54. Existence as Pleasure, Suffering and Love

The ancient Indian world view in modern presentation. A contribution to Darwinism, Brunswick 1891

Zeus in a tailcoat with a white bandage, that is the impression that the Indian theory of evolution, draped as modern Darwinism, gives us. You only need to fulfill two conditions: to take the esotericism of the Indians in a crude way and to extend Darwinism misleadingly beyond the realm of the physical world, then you can create a philosophical monster like this book. The intuitive wisdom of the Orient flows in a deep bed. Only the researcher who ventures into the element that is dangerous for knowledge can reach the bottom. The author of this book wants to see to the bottom with the eyes of understanding. He must therefore divert the river into a broad, shallow bed. He has succeeded in doing so. One can get by with the work without intellectual swimming. The water of the mechanical explanation of nature, to which the author - he is not on the title page - leads us, barely reaches up to the ankles. Whoever wants to recognize in the individual the All-Spirit, in the individual being the sum of existences through which it has to pass, must understand before all other things that this can only happen by delving into its inner being, not by an external way of looking at it. He who understands his own individuality as a human being finds all lower forms of existence within himself; he sees himself as the highest link in a broad ladder; he knows how everything else lives when he knows how to live it, how to relive it. A higher life is able to absorb every lower life and to visualize it in its own way. The possibility of man's understanding of the world is based on this. To imagine this idea as an embodiment of the individual in various, ever more perfect forms in the sequence of time is merely a figurative representation. This is what esotericism means. Those who take the images for what they are know nothing of esotericism. It is a peculiarity of Oriental spiritual life that it creates images which express great human ideas with great precision and vividness. One should ensure the widest possible dissemination of these pictorial masses, but they should not be distorted by the grafting on of Western realism. This book does that beyond recognition.