Thoughts about the Diagram Presentation

 

So you see how the number seven dominates the whole development, and what we have described in the past days by various pictures - sometimes with quite grotesque pictures and in any case with such, which deviate far from what man can see today in the physical world - we have now represented as a skeleton, as a framework. If you represent it in such a way, it is approximately like if you show the framework of a house, the very outermost, which is intended for the builders. That has nothing to do with the thing yet, those are, so to speak, only thoughts about the thing. We must ascend from this pure scheme of thought, which helps us to understand, to the living construction, by using, for example, for the different states the pictures which can be seen in the astral; first then we will have what is called occult wisdom. As long as you build up such a framework, you remain with the thinking that you are used to having in the physical world. The whole scheme we drew is only physical thinking. It does not even stand in relation to the full reality like the inner scaffolding of a house to the fully built building, but only like the scaffolding on the outside on which the builders stand. This must be torn down again when the building is finished. And therefore the thought scaffolding must be torn down again, if one wants to have the truth, as it behaves in reality, before oneself. If one regards this abstraction already as the real thing, then one does not speak of real occultism at all, but only of the idea which man can form of the occult facts in the present time. How man today cuts the occult facts to fit himself, that is contained in such a scheme. But it is unfruitful. I had to put it there because we also need such a scheme. But basically it is of no help at all to those who want to advance on a truly occult path. If you describe the whole world up to the highest occult facts by such schemes, it has only one meaning for your present incarnation. In the next one you will have to learn such a scheme again. You can think that only by using the brain, that is fitted only for the brain. But since this is decayed at death, this whole description according to the scheme is completely dispersed there. If, on the other hand, you grasp what really happens, what we have described as the succession of seal images, what the clairvoyant consciousness gives, if you grasp this, in the phantasy picture at first, then this is something which is not bound to your physical brain, which remains with you after death, because it does not spring from physical thinking, but gives the facts clairvoyantly. One must therefore be careful not to take for real occultism that which is striven for today according to the pattern of physical comprehensibility, which also wants to schematize the higher worlds. This is description with the means of the ordinary physical mind. Of course, the physical mind must play a role. Therefore, it is also useful to present such a scheme, and we can go further in our scheme.