Fourth Lecture

Now I am not saying that what is taught today is a direct consequence or effect of that council decision; but what was dogmatized at the eighth council in Constantinople was, as a dogma, only the intellectual outflow of deeper events that are hidden beneath the surface of things and continue to this day. And all that wants to dogmatize - no matter whether it was done by the good philosophers of the Council of Constantinople or by the good professors of today's universities - all these conceptual webs are basically only conceptual hallucinations that arise in man and are too thin, I would say, in reality content, to really grasp the reality that prevails beneath them. Because today's human being, in accordance with the constitution of his soul, oscillates to a certain extent between the hallucinatory nature of his conceptual world and the illusory nature of his view of nature, he is therefore in danger of dualism. And he will always be in danger of being able to carry everything he devises as ideas, as ideals, only into the hallucinatory sphere of concepts, which does not reach into reality; or, he will be able to carry what he devises about nature into the illusionary sphere of the view of nature, which in turn has nothing to do with true reality, which is precisely an illusion. Man is simply never predisposed to find directly, or, I might say, comfortably, that which he calls truth – a word. He must start from something that can bring him discord, doubt, skepticism in life, and penetrate to the truth. In today's developmental cycle, man is forced to ascend from oscillating between the hallucination of philosophy and the illusion of the view of nature to the truly real, to that which really is.