Hortus Conclusus

Path of my Pupils:

I have given sufficient and explicit explanation that seekers can only be ‘my’ pupils insofar as they adhere, in direction and self-determination of their striving, to the message, instructions and teachings laid down in my books, without wanting to see anything else in my own person than the appointed mediator and fashioner of the insights and advice offered here.

This is a purely spiritual teacher-pupil relationship in which I bear eternal responsibility for every seeker who takes his direction from my teaching in such a way that he gains the genuine right to call himself my ‘pupil’.

This is not the equivalent of the ‘sense of responsibility’ towards their faithful felt and expressed by all conscientious pastors within religious communities, – it is rather the case that my responsibility for the seeker who precisely follows the advice I have imparted in order to enter ‘into the spirit’ consists of an indissoluble obligation which continues to make its demands in future conditions after life on earth and is not fulfilled until the seeker who has entrusted himself to my teachings has achieved what I could promise him. –

And yet I must ask you: – to differentiate precisely the things I describe in my books as spiritually possible and capable of being experienced under certain, clearly shown preconditions, and which I only present in order to describe the various levels of spiritual experience, which without question can not already be reached by all men on earth, – and those things I, clearly and without fear of misunderstanding, want to see attained by every spiritual pupil during his life on earth.

It is necessary for me to allow the seeker to partake in a lively way in experiencing the higher levels of ability of spiritual experience which may still be inaccessible to him here on earth, thus enabling him to find his own ‘direction’, but this certainly does not mean that I could promise him reaching this ability of experience in the spirit.

Everything I show to be accessible presumes a certain level, to a greater or lesser degree, of development of the substantial spiritual organism; in every passage in my books treating attainable experiences in spiritual life I also show what must already have been attained in order to rise to the next higher level of appropriate spiritual experience.

After a receptive reading of my elucidations the pupil within the spirit can himself recognise precisely where he stands, although he must, of course, beware of refashioning to his advantage the characteristics of the relevant ability for experience which I give unequivocally.

In earthly matters someone can at times pretend to have grades of perfection so that others think he possesses them, – but in spiritual life every attempt to ‘pretend to have higher qualities’ is bound to fail abjectly, since anyone prepared to engage in this pretence, merely – deceives himself.

The spiritual level he has really gained emerges only from the ability for experience in the substantial eternal spirit he has reached.

For the seeker there ought to be no question that we are not talking about ‘levels’ or ‘grades’ rigidly and definitively determined according to a fixed ‘ranking’.

Yet frequently I have to observe that people like to see the rungs of Jacob’s ladder ‘numbered’, and because I thereby came across a misunderstanding which absolutely must be cleared up, let the following be stated here:

The spiritual can only become ‘conscious’ to what is spiritual!

The spiritual is only experienced in one-ness, and whatever seeks to be one with the spirit must itself be of the spirit.

Everything which is not of the spirit is not ‘concrete’ for the spirit: – not ‘real’!

( – I speak of the eternal, substantial, one and only truly indestructible, eternal spirit, – not of the outcome of the movements of the corruptible brain! – )

Earthly man could never enter ‘into the spirit’ if he were only the appearance perceptible to the senses on earth.

Only because he is at the same time substantial, eternal spirit can he, on completing one-ness, experience the spiritual, – can he become spiritually conscious within himself of himself as spirit from the spirit of eternity. –

For this to happen it is necessary for certain behaviour to be constantly maintained over a long period.

The various forms this behaviour can take are precisely described in my teachings.

The purpose of this behaviour is primarily: – to remove increasingly the habit of thinking life instead of living it, and learning to live in a truly active and conscious way. –

Active life is to take the place of ‘the life of thought’.

This striving has fully achieved its purpose when thinking itself is also lived and no longer only: ‘thought’. –

I cannot express any more clearly what is meant here; but I know full well that no one accustomed to thinking his life can even have the slightest inkling of what I mean here…

But that is also not necessary, because we speak here not of an ability to imagine, but of learning to live!

Man thinking his life believes in thinking: that he lives and what he experiences encompasses his life, – but to thinking life is but an object, even if it is the object which includes all other possible objects of thinking, – and life is extinguished for thinking in the very moment thinking itself is extinguished.

