Hortus Conclusus

‘Truth’ and substantial-spiritual ‘reality’ are not the same thing, even if all that is true is established in reality! Truth is always an image of reality, even if – according to the claim made by the word – it is in all circumstances a clearly defined ‘likeness’ where the sort of ‘retouching’ with cutter and scraper which serve deepening and clarifying this ‘likeness’ can be accepted. Whereas this image always remains an ‘image’, and is never the eternal substantial-spiritual reality itself, reality continues to be the cause of each kind of knowledge of the truth. I am not playing with words here! Both concepts describe something concrete which must be differentiated most precisely. There is much that is relevant to this in the book ‘The Path to God’.

 When I speak of eternal spiritual-substantial ‘reality’, I intend this to be understood as what is imperceptible on earth to earthly senses, what lives in itself and is at all times ‘eternal’, called by Jesus ‘the kingdom of heaven’: – the realm of the substantial spirit encompassing all duration within itself alone, which is the only inexhaustible abundance of all powers – nothing that has to do with ‘thinking’ – nothing conceived, – but eternally-begotten ‘space’. Not many things stand more obstructively and maliciously in the way of the inner discovery of this eternal reality than the terrifyingly fatal custom of using the word ‘spirit’ to speak of any expressions of the human brain: – of thoughts and associations of thoughts, ‘the life of thought’ and the work of thinkers. If one is accustomed to describe those fumes of thought swirling upwards through the activity of the earthly physical brain, as ‘spirit’, then it is indeed difficult to prepare one’s consciousness for receiving the ‘creator spiritus’, the creative spirit of eternity which is of itself sovereign ‘eternal life’, encompassing everything in its substantial being that is begotten by its realm, yet absorbs nothing in itself which had not come forth from it in eternity. Only because earthly man, in his earthly inconceivable core, is a ‘testimony’ to spiritual propagation from all eternity, can he, who let himself fall from the eternal ‘moment’ into the deceptive appearance of permanence of cosmic ‘time’, one day re-enter his realm, taking with him from his earthly consciousness what he wants to take with him, inasmuch as it does not contradict the inherent laws of this realm.

  Opposed to this eternal ‘reality’ is the image formed in its likeness: – the ‘truth’, – impressed by the earthly, – impression of the seal of eternity in earthly wax! Man, however, who does not carry the seal of the eternal spirit within him, cannot bring tidings of the truth from eternal reality, even if he wants to do so with all his earthly powers, and all the powers of his eternal soul! – We are not speaking here of the simple human ‘desire to tell the truth’, but of giving witness to the individual impression made on one by eternal reality. Only those who carry in this way the truth from eternal reality inside them can bring tidings from the truth because their own consciousness has become illuminated and alive by the mark of truth impressed upon them!