Michael and Elisabeth Tapp and Adam Bittleston","identified_edition":null,"book_title":"Reincarnation and Immortality","publisher":null,"publisher_inferred":false,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/ReinImmort/19160112p01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line"},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}