To a certain degree the Guardian of the Threshold will assume a different form in the case of each individual. The meeting with him corresponds exactly to the way in which the personal element in [pg 375] supersensible observations is overcome, and therefore the possibility exists of entering a realm of experience which is free from any tinge of personality and is open to every human being.
When the occult student has passed through the above experiences, he will be capable of distinguishing in the psycho-spiritual world between what he himself is and what is outside of him, and he will then recognize why an understanding of the cosmic occurrences narrated in this book, is necessary to man's understanding of humanity itself and its life process. In fact, we can understand the physical body only when we recognize the manner in which it has been built up through the developments undergone in the Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth periods, and we understand the etheric body when we follow its evolution through the Sun, Moon, and Earth stages of evolution. We further comprehend what is bound up with our earth-development at present, if we can grasp how all things proceed by the process of gradual evolution. Occult training places us in a position to recognize the connection between everything that is within man and the corresponding facts and beings existing in the world external to him. For it is a fact that each principle of man stands in some connection with the rest of the world. The outlines of these subjects could only be briefly sketched in this book. It must however be borne in mind that the physical body had, at the time of the Saturn development, for instance, no more than its [pg 376] rudimentary beginnings. Its organs—such as the heart, lungs, and brain—developed later during the Sun, Moon, and Earth periods, for which reason heart, lungs and brain are related to the evolutionary process of Sun, Moon and Earth.
It is the same with the members of the etheric body, the sentient body, and the sentient soul. Man is the outcome of the entire world surrounding him, and every part of his constitution corresponds to some event, to some being in the external world. At a certain stage of his development the occult student comes to a realization of this relation of his own being to the great cosmos, and this stage of development may in the occult sense be termed a becoming aware of the relationship of the little world, the microcosm—that is, man himself—to the great world, the macrocosm. And when the occult student has struggled through to such cognition, he may then go through a new experience; he begins to feel himself united, as it were, with the entire cosmic structure, although he remains fully conscious of his own independence. This sensation is a merging into the whole world, a becoming “at one” with it, yet without losing one's own individual identity. Occult science describes this stage as the “becoming one with the macrocosm.” It is important that this union should not be imagined as one in which separate consciousness ceases and in which the human being flowers forth into the universe, for such a thought would only be the expression of an opinion resulting from untutored reasoning.
Following this stage of development something takes place that in occult science is described as “beatitude.” It is neither possible nor necessary that this stage be more closely described, for no human words have the power to picture this experience and it may rightly be said that any conception of this state could be acquired only by means of such thought-power as would no longer be dependent upon the instrument of the human brain. The separate stages of higher knowledge, according to the methods of initiation that have been here described, may be enumerated as follows:
1. The study of occult science, in the course of which we first of all make use of the reasoning powers we have acquired in the world of the physical senses.
2. Attainment of imaginative cognition.
3. Reading the secret script (which corresponds to inspiration).
4. Working with the philosopher's stone (corresponding to intuition).
5. Cognition of the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm.