The Road of Life
The article: Mental Prisons
Chapter 15
What the initiate knows
The initiated being knows that one cannot by means of anger, violence or force change the nature of other beings, move them from one step in evolution to another, but that this transplantation of a being from one step to another is brought about by life itself through a more or less long epoch of evolution.
That one can by force compel a being for a short while to follow one's will in one field or another is not the same as raising the being in question to a higher step.
For complying with compulsion is only "trained".
It is a manoeuvre that an animal carries out in order to be free of the trainer's whip.
But the trained animal has absolutely no opinion or idea about why the manoeuvre should be precisely this way and not that, and therefore cannot have become more highly developed by it.
If a human being is attacked by a tiger, it is not the fault of the tiger, for this attack is only the vitally necessary nature of the tiger.
On the contrary, it is the fault of the human being who was already aware of how risky it was to travel in terrain he knew to be the domain of the tiger.
If a highly developed or initiated being is attacked or disturbed by a primitive human being, the responsibility for this lies in reality not at all with the primitive but on the contrary with the developed or initiated being.
He already knew what risk there was in travelling in the domain of the primitive being and could have protected himself.
If an enlightened or civilised missionary went into the primordial forest to convert cannibals and was eaten by these beings, the responsibility for this lay not with the cannibals but exclusively with the missionary.
The cannibals lived in their own territory and inevitably followed the behaviour natural to their step.
One can say that the missionary also followed his nature.
But when this happened to him it was because it was he, not the cannibals, who had left the particular terrain conquered for his nature or step in evolution and had gone into a terrain that was the manifestation-area of the step of the other beings.
That he could not there avoid, to a greater or lesser extent, being subjected to the contrary way of manifesting of the controllers of that terrain is just as natural as it is natural that he, to a greater or lesser extent, would be mutilated if he took it into his head to jump from a fourth floor onto a concrete or granite pavement.
This mutilation of his body does not make the pavement unnatural or reprehensible.
On the contrary, the behaviour whereby the "I" brought his body into a situation in which it must inevitably be more or less mutilated or crushed – that was reprehensible.
If the I through this behaviour has been able to create something so extremely good that it has been able to compensate for the destruction of the body, as was the case with the fate, the crucifixion of Jesus, this is another matter.
But it does not justify anger or revenge against the "primitive" beings within whose terrain the event took place and for whom the same event could be regarded as an undermining of the traditions that for them were the only things holy or absolute.