Hortus Conclusus

More Light:

On this earth there is a small number of men joined purely in the spirit, – a convention based in eternity – at work for thousands of years in silent seclusion and yet, – without the spoken or written word – is able to reach on spiritual paths all those whose soul has been sufficiently cultivated by their working on themselves so that the rays of spiritual light emanating from this hidden community acting only from the eternal spirit, can fill their hearts.

 This may seem astonishing and extremely dubious to western man, whilst the oriental – to whom, though hidden, the geo-physically determined magnetic field of spiritual influence of this community is spatially closer – would sooner be inclined to doubt the existence of the sun than to doubt what every educated person knows about the influence of those few which they have often also experienced themselves.

 In the west too, men have guarded in silent seclusion – since the days of the Edda – inner knowledge of this spiritual reality. Although not everywhere as evident as in the legend of the Holy Grail and its knighthood, the entire western world in medieval times was still replete with the sublime news of an elevated circle at one with God. Thus traces of these tidings are to be found everywhere in legends, popular beliefs and poetry.

 In more modern times it was an exclusively religiously oriented circle of seekers delving into mystic tradition which knew of the ‘wise men of the east’. For half a century (* This book was first published in 1936) so-called ‘theosophical’ books have spoken about ‘Mahâtmas’ and their community in a ‘white lodge’, even though the few they think they know by this name are very distant from the teachings found in these books, and they neither form a Freemasons’ lodge or any similar circle, nor a secret society; rather they are a purely spiritual community, – in no respect comparable with any other human association.

 The members of this spiritual community owe their  mysterious reputation specifically to the account given by ‘theosophists’. To this reputation they have never given rise themselves, and in it they see only a contemptible, fantasy-ridden distortion of themselves.

They have been turned into kinds of magicians or represented as semi-divines with an acquired scientific ‘knowledge’ of physics about which they care nothing in reality; – they have been generously invested with godlike omniscience over events on earth, and an almost unlimited power over spirit and matter has been ascribed to them.

All sorts of liberties were thought justified as from the start of the movement, which for the first time spoke in the west of ‘Mahâtmas’ as marvellous supermen, certain things occurred which were strange enough to be attributed by ignorance to ‘semi-divines’. In a hypnotic dependence, people believe the originators of those occurrences and the ‘wise men of the east’ to be one and the same.

The true ‘Mahâtmas’, – if one wishes to deploy this much used and worn out word which is an honorific title in India even to describe the members of the circle of Luminaries in the eternal First Light who reveal themselves in the life of an earthly men –, have never founded ‘spiritual movements’ nor tried to establish associations by which they sought to influence men with  fakir acts and supposed scientific omniscience.

 They regard the impetuous wanting-to-know found in western science as a kind of spiritual ‘vivisection’; they see the drive for knowing only as remaining within its proper bounds when it keeps to the realm of the world of experience normally related to man’s life on earth.

 Their spiritual ‘knowledge’ is completely different in kind: – it is an absolute certainty of the soul in spiritual things, and has not the slightest to do with scientific knowledge.

 It is true that they think it desirable from the perspective of man on earth for their members to view rationally the earthly spheres which are comprehended by reason; – thus they expect each one belonging to them to have a certain general knowledge about his age and people. – Yet in the strict sense of their purely spiritually determined laws, any illiterate and uncultured shepherd could also be one of them, provided he was born to it. For the ‘master’ is not ‘made’; in the same way one cannot make an artistic genius from someone without artistic talent.

It is superfluous to emphasis that a ‘master’ of this noble circle, described in the grotesque ‘theosophy’ of recent decades as the ‘White Lodge’, – a genuine ‘Mahâtma’, – in the true meaning of the word: a ‘great man of the soul’ or: a ‘great soul’, – can be born anywhere on earth, not only in India, China or Tibet. It is also completely irrelevant whether he connects with the centre-point of ‘all the brothers on earth’ in the earlier or later years of his life, whether he passes as a young or an old man through the spirals of spiritual schooling which one day awaken him to be the legitimate successor and heir to a master who has passed away. Such a master, though passed away, continues to remain present on earth through his union with the spirit of his successor to whom he transfers his already perfected master-ship.

