In comprehensible language:
Living in this unjust society, people are continuously being confronted with all kinds of events, which are indicating the necessity to them, to change their way of living for their own good. One, who listens to his conscience shall understand this, but one, who is deaf for it, shall blame all discomfort to others or circumstances. All literal and figurative pain and every emotion points back to the original life, back to yourself. The truth is that all misery results from everyone’s way of life, every now and then, man realizes this, but this realization is immediately repressed, because man thinks that he is like that and cannot change. Furthermore, everyone is being held in a web of relationships, which don’t allow him to change. Therefore, it’s not just seeing how you are trapped, but the urge and courage to escape is, like Brouwer rightly remarks, not a choice, but fallen to you, being given to you. Brouwer calls this "Divine Mercy". But actually, it’s like, as long as people have a bearable life and even find themselves in the illusion that they are happy, they feel no urge to release themselves of the life in this bizarre world, because they know what they have and don’t know what they will get.
The distinction Brouwer makes between immanent truth and transcendent truth is an artificial and confusing distinction. People look for confirmation for their way of living and the truth is that everyone has dirty hands that the way people associate with each other is murderous, that what people call love is barter, that this society is build on power of one over another and that every culture is one big mistake. That is why the truth is gruesome and people don’t really want to hear it.

Immanent truth sees the “idea” of the world. From the viewpoint of the so-called reality it may appear to be a lie or at least an exaggeration because of the false forms in which it must dress itself, especially in literature and the “visual” arts. It conflicts with current opinions which have all grown out of a world view based on outward appearance, that is, appeal to human desire. And yet it is tolerated only if it can be made to fit into the confined life without upsetting its structure. It is found in music, which appeals to the senses still unaffected by the intellect; to a lesser extent in the visual arts as was shown by Heinze, and least of all in literature which addresses itself directly to the intellect, life itself. The latter is duty-bound to act as the obedient servant of the lie that is human culture, to be enjoyed as a kind of uplifting, ennobling, or edifying experience, but not to be taken seriously in its claim to change the view of the world. Dead authors do not seem to address themselves so directly to the living will of the reader as do contemporary writers. The latter become literary figures only if they become workers in the industry of conscience-salving mock edification or titillation; their working material may even be truth, but only truth dressed up in the fashionable clothing of the prevailing cultural system. Later, however, when the cultural system changes, their clothing is no longer fashionable and they do not even survive as dead authors. A contemporary author is never forgiven for telling the naked truth; the work of the dead is covered with the conciliatory veil of unreality, their naked truths are swallowed as some vague sacred doctrine.
        One puts up with truth in verse more readily than with truth in prose, because poetry is the garb of the courtesan, appealing to the lowest sensibility of the time bound intellect, its sense of rhythm; when she gives her all, carried on the beat of “rub-a-dub, rub-a-dub” (“tommy-rot, tommy-rot”), she gives the impression not to believe a word she says. When you hear a poem such as

La vie est vaine
Un peu d’amour, un peu de haine,
Et puis bonjour

Comment:
True art is a contradiction in terms. Art is by definition artificial and un-real, that is why it’s called art and only real is genuine. Art can never show the truth, nor reality. Art can only show the estrangement and the yearning of people. But like Brouwer rightly stated before, art belongs to the conscience-soothing entertainment-industry and only supplies products with which the prisoners embellish their prisons.
Also art has gone from means to an end.

The former is clearly shown in music, but also and more fully—though less forcefully—in literature, in particular when it considers time from the viewpoint of a frozen now, as it does in drama. Epics are narratives, they leave in the reader an awareness of the separation of time and therefore stop and dwell on externalities. Comedy, even when it freezes the present, does not step out of time but continues to live in parallel with time; it stays within a fading flow time; its denials are not convincing; they center on externalities and arouse nothing but feelings of excitement. Tragedy on the other hand enters a static present and withdraws from life; it recognizes life to be a continuing creation from illusion and a decomposition, an illusion and a cruel disenchantment of fate, whose clouding wings spread over this earth and quash any rise above man’s immutable karma and sling him back into the mud. Fate’s cruel humiliation is accepted as justified and inevitable, as is man’s thwarted attempt to raise himself. A world contended and resigned would serve no purpose; karma wants to rise above itself and will always be forced back into itself.
        In the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare, the protagonists Oedipus, King Lear, and Julius Caesar follow the paths of their fate wandering in darkness, but one can sense the outcomes right from the start. In Hamlet illusion and disillusionment are so closely allied that they always appear together. In the course of the play the hero dies many deaths; whenever he reaches for a firm hold it is snatched from him, and again and again he is forced back into the flow of his karma. Death finally comes; its tragic justice as the disavowal of life is an indispensable part of all good tragedy. At the end of the play Hamlet must die, every single illusion has been shattered: happiness, trust, and love, then why not the sum total of all illusions, life itself? That is also why in King Lear, Cordelia, who had never done any wrong, must pay with her life just as her evil sisters had. Everything positive in this life, every act, every personal quality good or bad, will punish itself in cruel death, cruel because it is felt as an affliction, whether or not it is feared in advance and suffered in pain during one’s last hour. In this sad world everyone commits certain acts and has certain qualities and therefore lives in the original sin of his birth and in the expectation of painful atonement.

On the original sin:
Formerly the Christians had their doctrine of predestination, the Catholics their original sin and the east the Karma, meanwhile fate is determined genetically. Therefore that is the new original sin, but even more pernicious than the original and according sciences inevitable. Unfortunately children are no longer born `perfectly` because for nine months, during their intra-uterine life, they already have been exposed to the by emotions, fears and worries, unsettled mother with all consequences of that. It is actually unimaginable that still, so many apparently healthy children are born. But right after birth they are exposed to the good intentions of the educators, who force them into the straightjackets of clothes, time-schedules and drilling of upbringing and therefore don’t let them be what they are. They get them ready for a life in this bizarre society and saddle them with baggage, which they have to release themselves of later in life in a painful and laborious process (Brouwer calls this, grievous penance) if they want to become human again. A rather cumbrous way.

The visual arts lack the flowing element of time and therefore cannot reveal the self-destruction of the illusion of time but they do reveal deeper, and more directly than drama, the self-destruction of the illusion of space, the illusion of plurality which already now receives its punishment, the pain of gazing at this plurality, baffled and helpless, a pain which one tries to escape in never satisfied desire for possession, that is, joining it to the individual self, hopelessly forsaken and helpless. Straying further and further away, attention centers on the world outside and so adds to the burden of karma: it becomes lust for power, for money, for glory and for—the illusion which is woman. The latter indeed is a burdening of karma, for in the full karma of man there is no room for woman: she is a Siren luring him away from his path.

Comment:
Here Brouwer goes terribly wrong, what we can hardly hold against a 23-year old, living in the end of the Victorian period, but his view on women has been an insurmountable obstacle for him. The outside world, the sciences, arts and politics, was almost exclusively populated by men. Freud had already poisoned the western people with his delusions and had stated that the woman was the negation of the man, a dome over the emptiness (Prof. J.H. van den Berg, Metabletica pg 157). Apparently, Brouwer describes here the women he met as a student, women from the leisure class, the appendices of their husbands.
Exactly the same way as when man lets himself stray from his path to Self-knowledge by women, lets the woman stray herself from it by men. Brouwer makes exactly the same mistake, the writer of The Gospel of Thomas approximately 1850 years earlier made in logion 114: “Simon Peter said to them:
Let Mary go forth from among us, for women are not worthy of the life. Jesus said: Behold, I shall lead her, that I may make her male, in order that she also may become a living spirit like you males. For every woman who makes herself male shall enter into the kingdom of heaven."
If the man sees the woman as temptation, than that indicates only something about himself and the other way around. So everything below what Brouwer writes about the woman compared to the man, goes for the man compared to the woman as well. Neither the woman nor the man in this society has chosen the role they have to play, but it is the role that is allotted to them by others and which both can discard.

