Preparation for the Instructions of the Second and Third Main Levels

to listen to a barbarian and to believe.

He who believes everything and knows nothing will believe less the more he begins to know. Therefore, he will precipitate the feces of his—if I may express myself so—catechetical faith, and with the pure alcohol of faith, he will certainly live happily and blissfully and die in blessedness.

He who believes nothing and knows nothing, the more he begins to know, the more he will begin to believe, a path to which a deeply penetrating knowledge must eventually lead him on its own.

Since, however, faith would according to this simply depend on knowledge, a person with knowledge could easily go astray if we did not quickly anticipate this and provide the following very important paragraphs as preparation.

Knowledge itself, as well as the capacity for its development, lies partly within us and partly outside us.

Outside us, knowledge is to be viewed objectively as a reality resting and existing for itself in the Great; it represents itself in us, like the unlimited expanse of a landscape, in the small space of a camera obscura dark chamber/pinhole camera held up before it. This reality, with the sum of all truths in specie and in general, exists in the abstract without first having to become what it is after we have discovered it.

No one who has ever used his sound reason in one case or another in his life will deny that our outer senses are merely the imprint of our inner senses; and just as we feel, see, recognize, and distinguish from the outside through the organ of the eye, we likewise feel, see, recognize, and distinguish from the inside through the perpetual power of our soul and our spirit—or whatever it may be named.

A person who perceives a defect in the structure of his eye in seeing, for example, being far-sighted or near-sighted, must reasonably take his form to the study of optics and seek to remove this privation of the suffering eye through various simple lenses or telescopes. We choose this example intentionally because we would have to explain to you, regarding the phenomenon-rust, what it is that actually sees within us. For according to the theory of optics, the eye does not see by itself, otherwise it would also see in the dark. It must therefore be necessarily assumed that one or more rays of light, being nearby, cast the form of external objects into the eye, and then the structure of the eye must be of such a kind that these objects can be represented in the small on the net-like membrane (retina) behind the crystalline moisture (humor crystallinus crystalline humor). Only then do we say that we see and can perceive that objects are outside us. But the question remains open and unanswered: which free spirit sees the objects painted on the retina, since it is from the inside? We would have to see from the outside into the inside, and then the same question would stand in its place again. We cannot dwell on this here.

Just as every person has his allotted share of external vision, he is also gifted with an inner one; what he lacks almost as much from the outside as from the inside, or if this outer or inner faculty—or both together—should be entirely missing, that is a mere privation that we would have to replace through scientific art.

The inner power of sight differs primarily from the outer in that: a) with the latter, only the privation can be lifted and the disturbed faculty strengthened. With the former, however, the spiritual faculty can be exalted to a sevenfold degree and higher through applied aids. Then, b) the outer power of sight has the quality of only feeling, seeing, recognizing, and distinguishing things that are present to it; but the inner power of sight feels, sees, recognizes, and distinguishes the past as well as the present, and depending on the disposition of the understanding, also the future.