At the source of life
Truly it is necessary to give witness in ever new images to the truth; truth which is incomprehensible without images and parables, since it is reality, first being of things, source of all life! –
Nothing resists in our times the confusion of spirits.
Every testimony of inner experience is brought forth, from the decay of crypts, from the dust of libraries, and offered to the shaking hands of seekers like the pronouncement of an oracle.
The seeker takes from wherever he can what there is to find and what can be found. Feverishly he stays awake through the night poring over large tomes; in his pockets he carries the most dubious tracts around with him like sacred objects; reverentially he listens wherever he can to the dark words of unqualified teachers and thereby believes he can finally find the path leading to the source of life!
Heads are filled with the most scurrilous fantasies concocted by the most eccentric mystics; the strangest “knowledge” of things that can never be knowledge presents itself with grand gestures in word and text to an astonished world; the age-old arsenals of human superstition are ransacked and emptied; the most desolate ghost is modern again!
But all this confusion is nourished by the burning longing of parched hearts. Many of those who drunkenly follow the latest fairground prophet had only come because they did not wish, at any cost, to miss something which could give direction to their frenzied search…
By no means are they the worst who become victims of these madmen without responsibility and presumptuous windbags!
Many of those who allow themselves to be led by the nose open their eyes in time and see with dismay and self-directed shame that they have given themselves to “guides” who do not know the way themselves. Indeed, they have followed “guides” who never saw guidance as important, – but cunningly saw through the stupidity of their fellowmen and knew how to dangle the bait for the longing of the seekers to tempt them into their net.
There might well be quite a few of those deeply disappointed seekers among the readers of my words here!
Perhaps they feel, despite all their disappointment, that there must still be a way for them to reach the goal of their yearning.
These words are directed at them above all!
He who is not prepared, despite all the false paths he has known, to give up in his striving until
he has found what his soul seeks can find the path to freedom, the narrow path which leads to the essential light!
I have already often shown this path and I show it here again to all those who want to find it.
Guidance is needed on this path, for it leads through many a thick jungle in which the unsuspecting wanderer is tempted by perilous side tracks, – leads through deserts where every track is quickly wiped away by the sand so that the path has to be prepared anew for each wanderer. –
It would be folly as well as presumption for the seeker to believe he could discern the right path through his own deliberations!
It would also be folly and presumption if he would think himself capable of reaching his highest goal without first proving his powers which will be tested afresh at every single stage of his path. –
It would be folly and presumption finally if he entertained the hope of reaching his highest goal, the consciousness of unity with the first source of all life, without the help of those who have already reached this very goal. – –
He would then be like a mountaineer who setting off from the plain would like to reach the range’s highest peak without climbing the foothills surrounding it. From their height only can be shown the right path to the highest peak in the range for which he aims.
It sounds very bold to uncritical listeners when it is said: between a man and his god let there “be nothing come in between”; but the “god” who is supposed to be felt in this way is a deceptive god, the image of one’s own imagination whose reality stretches no further than the reality of all images. –
Well may such a “god” of a pious dreamer give temporary consolation to the faithfull who are in its bondage, – well may it arouse powers in him which strengthen the illusion that he is dealing here with the first source of all life. But in eternally existing reality such a “god” is only a deception, and never can it change the slightest thing in the true facts of this absolute reality. –
The person who is satisfied with this type of pseudo-experience of god is even less likely to find his “living God” within himself than the so-called “denier of God”. In most cases the latter only denies the “existence” of God because he essentially sees through the guise of the pious deception into which the former has sunk, believing he is on personal terms with “God” and yet worshipping only a product of his imagination. –
The “denier of God” is right to deny the existence of such a god, and his whole error only consists
in neglecting the search for reality after having recognised the spectre as spectre. –
At least he may still one day have within himself the genuine experience of the true living God, whereas the believer who has bound himself to a self-made illusion of a god can only rarely free himself from his own fetters.
There are other opportunities for delusion, and many seekers have fallen prey to them.
We must speak here of one of the most important which tends to play a more or less alarming role in the lives of most “mystics”.