 Only then is he who is born to be a master also de facto a ‘master’; only then is he aware of his priestly status ‘after the order of Melchisedec’. –

 During his years of development he had to pass through the most diverse stages of occult-spiritual possibilities, like the child in the womb passes through all stages of life which are below those of earthly man.

 In this way, he who was still not perfect stood at a crossroads offering him the freedom to mature into a fakir or into a spiritual master. –

 He had discovered powers within him which would soon have made it easy for him to perform the rarest of apparent ‘miracles’; the temptation to remain on the level of a fakir was great for him. The fact that he had the power to resist this temptation proved him to be one of the very few genuine chosen ones. But in so doing he had placed an inviolable seal upon the occult fakir arts in his nature, blocking them for all times unless the holiest and ‘oldest’ of the brothers on earth, remaining in the substantial pure spirit, gives spiritual permission to the master-to-be to remove this seal. However, this has only happened possibly on one occasion in many thousands of years, and only for the sake of a mission which could not otherwise be accomplished.

 Of course this permission is never granted for a ‘movement’ like the ‘theosophical’ society whose founder referred to and based herself on supposed ‘masters’ to be established with the co-operation of a genuine master: – and carry out silly spiritualist tricks with cups and letters, mocked by every fakir and lama magician, which are said to have occurred in the presence of this abnormal woman! I hope my irony will be understood! –

It is almost incomprehensible that sensible men, overwhelmed by the recorded phenomena, could in all seriousness come to believe that a purely spiritual society, not only with a high ethical standing but also completely rooted within the spiritual life of the cosmos, could yield to this sort of buffoonery only to show its ‘sovereignty over the laws of nature’ in this trivial way.

The powers possessed by a Luminary of the First Light on this earth, born to his position and having achieved perfection in his earthly life – a true ‘master’ of the spiritual ‘white lodge’, – to keep this commonplace yet completely arbitrary description for want of something better, – would hardly be suitable for influencing external phenomena and thereby competing with any old fakir.

 In external life on this earth every truly spiritual master is subject to the same laws of nature as all other men; a long time ago he freely gave up the use of those powers which would of necessity gained him the reputation of a miracle worker, either as a declared or a secret fakir.

 However, at the price of this renunciation he gained a power which, like the queen bee in a hive, unites countless other powers. Through him all these powers serve only the will of the master but would lead everyone else to ruin.

 This exalted power and those powers subordinate to it, reverberate in the external physical world of occurrences, although its origin is no longer perceived here; yet the place where these powers can be enacted by a true spiritual master , as he is, is closed to all who are not born and perfected after years of schooling to be a Luminary of the First Light.

 Only unconsciously every human spirit on this earth extends into that exalted sphere and so arises the possibility of reaching all men from there.

Whereas, however, for most men an inspiration in that sphere remains completely ineffective because their higher spiritual organs are afflicted by a kind of rigor mortis, there is in every age also a large number in whom the higher kind of spiritual organs are already active, even though this activity is not yet registered in the consciousness of the brain of  the earthly man.

 These advanced ones who achieved through their own work on themselves a kind of spontaneous, automatic activity of their higher spiritual organs, form – although they too do not know it in their earthly brain’s consciousness – the actual community of those who experience the spiritual influence of the ‘masters’, of those Luminaries of the First Light.

 This influence only becomes conscious when the higher spiritual organs of such a man are sufficiently developed, and when the will, awoken from latency, constantly strives to carry through the inspiration it receives from its higher spiritual realm with such honesty that the dangers threatening the unprepared when their higher spiritual organs awaken may be considered eleminated.

 It is a protection afforded by nature to the helpless, as men do not come into the world with fully awoken higher spiritual organs, when it sets the condition that this awakening must be preceded by working with perseverance on oneself over years and that those who push for their own awakening will not truly awaken before passing the tests which secure their powers of moral resistance.

