XXIII. Karmic Law as Outcome of Active Life. Causes of Sickness and Heredity

Religious source texts are altogether not taken literally enough. To begin with, people were naive, the way many country people are to this day. They would take the words of the Bible literally. Then people grew clever and took a negative view, throwing anything traditional overboard. That was the second stage. The third stage were our modern freethinkers who take it all to be symbolic. Bruno Wille would be an example.[^3] A great deal depends, however, on how clever such an individual is, for one of them will find an even better symbol than the other and feel he must let the world know that this is the one and only one. Other meanings are often read into the texts, rather than their true meaning. There is, however, also a fourth stage—the science of the occult. This teaches us to take the original source texts literally again and understand them. Having been naive to begin with, then a freethinker and seeing symbols, one finally becomes a student of the occult.