By the in­ner logic of our an­ces­tors’ lan­guage – by its tech­nol­ogy – we find con­fir­ma­tion of what has been said in this book about mu­sic and also about speech, and we be­gin to un­der­stand why our an­ces­tors, in their re­cords, have so se­ri­ously urged us never to lose sight of our free, in­ner for­ma­tive will amidst the outer turbulence of time, and to for­ever place the high­est value on an in­te­grated per­son­al­ity.

To pass on their knowl­edge, our fore­fa­thers thus chose, for ex­ample, the symbol of the forge. In this re­spect, the art of the smith was the symbol for that in­ner abil­ity of shap­ing speech, for that true skill of poetry, which was con­sid­ered a pre­req­ui­site for mas­tering the in­ner and the outer world.

Eve­ry­one had to mas­ter this in­ner art and – equip­ped with the keenness of his un­der­stand­ing – forge for him­self the sword of his ac­tion, namely the in­tel­lect: un­der the guid­ance of a mas­ter in the high art of smithery who also knew how to teach it: a mas­ter over the field of power-prom­is­ing crea­tiv­ity: over the true art of war on the battlefield of life.

Such a per­son­al­ity is de­scribed by our fore­fa­thers as be­ing equip­ped with a golden helmet, a golden breast plate, and a golden sword – the helmet symbolizing sov­er­eignty over the un­der­stand­ing, the breast plate sov­er­eignty over the feel­ing, and the sword rep­re­sent­ing the crea­tive power of self-cog­ni­tion.
The golden shield was the sign of the sun, the symbol for the self of the act­ing in­di­vid­ual, which from the level of self-aware­ness radi­ates its light of pure knowl­edge into the field of the mind, and from there into the sur­round­ing world.

We have used this one ex­ample only to pre­sent, in prin­ci­ple, our fore­fa­thers’ lively, sym­bolic yet uni­ver­sally un­der­stand­able, time­less way of de­scrip­tion and to show how deep an in­spi­ra­tion we can draw to­day from their an­cient re­cords.

Eve­ry day we all make use of lan­guage but we use it only on the level of sim­ple cate­gori­cal mean­ings. And yet we de­sire to com­pre­hend our lan­guage as a live ex­pres­sion of our an­ces­tor’s true art of poetry.

When, in the nor­mal wak­ing state of con­scious­ness, some­one says the word “tree,” the lis­tener knows what is meant, but he has not the lively im­pres­sion, the vivid image of that very spe­cific tree – as though he would ac­tu­ally ex­peri­ence it.

This lack of in­ner imagi­na­tion in the wak­ing state of con­scious­ness re­sults from our in­ner bond­age to the outer sen­sory per­cep­tion which, for ex­ample, is con­sid­era­bly re­duced in the dream­ing state of con­scious­ness and there­fore sub­stan­tially di­min­ished in its bind­ing in­flu­ence, an in­flu­ence which, in the wak­ing state, di­verts us to­wards the out­side, away from the pow­er­ful in­ner imagi­na­tion.

This gives us an idea of the great loss that is incurred when han­dling the ele­ments of lan­guage in a rou­tine, mechanistic, and undif­fer­en­ti­ated man­ner which is drummed into the heads even in school, and which drives the feel­ing to­wards lin­guis­tic stagnation. And the very same word that gives rise to a vivid ex­peri­ence in the dream­ing state of con­scious­ness, ap­pears merely as a shadow on the level of the com­mon wak­ing state, and is un­able to suf­fi­ciently stimu­late the in­ner fan­tasy.