Hortus Conclusus

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Throughout the millennia the human spirit has thought up innumerable ways to worship God, and according to its idea of ‘God’ every human possibility of feeling has found its expression, from the wildest brutality to the most sublime spirituality.

 At the heart of all these ways to worship God, however, lay and lies the anthropomorphic thought that ‘God’ needs the service of men, – as though this God expects man to serve him, – like the dead image of the deity needs the service of man if it is not to lose life in the imagination and sub-consciousness of its servants.

 The higher kinds of such service of God are indeed likely to stimulate  and elevate man’s mind, to force open the deepest shafts of original spiritual sensitivity, to create symbols of the most sublime knowledge in the rituals, and yet all this is only –  human service which has arisen from the need of man to give his own mind the encouragement to elevate itself and to make clear in rituals his own relationship to the world’s essence which he has dreamt, suspected, believed or already recognised.

 All this may become man’s strongest impetus on his way to the spiritual world but it still is service to his own soul, and it is falsely described as ‘service-of-God’. It is not the ‘true service of God’ I speak of here.

This true service of God is not serving the Godhead, it is not a cult celebrated with a view to paying a guilty tribute to the Godhead. Instead it is a free offering of all man’s powers and abilities so that they become servants of the divine will, so that they subordinate themselves unconditionally to the guidance of the living God in man’s own eternal spirituality – a redemption from the chaos of unbridled desires, a process of crystallisation in which every atom of power abandons itself to the eternal cosmic creative power in order to reach its ordained place.

 It may be that man seeks his elevation also in external cults, his soul may also be touched deep inside by cultic acts; nonetheless, true union of the soul with the Godhead can only be found through this surrendering of all man’s powers into its hands.

A form of ‘subservience’ is required here which alone can lead to the highest freedom; it is a serving which is to lead to learning mastery within oneself, a subordination in order to adjust all that is low to the most sublime so that it can reverberate in the rhythm of what is most sublime, and so remain preserved through all the aeons of eternal life. –

 This preservation of individuality, of the fullness of consciousness, beyond the death of the body, but untouched by it, through all eternities, – this harmonisation of all powers with the eternal divine spark around which all consciousness is to be crystallised in an ordered way, is for those with knowledge the ultimate purpose of all proper spiritual striving by man on earth.

 What use are all occult arts, even if they are the most astonishing achievements of fakirs, since all this relates merely to this physical world of appearance which as such leaves us as soon as the brain in the body of the human-animal is no longer there as a transformer of experience?

 What use is every gift of clairvoyance, since at best it only allows us to recognise the otherwise imperceptible images of the astral terrestrial, normally physically invisible ‘aura’ of this planet, and subjects the clairvoyant to crude deception if he is led to think that what he sees is already near to the worlds of the pure spirit, or even inherent in these worlds?

 What use is all rational knowledge, all knowledge about the worlds of the spirit if everything disintegrates without a sound into nothingness with the demise of the functions of the brain and can no longer be found in the soul’s consciousness, unless this consciousness of the soul had attained previously, while it still had the brain at its disposal, the eternal will to unite with its living God, with his divine spiritual spark in his innermost inside?

This integration of all the soul’s powers, of all possibilities of experiencing, also those imparted only by the body, within the innermost ‘I’, – in the

highest region of inner feeling which alone reaches the Godhead, while the Godhead can only reach man within himself as the living God within him, – is the only spiritual task of man which proves to be really worth every effort.

 “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force!”

 Truly, ‘violence’ is needed to repel all the disruptive pleas of reason limited only to the physical world and to speculations derived from it, so that inner stillness can emerge which allows us to feel the original image of our ‘I’, our living God, who creates us every moment of our being anew inhis image, – whose expression of eternal creation we are spiritually, – to whom we are to  fully adjust, so that from his consciousness we will be able to preserve ourselves in a conscious identity throughout eternity!

We do not mean here a strained effort of the will, not tortuous ‘concentration’, but an ever awake, energetic rejection of all the intellect’s loud insistence, a bringing under control its presumptuous claims of even doing all the talking in a region which is never open to it! – This repudiation is absolutely necessary so that the great abandonment becomes possible, which, – as a precondition, – must be attained, if all our powers of experience are to become willing servants of our inner God, from whom we live and are, – if the eternal man within earthly man is to rise from his grave, born anew from the spirit: – image and likeness of his ‘father’ who is in him in his ‘heaven’.

 It is true that in such striving the intellect can take us forwards ‘like a draught animal’, as long as we have put reins upon it! It is also certainly permitted to observe what has been felt spiritually in an intellectual way after the experience: – to construct for oneself, as it were, a conceptual edifice following the laws of logic, as an ordered ‘treasury’ where we can keep the gems of our inner feelings. Indeed, without such a self-constructed treasury our inner experience, the treasure of our spiritual feelings would run a great risk of being lost to us again in everyday life, of being scattered to the winds, instead of being at our disposal in an ordered manner.

