Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

self, the self which has experienced sidereal birth, that is thus able to establish and create reality, never the isolated or merely intellectual self.

What must we do to achieve this Sidereal Birth? In World Conquest Gutkind answers that ‘we must first learn what we must not do. We must clear ourselves out of the way’. For the idea that the narrow separate self can now initiate anything new is quite ridiculous. This ego, which man has built up through so many centuries, or rather millenia, as the centre of the world, as the most significant development in the whole of evolution up to nowthis ego with its potentiality for freedom and for creation through valuation has now reached the limit of the growth which is possible by acquiring and possessing, whether it be material things or knowledge or virtue. If it wishes to develop further and not to die miserably in futile emptiness, it must now burst out and start to give from the fulness it has gained. This is the only freedom and the only creativeness possible to it. And this means abandoning the security of fixed ‘being’ and ‘having’ and ‘knowing’. “Not that I live, but that I live—am truly alive—is the crucial point. That the divine ocean of life flows in me and that in holy poverty the individual keeps nothing for himself.’ But this is not for those who have not yet felt security in themselves or the security of possessions; nor is it for those who still feel that they need that security. Gutkind does not preach self-sacrifice or self-denial or any asceticism. He is speaking only to those who feel the poverty of a self which is restricted in the narrow world of things; of social and political institutions which are outworn; and of ideas, words and arguments which have lost their meaning. He is speaking to those who feel that they have nothing more to gain from the world, because they have an exuberance of wealth inside themselves which will turn sour unless they can share it and give it out to others.

Oriental or pseudo-Oriental cults which teach the unreality of the ego or reversion to some state of merging with the whole are merely atavistic. There is no need to go back to the ancient East, only forward to Immanuel Kant, to realise that the ego does not exist as a thing. And from Kant one can advance further, while westernised Oriental thought leads only to passivity and dissipation in the face of the world’s problems. And the early Christian notion

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