In the foregoing chapters, both pendulum swings of our activity were characterized in which the rhythm of observance proceeds, through which observation arises in the first place. These are the pendulum swings of the With and the Without. One cannot consciously speak of observation without being aware of this swing sequence. By no means everything that must be considered in this process during careful research could be brought forward here. This presentation had to limit itself to the most essential aspects within the framework of the given theme. From the plentitude that presents itself to a careful exploration of the process of structuralization, some further aspects must be singled out in order to round off this contemplation and fulfill its main purpose.
It has emerged that our cognition is not a reproduction but a production, that
it is therefore in its realm a generation of the real. With that, however, the
origin of our own spiritual individuality is at the same time also a free part
of it – to wit of its subconscious activity bound to the origin of shapes of
the sensible world as well as through its fully conscious observation and
cognitive activity. The fountainhead of our spiritual individuality is the
spiritual world from which we draw all the formative force of the sensible
world developed in our cognition. In step with this formation and in progress
with the process of realization, we construct our own spiritual stature and
form and strengthen the constitutional components in which the harmonious
fabric of our being unfolds. For this self-formation, we require the
individualized and individualizing impulses of our activity that we attain in
contact with the sensible world.
It has furthermore emerged that the concepts which we comprehend with our
individual thinking power, that the grasp of our thinking-will through which we
in attaining the archetypal universals spiritually individualize ourselves,
arrives in this contentually fully determined particularity (thus in contrast
to other conceptual contents) – but that the latter is also always an (in each
case special) representation of the whole spiritual world. This can in virtue
of the universal (thus as context characterized), even though in each case
singular (thus special) nature of concepts not be anything else. In each
concept, as was delineated in the foregoing, the spiritual vitality of
the whole spiritual world became active – just as the efficacy of each concept
accordingly is also imparted to the whole spiritual world. The whole
spiritual world (albeit in very different quality and intensity) is therefore
individualized in every member component, from which we construct our spiritual
stature. Granted, this constitution of our being will be realized with respect
to its conscious awareness and content by various people in vastly different
time spans, it is in any case a gradual process and its completion is for us
contemporaries a long way away. But behind what today is already attainable
appears spirit man, the in the human total individualization again manifoldly
membered individualization of the spiritual world as the primal conception of
our being and at the same time as our highest ideal goal. Spirit man is the
membered context of the world-shaping forces in every mode of activity and
being, which for the latter is immanent as a natural tendency in a certain
period of the evolution of the world, but which must first be made structurally
manifest by man. Spirit man is the absolute meaning of the world, in which the
meaning of the world and man is realized in equal measure. It is the
evolutionary progress, in which we transform ourselves by ourselves to
ourselves and give the world what it needs for its advancement. Evolution is
not a mechanical but a consciousness process and the human being is not a
peripheral coincidence of evolution but its central event.[1] The decisive novelty of
these deliberations is only properly evaluated when one bears in mind that they
are not content with the intellectualistic combination of borrowed contents and
their sentimental pious acceptance. They rather point to the results of
introspection of the structuralization in our cognitive life that are
accessible to every contemporary human being and the unique significance of
this soul observation for a meditative discipline of our frame of mind.
Whoever does not bear this in mind is likely to object that he merely hears
grandiloquent words that, even
if they would be true, are irrelevant, because they pertain to something in an
infinite future – which moreover could become dangerous, because through their
intoxication they divert our attention from things that are attainable,
from the dire needs and dangers of our time. Such an objection completely
overlooks the fact that the longing for a basic meaning to our lives is one of
the most pressing demands of our time. And precisely the question concerning
the nature of meditation and even more its meditative practice require a sense
orientation. For the danger of an egotistical striving towards perfection
immediately suggests itself by every practice of this kind. The egotism of this
striving for self-perfection and not the insight into the meaning of meditation
is from the viewpoint of social responsibility and readiness to help
questionable. Whoever is capable of applying only the smallest measure, but
does not know the rule according to which the latter is determined,
cannot neither trust himself nor his statements about the world: the results of
his measures remain dubious.
The understanding developed here for the nature of meditation is however not
only contemporary with regard to the mode of consciousness, but also does full
justice to the basic social demand of our time. For the latter demands after
all (sometimes deeply subconscious, sometimes as a widely audible outcry) the
motivation of the meaning of our existence, thus the recovery of our human
dignity destroyed by the materialistic world outlook, the renewal of the confidence
in our humanity.
It is from this point of view that the leading remarks are to be understood.
They have developed that modern meditation can be the realization of a process
that proceeds subconsciously in the construction of our objective
consciousness. This realization is at the same time the recovery of meaning,
because it leads to the insight that world and man are orientated in a uniform
process of evolution towards individualization, towards a goal that is at the
same time a world and human principle that can be realized, achieved, which is
man in his true own being. The ever anew exercised meditation of the
construction of reality in human cognition is not only a progressive approach
of man to his true nature, but also (and as a matter of fact long before the
attainment of his goal) the granting of absolute meaning that man himself
presents. It [i.e. this reality meditation] grants the certainty that there is
an absolute meaning, for it progressively realizes this meaning. This signifies
that the nature of meditation is not something to attain, but to achieve – an
achievement by which man accomplishes himself. Modern meditation does not
desire an entrance into a spiritual world antecedent to it, but rather freely
gives itself the responsibility for the origin of a spiritual world, which can
only arise out of man accomplishing himself in meditation as a world first.
Modern meditation does not object to a desire for self-perfection for
reasons that renunciation might expect an all the more richer welcome – but
from the insight that neither desire nor renunciation can attain a real
meditative content, since only the meditation itself can give this to the
latter. This is not the loan that awaits it, but the gift that it offers to the
world. Modern meditation is not the path into a pre-meditative world, but the
formation of a new metamorphosis of the world. The nature of modern meditative
experience is neither one of creaturely emerging from the creative powers
of the world nor the dissolution therein, but the transformed emergence of
creative spirituality from human self-formation. Meditation is the moral
intuition of the human being, the moral imagination of the transmutation of the
world process in man and the moral technique of freedom. Herein lies the
difference to all previous forms of meditative life.
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