There is a balance between man’s burden of guilt and the burden of labor and toil imposed on him. A similar balance is found between woman’s wantonness, her inborn capacity for karma burdening, and the measure of femininity which this world offers in temptation. In a world of humble acceptance of given karma there would be no women. But again such a world would serve no purpose, the wantonness of this world is inseparably bound up with its continued existence and its sufferance of womanhood and, amazingly, the latter are also empirically found to be inseparable. It is a particularly strong case of the different, ever conflicting, and irreconcilable interests in this world of plurality: man must shun and ignore woman in order to avoid increasing the burden of his karma and his own ultimate downfall—listen to Shakespeare’s Anthony under the spell of Cleopatra, crying out in desperation, “I must from this enchanting queen break off”—and woman cannot exist without man, her whole karma is nothing but her sex, so much so that between a woman and a lioness there is less difference than between twin brothers.
Woman must live in a world where she feels everything but cannot be anything. In her body she experiences the feelings of humanity, of race and family, but she may not indulge in them. Only one thing is left to her: one who is her ideal, one whom she may follow with her eyes without asking of him anything for herself, no love in return, not even being noticed by him. She is to be an instrument, sent from heaven to loosen the bonds of his karma and help him keep away from disturbing temptation. But in doing so she does not notice that her entrance into his life becomes his greatest temptation, when he begins to feel an all-giving love toward her. In her consciousness, in her attention she helps him live his life purely in himself, but underneath, from the dark depths of her sex she will lure him onto paths which lead him to ruin.
        She shall be humble, and humbly she shall want to take from his hands all ignoble work, all work other than the pure enjoyment of the faculties of the body in which he walks this earth. Without flinching she shall give her life to save his equilibrium.
        Her look shall be serene and calming; she shall live her life doing anything for her beloved with dogged persistence and patience, her body unwrinkled and unmoved, without desire to seduce and unaware of its seductive power, and yet a body so irresistibly tempting in its tormenting repose that no man can resist.
        The Venus of Milo symbolizes the karma of woman, the still, passionless woman, so unaware and yet so devilishly seductive. Pure female love, however, love without temptation can be wonderful, such serene untroubled love as can be found between brother and sister.
        In the meantime woman will sin and burden her karma, as indeed man does; she will do this through her female passion for her beloved and also by engaging in male activity. An example of the first is Gretchen’s monologue in Faust.

My peace is gone,
My heart is sore:
I never shall find it,
A nevermore.

Save I have him near,
The grave is here,
The world is gall
And bitterness all.

My poor weak head
is racked and crazed.
My thought is lost,
My senses mazed.

My peace is gone,
My heart is sore:
I never shall find it,
A nevermore.

To see him, him only,
At the pane I sit
To meet him, him only
The house I quit.

His lofty gait,
His noble size,
The smile of his mouth,
The power of his eyes.

And the magic flow
Of his talk, the bliss
In the clasp of his hand,
And ah! his kiss.

My peace is gone,
My heart is sore:
I never shall find it,
A nevermore.

My bosom yearns
For him alone;
Ah! dared I clasp him,
And hold, and own!

And kiss his mouth
To heart’s desire,
And on his kisses
At last expire.

Faust (translation by B. Taylor, OUP)

Comment:
Also, here Brouwer is not consistent. He calls work the "self-inflicted task" through leaving the original state. Therefore, noble work is just a social qualification because ultimately work is for the fools. Furthermore, there are no species or races of people, but only people who think they are of a different species or race.

The gradual usurping by women of certain work will inevitably lead to the degradation of that work. People’s views as to what is “noble” work change with the times; in the age of chivalry it was fighting and hunting, later it became politics, in modern times it is science, especially the kind of science as is practiced in universities. Such noble work has always been reserved for men, women were excluded. Two recent examples of change or so-called development have been: the debasement of universities into places where wage earners are trained in disagreeable, wretchedly necessary but degrading social work, and the admission of women to these establishments. Until recently the state, public life, was considered to be an honorable institution, even something metaphysical. Work in the public sector ranked high, it was a noble task in contrast with domestic work, which is necessary but wretched and inferior. During the last century socialist movements have swept away that noble and honorable status; at the same time women started to take up positions in public life, first only in a subordinate administrative role. The management of great enterprises still relies on male passion and male folly; but when at the end of this socialist process of decay the state is no more than a well-oiled robot, then perhaps the whole of its administration will be left to women. That money for one’s livelihood is usually earned by the man is of as little importance as money itself. This happens to be so at present, when earning money goes hand in hand with doing noble work. The old Germanic tribes regarded tilling the land as ignoble, inferior work and it was, therefore, done exclusively by women. When all productive labor has been made dull by socialism it will be done exclusively by women.
        In the meantime men will occupy their time according to their abilities and aptitudes in sport, gymnastics, fighting, studying philosophy, gardening, woodcarving, travelling, training animals, and anything which at the time is considered to be noble work, even gambling away what their wives have earned; for even that is much nobler than building bridges or digging mines.
        In this way the sin of male activity becomes a hopeless struggle of woman against fate, which had allotted her nothing but menial, ignoble tasks. This carries with it its own punishment in the uncomfortable feeling of never experiencing within herself the strength-giving drive to do this male work and never understanding the work she is doing, however good she may be at it. No matter what male activity she engages in, the simple realization and expression of the male idea or its more frivolous aberrations, her sin remains the same: amazons, female writers, and painters are no better than female butchers. A philanthropic woman is a caricature just as much as a cruel or ambitious woman.
        If a woman can keep herself free from passion and activity, she will still experience and feel the shackles that imprison her nature as atonement of past guilt, failing to know or find her ideal. Groping in the dark and childlike, she will at first admire and share the minor male talents and phantasies, unable to do more than share in and agree with the peripheral sentiments of a man. Only few will go on to see the whole of individual man, including his fate, and only this can be called ‘love.’ She may then understand his fate and his life even better than he does himself, and in his aberrations she must suffer the pain of not being able to hold him in as high a regard as she would wish. If his fall away from his karma is permanent and not toward her (a fall toward her would be the only one she would not recognize), then his fall away from himself would also be a fall away from her. She then must surrender all that had any meaning in her life, and in doing so she acts in accordance with her duty. Clinging to him in desperation would be typically male tenacity. Real love does not survive contempt. She shall bear her loneliness with patience until one day a new and higher male sphere is opened to her, a less burdensome male karma. There will be lovers, one after another, and every time she will let her beloved go when he falls away from his karma permanently or when another love, one of a higher sphere, is revealed to her. Only in her life and by living will her ideal become clear to her: the highest male principle, which surpasses fear and desire, which cannot fall away from karma because it is above karma, which is not concerned with power or talent nor with good looks or character, but which is nothing but humble courage and clear vision. To know this ideal and yet not be able to find it in this world, that is her ultimate torment during the whole of her life.
        But this is not the life pattern of most women, because woman too strays away from her karma. First it is her female passion which makes her want to draw her beloved to her, it is felt as an emptiness to be filled by him. Then it is male activity which burdens her body, creates an ideal which is not the highest male principle but some talent or other, usually a talent which accords with her own nature; the latter in contrast with man, who wants to possess what in his ignorance he feels to be different, outside himself and who is most easily tempted by and drawn to the opposite of his own nature, another example of the conflict of interests in this world. Gretchen in Faust expresses her admiration of such talent of male activity.

Dear God! Such a man,
Who can do all and everything!
I stand before him in shame
and say yes to all he says and does.
I am only a poor and ignorant child
who does not understand what he sees in me.

But woman strays further and further away; overcome by ambition, fear, and jealousy she is drawn away from her ideal to other men. If she has taken on the male characteristics of self-consciousness and ambition she will become a temptress of men and so trade in her womanly ideal for the lowest in the make-up of man.
        Such is the inevitable, sad state of love in this world; the pure forms of love will only come to life as the world and she herself are destroyed.

Comment:
In this society and in every culture, relationships are based on Karmas or baggages of both partners, being complementary. Two half people that supplement each other, find their better half. On the road to self-knowledge, where people dispose of their baggage, people change so that relationships are non-sustainable. And every time the seeker meets others that fit in with their changed karma, but also these others are just an obstacle on their road till the end. In this society, unselfish love is an impossibility, not of this world.

But truth in art shows in never fading lines that man should shun and ignore woman but that woman should live in man, consider herself to be nothing, powerless and worthless, and should sacrifice all for her beloved. A true woman is pale, smooth, and without expression, her eyes are dull and dreamy; she has no physical strength and yet she shrinks from nothing. But any man who turns to a woman loses his life. It is the old story, briefly described in a vision of Marie Madeleine.

I had a dream and saw a tree,
Youthful and full of the strength of spring;
And in this dream I saw a tropical flower,
Winding itself around his bark and drinking his sap.

She was very white, and she never weakened
Taking the sunlight from the other’s face.
She drank his blood and sapped his strength.
The tree withered.—It was only a dream.