However, life can still be thought, and millions upon millions know it only in thought, – yet never can the substantial eternal spirit be comprehended in thinking but only in living: – in occurring – not thought-determined, – experience! – –

Whereas in thinking, life is always only thought: – only in thought does it disclose reality, – the true living of life creates an occurrence of which one is fully part.

Thus ‘learning to live’ is the task of those who would enter ‘into the spirit’, for one enters the spirit not through thinking, but through a sublime occurrence which only those can experience who have become able of experience in active life, where others think to live.

This learning to live is not achieved ‘at a stroke’, and the ability to live does not come upon man as an ‘instant illumination’.

Instead it must be worked for!

It is a process of ‘learning’, – though not learning through reason, – and like all learning it has its various levels, or – to stay with the symbol of an inner path, – its various stations upon the path! –

In order to give a rational idea of this sequence, since the seeker initially only thinks and grasps but does not live (I am not speaking here of the passive being alive of the body which is described as ‘living!), the ‘masters’ of the art of living have at all times spoken of ‘levels’ which follow on from each other in sequence, or of ‘stations on the path’ which are reached one after the other, but never should they be described as rigid and definite didactic levels in the sense of a teaching ‘method’.

Instead of the image of the path, the steps on a staircase, or rungs on a ladder, one might also choose the image of the growing tree from which it would be clearer how, in the process of learning to live, one state of growth follows on from another through the years, – and how one passes on into the other. –

Of course I can divide the growth of the tree according to the most varied systems, and likewise the progress in learning to live. All such divisions may awaken understanding for the gradual growth of a tree or for the progress made when learning to live, – but can at any time be replaced by a different division.

The process of moving forwards is not altered in any way if I divide it up into seven, sixty-eight or two thousand stations, levels or grades! –

Thus one cannot say: – “This person or that one is on such-and-such a level” but only: – “He is at the very start; he has made fair progress, or he has made considerable strides forward.” –

(Here should be discarded, of course, ‘grades’ in the sense Freemasonry attaches to them, or any similar orders where the grade achieved is parallel to a military ‘rank’.)

All else is nonsense!

‘Nonsense’, for it is without a sense which corresponds to reality!

But this does not appear to have been convincingly clear to some of my pupils, and for this reason I have now explained it as clearly as possible.

Iam not presenting any theories here, where ‘B’ results from ‘A’, and ‘C’ from ‘B’; instead I speak from my own experience!

For many years I no longer think my life but live it instead, – and in the same way I live my thinking!

I was not in any way ‘given preferential treatment’ on my path but had to learn ‘the ability to live’ in an incomparably more intensive and more demanding way than would be possible for any of my pupils!

I really had to ‘struggle’ for everything!

There is also no end to this ‘learning’ for it requires constant practise once it is ‘learnt’.

Death of the earthly body touches upon this ‘practise’ of ‘what is learnt’ only insofar as after this event this body is no longer lived. However, the thinking learnt by this body, man can live at the same time in eternal life only if he has ‘learnt’ it through the body in his earthly life…

Those who have not learnt ‘living’ in the body can only think it dreamingly after the death of the body, just as he also thinks of himself in a dreaming way for a long time – until he learns living spiritually–, even if this thinking is no longer registered by a brain.

It is not for nothing that I speak of our substantial spiritual organism!

An ‘organism’ is for me something which has grown of itself and has its own life.

The earthly body is by my definition not an ‘organism’ but a combination of organs.

I know all too well that it is possible to think of this using a different terminology, and when I was still thinking my life this was also my terminology, – but since I have been able to live my thinking, I have no further use of it…

Every one of my pupils is at liberty to ‘translate’ into his individual idiom everything I have said in the words available to me.

I mean: – one should not just ‘leave’ the words ‘as they are’, but should rather change them and let them become alive! –

But at this point I shall also have to tell my pupil why, unfortunately, I have a great deal to say about myself in my books: – why I constantly have to mention myself although nothing is more difficult for me than even finding my name mentioned in earthly life.

There are two reasons why I am compelled to act against all my wishes and inclinations:

Firstly, I am, to my not inconsiderable distress, under an obligation to the spirit to, as it were, ‘identify myself’ to all those who read my words, regardless of whether I like doing this or not, and without consideration to whether I like the way my communications are received by others.

I have, to put it briefly, a spiritual duty to provide insight for the readers of my books as to the manner in which I came to write what I have written.

Secondly, I am, naturally, the closest, most familiar and in all aspects most readily verifiable field of experience for myself.

