679. While those parts of the symbol just mentioned express life and its mystery, the twelve-pointed star in the symbol with its particular figures expresses the solution to that mystery. Each individual local figure expresses one of the specific twelve basic answers that together make up the solution to the riddle of life. In order to really benefit from reading these answers, concentration is needed. Concentration is in turn the same as an exclusion of everything that has nothing to do with the object of the concentration. And we must therefore ask the reader to totally exclude everything he otherwise might possess in the way of knowledge of the solution to the mystery of life, such as the interpretations of theosophy, anthroposophy, spiritualism or other schools of thought, since these are completely superfluous or unnecessary here. There is absolutely no need for these interpretations in our exploration of the solution to the mystery of life. Here it is merely a question of us being absolutely free and impartial researchers, which we definitely cannot be if we are already restrained by theoretical systems that the absolute solution to the mystery of life has to fit into. With such a bias, we will very easily find ourselves obscuring the solution instead of revealing it. If we have a theory about the mystery of life that leads us to suppose that its solution is either this or that, and we are at the same time very pleased and happy with this theory, then any form of solution to the mystery of life that does not fit into this theory will give rise to disbelief and disappointment, regardless of how true and correct it might happen to be. In the subconciousness of such beings there will arise a kind of unconscious resistance to everything that can lead to disappointment, and the beings will try to avoid such disappointments by opposing the analyses of the solution with every possible counter explanation. As a rule, the truth will not be well received where it is not in one's favour. If we are therefore to have any hope of finding or experiencing the solution to the mystery of life, we have to be so free and impartial that we realise that it is absolutely not a missing link in some especially favoured system that we are looking for, but, on the contrary, the truth itself, quite regardless of how near or how far this truth may be from our favoured system, or how ruthlessly or brutally it might expose this system as being false or in some other way directly to our disadvantage.
      The object of our meditation must therefore be exclusively an orientation towards what life itself, in its own pure and absolute speech, has to say about its identity and existence. When all is said and done, we can nonetheless never ever obtain this explanation anywhere else than through life's own direct speech. And it is this irrefutable speech that, in the course of our meditation, we will meet in the symbol's series of analyses.