No work of art portraying love is hailed as great and true unless the woman, and she alone, is a most splendid figure, the man is usually described as a poor duffer, completely thrown off-balance. In Hamlet, the truest of all drama, the hero also represents this aspect of male karma; in spite of all the love he feels for Cordelia, the seductive temptation in which he feels trapped, his conscience does not allow him to let himself go! But in her case all attention is centered on his Fate, his sadness and confusion, the fateful course on which his life is set.
        Male love is always portrayed as frivolous and as a sad, blind passion, while womanly love is raised to heights of sublime fate. This idea of human love is the subject of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra. She shares life in the highest form of which she is capable and as she finds it expressed in her beloved; but he—for this very reason—is lured away from his right path and he squanders all that is noble in him for her sake. His life is ruined, and after his death she too parts from her life that now has lost all meaning. The burning of widows was once a sacred rite, but it was banned by western barbarian governments as barbaric.
        Adelbert von Chamisso gave a pure rendering of womanly love. In his Song of the Three Sisters two of the sisters tell of the suffering their loves have brought; but the greatest pain is that of the third sister, who sighs, “...only a few words: ‘I have never been loved...’ .” She should have said, “I have never loved.” Only through love does she become woman, but in doing so she loses her own identity, as she admits when she says,

Startled and ravished by my Friend,
I am lost to myself.

See how little desire she has to draw him toward her and to bind her life to his:

Wander and go your way,
I shall only see your shadow,
Watch your image in all humility,
And be happy and yet, sad.

Also:

Don’t listen to my quiet prayer,
Only devoted to your happiness...

This, because sublime love goes hand in hand with a deep sense of shame, an instinctive shunning in his presence of the temptation which emanates from her; and no matter whether he falls under her spell or not, even knowing her is a distraction to him. Important to her happiness is not what she does or what happens to her, only his life matters and what happens to him. The health of the ideal woman is not affected by her own diet but only by that of her beloved. Physically too she literally only lives on love. She is cured of every illness by the mere touch of his hand, by his breath, but she does not have a similar power over him.
        Since she lives in nothing but love she does not have any desire for, nor does she feel herself capable of leading a life of her own. She does not know human, that is, male desires; moderation and abstemiousness are typically female qualities. As to worldly aspirations and political convictions, she will simply and naively follow in the footsteps of her beloved, adopt his opinions without question and defend them against others as if they were objective and unassailable axioms. Disputes with women clearly show the ridiculousness of language as a means of reaching agreement and the notorious phenomenon of female logic. Goethe speaks of

...these women, who after hours of reasoning,
keep going back to their first sentence.

Here ends his philippic against the woman. Don’t blame him!

Comment:
"Alle Wissenschaft wäre überflüssig wenn Wesen und Erscheinung der Dingen unmittelbar zusammenfielen", Karl Marx wrote. Man can only then start to think about reality and nature, when he has placed himself outside of that reality and nature. Just like he can only then start to think about himself when he has placed himself outside of himself, and, as Brouwer writes, “the bond with the self, its only source and guide, is lost” Then the outside world is suddenly strange, and full of threats and then, with the aid of theories, man tries to allay his fears and that is the source of science, that will lead him further away. Natural science tries to get a hold on the outside world, the psychology on the inside world.

Whatever is perceived as independent of his own action, will be felt and seen in a kind of polarization as an image of his own fate; the true self will accept it and live with it as something free and yet something obviously necessary. Living in what he so beholds as the one pole of this polarization, he will not lose the bond with the other, the source of permanent tranquility and wisdom. The blue, firm sky will be felt as the exact antipole of his own mood of humility and contemplation, the firm course of the stars as the antipole of his own freedom, the colors and branches of plants as the antipole of yet other colors and of the passions in his own blood.
        These insights break through as immanent truth in the science of culture. Once alchemy and astrology were cases of such a disturbing breakthrough; modern chemistry and astronomy are just slaves of culture like any other branch of natural science. In any of these cases, however, the breakthrough of truth always moves the center of gravity back again from the observed to the observer: Copernicus moved the rotation of heavenly bodies down to earth, one day it may well be placed in man’s own body. Kant replaced the study of the properties of things by that of the human head, man becoming aware of categories. Positive, quantitative properties are again and again replaced by polar ones; for example, in the new theories of electricity and light: Newton’s theory of color analyzed light rays in their medium, but Goethe and Schopenhauer, more sensitive to truth, considered color to be the polar splitting by the human eye.
        Of course, none of this really matters, it leaves the world as stupid as before; it is not what we described as turning-into-the-self, turning toward free truth, but the appearance of truth in the forms of folly.
        In this world the most acutely felt breakthrough of immanent truth is the appearance of disaster and misery in man’s pursuit of happiness. Misfortune is the denial of luck and happiness, appearing as the frustration of happiness in all its forms. The houses of cards, in which people so cowardly lock themselves, will one day all collapse. At the point of death they will all wake up to the awful truth that their lives have been empty, that in spite of all their hard work and meddlesome interference, fate will always keep the world on the course it had mapped for it from the start.

Chapter Seven: Transcendent Truth

Anyone convinced of the immanent truth of the world of perception, who has understood the inescapable disillusionment of all human endeavor and the inevitability of his karma, will be guided by that conviction in the direction of the reunion of the world with the self, the direction of transcendent truth.
Transcendent truth represents the Kingdom of God in this sad world, selfreflection, forever emanating and resorbing itself, the confluence of all phantasies, the π´αντα ρεˆι of Heraclite. It denies the existence of phantasies in themselves, it abolishes desires and fears and also intellectual opinion concerning things which either are desirable or to be feared—as is the case if the intellect is still the servant of a hardened will—or which may be ‘objectively true’, that is, when the intellect, living all by itself, has got stuck. In this restricted life it may appear as something unreal, a welcome pretext, satisfying man’s need to salve his conscience; it may also effectively undermine the systems of the restricted life, in this form it is hated by the world and is stubbornly banished and yet it always returns.
In music and the visual arts, which are understood and felt to stand above life, transcendent truth is accepted, but only in small doses, that is, in accordance with social needs. Therefore the images which these arts produce usually do not represent immanent truth nor moral truth. Almost everything here is either crude titillation, diverting the attention of conscience, or an endorsement of society’s ideals, temporarily shoring up the flimsy walls of the structure of society’s conventions, portraying passions and phantasies which have official approval, so that people can indulge in them with greater confidence, or picturing other passions which might erupt in their culture, just to make people continue to believe that their culture is not too bad after all.
        Transcendent truth is not found in art except in the work of a very few such as Bach and Leonardo. Titillating and anarchical in the worst sense is practically all that is currently considered to be great music or art: the work of Beethoven, Wagner, Rubens, Raphael, and Rembrandt. Examples of ideal endorsement are the work of Grieg, Michelangelo, and Palestrina, all good church music, as well as the work of Giotto and Memling and all other religious paintings.

Elucidation:
Brouwer juggles with the concepts of immanent and transcendent truth. What he is trying to say is that when you look around at everything what happens in the outside world, the struggle for power, the lies, the contradictions, appearances, the injustice, the short sightedness, the useless plodding of mankind, the gathering of possessions, the, through this fight, damaged and injured people, this then only points at the necessity to withdraw yourself from that. This is what he calls the immanent truth.
If you look at yourself you see how you, through your adjustment to that outside world, have internalized all the exterior characteristics of that world. That you yourself have become a collection of contradictions, how you yourself are unaware of your lies, self-deceit, vanity, unfairness, how you dirty your hands, are attached to your possessions and how you, because of this, are damaged and wounded yourself. That is what he calls the transcendent truth. In other words, he means that the immanent truth is to observe all that disturbs the original harmony on earth and with the transcendent truth, to recognize all that keeps you from your original human being.

On watering down:
Everyone who has recognized how deranged people treat each other and themselves and has discovered how disastrous mankind treats the creation, has come soon to the understanding that exactly this is, what makes them in the eyes of others, heretics, dissidents, anarchists and dangerous revolutionaries. During the whole history of mankind, everyone knows that the truth may not be told and the bizarre game must not be disturbed on penalty of being burned at the stake, put in a madhouse or being hashed up. That is why these people keep their mouth shut or disguise their message in satire or parables, but by doing so, immediately take the edge of what they really would want to say.

