21. Gnosis and the Apocalypse
GA 87/1902-03-29/p016
·1902-03-29
·
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: «Auch wenn die Mitschrift noch nicht die später übliche Genauigkeit aufweist» (Even though the transcript does not yet have the accuracy usual later). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 87), which calls the cycle the earliest of which a listener's transcript exists. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
I hope that I have at least evoked a general idea [of gnosis]. [In its essence] gnosis consists in the fact that man can reach this high degree of development in the course of various re-embodiments, and that he has reached the highest when not only his personal life lies before his memory, but when he can look back in this way, when his memory is so far extended that he is able to embrace all embodiments in his memory. This is how far Jesus was, who emerged from the small droplet of sidelight. He is ripe to receive the Christ from the upper regions as "Vahän", as a "vessel". The human being becomes the bearer of the Christ. Thus we have the Christ born out of the spiritual world and the Jesus Christ of the Gnostics.
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