 But never must the intellect guide us when in the early dawn of vague suspicion we set off on the path of seeking, seeking for what is our very lasting, indestructible life’s core, our very innermost homeland, our very inexplicable miracle: – the ‘jewel in the lotus flower’.

Reason is a good pathfinder if we need to discover the ways leading to knowledge of those things which manifest their ultimate effect in the physical world of the senses. In this area one should indeed trust reason and should give it every opportunity to develop, for reason too is of divine origin and has a benevolent influence in its own allotted field.

 But if we want to come to God, we must not seek outwardly, – even not in that external sphere which seems to most already an ‘inner sphere’ because none of their senses are capable of comprehending it.

 Even if the human spirit wants to seek for God through eternities in the highest spiritual regions, it would never encounter God, for just as force of nature in itself can never be found in the whole of physical nature, and yet is recognised in every atom of this visible world, so Godhead expresses itself only in the spiritual essences emanating from it, – in every one separated individually in accordance with the manner of revelation striven for by  it alone; – and it can never be found, not even in one of the highest spiritual worlds, in isolation and existing for itself.

 We must discover God in ourselves, in his eternal, propagating life, and, so that we can discover God in ourselves, without creating from ourselves an idol to ourselves and thereby succumbing to a dreadful deception; we must entrust ourselves here to the guidance of those who are already living in the consciousness of God, who have given their powers as servants to God and have united themselves with the eternal original image which propagates them.

It would naturally be a foolish belief if one were to expect to encounter the highest spiritual essences united with God as visible manifestations here in this life on earth determined by a completely different type of laws. The human soul too, who has united here with its living God and has got from God the rule over its powers consecrated into his service, will never, as long as it remains attached to the body of the human-animal, be free of earthly fetters, and can, even in its highest perfection, only reach the lowest rung of spiritual union with God. Even the one united with God, from whom a Luminary of The First Light creates himself the revealer, would be of himself alone incapable of climbing the higher rungs opened up to him!

 It is true that spiritual essences live in the spiritual region of this planet who are at a far higher rung than would be open to them in physical incarnation, but they have either been freed from the earthly body a long time ago, or were never attached to it, having not succumbed to the fall of the spirits.

 But they can only be felt by us from within, they can only be seen and heard, according to eternal laws, by the completely God-united soul of a man in certain rare circumstances.

 The few instances where an earthly man tied to his senses  is able to perceive these spiritual beings are exceptionally rare; – yet countless are the ways of being deceived here, countless the reports of those who have seen figments of deception and could not think other than that a spiritual being had revealed itself to their senses.

 The illusion can hardly be eradicated that these exalted spiritual beings might have been visible to ‘clairvoyants’, and thousands want to ‘learn’ clairvoyance because they think that if they could, they would be able to perceive the spiritual with their inner senses.

 It is not possible to ‘learn’ clairvoyance, nor has a clairvoyant ever seen anything other than what can be found in the lower astral aura of the earth, which is in no way ‘spiritual’, by way of illusory figments and beings eager to deceive which are in no way of a spiritual kind.

 Indeed there are ways of over stimulating the powers of man’s form-giving imagination so that they make everything he sees and hears seem real whatever he wants to see and hear. Indeed, this sort of deceived person can gain ‘inner elucidations’ in which true and false mingle in grotesque confusion. He may indeed see the grandiose figments of the fantasy of other people, or his own illusory figments as apparent ‘reality’. But who can be in any doubt that such a person is much more pitiful than the true clairvoyant who always brings with him his dubious ‘gift’ to the earth from his birth, and who at least perceives something which is actually ‘real’ in an earthly sense, even if he wrongly believes that the worlds of the spirit have opened up to him.

It is a completely wrong attitude of the desires if someone thinks he strives towards the spiritual and thereby hopes to soon gain more or less visible evidence of the existence of spiritual worlds.

 Regardless of the fact that it would not take him any further even if all the ‘worlds’ of the pure essential spirit were open to his physical eye, – regardless of the fact that even a century of continual dialogue with the highest spiritual essences would still leave him stuck at the same rung as when he had begun the exchange, – he must also never think that he could recognise the spiritual immediately on all its spiritual rungs, once freed of his body by death.

 Here recognises itself only what is of the same kind, and even in spiritual worlds human spiritual beings united with God can only move upwards to those rungs which correspond to their own spirituality.