For contemporary authors dilution has become obligatory to such an extent that those who really feel truth within themselves will not succeed. Moreover, their personality is a live, clear commentary, an open declaration of the hard truth, and leaves no room for misunderstanding; they show it even if they keep their mouths shut. They will therefore be bitterly resented by most people and be attacked even by the best among them, their admirers, in dutiful defense of mediocrity. Meanwhile they become less vulnerable because of the truth which they uphold; all the suffering inflicted on our Savior failed to make any impact, even crucifixion did not touch him.
        Transcendent truth in language, therefore, has only managed to break through in the work of imitators, those who vaguely understood the word of the prophet and recognized its truth and whose personality has done the necessary watering down. They are the ones who in their circles are honored as wise men or as men of great genius; their appearance gives the message that what they say—in flagrant contradiction with the nature of truth—must not be taken too seriously. People find them pleasant and interesting, the more so because of a certain mystique that surrounds them, because they do not quite understand where such a person gets these ideas, so much at variance with his outer appearance and behavior. Of course, the main concern of these imitators is to keep the prophet away from the circle where they are the stars, anxious to preserve the aura of mystery. They will first try to deny the existence of their spiritual father and then disclaim any connection with him. They need not bother, the relation between the real thing and the watered down version is rather difficult to see anyway.
Writings of transcendent truth which have been preserved are usually the work of an imitator; their real spiritual father never had the inclination to write, he radiated truth throughout his life, infinitely stronger than he could ever express in words or in writing. He was never able to water down the truth as society demands; neither did he feel inclined to spread the truth, rising so high above the world, here on earth, or express the truth, which transcends language, in words.

He will also scorn any attempt to make just bits of truth acceptable to his fellow men by appealing to their limitations, their fears and desires, by confronting them with the awful consequences of their thoughts and their actions, or by showing them how their various desires counteract one another and how their fixed ideas contradict one another. He does not want to disturb the self-revenging power of evil, he knows that removing one desire or error will only make room for another, that man’s will is naturally drawn toward passion and folly, and that deprived of one he will soon rush toward others.

Comment:
All people that really proclaimed the truth are brand as heretics and killed and all their writing destroyed or desecrated to watered down and innocent so called holy books, to the service of the establishment and priesthood. All these people had an uncontrollable urge to spread their message, driven by compassion with their fellow men. Consequently Brouwer is mistaken here. Brouwer does not know compassion and unfortunately sees the escape from society as being an solipsistic search, away from all these fools, who in his mind will never understand. He does not oversee what would be the consequences if people would massively follow his path and also doesn’t think that is possible. He reconciles in that.

But imitators seize upon this tactic with great gusto. They claim to be the great liberators who will rid the world of all evil, folly, and injustice, they will be hailed as the benefactors of mankind, but they will leave mankind as miserable as ever it was. They expose the folly of popularly held beliefs but replace them by others, equally stupid and leave mankind as stupid as it was before.
        Knowing that nearly everyone craves the respect of others, wants to be thought of as superior, better than everybody else, able to say, “Thank thee, Oh Lord, that I am not like any of these people!” and feels important because of the faith which they—and others do not—profess to, they start up associations of vegetarians and theosophists, indeed even a socialist society of property owners, seemingly unaware of the absurdity of calling oneself a socialist while hanging on to one’s capital. They
managed to make people less jealous and less greedy—a rather trivial exercise—in the past by maintaining that all their good deeds would be rewarded a thousandfold in life hereafter, nowadays by pointing out that a life of love and brotherhood is the ideal state of man and that all who aspire to this ideal, do good and are better than others. Sometimes they even maintain that acts of charity and love somehow have the effect of making one’s face more beautiful and serene and so will be visible to all with eyes to see.
        The respective cosmic systems were depicted, in the past as one of heaven, angels, the last judgment, the elected, and either eternal happiness or eternal damnation, nowadays as one of cosmic rays, magnetism, somnambulism, re-incarnation, and the seven heavens, always on the understanding that such faith is the exclusive reserve of only the best, those who are ready for it.
        Every truth, to be more palatable, is adjusted to suit the audience and “clarifications” are added. When they say, “Do not seek glory by trying to be what you are not,” they add that keeping up appearances leads to worry and illness, and that in the end all appearance and pretense will be shown up.
        They do not simply say, “Security is mortal’s greatest enemy, every penny of your capital is a black mark against you, and saving is a sin, forbidden by the voice within you,” but they must add an explanation and say, “Look at the trees, the flowers, and the wild animals; they too live from day to day and yet they do not look any the worse for it.” Instead of spurning human fear, the passion for saving, they play it down and even seem to accept it when they say, “Capital and property are a barrier on the road to happiness, because hard necessity—hunger and cold—is the only source of pure growth and strength of character, without which there can be no physical health either.” The people will nod and agree, hail them as great and wise men, and then go on saving and living their lives of abuse and exploitation.
        They do not simply say, “You should not wear any clothes, because they are a cover of fear, pride and vanity,” but in their explanatory comment they refer to the important role that skin-breathing plays in the human metabolism and to the salutary effect of exposing one’s skin to the fresh air; they turn themselves into experts and reformers of hygiene. The idiots listening to them then take to airbaths and, when somebody discovers the beneficial effect of sunrays, they take to lightbaths and sunbaths, and finally to duskbaths, nightbaths, moonbaths, starbaths, forestbaths and meadowbaths as soon as somebody proclaims them to be healthy. But it all leaves the people just as unhealthy as before because their evil nature makes them sin against their health in yet another way.
        They do not just say, “Pray and work!” but must add that praying is a kind of recapitulation, a concentration of mind which gives a better view of life’s path and helps one to follow that path refreshed and steadfast, a guard against illusion and error. They do not simply say, “You should live naked in the world of nature, leave nature undisturbed, and you should not work,” but they add, “You are worried about losing body heat, but you should know that our ancestors were naked and they lived at a time when our climate was certainly not warmer than it is now, that some of the ancient tribes walked around practically naked and that at a temperature of forty degrees below zero. You are worried that nature is not rich enough to feed you and that you will starve unless you work the soil, but remember that whatever nature has brought forth will be maintained by her as long as needed; remember also that Catharina of Siena did not eat at all. Finally you are worried that you might be torn apart by wild beasts and be deprived of your precious life, but you should know that no wild animal will attack a truly good human being because in his looks there is something that the glazed eyes of those who have not got it cannot see, but something that wild animals will recognize. Only when people began to live a life of greed did the need arise for so-called heroes, to fight wild animals.”
        They do not simply say, “All forms of transport are evil,” but they point to the ill effect of the smoke of trains on one’s health, to the damage to the nervous system caused by the electromagnetic field of electric trams and the inevitable disharmony in the human body which must follow displacement of the field of force without the appropriate use of muscular power. And when they say, “All cultivation is evil, the abuse of nature and its forces is just as immoral as the abuse of human beings and animals,” they must point in addition to all the degeneration, the illness and misery that the cultivation by man has brought. Indeed, they sometimes even express their willingness to enter into a debate with the fools, their fellow human beings! Contrary to their own expressed beliefs, which reject the will of others, they accept this will by the very act of entering into debate, and make it equal to their own will.
        In order to make a truth more palatable they will not hesitate to base it on a definite endorsement and proclamation of some fashionable piece of folly. For example, economic reformers base the fact of social injustice and the need for a better, higher form of life on the foolish arguments of fear and ambition, as if the “higher” can only live on a full stomach—primum vivere deinde philosophare, they cry—as if evil in all cases can be avoided by rational argument and by action. Often, while explaining their moral disapproval and trying to console their audiences, they tacitly retract their original stands. They do not simply say, “Abandon the illusion of the constancy of matter, the self is sufficient and can create all without any limitation,” but they must add explanations and hypotheses on the nature of matter and so, equally foolishly, introduce the constancy of other things like electrons.
        Their advice “Rid yourself of your intellect, that gift of the devil” is qualified by some added remark which in fact endorses the view of the intellect they had just condemned, for example, “The structure of nature is so infinitely subtle and complex that your intellect will never fully grasp it and therefore will never give you the stability you are seeking.” For those, however, who manage to relinquish the intellect, the world is anything but subtle or complex, it appears to be subtle only to an intellect which struggles laboriously and sees no end to its struggle.
        The role of preachers therefore is no more than that of a guide, helping along without any power the self-correction, the self-development of the life of desire on this earth, where each form of folly is only a temporary craze which soon exhausts itself and is then discarded by the preachers to make room for other follies. Yet people still behave as if the end justifies the means; they foolishly see something desirable and go after it, using means which are themselves felt to be rather unpleasant. For example, they find the whole business of breeding, feeding, and milking cows rather revolting, and yet they expect nothing but benefit from it; they go on consuming meat and milk until they discover that it damages their health. They dislike the planting and pruning, and the use of manure in horticulture, and yet they expect nothing but benefit from it; they go on eating fruit and vegetables grown that way, until again one day they discover the harmful effects. They dislike spinning and weaving, and yet they go on using curtains and clothes until that too is shown to be harmful. They resent all hard work and the rat race, and yet they expect all kinds of benefits to flow from this “culture”; even those who become disillusioned and give it all up, they still go on, elsewhere, pursuing goals and working hard, because ambition and hard work are part of their nature. History shows that the form and shape of the human prison may change, its walls are never demolished.
        Lyrical poetry is a form of word craft and has therefore nothing to do with transcendental truth. It dreams of all kinds of states of mind which flourish in the madness of our culture, according to whether it is more or less intellectual it either supports the ideals of the reader or simply titillates.
        It sings of love and sadness, of passion and despair, moons and daisies as they all appear in this imprisoned life. The reader hears the echo of his own phantasies and has the pleasant feeling of being supported, of greater self-confidence and contentedness, which he all badly needs. Most to his taste is the added infusion of a little weltschmerz. This mixture seems to give him comfort and a promise of balance, grown from weltschmerz with the help of some overdeveloped emotions; it helps him escape from his own feelings of dissatisfaction in endless dreaming and gives a temporary release of pain.
        Truth and poetry, like any other merchandise, are falsified: indeed they are hardly ever found in a pure, unadulterated form. Most philosophers and moralists believe as little in what they write as the manufacturers of baby foods and meat extracts believe in their own products; neither do they act with more good faith than those who lead spiritualist séances; and very few poets have themselves experienced the happiness they describe. The critical sense of our corrupted instincts is somewhat warped, it does not detect fakes: Mundus vult decipi. Priests do not believe in what they preach to the masses; the leaders of political parties deceive the people deliberately, they use words they don’t really understand. Most poets, painters, and other artists have arrogated this role to themselves out of weakness or laziness, knowing themselves to be poorly placed for any other role in the social industries, and the uncritical public has come to accept their place and their fake products simply because they cannot do it themselves.
        Sometimes only the accompaniment of transcendent truth may be heard in life, truth itself is absent, remains outside this limited life and therefore outside the domain of communication and mutual understanding, its expression seems to be completely removed from life of which it is a part. Returning to his humble, earthly duties the “seer” will steadfastly believe in the sudden flashes of imagination received in self-reflection as the accompaniment of higher wisdom, recalling the echo of the guiding voice of self-reflection.
        These images are the harmonious results of an attention to the self and of work in this world. They are not an expression of an attention to this world. He who lives in self-reflection, in freedom from fear, desire, and knowledge, who does not see nor follow any direction in this world, who only does what he is made to do and in this way guards himself against irreversible actions which only aggravate his karma, who is not affected by outside influences and stands aloof from what happens outside, who does not grow but quietly maintains his position and at the same time feels free to remain motionless outside the world where he has escaped from his karma, from misery, from growing old, from decay and death. Such a man will see even the flashes of imagination of others as accompanying the truth in his own life, moving high above the world and detached from the forms of this world.
        Those imprisoned in life call it mysticism, they think it obscure; but in truth it is light, it is only darkness to those who are in darkness themselves. The phantasies of mysticism are locked in forms which come closest to the humble but sacred task it must fulfil in this world; they therefore do not so readily appear in music or in the visual arts and are usually expressed in words, which are closest to the human curse, the intellect. Mysticism simply denies that there is anything positive to be found in this limited life, it reflects the infinite emanation and re-absorption of the self in strange imagery and sounds. Only those who know the melody can understand the accompaniment, and they will recognize it, even if it is a strange accompaniment on a strange instrument. Such are, for example, the images of ancient and medieval mystics; they were taken from the perceptional world but seem strange to the modern reader who has not learned to see such a pantheistic world in the surroundings where his duties lie. But that is no reason why he should not understand them.
        Sometimes the sounds of truth and of mysticism do not follow the rules of the intellect, but they can be understood by the intellect. Such were the words of those who had been able to turn into themselves. Living their imprisoned lives, they treated this experience as something independent, something outside themselves; they used it to strengthen themselves through words expressing insight and moral sense within the system of this limited life to which their attention had reverted. These writers may be called semi-mystics. Their work is a source of irritation to those who understand because it brings supernatural truth too far down to earth. For those who do not understand, their work is extremely dangerous because it leads the wanderers searching for security and certainty to all kinds of extremes. At the bottom of almost all forms of religious extremism and sectarianism there is always some semi-mystical pronouncement of truth.
        The Church was therefore quite right in condemning the heresies of Eckhart, Huss, Luther, and Calvin, who brought down to earth what should really have been left high above the earth. These men could not remain steadfast, unaffected by the instability of this earth and accept it as God’s will; they were moved by their own instability, allowed it to affect their own wills and tried to bring greater stability through their own wills. A much purer form of mysticism is found in the writings of the ancient Indians and Chinese and of some of the church fathers, also in the work of Jakob Boehme; their writing is kept well above the level of practical everyday life and is beyond practical understanding. Great intellects may sometimes manage to make a photographic copy of these works within their limited brains and that copy may then seem to hold great truths; however, the essence of the original is completely lost. Since it is all beyond the wits of the hoi polloi, the poor souls suffer no harm from this little game—for it is no more than a little game when so-called philosophers start giving rational explanations of God, Trinity, Immaculate Conception, the Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva; and neither is biblical exegesis more than a little game.
        To the intellect and in the context of this limited life pure mysticism is totally meaningless; it does not stir the conscience of evildoers and leaves the great and powerful in peace, and they in turn do not bother themselves much with this “harmless curiosity.”
        And since mysticism remains outside the sphere of reason there is not much that can be said of it in rational terms except perhaps in the negative.
        Mysticism cannot be learned, it can only be recognized. Anyone with talent can write the truth, and talent can be found even in imprisoned minds; and anyone of sound mind and body can understand the truth. But writing and recognizing pure mysticism requires a freedom of soul, which cannot be acquired by earthly means but can only be granted by divine grace. Mysticism is quite different from occultism, or rather it is its complete opposite: mysticism denies all knowledge whereas occultism follows the human thirst for knowledge to its extreme; occultism is not concerned with morality, while mystical wisdom and high moral sense are inseparable companions. Nowhere in mysticism is there a thread or a correct sequence, every sentence stands on its own, it does not require another sentence to proceed or to follow it, as suits the accompaniment of what is timeless. It treats the questions posed by metaphysics, such as immortality, free will, the meaning of art and religion, and the foundations of morality, as riddles hatched by the intellect; in doing so it removes all mystery and yet shows the impossibility of solving such questions by reasoning.
        To the intellect mysticism sounds incoherent, oracular, and sometimes even bombastic, something that cannot stand the test of criticism, all-bristling with contradictions.