Without any guidance, without any help from the spiritually awake everyone can become aware of a spiritual light within himself, the image of a flaming
star which the monks on Athos believed they could only revere sufficiently by calling it the “holy light of the godhead”.
But not only the monks in the Athos monasteries, also many other mystics and seekers after God allowed themselves to be misled into seeing confirmed the certainty of the union of their souls with the living God within this light.
Yet all they experienced was just a vague reflection of their own exalted form of life: – they had become worshippers of themselves where they imagined they had found the godhead…
They saw in themselves only that living form of their spirit which can only wake up to eternal blaze when the “living God” full of power and reality makes it into the throne of his glory, – when he prepares his own “birth” as “child of the virgin” in
earthly man, announced by the “shepherds” who “keep watch at night”, – worshipped by the “wise men of the Orient”, the priestly kings from the “innermost East” who can see the “star” as soon as it lights up over a “stable” in which “among senseless beasts” the king is born who will “redeem” Israel.
Many spoke with intoxicated words of “rebirth”, – of the inner “friendship” of their soul with “god”, – of the “spiritual wedding” with the “heavenly groom”. – – many believed the work to have been completed and “Nirvana” reached, – and yet they had only seen in themselves the image of the “flaming star” which must first receive the power to blaze eternally, the power which only the “First Word” can give and to which no man comes who has not walked the path which the “First Word” itself had to prepare for the fallen son of the spirit, so that he could reach it again.
We humans are not isolated in existence! We are all merely the effect of eternal creative power, and as such an effect we are connected with each other by a thousand secret threads.
Whatever is aimed at, – never can one cope with it without the other; all the great aims of human striving are achieved through the harmonious interaction of one upon the other. –
If we want at all costs to achieve something alone and without the help of others, then we only show by this that we do not understand ourselves as that which we simply are and also were throughout eternity before our “fall”. – –
We must then go wrong, even if we are striving for the highest goal with the purest will and the purest heart…
Even man’s highest exalted goal, the experience of unification with his “living God” full of power and reality, is never achievable for him if he believes he
can do without the guidance which was provided for him by eternal wisdom and mercy in love.
He needs this guidance because it is simply grounded in the cosmic life of the whole, and in no way will he lose in worth by asking for help, just as the other whom it behoves to give spiritual help will not gain in worth, having also once had to be given help before he could give it to others. –
Here one hand continually passes on to the other what it once received itself, and no one has only from himself what he passes on to others!
Only from the shining “First Word” does “the word of the Lord go into all lands” and creates at all times the Luminaries of the earth, who are able to bring light into darkness for their brothers who are still not awake. The man who has not been prepared, – long before being born on this earth as his mother’s son, – can after the “fall” no longer grasp without help that light which only streams forth from the “First Word” and that only can turn into “word” him, who millennia ago, before the earth gave him the body of a beast for concealment, freely took upon himself that burden which is hard for a man of the earth to carry. Only rarely is found one who was subject to the “fall” and yet takes this burden upon himself out of pity and mercy for earthly humanity.
Only he who was thus prepared as “word” has the right now to teach his fellowmen where most exalted teaching is needed; humanity through all time has received this assured teaching by teachers whose word was founded in God.
Not one person, carried and nourished by this earth since thousands of years, has ever reached his highest goal, has ever reached consciousness of
unification with his “living God”, without the spiritual guidance of those ordained by the “First Word” to give help!
They alone can be trusted, – and if there is indeed one of them before you, the voice of the heart will admit no doubt as long as it has not been drowned out by deceptive teachings to which one without question and numbed by illusion has become enslaved.
Miracles do not give evidence here; a true helper to his brothers will never parade fakir tricks.
It may well be that he has mastery over powers which appear to most men as “supernatural” and “wonderful”, – yet such “signs and wonders” are only the secondary phenomena of his effect and, among other things, conditioned only by the special suitability of his psycho-physical organism, – never can such work ever prove him to be one who is called. The credentials of the one who is truly ordained to help are only ever found in that deepest innermost of the seeker which no sounding line measures and no everyday opinion nor preconceived idea ever penetrates.