 Where necessary, spiritual essences descend from a higher spiritual rung to impart teaching on the knowledge of what has been opened up to them, as is inevitable when bringing forth the man of the earth united with a Luminary of the First Light, – for higher spirituality can enter in self-denial the sphere of lower rungs for a time, whilst the spiritual beings on such lower rungs would destroy themselves, were they to attempt to penetrate, if this were possible, into spheres of the spirit for which they were unprepared. (The lower mental influences every earthly man can experience do not come from spiritual regions but from regions of the invisible physical world!). Everywhere the strictest spiritual laws apply to which yields willingly that which is truly of the eternal spirit. Wisely the eternal First Light which shines forth in all that is spiritual has shrouded protectively its rays for all that is not at one with the spirit in such a way that it can bear the essential light of the divine spirit!

What should it profit man on earth if he could behold the spiritual, as long as he was not in himself absolutely at one with the spirit?

 It would be for him a torture without name; no infernal torment ever conceived by the devilish lust of animal man is so gruesome that its torments would match the suffering that a human consciousness would have to experience, were it able to behold the spiritual, before being capable itself, substantially at one with the spirit as well, of sharing the life of the spirit.

 There is only one thing which needs to be done: – to offer up willingly and without reservation in service to ourselves, all the powers of the soul, all the abilities to feeling of the body, every impulse and every stirring, to the spirit, – to the living God within us, – so that it is possible for the eternal divine spirit to unite gradually with our human consciousness and to bestow again upon us from itself these powers, impulses, stirrings and abilities to feel as willing servants, – after we have been prepared to master them from the illuminated core of our being propagating us eternally.

 This is the ‘true service of God’ which each must accomplish who wants to take his earthly human consciousness with him to the other side, not only for what seems to be endless time but for all eternity!

 “Work while it is day, for the night comes when no man can work!”

Here in his life on earth it is possible for man to ‘work’. – But after leaving the physical world he finds himself in the situation he has created for himself and he must remain passive until, without his influence, perhaps in a shorter period of time, perhaps only after millennia, – speaking in earthly terms, – his soul has been purified to the extent that substantial spiritual essences at one with God manage to awaken within him the consciousness of the true inherence of his divine essence, of his living God. Only then can occur the reversal of his will through which he leaves all his powers for the use of his ‘living God’, through which can only thenbe brought about within him the unison of his consciousness with the eternal consciousness of the divine spirit, a unison which even no ‘act of grace’ by the Godhead can ever bring about in any other way!

 But by now his earthly human consciousness has long since vanished from him, like a dream vanishes.

 Though ‘saved’, his life on this earth with all its striving, its happiness and its toil cannot be remembered  by him for eternity; he has not attained for himself the prize of the victor, the widening of consciousness of him who has passed through the outermost realms of divine self-revelation!

 It is true that he too, – having become an expression of the divine spirit and at one with his corresponding male or female spiritual counter-pole, – will live the life of the pure spirit in the fullness of endless happiness, yet incomparably higher is the form of self-experience of those eternal spirits which in all their endless happiness are also still capable of consciousness of the deepest depths into which they, once attached to the earthly human-animal, had plunged.

 Just as the man from the flatlands stands with his soul shaken and full of delight before the wonders of the mountains, his rapture at times scarcely understood by the mountain dweller, so too the spirit, able to remember consciously all the depths as well, realises the complete height of its happiness. The higher the rungs become which he, even if it takes aeons, is to reach, the less he would like to miss the opportunity to remember his lowest rung.

Since the spiritual can never be changed in its essence, we are while the soul ascends never talking of a change of the divinely spiritual essence propagating itself eternally.

 The ‘living God’ in man’s innermost self with which he can become one in his consciousness already here on earth, is the same on every spiritual rung that will ever be reached, throughout all eternity.

 Only the condition of the soul, the condition of the human consciousness of the soul, is widened to attain ever higher spiritual  consciousness, to be able to experience ever more immeasurable depths of spiritual being.

 If it were only a question of forming some or other soul-like individual consciousness around the spiritual, propagating essence, then every attempt to bring consciousness into union with the spirit, here during this earthly life, would be completely superfluous. For union can, with the exception of cases of complete dissolution of consciousness, still take place in accordance with the laws inherent in divine life, even after aeons have passed.

 The call to wake up made by all true spiritual teachers of mankind has gone out therefore at all times because the supreme happiness of the soul in all eternity is to preserve its earthly consciousnessand therewith the ability to remember, and because indescribable suffering of the soul which can lead to its dissolution after it has left the earthly body, is avoidable through its spiritual union during life on earth.

 To lead mankind in every age through those called to speak, onto the path leading to increased happiness is the task of those from whose midst I impart these teachings; every word in this book shall teach its readers nothing other than this ‘true service of God’.

May no one reading these words leave this life of earthly toil before his consciousness has become one with his ‘living God’!

 May no one enter that ‘night’ when working is impossible, from which there is no escape until the debt of those biding is paid ‘to the last penny’!

 Still it is ‘day’, and helpful hands are at work to lead spiritual help to all those who seek it. – There is no need of special training to call upon this help; there is no need of any individual instruction to make it one’s own.

 “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”