 If this were not the case, the higher spiritual organs of man which cause his highest state of blessedness, would only serve to destroy him spiritually in absolute despair and hopelessness, without the despairing one even having an inkling to which end he used them.

On the other hand, let no one believe that those who, though still not ‘awakened’, yet already subjected to the influence of the ‘master’, cannot feel this influence in any way at all.

 Indeed it is felt, though its cause is unknown and thus interpreted mostly with shallow rationalism or wrapped up in ideas tinged with superstition or religion owed to the influence of the ‘older brothers’ on the highest spiritual plane.

 This influence does not exist, as one might think, in the imparting of particular ideas from the world of insight of the spiritual masters, even though such an influence is not absolutely excluded in more highly developed individuals; rather it extends mainly to a transmission of powers, – help which is brought about spiritually, – which allows the person in question to perceive through his spiritually higher organs those things which incline towards his own higher impulses.

It has been said that the masters can reach ‘all peoples and every individual’ spiritually, yet when whole peoples were under their continuing influence for a long time this only happened because these peoples produced conspicuously many individuals capable of reaching the sphere of influence of the masters of light on a higher spiritual level. On the part of this purely spiritual community neither favouritism nor prejudice are known with respect to ‘peoples’, ‘nations’ or ‘races’, in as far as the receptivity of the spiritual light is concerned. One is only concerned with the individuals constituting all these earthly separated human complexes. Belonging to a race and people or to factions within them is, on the high spiritual plane where the Luminaries of the First Light work, not only completely irrelevant but also not at all effective or even recognisable! Here there is really one – though purely spiritual, – ‘general brotherhood’ of those who could enter this sacred realm. All that is destructive keeps its distance through its own disinclination, and could never be assimilated with it.

And yet there is only in so far ‘freedom’ in these high spiritual spheres as it can be attained by complying with the obligations of cosmic law. Never has there been, nor will there ever be, ‘equality’ for in these regions governs only the law of hierarchy which allots to every individual his appointed position with irrevocable necessity. The Gothic cathedral is the most perfect image of this hierarchical cosmic order! Whilst the stones in the walls add up to thousands, the number of stones suitable for building the pillars, and the turrets are less and less numerous, until in the end a single stone forms the finial.

 As diverse in worth as these stones are, they are all of equal necessity for  the harmony of the whole and herein only can one see an expression of ‘equality’. There is an absolute subordination, from the finial and the turrets which are visible from afar down to the most hidden stones in the foundations whose sole task is to bear the whole construction.

 It is no different in the spiritual world whose eternal harmony is ensured only by the unerring influence of hierarchical law.

If we stay with the metaphor of the Gothic cathedral but in a different sense, the hidden spiritual task of the Luminaries in the First Light, as masters of temple construction, is to a certain extent: – offering spiritual help, if need be, to the individual ‘stones’ working as stone masons on themselves while forming themselves. – It would, however, be pointless for a spiritual living ‘stone’ to complain why he could not be a stone in a column or a turret, whilst perhaps being indispensable as one of the many stones in the walls which give outer support to the cathedral vaults.

The ‘knowledge’ of the true master of cosmic architecture who possesses the eternal designs is an absolutely secure knowledge of the soul and not

investigation, calculation or knowledge in the sense of an earthly science.

 Let an example illustrate this. – Everyone with good eyes knows he can see when his eyelids are open.

 Yet the process we call ‘seeing’ is, scientifically seen, very complicated in its nature and much thought is needed for it to be understood in a way that can be rationally comprehended.

 In this case the masters side with the most naïve of men or the child…

 They want no more nor less than to be able to see; it is enough for them to ‘know’ that they see.

 The earthly-scientific investigation of this process is in every respect irrelevant for their world beyond matter; moreover, it would also be decidedly harmful and highly contemptible, for here activity and investigation of activity cannot be separated as they are in the earthly-scientific process of knowing, and thus investigation would make the activity itself impossible.