He who seeks an answer there, testing the words of his teacher, not mislead by any illusion of self-made doctrine and not beholden to the opinions of others, – he will never be deceived by false teachers.
He will be led to the source of life, to that “First Light” which knows itself as the “First Word” and which “speaks” its “words” as living spiritual essences from eternity to eternity.
Just like a poet forms songs, epics and hymns from the words of human language, so too the “First Word” forms by its own creative power its“words”, its eternal song of praise in the form of immeasurable hierarchies of spiritual essences. The last echo of those hierarchies resides in the brothers of the “White Lodge” which has sought from the very first days to spread light on this earth and whose members alone have the spiritual authority to give witness to the spirit from profoundest “knowledge” and deepest experience.
Thus all rays which have ever sought to ignite light on earth originate from the “Word” that is “God”, from the self-expression of the eternal “First Light”!
This appears incomprehensible or dubious only to those who have as yet no inner insight into that sublime being which surpasses every power of representation, which in the most exalted formation of itself recognises itself as “God”. –
One must know something of the stages of this eternal life, of its forms of existence, if one wishes to fathom what “God” in truth is, how the living, true God in unending self-procreation breaks away from his own being into an eternally renewed form of being.
One must know what differentiates Him who rules over all heights and depths, since he encompasses everything that is within himself from that, – oh, most wondrous form of “god” so often dreamt of by human imagination. –
Many have said: “Everything is God!” – and “in every atom of this phenomenal world you shall find God!” – “The whole exterior of this world is only appearance and in truth all things are not things but God!” –
Certainly such things can be said, and if understood in the right sense they can be seen as truth, even if this truth remains accessible to very risky interpretation.
But for the comprehension of the human spirit such a word game will bear little fruit.
If one wishes to attain the highest recognition of the truth, then things, despite not being what they seem, must still remain things for us and must not be idolised by us even in the most sublime way. –
Otherwise we run the risk of giving divine honour to a form of representation of eternal life, from which the godhead eternally renews itself, only because it surpasses human comprehensibility. We can attach ourselves to such a stage to the extent that it becomes impossible for us ever to encounter the true “godhead” in its radiant majesty.
This eternal life which forms “nourishment” to the godhead expresses itself in three ways in its respective forms of representation: – as physical universal nature, as the realm of the fluid soul and as the kingdom of the spirit!
No “creator” ever “created” any of these realms!
Everything is but a form of representation of the one eternal life elevated over all these three forms of representation, crystallised in its highest consciousness as the “First Light” as the essence of that which man, shuddering, in truth can feel in himself as the source of all life – as his living “God”.
Its own cause in all its forms of representation, this eternal life still finds its highest being fulfilled only beyond all forms of representation. Each of its forms of representation is of its essence, serving, so to speak, only as the ocean of renewal from which it continually propagates itself, from itself, through its own self-given power. –
About this has been said: “Brahma formed this world as nourishment” – only, caught in exoteric way of thinking, one must not think of a sculptor and his creation, for this saying of the Veda says considerably more to one who knows, – it reveals to him deepest reality, it reveals to him the inherent law of self-propagation of the “Brahma”, the essence of the one, absolute being which is eternal life of itself and to which serves as “nourishment” for its highest all encompassing self-recognition as “godhead”, its forms of representation…
Eternally pregnant with creative might, the inherent powers of the form of representation of eternal life work like physical universal nature, form creating and form destroying in order to create new form.
Worlds come about and worlds turn to dust in the universe at all times. But there has never been a “beginning” which would have been a beginning of the universe; never has there been a “end” of what is in itself life, what effects itself creatively as life and includes in itself the becoming and vanish of all worlds for all eternity. –
Just as there are centres of power in this form of representation of eternal life which no microscope and no refined instrument of research can ever disclose to human sense, so too there are here invisible carriers of the highest intelligence whose capacities exceed the power of the most powerful human thinking in the same way the thinking of a jungle negro is exceeded by the thought of a philosopher like Spinoza or Kant.