On mysticism:
In the "Allegory of the Cave" (The Republic, book VII) Plato gives a clear description of the mystic. The mystic is one, who has left Plato’s cave or has ended up in the other world behind this world. He has seen the light and returns to those left behind to inform them of his ecstatic experiences. Lao Tzu has warned for this already when he says: `Those who know don’t speak, those who speak don’t know`. And from Wittgenstein we know “that of what we cannot speak we have to keep silent”. That’s what the mystic ignores, because he excites those left behind with beautiful stories and doesn’t return to the cave to show the still imprisoned ones, how to free themselves from their shackles and how to get out of the darkness into the light. That’s why every word mystically spoken makes dirty hands. Plato also describes in his "Allegory of the Cave" how ponderous the return and getting used again to the darkness is and what will happen to someone who shows the imprisoned ones their seeming existence. The mystic is not able to adjust to the darkness of the cave anymore, he can only drivel on mystically. Therefore, mystics are only disastrous for the imprisoned mankind, vein creatures that don’t understand how they escaped and therefore not knowing how to get back. Brouwer does not recognize this. He sees them as soul mates. The mystical sounds below are therefore no more than drivel without engagement.

Here are some mystical sounds which illustrate and transcend what was said in the previous chapters.

The first property of nature is desire; it is like a magnet, a drawing power of the will, which wants to be something but has nothing of its own to build on; it therefore acts through an attractive force and fastens itself onto a something, and yet it is nothing but an acutely felt magnetic hunger, a bitterness, hardness, and cold.

The second property originates in the first, it is the act of drawing, movement in this acute state. The magnet (the attraction) makes hard, and hardness is again broken by movement, and therefore there is an everlasting battle within the self; this causes bitter pain, stinging its sensitivity, which could not exist without acuteness and movement.