 In other words: only with perfect naivety can absolutely secure experience be won in the purely spiritual otherworldly realm. Very many things which seem so important to earthly science that scientists with a religious outlook go as far as to hope for a ‘complete enlightenment’ in the ‘beyond’ for all their questions, are regarded on a spiritual level as not only not worth knowing, but also as being harmful.

 In all yearning for analytical knowledge nothing other is seen than the calamity which drove man from ‘paradise’: – seen in it is an expression of the stupidity which acts no differently than a man who puts a clock in strong acid in order to get to the bottom of its secret mechanism, thinking that once it was dissolved into atoms it would reveal the answer.

 In those spheres one knows that every analytical wanting-to-know leads in the opposite direction, opposing the cosmic law which brings forth forms from points of power within chaos, whose true explanation can only be found in the highest spiritual forms. There one knows that every higher form illuminates the lower, but that any deduction from the lower to the higher, even if it seems to offer satisfying results within certain limits, is nevertheless an illusory deduction.

 This is also why no true spiritual master will ever consider paying any more attention than is absolutely necessary for his own subsistence on earth to the daily events of his age which, from his idea of time, can only represent a tiny time-atom.

Atavistic occult remnants, such as ‘clairvoyance’ and such like things, are from the outset excluded from his nature from the day he was born.

There is no clearer sign of a ‘false’ master, even if in good faith he regards himself as a spiritual master, than knowing that he is a ‘clairvoyant’.

 In the best instance, every clairvoyant only sees hidden things from the realm of the invisible physical world. If he thinks he is seeing spiritual things, he is merely subject to the reflections of earthly produced imagined pictures which fill the normally invisible physical aura of this planet like a mirage of thousands upon thousands of images.

 Neither has there ever been a real, genuine spiritual ‘master’ who in some respect or other would have been, as it were, ‘omniscient’! Everything spread in every age by superstitious zealots or unscrupulous deceivers in this respect belongs to the realm of fairy tales.

 If a true spiritual master were to show unusual astuteness in the things of this earthly life, the reason for this would lie purely in his individual human talents; for never would he be able to claim occult help in these things without breaking the binding law, by whose absolute and freely chosen recognition he stands and falls. –

Even a spiritual ‘master’ can, when it comes to his earthly existence, still ‘fall’, yet even he can only as a man of this earth, commit the one ‘sin’ for which there  is ‘no forgiveness’ – ‘the sin against the Holy Spirit’, – which in his case is the resisting, arrogant ignoring of what seeks to reveal itself through him. Without a sound he will then disappear from the spiritual world like an extinguished star sinking into space. His name is eradicated from the ‘Book of the Lamb’ bearing the ‘seven seals’.

 To be sure, the eternal within such a spiritual criminal can never be destroyed with his spiritual suicide, but his individual consciousness is gradually dissipated in a process of decomposition lasting thousands of years until it becomes part of general planetary consciousness; his final individual knowledge of himself only tells him that he has condemned himself to sink into tormenting night.

 He is ‘Lucifer’, the fallen Luminary which stood before the throne of the eternal one; truly it is no ‘invention of power crazy priests’ that there is, as long as the earth is inhabited by men, a ‘hell’, that this planet is surrounded by a host of ‘devils’ who are none other than the fallen ‘sons of God’ who cannot find peace after their fall until the abyss of chaos consumes the last spark of their consciousness.

 “The devil walks about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” –

 Among men living on this earth these fallen ones have found accomplices by familiarising their disciples with all the fakir arts they once abjured themselves.

 They keep them in the delusion that they had not ‘fallen’ but had risen above their former brothers, now they new that the commitment to eternal laws they had put upon themselves was a pious deception. Everything regarded on earth as infernal, evil and vicious, they explain to their pupils as permitted, and so they have kept till this very day within the interior of Asia a satanic distortion of the spiritual community of light, – a quagmire of horrific abominations whose venomous miasmas infect all lower human races and have equally claimed many unconscious victims in the western hemisphere. Here are included the secret societies, fraternities and secter sects spread throughout Asia and other parts of the earth; for them man is seen for religious reasons as something which should not be, and they strive typically first and foremost for the extinction of the white man. Iknow well enough that many readers will resist these statements more than what I have said about the so-called ‘white lodge’.