At the same time there are also in this same form of representation of life invisible essences scarcely possessing the “intelligence” of those animals man needs as beasts of burden.
All these invisible essences are not, however, at all “spiritual” in nature; they are also not “immortal” even in their highest forms, although individually they can live for millennia. – –
For the highest of these essences, – in many cults of the past they have been revered as “gods”, – there are no “enigmas” of nature of any kind.
Everything which determines the physical representative form of eternal life – visible and invisible – has been disclosed to them, who are intellect through and through, in most minute detail.
But everything beyond this form of representation, – the whole immeasurable realm of the flowing soul and the realm of the spirit is as absolute nothingness to them. – –
They know no “godhead” and they despise the intellectual striving of man, known to them, to wish to prove a “god” and the “existence of god”, since they know that for the intellect there actually exists no “god”…
To their influence must be ascribed that overestimation of human thinking, that hypertrophy of the intellect in mankind.
In the physical form of representation of eternal life, life itself is recognised only as physical universal nature without awareness in itself of its higher forms of representation as soul and spirit.
Sharply separated from the form of representation as physical universal nature, cut off from it by the unbridgeable chasm of the ability to feel, and yet penetrating this first form of representation, the realm of the flowing soul reveals itself with its endless variety of forms of feeling powers and essences.
All of them are “conscious” of both the existence of physical universal nature as well as the existence
of the spiritual realm in the sense of being sensitive to the effects which they are capable of perceiving from both realms.
Again, sharply separated from the realm of the flowing soul, as well as from the realm of the physical universal nature, although penetrating both forms of representation of eternal life, is the realm of the spirit with its immeasurable hierarchies of pure spiritual beings which are self-conscious, self-sensitive, thinking, feeling and knowing by direct “perception”, eternal and withdrawn from the transience of their individuality, – the highest form of feeling plurality in eternal life.
In an immeasurable sequence of stages one circle of perfection rises over the other until, speaking in human terms, the highest top of this cone of light shines forth in the self-consciousness of eternal life in its highest self-recognition, comprehending its entire being, having become conscious within the “First Light”, having experienced the being of the First Light and becoming in it the “First Word”, becoming the self-expression of absolute being, which again effects life in all three forms of representation appropriate to eternal life.
Here we have arrived at the source of life, that source which flows eternally from itself and eternally lets flow back into itself what flowed out of it.
I am well aware of the shortcoming which leads human language inevitably to stammer when it seeks to describe these things which are only comprehensible in the spirit and only by direct “perception”. Yet I believe that for some who read these words there will be a dawning, like a distant presentiment which to him his innermost confirms in a joyful echo. – I believe also that the way to the highest goals of the human spirit, which I have sought to show in so many ways, will be better disclosed to him than if I had kept silent. – –
Certainly everything here has been given just by hinting; but let it not be forgotten that most things in this domain withdraw from language. A mystery would still remain, even if I wrote a thick book on every word used. Out of deepest reverence for the sublimity of the subject, which remains beyond my language, I have, as much as possible, steered away from all conventional coinages created by human thinking when it tried to speculate and recognise the eternal. –
I believe I have kept to what the title of this treatise promised. But he alone will benefit from my teaching who sets off in search of the source of life and does not rest until he has found its trace within himself, even though its “living water” can only flow to him through those channels which it created for itself as as to become comprehensible for the human spirit on this earth despite his “fall”, so that he might ask for more of it and enjoy after aeons, the fullness of eternal life through all eternities.
The one who once left his life on Golgotha and dying steered the highest power of love from primeval depths anew into earthly existence, has prepared for all who truly wish to follow him a way which leads to the sources of life.
What he once did for mankind can only be grasped by someone who walks his own way of redemption and feels the power which through the work of the “great Man of Love” flows to him on the path he has chosen…
Such a man will also know the meaning of the exalted Master’s saying:
“And I, when I am raised from the earth, will draw all things to me.”
Only such a man will be able to use that “magnetic” power pulling back into the First Being, which once that Luminary tore from its fetters through his unlimited love!
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