Chapter III

It then chanced that I became acquainted with a simple man of the plain people. Every week he went to Vienna by the same train that I took. He gathered medicinal plants in the country and sold them to apothecaries in Vienna. We became friends. With him it was possible to talk about the spiritual world as with one who had his own experience therein. He was a personality of inner piety. He was quite without schooling. He had read very many mystical books, but what he said was not at all influenced by this reading. It was the outflowing of a spiritual life which was marked by its own quite elementary creative wisdom. It was easy to perceive that he read these books only because he wished to find in others what he knew for himself. He revealed himself as if he, as a personality, were only the mouthpiece for a spiritual content which desired to utter itself out of hidden fountains. When one was with him one could get a glimpse deep into the secrets of nature. He carried on his back his bundle of medicinal plants; but in his heart he bore results which he had won from the spirituality of nature in the gathering of these herbs. I have seen many a man smile who now and then chanced to make a third party while I walked through the streets of Vienna with this “initiate.” No wonder; for his manner of expression was not to be understood at once. One had first in a certain sense to learn his spiritual dialect. To me also it was at first unintelligible. But from our first acquaintance I was in the deepest sympathy with him. And so I gradually came to feel as if I were in company with a soul of the most ancient times who – quite unaffected by the civilization, science, and general conceptions of the present age – brought to me an instinctive knowledge of earlier eras.