Drafts II. First scene: Capesius — Benedictus

First CAPESIUS alone:
(finishes reading a book):
"The human spirit searches
For the meaning and purpose of existence
Wandering through worlds
With the shadow images of his thoughts;
He wants to squeeze from the depths of his soul
The words that interpret for him
His enigmatic life's work.
It should lead him there,
Where the senses experience nothing.
With such a search,
He can only scatter the power
Of his own being into nothingness.
At the end of this path
He will think only in words
The dream of life
And with the thinker's dream
Feel his own soul flow into nothingness
Ghostly and fearful."
Thus Benedictus' visionary spirit
Expresses in eloquent words
What must happen to every soul,
That only thinking and feeling
Wants to build on sensory truth.
And I must clearly recognize,
He faithfully traces the paths,
That I must recognize as my own
For my past life.
O terrible fateful knowledge,
That flows to me from these words.
I feel it like the destruction
Of the roots of my life.
And if a god at this moment
From wild world storms of chaos
Destroyed the powers of my existence,
It would not seem more terrifying to me
Than the voice of fate in these words.
That one can know nothing
At the end of one's research,
It demands nothing more than resignation
To inexplicable spiritual powers. —
And to find myself calmly in such a fate
Despite all my high aspirations,
It did not seem to me today
To rob me completely of the joy of life.
However, too much has been given to me
By the light of Benedictus' spirit,
To doubt the power of knowledge
And enjoy the dream of life in peace.
I must not surrender in doubt,
If I do not want to destroy the plan
That the powers of the spirit laboriously devised,
When they gave me human existence.
How wrong are those who think
That man strives for the treasures of knowledge
Only out of his own urge.
They have no idea of the true course of the world,
Which demands of the human soul
That it kindle the light within itself,
To banish the darkness of the world.
And unknown to them is
That the destruction of the world must follow
From the darkness of the soul.
To destroy oneself unknowingly —
To sink as an individual being
Into the insubstantial nothingness
Would be the will of fate,
I dare it undaunted.
But I must feel it with a shudder,
The entrusted treasure of the world's will,
Must perish with my own fall,
The soul that cannot know.
I must not find peace
In vain doubt,
And not in the belief
That I am denied the certainty of knowledge.
O terrible powerlessness in my soul,
I feel bound to you,
O dreadful chains,
I must not want to break you.
And yet it is only this powerlessness
That now completely fills my being.
For already the next step
In Benedictus' treasures of wisdom
Lets me clearly see
How dull my thinking becomes
When it wants to understand true words of the spirit.
"Let there be calm in the depths of the soul
The power of shadowed thoughts
And erase from the light of the senses.
Let it dampen, as in the bosom of sleep,
The feeling of temporal life.
And may it mature in the depths of the heart,
A will that feels the seed power of the spirit
Within itself as its own being.
You then look down from the heights of the spirit,
Knowing the earthly being.
You feel yourself in spiritual worlds.
World thoughts live in your thinking
World forces weave in your feeling
World beings work in your will.
And from worlds afar sounds
The riddle word of fate:
Recognize the goal of life.
And seeing yourself in your true essence,
Pour out the answer into the vastness of the world
Your own heart speaking powerfully:
I myself, I am the meaning of the world
A divine plan lives within me
Understanding the deep meaning of such words
I fulfill the command of the spirit
O human, recognize yourself.“

(At the last words, Cap. has a vision of terrible thunder; you can see that he is devastated.)

”Desire such knowledge's light,
Only when you are ready
To change your mind,
And banish vain delusions
From your heart and mind.
For if you remain as you are,
Knowledge will destroy you
And your spiritual gifts
Will be consecrated by the lords of deepest darkness
As creative powers." —

Where did these words come from?
I know I did not speak them,
I am aware of that.
But there is no one with me
From whom they could have come.

It was as if they rose up
From the depths of my being.
Am I still alone?
Are spirits from another world speaking,
Who need my soul as their tool?

(There is a knock and someone enters):

BENEDICTUS:
I know I am not unwelcome
In your home at this time.
What I learn from you
I must clearly feel
As a call to come to you.

CAPESIUS:
And even though I myself hardly
Dared to call upon you,
I feel something dark within me,
That your coming is the greatest happiness
Strongly desired by you at this hour.
In this hour of grave destiny,
You enter this chamber,
Which for many a year
Kept locked away
My ardent striving, my diligent research,
In which I first entrusted to my soul
What I was tasked with passing on
To my dear students.
In this jumble of books, you see
Much that, over long periods of time,
Became the nourishment of my soul
And, transforming itself into my own thoughts,
Brought my soul so much joy.
Since you entered my circles,
Many works have been eagerly accepted and thought through In my collection,
Which I had previously strictly denied entry,
Because only empty words
Seemed to me to be their content.
The spiritual teachings of ancient times
And what the present
Gives us in this way,
I have long regarded with little esteem.
But since the seed powers of your speech
Have been allowed to work in my soul,
It has now been years,
I have been wearing down my mind and heart
With that kind of knowledge,
To which your words are dedicated.
It would be impossible for me
To describe to you the struggles
And all the heavy suffering,
That the turn of my life
Has brought me into your paths.
And all my previous striving seems dwarfed to me,
That drove me before,
And only with a shudder
Am I able to call the memory
Alive before my soul —
How the nature and essence of your knowledge
Placed me before the powers of fate,
How it called me to heights
Where my senses faded
And buried me in depths
Where I felt myself shattered.
So I stand before you
Not as a young man
Who boldly, in the hope of life,
Freshly treads the paths of research,
No, at the end of life,
I must begin anew,
Since all my research
Has been transformed into insubstantial shadows
In the fire bath of your spirit.
You see my hair bleached
Not only by age,
I am heavily burdened by that worry,
Which can flow terribly into a heart,
That must not be deprived of spiritual revelation
And yet can hardly imagine
How the gates of true light
Will ever open to it.

