in order to share with her his ultimate salvation. The master responds to this without harshness but as though lamenting an error, an impossibility. Finally, however, when Ananda begins to think in his deepest sadness that he must abandon all hope, Cakya, drawn to him by his fellow-suffering and as though by some new and ultimate problem whose solution detains him in life, feels called upon to test the girl. The latter now arrives to appeal to the master in her deepest grief, begging him to marry her to Ananda. He expounds the conditions, renunciation of the world, and withdrawal from all the bonds of nature; on hearing the principal commandment, she is sincere enough in her resolve to collapse in a faint … . In rejecting all human pride, his growing sympathy with the girl, whose earlier existences he reveals to himself and his opponents, grows so strong that, when she herself – having recognized the whole vast complex of universal suffering on the basis of her own individual suffering – declares herself ready to swear that oath, he accepts her into the number of the saints, as though by way of his own final transfiguration, and thus regards his own course through life – which has been one of redemption and devotion to all living things – as now complete, since he has been able to promise that womankind, too, may now be – directly – redeemed.” [662W-{10/5/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 425]
[663W-{10/5/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 425-426]
[P. 425] {FEUER} “My child, the glorious Buddha was no doubt right when he strictly excluded art. Is there anyone who feels more clearly than I that it is this unhappy art that everlastingly restores me to life’s torment and all the contradictions of [P. 426] existence? If I did not have this wondrous gift of an over-predominant visual imagination, I could follow my heart’s instinctive urge, in accordance with my own clear-eyed insight, -- and become a saint; and as a saint I could say to you: come here, leave behind you all that holds you back, burst the bonds of nature: in return for this I will show you the road to salvation! – Then we should be free: Ananda and Savitri!” [663W-{10/5/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 425-426]
[664W-{12/1/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 432]
[P. 432] {FEUER} {anti-SCHOP} “During recent weeks I have been slowly rereading Schopenhauer’s principal work, and this time is has inspired me, quite extraordinarily, to expand and – in certain details – even to correct his system. The subject is uncommonly important, and it must, I think, have been reserved for a man of my own particular nature, at this particular period of his life, to gain insights here of a kind that could never have disclosed themselves to anyone else. It is a question, you see, of pointing out the path to salvation, which has not been recognized by any philosopher, and especially not by Sch., but which involves a total pacification of the will through love, and not through any abstract human love, but a love engendered on the basis of sexual love, i.e. the attraction between man and woman. (…) The presentation of this argument will take me very deep and very far: it involves a more detailed explanation of the state in which we become capable of recognizing ideas, and of genius in general, which I no longer conceive of as a state in which the intellect is divorced from the will, but rather as an intensification of the individual intellect to the point where it becomes the organ of perception of the genus or species, and thus of the will itself, which is the thing in itself; herein lies the only possible explanation for that marvellous and enthusiastic joy and ecstasy felt by any genius at the highest moments of perception, moments which Sch. seems scarcely to recognize, since he is able to find them only in a state of calm and in the silencing of the individual affects of the will. Entirely analogous to this