Since I know myself now to be absolutely free, to the imperceptibly tiniest degree of inclination, from the slightest shimmer of any personal, albeit ‘innocent’, desire to assert myself, instead of which

I am used to observing myself far more than anyone else in an objective and sober fashion, I know I can best account for experiences familiar to me which I am to make understandable to others.

Nobody who only has even a passing acquaintance with me can entertain the foolish thought that I have for this reason become the material for my own portrayal because in some way the person who is unreservedly in my service is at stake.

Had I the inclination to seek personal pleasure in vain reflections of myself, then I could provide this in a way which is truly desirable for me; for I am no ascetic, and the amazing pleasure of the ascetic in gaining pleasure from what causes him pain is foreign to me…

Just as I may indeed be permitted to say that I do not seek myself in my work, so too I must add that the reason for my unceasing work is not only the ‘eternal salvation’ of my pupils, but equally the release of their assuring powers, necessary for any development in the outside world.

The pupil will have to differentiate sharply between what I can bring about spiritually for his sake and the things which can only be done by himself through daily work on himself…

Life in the spirit is not at all everyday life’s foe; those seeking the capacity for spiritual experience must therefore first of all learn to bring satisfaction to their everyday life.

One must not allow oneself to be persuaded by overwrought fantasists in all ages who claim that the spirit of eternity is only attainable if the seeker turns his back on all earthly manifestations of reality.

The truth is found in the opposite of this supposition!

It is true that the seeker must never chain himself to the earth so tightly that he can no longer ‘raise’ himself; yet he must know at all times that the earthly is also encompassed by eternity.

Although in the earthly outer world only the oft transformed and final result of powers emanating from eternal reality is experienced – in the reciprocal effect of these powers upon each other –, earthly man does not by any means receive just sham and shade of it!

All earthly appearance can be traced back by those who have already power over their spiritual senses, to the turning point in perception whence the powers of First Being which create all forms become experienced as substantially spiritual.

Thus it is that the outermost is continually connected with the innermost, even if the ‘outer’ in its manifestation is already too close to the eternally rigid: – the absolute ‘nothingness’, – for it ever to be able to enter the freest of all, the ‘inner’, remaining in eternal, incomprehensible movement.

Since earthly man is an inner being which is lost in the outermost realm, he may also only hope to become conscious again of himself as a substantial real inner being if he departs from the point he now finds himself, – that is to say, from the outermost point: – from his own earthly body and the ‘outer world’ which surrounds this earthly body. –

This outer world becomes conscious to him through his feelings, in as far as what concerns his own body, and every change of situation is perceived through feelings.

But the surrounding things outside his own earthly body only attain perception in as far as felt by the body, where they just make an impression upon this body, whether their effects are scarcely perceptible or violent in the extreme, – whether they excite the capacity for feeling in a pleasurable or in a painful way.

All these sensory effects are given to feeling only for the moment in question and are immediately replaced by new feeling even if this sequence of momentary contents at times appears to be a constant and enduring feeling. It is just like the countless images projected from a film strip which are perceived as a constant picture as long as the figures, or other possible sources of change, do not move. For a limited time, – in the most extreme case until the death of the earthly body, – the remembered images of former sensations from individual, physically conditioned existence, along with the emotional value given to impressions on the senses by the outer world, can remain within consciousness.

Any other relationship to the outer world comes to earthly man only through his imagination, – yet the products of his imagination are subjected to human will – in its aspect as belief – to such an extent that it was possible for the philosophical error to emerge which has it that ‘imagination’ is the creator of external phenomena.

If this is, of course, certainly not the case, but rather the result of the ability to integrate intoimages those effects of the powers of First Being, which cannot be apprehended by the senses: – like the abbreviated versions of complex courses of events in a form suitable for human senses, – thus the world of imagination does not in any way form the real world accessible to physical senses.

However deeply anchored his world of the imagination may appear to the individual, there will sometimes be moments for him when he is faced with the recognition that he is still far from having made complete use of the receptivity available to his physical senses. –

The world of the imagination is indisputably the relevant world for the individual, regardless of how little it corresponds to the world which could be apprehended by him with full use of the possibilities of his earthly senses.

Now this world of self-created products of the imagination, which is so critically important for human behaviour, is a very variable construction which is not only influenced by individual insights and experiences but at the same time by the imaginary worlds of others.