The third property is fear or anxiety, a form of will induced by the attraction toward nature and the ego. This movement is like a turning wheel, because desire pulls toward itself while movement repels. In such a state of anxiety the will can neither move inward nor outward, and yet it is pulled inward and outward. This state of fear is the real foundation of hell in as much as it is not—unlike God’s being through eternity—absorbed and raised in the freedom of light. (Boehme,II, p. 57)

Creatures should remain humble and obedient to God and not try to raise themselves higher. They are not God’s equals: God wants the company of children, not of masters; He is the Lord and no one else. (ibid. p. 65)

Ever since God spoke the word of creation, the wheel of eternal essences without being turned in wonder. However, when he moved will into fiat, it turned into being. And then time began, time which in eternity did not exist before.(ibid. p. 66)

As the revelation of the eternal conflicts with that of the external, earthly, and fallen natural world so do the spirits of the dark world conflict with those of the holy world—in particular in the case of human beings—manifest in a battle of good and evil. In this way God has set one against the other, so that his majesty will be revealed both in his love and his wrath. (ibid. p. 78)

The angels are our servants and our guardians that we may be Christians and not animals. (ibid. p. 79)

There must be struggle until the dark, hard, and closed kernel cracks open and the heavenly spark sets it alight, so that from it—as Christ says—will grow a noble lily as from a divine mustard seed. One must pray seriously and in great humility, sometimes even spite one’s intellect and be a clown, appear to be foolish, before Christ will take form in this new incarnation. (ibid. I, p. 83)

lt is quite possible that a poor dead sinner mends his ways, when he stops and moves away from visual images and listens to the Lord’s voice within him.
But the impenitent, the embittered will not listen to the Lord’s voice within, he only says: I want words! printed words! To him only the written word matters, he plays with these words and abuses them and he prides himself in doing so, but he ignores the living Word that has spoken them and he does not want to listen. If, however, he sees the light and repents, he will be dead to the old printed words and be made alive by the Spirit behind them. (ibid. III, p. 215)

For even though a wise man strive, O son of Kunti, the forward senses carry away perforce his mind.

Holding all these in check let him sit, controlled, intent on me: for he whose senses are restrained possesses steadfast wisdom.

When a man ponders on the things of sense, springs up attachment to them; of attachment is born desire, of desire is born wrath.

From wrath there comes delusion, and from delusion a wandering of memory, from memory wrecked the ruin of reason; with reason’s ruin the man is lost.

But he who approaches the things of sense with sense from love and hate disjoined and under self’s control, with governed self, comes to serenity.

For him serenity begets the loss of every pain; for soon his reason becomes steadfast whose mind is serene.

There is no judgment in the uncontrolled, and in the uncontrolled is no reflection, the unreflecting man can know no peace; he that has no peace—whence has he pleasure? (Bhagavad Gita II, 60–66)

A man should not rejoice at gaining what he loves, nor grieve at gaining what he does not love, steadfast in judgment, undeluded, knowing Brahman, in Brahman abiding.

He who, with self detached from contacts without, finds happiness in self, enjoys imperishable happiness, his self controlled by contemplating Brahman.

For the joys that are born of contact are surely wombs of pain; they have beginning and end, O son of Kunti; not in these does the wise man rejoice.

He who can bear even here, before he finds deliverance from the body, the impulse that desire and wrath beget—he is controlled, he is the happy man.

He who has joy within, pleasure within, and light within, the ascetic, becomes Brahman, and reaches the calm of Brahman. (Bhagavad Gita V, 20–24)

When thought is curbed by practice of control, and comes to quiet, when he sees self by self and is with self content.

When he knows that utmost pleasure which can be grasped by reason but is not reached by sense, and when he stands and swerved not from the truth;

Than which, when gained, he holds no other gain more excellent; wherein he stands, and is not shaken even by grievous pain;

This disunion from union with pain, he should know, is called union by control; this control must he practice with firm resolve and undespairing heart. (Bhagavad Gita Vl, 20–23)

Chapter Eight: The Freed Life

In this world the self and transcendent truth are also reflected in the everyday life of those who are free, those who expiate their old inevitable karma without creating a new one, those who humbly accept their incarceration and never try to break out violently but who on the other hand never hesitate to leave as soon as the gate of liberation is opened, those who feel and accept their bodies as straitjackets until the day when it pleases God to free them and take them to Him. In the eyes of their fellow men their influence in this world is insignificant, and yet they are the ones who carry out the ordinances of fate, the appearance of chance or accident which spites the laws of causality, turns the course of life and takes its revenge. Their well-intended action, however, will not turn the course of events; they cannot disturb the self-revenge of evil and therefore they refrain from preaching the truth. And yet, in spite of their humility and reticence the truth will show in their personalities, it will cause uneasiness and resentment and sting others into acts of violence against them. From the evil and suffering inflicted on them will spring the various religious movements all over the world, apparently as something positive and new, but in fact no more than a negative revenge on the old.

Comment:
Those that Brouwer calls "the free" here, and he includes himself among those, are not free but on route to freedom and self-knowledge, just like he says so himself. Besides "one is not really free until all are free." (Bakunin) Freedom in a world of unfree is a deceptive-freedom, because the unfree restrict the freedom of the "free" through laws, rules, boundaries, and self-created standards. In fact, the road to self-knowledge is “a road where all social road-signs just point in one direction: back, back, back” (Kierkegaard). Nobody is allowed to see through the game and the penalties for an attempt of that, are nearly inescapable. Nowadays, the audacious ones, not only are certified insane but run a high risk of being locked inside a mad house. There, people stay who see what they are not allowed to see and say what they are not allowed to say.

Their lives show a disregard for pleasure, property, and honor and even of work—except the tasks immediately before them. They have not set themselves any targets either for the immediate future or for the whole of their lives; neither do they seek contact with their fellow human beings. Societies are for them the lowest dregs in the thick fluid of mankind.
        For a man therefore life will move toward absolute solitude. Not so for a woman: her life will always be a searching and a giving of herself in human, that is, male company. His unchangeable karma, through which and from which his life is directed, is the environment in which he has been placed as well as his reaction to this environment in accordance with his fateful intellect. Hers is a hankering after that which is male as it lives in her beloved; this yearning for what is human outside herself and absolutely separated from herself causes her life slowly to move toward purity. She will ignore her surroundings, life’s conditions, and even her own human faculties. Her life will remain directed toward her beloved and therefore stay in this world; she feels she cannot escape as long as she is not man herself. But his path leads away from this world, as soon as he becomes aware of his manhood he moves along this path toward atonement and ultimate elimination.

Comment:
Brouwer is mistaken here. First of all it’s not about escaping from society and others literally but figuratively. Playing the game, but realizing that it is a game what others demand you to play. To be in the world but not of the world. Secondly, this applies to all people, both man and woman as.

To start with, he will make his intellect adapt and conform meekly and zealously to the habits and ideals of society, and he listens carefully and waits patiently for the revelation of inner contradictions of that intellect. This revelation is not forced by him and therefore it will only appear when he reaches the ultimate consequences of philosophy and gets stuck as in the vertex of a cone. At that moment the illusion of the world evaporates and the self is revealed. From then onward science and reasoning will disappear from his life, recognized as the mere products of arbitrary limitation.
He now only lives in the present moment, happily accepting his condition and his environment, reacting to it with equanimity and carefully waiting for any opportunity to escape from its oppressive force. After his first little escape he feels no longer at home in the company of his fellow men, and they get irritated by his eccentricity which follows from his newfound freedom. He in turn begins to resent all his links with society; he is forced to exercise extreme care in human company and faces the difficult task of reacting to circumstances without being susceptible to the suggestions implied by these circumstances.
        The temptation to give up his new freedom and fall back into the old routine would indeed be great were it not for the all-embracing power and wisdom which flow to him from his self and which together with mysticism guides him securely on his path, and through immanent and transcendent truth keep life’s blood warm and flowing when there is danger of curdling and freezing and therefore of its ultimate death.

Comment:
Here as well, Brouwer drifts between people that are on route and those that have returned home.

These disturbing influences will only help his patient move away from human society. His needs, the burden of his body, will steadily grow fewer and those that do remain will more and more be met by his own hard work rather than by sponging on others; in the end his dislike of labor will lead him to eliminate all needs. In this way there will be a steady cleansing of his environment without any interference on his part, the intellectual mists—another burden he had suffered with equanimity— will vanish. To his intellect life will be like a forest path: from afar the end will seem dark, but as he walks it will gradually become clearer and clearer.
        He will go on and reach a state of ever greater solitude, poverty, and immobility; the last that society will see of him is when he disappears, a hermit seeking the barren heath over lush but dull vegetation, seeking the night rather than the insipid light of day. Often he will bathe in the ocean. He knows that he is destined for even greater poverty, and lives in the belief that

Poor are those who are not satisfied with all that God has ever created. Poor are those who do not want anything, do not know anything, and do not have anything.