BENEDICTUS:
You have not lost your way,
If only you can see clearly
That none of the steps
You have taken so far
Lead you away from the path of the spirit,
As soon as you see it in the right light.
You were on the right track, and what you lack
Is not the direction of the path,
But only knowledge of what has already been accomplished.

CAPESIUS:
So you must also take away that support
From which I could believe
It would remain as my last.
Thoughts were the content of my life,
They gave me the strength
To break with everything
What I thought I knew.
And to abandon vain research,
To chart a new course for myself,
Often seemed like a consolation to me.
Now I must accept as true
What I wanted to reject,
And my thinking, in which I sought refuge
In the shipwreck of my life,
Must be worthless to me.
In the shipwreck of my life.

BENEDICTUS:
What you have accomplished so far,
It flowed from the power of the will of the world
And can only become delusion,
When the light of false thinking
Before your errant gaze
Transforms it into its opposite image.
What you have lived, use it
In a new form for your salvation.
What you have thought and think today,
Transform it through that light,
Which flows to you from spiritual revelation.

CAPESIUS:
I can feel it fully,
How true the words are
That sound so terrifying to me.
And often I have said to myself,
Life cannot be wrong.
Seek the source of error only within yourself.
So I tried
To transform my own thinking,
And I wanted to direct all my thoughts
In the direction you have pointed out.
But this is precisely what is denied me.
It is as if the resistance of my own brain
Robbed me of all thought,
When it wants to conform to your way.
The truth of your revelation,
I can feel it completely.
But I cannot succeed in thinking it.
When I try, my power of thought dies
And I feel only the leaden weight
Of the tool of thought,
Which proves hostile to me.

BENEDICTUS:
You speak the solution to the riddle
And want to reject the wisdom of your own words
In a vain delusion.
Recognize what you yourself have spoken,
Seize that light,
Which shines brightly in your speech,
And one of the veils must fall,
Which hides the knowledge of the spirit from you.
You stand before the gate of all revelation
And want to deny the essence of this gate.
The true self speaks within you
And the appearance of your own being,
It defends itself against your true self.

CAPESIUS:
If truth is hidden in your words,
Then in this moment
You have robbed me of myself.
For I can save nothing
Of all that I may call mine,
Through my past life,
When the true being of my essence
Gives me the gift of light,
And the illusory being of my soul
Sees its own light only as darkness.
So it seems to be the truth,
What has imposed itself on me as an opinion
As an opinion imposed on me.
Whoever seeks secret reasons in the world
Untimely leads the powers of the soul,
Will feel torn apart
The bonds that bound him to being.
Oh, how horribly I realized
How I was torn away
From what bound me throughout my life
And worldly things.
I accepted it,
Because I had to feel
How new threads can bind me to higher realms
Only when loosened,
What only delusion and error have begotten.
But I hope through myself
To invent the bonds of new life.
0, how cruel is your teaching.
It takes away everything else
And also the last refuge of striving,
It takes away the human being itself.
If not I myself,
If what is foreign to me
Rests in me as another being,
Should bring me salvation,
Then the bridge falters,
Which should lead me out of this worldly delusion
Into another realm of truth.

BENEDICTUS:
You imagine yourself rejected
By your lofty spiritual goal
And yet you are so close to it.
You feel how the heaviest burden
Of your own being's tool.
You feel lonely and alien
In world events, in the realm of truth,
And your wings seem lame to you,
Which should carry you to other worlds.
You only need that faith,
Which you can give yourself,
Faith in the power of the soul,
Which seeks the stones for a new existence
From shattered life force,
And which wants to see in solitude
The light that shines from darkness.
You will seek, because you must.
Instead of another greeting, let me part from you today with these words.
The spiritual powers that I am privileged to serve,
The spiritual powers I am privileged to serve,
You sense them near you,
Even if you want to deny it.
First image Fifth image

CAPESIUS:
He leaves and leaves me alone in my misery
And my powerlessness.
Oh, if I did not already know
That people of his kind
Speak more through deeds
Than through meaningful words,
I could not understand his behavior.
But as it is, it is clear to me
How I am to interpret his departure.