And so human groups are shaped from many individuals who have made their imaginary worlds correspond largely with one another; the ascertaining of this similarity becomes for individuals an apparently ‘decisive’ argument for the ‘rightness’ of their imaginary pictures, although these may only be caricatures of the world: the world which can be perceived by  not blinded physical senses.

The spiritual pupil will therefore not only have to test his own imagined view of life but also that of the group of which he has become a part, through the circumstances of his life, – or the group of people, comprising many sub-groups or ‘parties’, into which he was born.

Since the demands of the spirit are the same, whether with respect to the individual or to a ‘mass’ of individuals, one cannot as an individual follow the demands which must be fulfilled by any who would enter ‘into the spirit’, – and at the same time serve, without clear reservation, the imagined view of life of a group whose manifestations automatically block access to the inner path to the spirit.

It is an insane misjudgement of the universality of the substantial eternal spirit to believe that one can enter ‘into the spirit’ whilst despising something belonging to the spirit or even hatefully persecuting it!

But since all humanity on earth holds latent spirituality within it, one must carefully differentiate between strict rejection of individual opinions or attitudes rooted within the human-animal, and the arrogant devaluing of those who think differently, whether they are individuals, groups, nations or races. – –

It is easy to understand that cultivating feelings of hatred makes one ‘spiritually deaf’ and ‘spiritually blind’. –

It is true that the capacity for feeling hatred should not, as it were, be eradicated, for in doing so one would eradicate the ability to feel primevally spiritual eternal love, – but the sprouting feeling of hatred must not be cultivated but only ‘noted’, where-upon the great deed begins for the spiritual pupil: – to turn the hatred with all its vehemence he has just observed in himself into the love which is its opposite pole as an expression of one and the same power…

Where hatred is cultivated – against individuals, groups or other nations, there is no possibility of development for the spiritual pupil; the place offered to him or already taken up by him might as well be passed on to another who does not seek to rise above his more or less highly bred animal nature! –

Whatever kinds of influences from the outer world a seeker may face, – he must always remain aware of the fact that nothing in this outer world can make the path to the spirit inaccessible, as long as, with careful observance, he lives up to the plentiful advice I have given him in my teachings.

But it depends on ‘living up’ to these advices, – not on approving and therefore being enthusiastic about them!

However, living up to my teachings requires the pupil from the start: to create order with respect to his specific personal daily life. –

Only when all this has been ‘sorted out’, – in all aspects and in every single relationship, – has the seeker acquired the right to carry on striving, and only then is his expectation justified that he will attain what can be attained in the spirit while on earth, even during his life on earth.

The most widespread and popular ‘broadmindedness’ which thinks that it is permitted to treat everything to do with everyday life as a bagatelle when striving for the spirit is most reprehensible.

Even if something is inherently a ‘bagatelle’, it is never a bagatelle depending on whether it has been treated according to the spirit or not. – –

In a parable in the Gospels it is said to the good servant: “Because you have been faithful in little, have authority over much!”

What is here in parable form applies to one of the most important demands of the spirit!

Whoever cannot manage in his transient earthly life to behave already in such a way that his thoughts, speech and actions can be acknowledged by the spirit has not yet understood the possible help of the outer world, and all his striving to become conscious in the eternal spirit is of no use to him.

But whoever in his daily world even makes the smallest decision to act, – and even if it must be made in extreme haste, – with all naturalness in such a way that his eternal salvation depends solely on this one decision is much nearer to becoming spiritually conscious than he thinks. Even if his inherited disposition prevents complete development here in his earthly life, he will enter eternity as one who is conscious! –

Little has been so misunderstood in the course of human history – in all parts of the world and at all levels of culture – than that suspicion of the substantial eternal spirit within the own human self which is more or less active in every man on earth!

Seduced by trite intellectual conclusions, those inclined to seek the spirit were and still are of the opinion that everyday life experienced through the physical senses must be a torment and abhorrence to the spirit.

This opinion is believed to justify the conclusion that it must be impossible to enter into the spirit without despising earthly everyday life and regarding it as an utter shame and disgrace.

To this very day one can easily count the few who have risen above this obstructing tradition and have learnt to recognise that the path to the eternal substantial spirit begins in the midst of temporal, apparently insignificant daily life…

No one can be the pupil of spiritual schooling who cannot fight his way to this fundamental insight!