Necessity
Although the ancient Greeks raised their gods to a most elevated position, the wise men of the time recognised a higher, mysterious principle to which they considered even the gods to be subordinate, namely: – ‘ananke’, = necessity.
Let those who want to renounce the ‘mirage’ of the ever changing, insubstantial appearance of freedom, – those who finally renounce their obedience to the spectre of freedom, – tarry here a while.
The wisdom of the ancients might make itself felt in their souls…
They were certainly searching for genuine freedom when they encountered its spectre in the past, and they only believed in it because they thought it was that freedom born of reality they were ardently striving to attain.
If they now really want to experience the mark of genuine freedom, it will be lit with unsuspected brightness once they see how men in ancient times subordinated their gods – the freest of the free – to necessity. – –
The spectre born in men’s brains is quick to cast shadows upon the mark of genuine freedom and to arouse with dazzling images, the deluded hope that freedom can also liberate man from every demand made by the law of necessity…
But true freedom grows only out of the most perfect fulfilment of this law!
No man has ever become genuinely free without having been ‘liberated’ by necessity! –
Those, however, who ascribe the same worth to a deception as to genuine freedom are truly not worthy of freedom!
To be free means thinking, speaking and acting as necessity requires – and those knowing the way freedom comes about can turn around their suffering! –
Truly! – no power is ever capable of stealing from them the freedom they have made their own!
Those blinded by the spectre have little idea of the things this freedom opens up to those who could acquire it. – –
Necessity is not ‘compulsion’, – otherwise no one could stand in its way!
Necessity is the highest, spiritually ordering principle in man, as in all life; this is precisely what the ancients sought to acknowledge in placing ‘ananke’ above the gods themselves! – –
Compulsion is simply force conditioned by earthly circumstances – the true caricature of necessity!
You can be forced and you can force others into doing many things which certainly have nothing to do with necessity. – –
Necessity is the fixed ordering of the totality in which the individual participates.
No one can escape this totality and its order for one moment, even were he to try and negate everything for his imagination apart from himself!
In reality he is always united with the immeasurable whole, – he harms himself if he acts against this whole, and he harms the whole when he does not develop himself out of inner order. –
Only what really happens is decisive here!
The dreamer who sits in his cave and stokes the fire of his fantasy until it delivers to his imagination any world of the spirits he may prefer, – the lofty aesthete who separates himself from all external activities to live ‘in beauty’ and produces his world of expression remote from everyday life, – they are worth as much to the immeasurable whole as the brutish libertine who only satisfies his bestial instincts which are in a continual state of arousal. – –
Such deluded persons are in ‘reality’ poor people who succumb to their own cravings and fail to fulfil what ‘ananke’: that necessity transcending the gods which orders all life, demands of them. –
Whatever he has created as his own world remains insubstantial, even if he manages to project its reflection onto the brains of thousands of other people!
Nothing real has been achieved through it!
If you want to attain genuine freedom you must fulfil what necessity commands you to fulfil!
The spectre of freedom will arouse you so that your fantasy will affect your every thought!
You will make demands on yourself and others which are not founded in necessity but in the compulsion of your ‘overstretched’ thinking…
Because you demand too much you can not achieve anything or far too little; what you seek to steal greedily for yourself will be immediately taken away by those who were once your companions…
The yardstick which alone applies to all life is lost to those who follow the spectre of freedom in their frenzied haste!
You call your criticism ‘justified’, – but how will you within yourself find a justification for creating ruin? – –
Criticism is like an avalanche crashing down from the icy glaciers.
Barriers must be constructed for it to be of benefit! –
It is understandable that you would like to see all that is around you ordered in the way you desire, – but have you already been ordered within yourself?!?
How can you expect the whole, of which you represent a tiny cell, to order things as you desire?!?
You will only learn to recognise what will add to your well-being when you learn to put your trust in necessity!
Necessity alone can teach you the things which will remain forever yours once acquired!
Only by fulfilling the law of necessity can you attain the true freedom you yearn for, even if you are still trapped in the delusion that freedom must surrender itself to you as arbitrariness. – –
Wherever freedom was sought without fulfilling the law of necessity life became grey and murky!
The insubstantial spectre of freedom rises with a smirk over vast territories and poisons every seed of the true will to freedom with its life killing breath. –
All the soul’s strength is beyond the responsibility of those who – even though in good faith – take it upon themselves to lead others into a delusion which lures into such despair! – –
Unbearable also is the responsibility of those lured who could not resist when promised impossible things although they surely knew that anything here on earth which ever tried to resist the order of necessity was bound for ineluctable destruction, despite earthly compulsion temporarily resisting dissolution…
Necessity calculates by different realities of time than those surveyed within the life of a man on earth! –
It can never ‘miscalculate’, for it is the value and content of all number!
All the reality of earthly and otherworldly existence is founded upon it!
It carries the firmament of the solar hosts; its ordering forces give measure and form to every grain of sand in the desert!
Man vainly seeks a continually flowing source of earthly well-being which is not contained by such fixed order! –
Those who vainly strive for freedom seek in another way than by fulfilling every demand of necessity!
It is not only the gods who must submit to ‘ananke’ but – the man of the earth as well…