Practical Knowledge of the Soul by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General
ISBN: 9781498274319
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2015-11-10T08:00:00+00:00

5. In this book the German du is generally translated as “you”; it can also be translated and understood as “thou”.

6. Presumably St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, martyred 258.

7. Ludendorff was a general, Hiller a pacifist.

8. Matthias Claudius (1740–1815) was a German poet.

6

The Fate of the Soul

We have gone to sufficient lengths to make the point that both occultism and psychology commit the same error the Greeks did. They assume that an “I” or “it” precedes a “you”, while in reality both are answers to the “you”, or longings for the “you”. They can offer meaningful insights only as responses to our longings for a command from someone who loves us.

This Greek attitude has the most devastating effects in prophecy and magic where the answer as an answer is still retained clearly. A person certainly must receive a calling to become a prophet or a miracle-worker, otherwise he may not prophesy or try to heal. Prophesying and miracle-working may only be done at the right moment, in their own time. It is sacrilege to try either without a calling. The Greek mentality, or to use a better expression, the pagan mentality, does not recognize that the entire realm of our existence as souls is beyond our arbitrary control, that it has to give an unintentional answer to the question and to the calling of our particular lives.

Lack of this insight has been most devastating where the greatest effects are ascribed to individuals. The occultists, for example, turn prophecy into fortune-telling, and miracle-working into sorcery. They let demonic beings have their way, their rigid way, instead of leaving it to souls who have a calling for it. A Catholic clergyman, Staudinger, wrote a book on experimental magic, its demons and manifestations.9 The book shows that a man’s belief in a religious creed has little influence on errors of the spirit like these. The occultists’ method coerces people into believing in it, and swallows up anybody who employs it. Scientific psychology is rooted in the same fundamental error.

Scientists also believe that isolating “I” is a free act by this “I”, or a “fact’’ about it. Belief in this obscures the real difference between selecting the status of an “I”, which is the necessary result of the whole process of life, and the sin of intentionally being an egomaniac. So they deny the borderline between health and sickness. For a relatively unimportant reason, this mistake has a less devastating effect on science than on occultism. Scientists put the “I” aside, under glass, avoiding the danger posed by its Satanisms and their permeation of the world. This works only because the scientists don’t dare implement their error. They stop at the isolated “I”. And by artificially isolating lots of abstract, formless “I”s, they rob the “I” of its worth in the world as a bearer of its own proper name.

But men demand their own proper names. For our proper names are what let us become carriers of our own souls and of our own particular fates.

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