Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

consciousness, for being is the basic function of consciousness and of the same nature—a kind of possessing . .. But can we pass beyond experience to the transcendent? We not only can, we must.’

Let me immediately clear away any possible misunderstanding that Gutkind is talking about some remote or obscure ‘spiritual’ realms into which we ascend as if by magic, a realm of things outside our present experience, like some childish Beyond or higher regions. “There are,’ he affirms most strongly, ° no supra-empirical things,’ In the realm of existence, of what ‘is’, the empiricism of science must be wholly accepted as the arbiter. The realm of existence, however, is only this man-made world of things—and thoughts—which we can grasp and possess, which we can feed on by knowing. ‘But,’ says Gutkind, ‘it is not a question of knowing, but of rising up by a super-human deed of faith... A great mystery is revealed in the words: I must have faith before I can know. Faith isnot merely a childlike belief that something is true. No knowledge can come into being unless we have faith to take up a firm position from which it can be won . .. And in all we are saying there is a fatality which compels us first to assume without question that which we seek to attain; and this fact is a reflection of the world, whose most characteristic feature is to rise beyond oneself, to stand on one’s head or to jump out of one’s skin . .. The transcendence we speak of is Sidereal Birth . . . And the realm to which we seek to rise, which is the consummation of “world” we will call, making free use of a gnostic term—Pleroma.’

These higher realms of Pleroma must not be thought of as a denial of the lower realms. It does not mean that in some mysterious way we leave our bodies and escape beyond nature and world into an existence where there is only disembodied ‘spirit’. On the contrary our bodily life will become more intense and more real, not less so. Pleroma means the whole-fulness of all reality, physical, psychic and spiritual, and so includes ‘world’ but goes beyond it—it does not deny it or go outside it—and world includes and goes beyond nature. Pleroma is ‘the kingdom of love where all forms penetrate one another without obstruction and where one does not hate the other. There we do not find, as we do in the world, that everything always excludes something else, whilst something is lacking in everything. In Pleroma everything is molten together in seraphic heat, and yet each single stands alone in its glorious idiom.

tS