 They will sense the ‘superstition of old religions’ in new clothing.

 But the teachers of the old religions, the priests of ancient cults, were largely ‘men of knowledge’; thus the matter is the opposite of what it seems as those ancient accounts contain, more or less concealed, knowledge of reality.

 I am not presenting fantasies here nor am I telling fairy tales! I speak only of facts which cannot be gainsaid simply by denying their factuality.

 The incontestable privilege of the true spiritual master vis-à-vis other men is an absolute security of experience in purely spiritual matters and his power to create conditions on a high spiritual plane which will prevent, where possible, calamity all through the lower spiritual spheres down to the invisible physical aura of this planet.

 The battle against his erstwhile brothers who would like to take everything they can grab in their ‘fall’ is one of his chief tasks.

 Yet since this battle can never be fought offensively but always only through a prevention of assaults, the task is made easier as one succeeds in alerting people to the danger.

Men nowadays will never be capable of taking seriously the dangers which threaten them invisibly as long as the whole concept of a spiritual ‘master’ remains as unexplained and problematic as it has been to date.

 As long as man’s common sense is expected to believe in ‘masters’ who live on this earth and yet at the same time are raised above the life of man as demigods; as long as one is expected still to believe in ‘Mahâtmas’ who exceed every Indian fakir in the triviality of what they bring forth; as long as one is expected to see in the brotherhood of the Luminaries a ‘great school of science’ (which naturally knows much ‘more’ than all the representatives of science at our universities!); one cannot blame any serious thinker who smiles in pity on hearing of such a community.

 Many things concerning the perfected genuine spiritual master remain ‘mysterious in the light of day’; we do not need to drape his existence with mysterious cloaks of a dubious nature.

In his external life he is a man like any other and must never misuse his purely spiritual possibilities to bring advantage to his external human life.

 As a result of his spirituality he is in no sense a human ‘genius’ or even a ‘saint’.

 Only very well practised eyes can ever recognise him in his external human life.

 Here he is a man and nothing more!

 His ‘master-hood’ begins only just on a spiritual plane; he owes the fact that he, as an earthly man, can be simultaneously conscious in both regions and also active in the spiritual world to this innate
 

master-hood, and to his human resolute will which enabled him from a certain day onward to pass through the spirals of spiritual instruction until he reached perfection on the spiritual plane despite all external and internal dangers and obstacles.

 The continuing spiritual connection between individual masters, who may well live at opposite ends of the world, and the connection of all masters with their hidden earthly focal point in the interior of Asia, remains a mystery in external life – even for the participants. Yet no real master would ever lift the veil even were it possible for him; and all the nice explanations found in books on the occult, all references to the household term ‘telepathy’, can never make the ‘method’ comprehensible tosomeone who is incapable of practising it himself. To such a one, however, it is enough to be able to practise it; he will never be tempted to want to explain it ‘scientifically’, even if only to himself.

 Let it suffice all others to know that a true member of the ‘white lodge’: – that is, a true Luminary of the First Light – will never teach through word and text anything relating to pure spiritual things without the complete agreement of his brothers and of his, and all the others’ spiritual head in the eternal original light.

 A spiritual ‘master’ only has absolute certainty in spiritual things! In all other matters and branches of human knowledge his credibility will depend entirely on his experience and the knowledge and skills he has learnt in daily life. –

 May these explanations serve to eradicate a ‘blind spot’ in the spiritual eyes of my contemporaries which is the cause for every view of life to remain incomplete, however much it may seem in other respects to be logically ordered and harmoniously perfected!

 May it become easier for some embarking on a search for ‘the light’, to trust that their path is protected – ‘by the masters of the illuminated day’, the architects of the cathedral of mankind to whom the master of all masters gave the measurement of the ‘corner stone’ encompassing within it all ‘accurate scales’ of the spiritual!