Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

For Pleroma is governed by the seraphic law of love, justas “world” is governed mechanistically by the sadistic law of touch.’ And so when Gutkind uses the word God, he does not mean some childish notion of a kindly old man in the heavens or some absolute—and thus ultimately empty—principle, but this inter-relatedness of all in ever-flowing life and movement. We must realise that ‘neither the tangibility of things nor the certainty that “I exist” can be the starting-point. That “there is Godness”’ is the most certain foundation of experience... So in place of “I think, therefore Iam” we say “T actualise Godness, therefore I am’’. “I think’’ still belongs to “world”, “I actualise Godness”’ goes beyond self and thing.’ It goes to the whole, which is at once both subject and object. “We do not’ says Gutkind, ‘take the name of God upon our lips unnecessarily but only with a hesitating reluctance. Now everything must be imbued with this: that from now on we rise to sidereal birth in which we ourselves become God.’

Gutkind speaks about the incomparable experience, when we realise that we are greater than ‘world’, and that ‘world’ is not any longer over us and around us, but within us. For the ‘I’ is the highest ofall forms of creation. Itis, says Gutkind, ‘the key to the world, and world is nothing but the life of the “I” . .. Everything first comes to life in the “T”. In the “T” everything is interwoven with everything else . . . It is that which is first able to stand on its own with a certain freedom and independence.’ And so we should give up creeping about the world with the ignominious idea that everything has developed from the lower as if by some accident and affirm with confidence as an act of faith that the higher always precedes and creates the lower, and that it is the whole which precedes and creates the parts. This is the same as to say that ‘it is not the stones of a mosaic which form the picture in all its beauty, but the picture in all its beauty guides and directs the stones, which are nothing apart from the picture.’ Mere existence is meaningless. In itself nothing has value, but gains it only in relatedness. And it is in man’s power to conceive in his imagination the wholeness and movement of relationship which he can bring to actuality; and so he can endow with value that which hitherto merely existed. Thereby man becomes a creator. “The human mission and meaning,’ says Gutkind, ‘is to bring to life and warmth what was cold and dead b means of valuations glowing with love.’ But it is only the seraphic

16