If man is at the stage that there is still some place for God to work, we say: as long as there is such a place in man, he is not poor in the deepest sense, for God is not at one with his work. Man should have a place where God can still work: it is poverty of spirit when man is so empty of God and his work that God when he wants to work in man’s soul is himself the place where he works and that he does willingly.

There man is what he was, and there he does not grow nor decline because there he is an immovable origin which moves all things.

Here God does not find in him any place since man because of his poverty achieves what he has always been and will forever be. And here God is one in spirit; this is the deepest poverty we can find. (Meister Eckhart)

Comment:
One, who is finally "redeemed", can never go back without consciously hurting himself. He will always know that all that happens to him is self-inflicted. He cannot fool himself anymore. He plays along the game, fulfils his social duties, in other words "renders unto Caesar the things which are Caesar`s; and unto God the things that are God`s " (Matth. 22:21). For others he is "dead" but he knows that the others are "dead" and he is alive.

But it does not disturb him; he stands outside the world where he has no obligation, he cannot sin anymore; he cannot do anything there anymore, he has been dead for a long time, his attention moves in higher spheres and “Apostasy is permitted as long as the heart is pure” (Flaubert).

Only the death of aversion from God leads to true tranquility. He who has forsaken his self and surrenders himself wholly to God in mind, taste, desire and will, he is dead to this earthly world; there is a split within him: the aversion, self-centered, keeps stirring in the self unto death, but the surrender of will lives on in the death of Christ and will remain in his resurrection in God. And even if his inborn passions lead to sin—and they can do nothing but lead to sin—the surrendered will does not share in sin, because it is dead to passion and sin and lives through Christ in God. It lives in the land of the living, while the selfcentered will lives in the land of the dead, an ever-dying. (Boehme, III, p. 263)

Now that man whose delight is but in self, whose pleasure is in self, whose satisfaction is in self alone, has no work that he must do;

For him there is no purpose here in work done or left undone, and he has no reliance on any being for any end.

Therefore without attachment ever perform the work that thou must do; for if without attachment a man works, he gains the highest.

Entirely by the strands of nature are works done; he whose self is deluded by the I thinks “I am the doer.”

But he who knows the truth about the distribution of strands and works, O thou strong of arm, thinks “Strands abide in strands” and so escapes attachment. (Bhagavad Gita, III, 17–19, 27–28)

Following the path of practice, his self refined, his self subdued, his senses conquered, the pure self becomes the self of every being, although he works, yet he is not defiled.

“I do not work at all” thinks he whose way is practice, who knows the truth, although he see, hear, touch, smell, eat, walk, sleep, or breathe.

Speak, let fall, lay hold, open or close his eyes; remembering ever that the senses abide in the things of sense.

He who lays works on Brahman, abandoning attachment, and so works, is not smeared by sin, as a lotus leaf is not smeared by water.

With body, mind, and intellect, and sense alone, ascetics do work, abandoning attachment, to purify their selves.

He whose way is practice abandons fruit of work, and wins to final peace; he who shuns practice, and is attached to fruit by the prompting of desire, is bound. (Bhagavad Gita, V, 7–12)

But the free man—whether he continues his escape through every possible opening or returns to the old life—he does not touch the walls of life nor does he feel trapped in them.
        That is why his beauty shows through these walls. Only visible to his equals, his beauty shines through all that binds him: his house, his clothes, his country, and his body as his ‘idea’, the karma which burdened him from birth but above which he has raised himself. This beauty is free from the world, free from decay and it is imperishable; it is the beauty of freedom, visible through chains since freedom at a time of tribulation is always enchained.
        As long as he has not moved out of society there will always be women whose lives flow toward his. If they are driven by passion or seek support in his weak manliness, their lives will not penetrate into his life because they do not see him. But if they live pure lives, that is, live in him without lives of their own, then they will see him and their lives will merge and flow with his. The lack of any life of their own does not allow them to break themselves loose from society; it is therefore through his women that he will maintain his last links with society and through some very fine threads remain rooted in society. The temptation that radiates from them unconsciously will appear to him as the strange and tempting radiance of the flowers of his dreams, which vanishes when touched and which kills the guilty, a radiance which respects the lives of those who pass it by with reverence and admiration, a radiance which is immaterial and therefore out of reach of any attention imprisoned in plurality and materiality, but a radiance which without any resistance will penetrate into the soul which is pure and does not need the support of matter.
        The women who swarm around him, driven by passion, are like vampires but like the predators of his solitude they can cause him no harm.

Comment:
What Brouwer writes here about men applies also to women. So what he says about women is nonsense.

In the end he is no longer seen among his fellow men because “None of all that God has created satisfies him anymore.” If he is dead, he has escaped from his karma and therefore from existence and limitation. However, escape from his karma alone does not necessarily mean that he must die nor that he must live in a country with unknown horizons and strange fellow creatures. He will therefore live alone and naked on a desert island, not too big, not too small, one that he can easily oversee. Is it to be found in this world? No, because there is no longer any need for an earth and therefore earth no longer exists.
        The sea is calm, the horizon sharply set. The needs of his body, which he already knows to be nonexistent, have now also vanished physically. There is therefore no longer any reason why his body should die. He does not eat anymore, he surveys his island all around him: a fox, a few rabbits rustle away and some birds perch quietly in the branches. He sits down on the beach and watches the horizon. There is a soft fall of rain; in the sky behind him the moon, and over the sea a pale shimmer. The birds, also behind him, watch him silently, wondering but paralyzed. It all is frozen in time: so it has always been and will forever be.

Comment:
Here Brouwer makes a curious mistake. He doesn’t make any distinction between primal needs such as eating, drinking and sleeping and secondary, false needs. He just describes the original, true human and thus in essence the little child. That’s why there’s written: " Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." (Matth. 18:3). In addition he doesn’t see that when, the last penny has been paid, the last metaphorical tie with society has been broken, the last conditioning has been removed, what for society and the conditioned man is Nothing, for the true human being is All. It is the absorption of the drop in the sea, the convergence of man with himself, getting your feet on the ground again. "He that findeth his life shall lose it" (Matth. 10:39), but it would have been correct if it was written as: "He who loses his social life, finds true life".

That was mysticism. It is Flaubert’s immanent truth in the cloak of phantasy of his Gymnosophiste:

At the edge of the forest there stands something that looks like a woodpile, something rather strange: it is a man, completely naked and covered in cow dung, more emaciated than a mummy; his joints are like knots at the end of bones, which look like sticks. There are shells over his ears, his face is thin and long, his nose like the beak of a vulture. His left arm points in the air, paralyzed, stiff like a wooden stake; he has stood there so long that birds have nested in his hair. On the four corners of the woodpile there are four fires burning. The sun shines right in his face, he watches it with open eyes.
[And while the flames surround him he says:] “I am like a rhinoceros, I have buried myself in solitude, I lived in the tree behind me and fedmyself on flowers and fruit, so carefully observing the rules that even a dog could not see me eat.
Since existence arises from corruption, corruption from desire, desire from sensation, and sensation from contact, I shunned all action, all contact, not making any more movement than the stone figure in the graveyard, breathing through my nostrils, my gaze fixed upon my nose. Seeing the universal ether in my mind, the world in my limbs, the moon in my heart, I became aware of the essence of the Great Spirit from which keep bursting forth the beginnings of life, like the sparks from a fire.
At last I found the Supreme Spirit in all beings, and all beings in the Supreme Spirit; and I was able to make my soul enter into it, my soul into which I had brought all my senses.
I gain my knowledge directly from heaven, like the tchataka bird which only uses the rain to quench its thirst. Only in this way do I know things, things themselves do no longer exist.
For me there is now no hope, no anguish, no happiness, no virtue, neither day nor night, neither you nor me: absolutely nothing.
This awful deprivation has made me stronger than any power; one movement of thought can kill a hundred princes, dethrone gods, turn the whole world upside down.
...I have taken a dislike to form, to perception, and even to knowledge itself because thoughts do not survive the transitory facts which brought them into being; like everything else, mind is an illusion.
All that has been created will perish and all that is dead will revive; beings that have actually disappeared will dwell in a womb not yet formed and they will return to this world to share the suffering of other creatures.
But having turned through an infinite multitude of existences in the form of gods, of men and animals, I now give up all travel; I do not want any more tiredness! I abandon the squalid tavern of my body, built of flesh, colored by blood, covered in a hideous skin, full of dirt. Instead I shall finally go to sleep in the deepest sleep of the absolute: in annihilation.”

