Excerpt

WHAT SEEK YE?

          What seek ye? Say, what is the point of all this impetuous urging? Like a roaring wind it sweeps across the world, and a storm flood of books inundates all peoples. Scholars dig in the ancient writings, they research, pondering to the point of spiritual exhaustion. Prophets rise up to warn, to promise . . . suddenly from all sides people are feverishly intent on spreading new light!

          Thus it rages at present over the ravaged soul of mankind, not refreshing and invigorating, but scorching, consuming, sapping the last ounce of strength still left to the riven souls in this gloominess of the present times.

          Here and there also a whisper stirs, murmurs of a growing expectation of something impending. Every nerve is restless, tense with unconscious longing. It seethes and surges, and over everything, drearily brooding, a kind of stupor settles. Pregnant with disaster. What must it beget? Confusion, faintheartedness and ruin, if the dark layer now enveloping the terrestrial globe spiritually is not powerfully rent asunder, that dark layer which, with the soft tenacity of the filthy morass, absorbs and smothers every ascending free light-thought before it has become strong, and which with the sinister silence of a swamp already suppresses, undermines and destroys every good volition even in the bud, before any deed can arise from it.

          However, the cry of the seekers for Light, the cry which holds power to cleave the mire, is deflected, it trails away at an impenetrable vault assiduously erected by those very people who imagine they are helping. They offer stones instead of bread!

          Look at the innumerable books:

          The human spirit is only wearied by them, not enlivened! And that is the proof of the barrenness of all that is offered. For what wearies the spirit is never the right thing.

          Spiritual bread refreshes immediately, Truth revitalises and Light enlivens!

          Simple human beings must indeed despair when they see what walls are being built around the beyond by so-called spirit-science. Who among the simple is to grasp the scholarly sentences, who the strange modes of expression? Shall the beyond then only be for spirit-scientists?

          Withal they speak of God! Shall an academy be established in order first to acquire there the abilities to recognise the concept of the Godhead? Where does this obsession drive them, which for the most part is rooted only in ambition?

          Like drunkards, the readers and listeners lurch from one place to the other, unsteady, not free within themselves, one-sided, because they were diverted from the plain path.

          Hear this, you despondent ones! Look up, you who are earnestly seeking: The way to the Highest lies ready before every human being! Erudition is not the gate thereto!

          Did Christ Jesus, that great example on the true way to the Light, choose His disciples from among the learned Pharisees? From among the scribes? He took them from plain and simple folk, because they did not have to struggle against this great error that the way to the Light is arduous to learn and must be difficult.

          This thought is the greatest enemy of the human being, it is a lie!

          Therefore, turn back from all scientism where that which is most sacred in the human being is concerned, which must be fully grasped! Desist from it, because science, as the sorry effort of the human brain, is piecework and must remain piecework.

I-1/15.          Consider, how should science acquired through arduous study lead to the Godhead? What is knowledge after all? Knowledge is what the brain can comprehend. Yet how narrowly limited is the conceptual capacity of the brain, which remains firmly bound to space and time. Even eternity and the sensing for infinity cannot be grasped by a human brain. Just that which is inseparably connected with the Godhead.

          Yet the brain stands silent before that inconceivable power which streams through all being, from which the brain itself draws its activity. That power which all, daily, hourly, at every moment, intuitively perceive as a matter of course, which science, too, has always acknowledged as existing, and yet which people vainly seek to grasp, to comprehend with the brain, that is, with knowledge and intellect.

          So deficient, then, is the activity of a brain, the foundation stone and tool of science; and the limitation naturally also pervades the works it constructs, hence all the sciences themselves. That is why science is indeed good for a follow-up, for a better understanding, to classify and arrange everything it receives ready-made from the Creation-Power preceding it; yet it must inevitably fail when it wishes to put itself up for leadership or offer criticism, so long as it binds itself, as it has done up till now, so firmly to the intellect, that is, to the brain’s capacity to comprehend.

          For this reason, erudition, and also the mankind that orient themselves to it, always remains hanging onto details, whereas every human being bears the great, inconceivable whole as a gift within himself and is fully capable, without laborious study, of achieving the noblest and highest!

          Therefore, away with this unnecessary torment of an enslavement of the spirit! The great Master does not call out to us without reason: “Become like children!”

          Whoever bears within himself the firm volition for the good, and exerts himself to impart purity to his thoughts, has already found the way to the Highest! To him will all else then be added. For this, neither books nor spiritual exertion, neither an ascetic life nor solitude are required. He becomes healthy in body and in soul, freed from all pressure of morbid pondering, for all exaggeration is harmful. You are meant to be human beings, not hothouse plants which, through being one-sidedly cultivated, succumb to the first puff of wind!

          Wake up! Look around you! Listen within yourselves! That alone is able to open the way!

          Do not heed the dissension of the churches. The great Truth-Bringer Christ Jesus, the embodiment of Divine Love, did not ask about denominations. What, after all, are the denominations today? Binding of the free human spirit, enslavement of your indwelling spark of God; dogmas that seek to constrict the Work of the Creator, and also His great Love, into forms moulded by the human mind, which means a dragging down of the Divine, a systematic debasement.

          Every earnest seeker is repelled by this kind of thing, because in this way he can never experience the great reality within himself, as a result of which his longing for the Truth grows ever more hopeless and he finally despairs of himself and of the world!

          Therefore, wake up! Demolish walls of dogma within you, tear off the blindfold, so that the pure Light of the Highest can penetrate to you ungarbled. Exultantly, your spirit will then swing itself upwards to the height, jubilantly feeling all the great Love of the Father, Which knows no limitations of earthly intellect. You know at last that you are part of It, grasp It effortlessly and wholly, unite yourselves with It and thus daily, hourly, gain new strength, as a gift that makes ascent out of the chaos a matter of course for you!

(In the Light of Truth, Lecture: What seek ye?)