Esoteric Lesson

On the fifth stage, we develop manas or spirit self. Here, we must not fixate on what we have seen, learned, or heard so far. We must learn to disregard all of this and to remain completely empty of everything we encounter, as if we had been emptied of everything we knew before. Manas can only be developed if we learn to perceive everything we have acquired through our own thinking as inferior to what we can acquire by opening ourselves to the thoughts that flow in from the God-woven cosmos. Everything that surrounds us has arisen from these divine thoughts. We have not been able to find them through our previous thinking. Things hide them from us. Now we are learning to sense the divine behind everything like a hidden mystery. With increasing humility, we are learning to realize how little we have fathomed these mysteries so far. And we learn that we must actually remove everything we have learned so far from our souls, that we must approach everything with a completely open mind, like a child—that only to the open mind of the soul do the divine mysteries that surround us reveal themselves. The soul must become childlike in order to enter the realms of heaven. The hidden wisdom—manas—then flows toward the childlike soul like a gift of grace from the spiritual world.