You may think it strange that the way of life chosen by the greatest, the wisest of men requires so few special skills and powers, that such total surrender, such laziness is too easy. But remember: they have broken right from the start with the habit of aspiring to the difficult and the artful, of making the best of one’s talents; for a long time there has not been anything in this world that they admire and worship, they know that there is nothing here worthy of worship or admiration. They look upon their talents as temptations, luring them toward action in this world (which again promotes itself as the real movement of the world), temptations which remain powerless, frustrated by their insight of the “grandeur and decadence” of all worldly greatness and worldly show of strength. From the moment that the inner contradiction of the intellect was revealed to them they shunned and ignored their own talents. They do not wish to know the truths of the world nor learn the art of prediction, knowing full well—even if they can see and feel through past and present—that this has nothing to do with the world of outer appearances nor with language, and certainly cannot be expressed in language.
        They can do anything that comes their way, but rather than perform tricks they work miracles.
        As to the free woman, her life’s path moves through the densest growth of society and there it will end, even if her real self remains outside, existing as it does outside time and space. She will not seek nor recognize stability, she trusts no one nor will she be faithful to anybody or anything. But the barrier wall built around her by her karma, her fate, is to worship the highest in man that she is capable of grasping, and to adapt her own external life to the service of his free and full development. In doing so she will not be bound by any law or convention of society.
        Uninhibited she will spread crime and cruelty along her path, she will show the same lack of restraint in guarding herself and her own life—itself of little importance—in the service of her beloved, not afraid to sacrifice human lives in the process and not ashamed to lose her honor. He is the only one she tries to care for, but he does not know her; and if his life would touch hers, she would choose to serve him in the most menial and degrading of tasks, knowing full well that nothing in this world is unworthy of woman, who has no soul and bears the guilt of man’s fall.
        The barrier round her will open up when her beloved falls away from his karma for good, revealing the contradictions of the karma that abandons itself, revealing also the illusoriness of her ideal. It may also happen that a higher male karma is revealed to her, that a great light will shine through the old barrier walls, which will appear to be nothing, the back wall eliminating the front. A new deeper and lighter wall then becomes visible behind the old one and demands her full attention. Her heart now belongs to her new beloved, the old one deceived by her fake loyalty—maybe to his salvation.
        For the free man life is a full but humble employment of his intellect reacting to his environment; for woman it is love, that is her inexorable karma...until the last, the faintest and lightest of walls has come down and she falls into an empty space: the mirage of male stability outside herself, the only basis of her femininity, has faded away; her life no longer has any purpose and after this last revelation it has crumbled into nothing.
        Having served many, one after another and with greater purity at every stage, she meets her last friend, in whom manliness has raised itself and as the highest male principle returned to his father, the last friend whom she can only serve by leaving. And she goes away and lies down awaiting death.

Comment:
It may be clear that here Brouwer tells nonsense again.

Chapter Nine: Economics

There is one more evil which the free life will carefully avoid as long as its links with society remain, and that is “economics.” It is governed by the absolute conviction that folly and injustice are an essential part of society; indeed, if society were better, if it were governed by love and brotherhood, there would be no ground for its existence, it simply would not exist. There is no temptation to look at it more intelligently, examine the manner and the rules by which misery and injustice operate. To the free man the world is no more than the brute force and restraint which it uses against him, the guilt with which it burdens him and which haunts him. This doom is all he thinks about: he thinks of nothing but escape, of freeing himself slowly, avoiding falling down the ravine of temptation, not pursuing what is desirable and not trying to make up for what is regrettable. For if one considers something to be desirable or regrettable, one sees it as something outside oneself, as part of a world which is independent and permanent, as part of an inalienable property which can be nurtured, cared for, improved, and made to grow like flowers or chickens. Trying to exert outside influence for the sake of a better world or one’s own power is vanity, blind folly, and lust for power.

Comment:
In a culture all people depend on each other in a present global network. Therefore, improvement in one part of the network means deterioration in another part of the network. If the rich get richer, than the poor have to get poorer. If one group gets to be more powerful than another group gets to be more powerless. Therefore, improving society is completely useless. Society can only be abolished.

The free man rather looks on his fellow men as burdensome hallucinations, luring him away from the right path and trying to make him join their ways because they cannot tolerate his freedom. The free man will carefully avoid them.

Comment:
Here, Brouwer clearly shows that his path is an egoistical path without compassion.

Messing about with society, trying to change it, is something he will leave to “idiots with ambition,” knowing full well that there will always be such idiots and not worried about the lack of any such people. For if there were no people chasing the mirage of a world to be governed by them the world would be perfect, there would be no need for government and no need for social work. If the world were perfect, it simply would not exist.
        The self-correction of the social lie is guided by the hand of truth, but truth dressed in the robes of lies, and therefore it does not stop at cleansing and breaking old injustice, old folly: from man’s penchant for folly and greed will grow new folly and new injustice.
        Look and see how the theories which help to undermine one worn-out social structure of injustice always carry in their own positive concepts the germ of yet another evil, just as deadly as the old one.
        They talk about “the rights of man,” as if human beings bring with them into the world, rights, and worse, duties as a punishment for being born.
        They talk about “work,” the necessity of it, and the happiness it brings, as if human labor were more than a blind convulsion of fear for what in fact is not evil at all, and of desire for what can only bring misery: this wretched “work,” through which the human swarm of insects has pushed back and eaten away Mother Nature, who gave them life and who kept them in balance! They will all end up lonely, in utter misery, without balance and support! In order to extend their miserable lives they use the services of such hellish forces as fire and cohesion. Work, which uses its hellish powers to create wealth, which turns into sensuality, which makes the human species expand even more, makes it more miserable and more dependent on the services of hell; work, which man’s sin has turned the world into a necessary instrument of fear and greed, and made it a place of sorrow, folly, and misery!
        They talk about “the poor and repressed” and about “the repressed classes,” as if anybody in this world were born into a state of repression without deserving it! As if anybody could suffer social deprivation without having bowed down out of fear! Is not the world a garden of misery, kept alive by inner contradiction, a place where everyone, after a helpless struggle and total defeat of his ambitions, receives his reward according to his work and his guilt! And will this not remain so forever, and will people not fight their punishment only to protract it even further?
        They talk of human talent and the joy of life, which the poor repressed classes have no chance of developing or enjoying. But there is no joy of life, it is only an object of desire, life is joyless! And as to talents, they only tempt and divert attention away from life’s path; by ignoring one’s talents one usually saves oneself a lot of folly and misery. In the rare case that the deployment of talent helps a man to keep to the free path of life, toward atonement and redemption from his karma, one will find that he has maintained the bond with the self, and that in this case he would have succeeded even if he had been born in the most depressed of classes.

Comment:
Brouwer is right when he states that everyone can struggle out of the grasp of society and that it is not privileged to the elite. On the contrary actually, because who has climbed high on the social ladder has to also descend a long way again. But what he forgets is that people from the lower social class have learned to look up to all that stands above them and also because of their lack of insight into the complicated social structures, don’t have the power to verbally defend themselves against the authorities, who use their convoluted and complicated language to put up an impenetrable smoke screen. Furthermore is it incorrect to claim that people have chosen the family into which they were born.

They also talk of “justice” and in their childish and arrogant expectation of the future they cry that one day justice at last will rule this world. But is not justice merely a way of keeping human society in a kind of frozen state, expressing their separation without independence? Has not mankind united itself in justice out of a common fear of the uncertain and fear of one another, not realizing that in doing so they have done nothing but shift the area of uncertainty, move the battleground from where they openly murdered one another by every means available? Having justice on their side, the battle now becomes fiercer and more ugly than at the time when there was no “justice.” It started already with the duel, which lacked spontaneity both in the opening of the fight and in the choice of weapon. Nowadays not only have fistfights and duels been abolished, but we even must pay our bills and we are not even allowed to falsify signatures! And that all in order to protect the devious power of money and those parasitic state institutions. The venue of permissible fight has now moved to a most unpleasant backyard; that is where now the center of gravity lies, where people now murder and swindle one another. Mind you, those who do not like fighting there and simply choose to ignore justice and the law do so anyway: fighting against justice is much more provoking and also more dignified than with justice on one’s side. Those who know no fear will also find justice to be quite an easy match. Don’t worry, ninety percent of all murders are never solved; moreover, it is probably the best solution for those who are murdered, and in any case they deserve it.

Comment:
It sounds gruesome when Brouwer postulates that people deserve their fate, whether it means being killed or becoming ill but he is nevertheless partly right. In the all humanity embracing network, everybody is jointly-responsible for what happens anywhere in the world to whichever person. Everyone, who participates in this unjust society and who aids to preserve it , is jointly responsible for the circumstances in which fellow-men are murdered or become ill. Everyone has dirty hands. People don’t deserve their fate, but are jointly responsible for it, all except the children.