Lecture VI

Both of these facts must be recognised by the disciple of occultism, when he takes the first step into a higher consciousness. (We shall speak further tomorrow about the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold.) For as consciousness is then divided into three parts, so too if we go forward in the right way, we learn to perceive in the manifest external form of man a three times sevenfold being We have here two aspects of a many-sided and many-membered mystery,—the Mysterium Magnum. Of other aspects we shall have to speak later. For the moment we have indicated the very first and most elementary beginnings of this great and wonderful mystery. This is why, when you come to a particular stage in occult development, you are met on all sides with the formula (expressed in many different ways): The great secret is—“Three are one and one are three.” For the occultist this formula signifies what I have here described to you; herein it has its full and true meaning. Only when people misunderstand it and make it into a materialistic dogma, is its true meaning lost. If, however, you will take it in the sense I have explained, it can be a right symbol for the truths with which we have been dealing today. The formula becomes then an expression of the Mysterium Magnum. If we want to find our way aright into the realm of occultism—and this is what we are attempting here, in many connections—then we must learn to understand this mysterious and apparently contradictory formula: Three are one and one are three. To the mediaeval disciple of occultism again and again were the words spoken: “Give heed to what is said to thee; so mayst thou understand the mystery of how the Three can be at the same time One, and the One at the same time Three.”