The Way of Initiation; or, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds — John Shaqi
The Way of Initiation; or, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher WorldsSteiner, Rudolf
Religion
The Way of Initiation; or, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
Steiner, Rudolf
Theosophy
These two human types are blended in the Adept, in the higher Initiate.
No doubt one or the other, and often both, are met with in the founders
of great religions and the loftiest philosophies. No doubt also they
are to be found again, in a less, but still very remarkable degree,
among a certain number of personages who have played a great part in
history as reformers, thinkers, poets, artists, statesmen.
Why, then, should these two types of mind, which represent the highest
human faculties, and were formerly the object of universal veneration,
usually appear to us now as merely deformed and travestied? Why have
they become obliterated? Why should they have fallen into such
discredit?
That is the result of a profound cause existing in an inevitable
necessity of human evolution.
During the last two thousand years, but especially since the sixteenth
century, humanity has achieved a tremendous work, namely, the conquest
of the globe and the constitution of experimental science, in what
concerns the material and visible world.
That this gigantic and herculean task should be successfully
accomplished, it was necessary that there should be a temporary eclipse
of man's transcendental faculties, so that his whole power of
observation might be concentrated on the outer world. These faculties,
however, have never been extinct or even inactive. They lay dormant in
the mass of men; they remained active in the elect, far from the gaze
of the vulgar.
Now, they are showing themselves openly under new forms. Before long
they will assume a leading and directing importance in human destinies.
I would add that at no period of history, whether among the nations of
the ancient Aryan cycle, or in the Semitic civilizations of Asia and
Africa--whether in the Græco-Latin world, or in the middle ages and in
modern times, have these royal faculties, for which positivism would
substitute its dreary nomenclature, ever ceased to operate at the
beginning and in the background of all great human creations and of all
fruitful work. For how can we imagine a thinker, a poet, an inventor, a
hero, a master of science or of art, a genius of any kind, without a
mighty ray of those two master-faculties which make the mystic and the
occultist--the inner vision and the sovereign intuition.
* * * * *
Rudolf Steiner is both a mystic and an occultist. These two natures
appear in him in perfect harmony. One could not say which of the two
predominates over the other. In intermingling and blending, they have
become one homogeneous force. Hence a special development in which
outward events play but a secondary part.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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