Initiation or Consecration

Goethe repeatedly expressed and emphasized in a wide variety of beautiful sentences and phrases that which forms the basis of a way of thinking that leads to initiation or initiation. Let us begin today's lecture with the words with which Goethe, in his deeply thoughtful fragment “The Secrets,” points to that inner human power that strives ever further and further, ever higher and higher, which is indeed constricted by what surrounds us, which is inhibited at every moment by what is imposed on us from outside, from all sides, as the sensual, as the inhibiting force, but which nevertheless has a means of attaining inner knowledge, knowledge of the world. Goethe says in this poem “The Secrets,” in which he speaks of a special initiation of the Rosicrucians and thus alludes to the principle of initiation in profound words: