The Bible and Wisdom II

But there were also those who recognized the “I am that I am,” but to do so they had to go through all the procedures, the methods, by which man is transformed into an instrument of higher vision, of looking into the spiritual world. Thus, the deity that already lived in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was completely veiled from the physical world. It ordered the world through the law. For the initiate, the mystery of the mysteries becomes visible in thought. Now came the time when the mystery of Golgotha was to be fulfilled. What actually happened there? Let us really form a mental image of what happened to the initiates in ancient times. I can only sketchily describe to you the process of initiation through meditation, concentration, and other exercises. Through these, the soul of the initiate was prepared for a long time. Then came a three-and-a-half-day conclusion to these initiation processes. The person who was to be initiated and who had been prepared to this extent was brought by the initiator into a state in which his physical body was completely asleep. He was not only asleep, but as if dead, so that he could not use his physical senses, his physical eyes and ears. Instead, through the organs of his spiritual limbs, he saw into the spiritual worlds. He could perceive when he was outside his body, when he was not bound, when the physical organs within him were latent. He could then look within himself at what lived invisibly within him as the “I am that I am”; but he could only see it in the depths of the mysteries. Then, as everyone who knows these things knows, he was awakened in his physical body and again made use of his physical senses. But now he had full consciousness: "I am the I Am, I was in the spiritual world. That which spoke to Moses, ‘I am that I am,’ stood before me, and it is that which eternity denies me, that which has entered into my body. I was connected with it. I was connected with the divine archetype of the I am, whose reflection and mirror image is my I am."