10. The Essence of the Human Being

Many people consider it a kind of immodesty to say that there is more to know about the human being and the world. They ask: How do you know these things? You cannot know them, because there are limits to our knowledge! — I quote here a saying of a great German thinker, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who in 1811 discussed before a large audience the same thing that Theosophy will have to discuss again and again: what underlies the human being as the invisible. Fichte says: If you imagine that you are the only one who can see in a world of blind people, and you talk to them about shapes and colors, about all the marvels that the eye transmits to us, then these blind people might say that this is all imaginary stuff. But the moment you are able to give all these blind people the ability to see, they see a new world, everything that the one spoke to them about is then standing before them. The blind man then realizes that he had no right to say that there are no forms, no colors. — In the same sense, Theosophy speaks of higher worlds. These are not new worlds, they are all around us, we are in the midst of them, only man lacks the organs, the abilities to perceive them. – Theosophy says: the world that our physical senses perceive is not the only one; we can expand our perceptions, can perceive other worlds. – They do not lie in an incomprehensible beyond, not in a cloud cuckoo land, but around us. Theosophy does not speak of these worlds in a magical sense, but in the same sense as Johann Gottlieb Fichte.