Light of the primordial Light

Max Prantls vision of the New Age, in a letter he wrote as a soldier on august 9th, 1944, as shown above: ‘This thought does not ... lead to a christianity of the old character. That time has passed. Something new and great is breaking through as the heir and executor of Christianity Many will attribute to it, but to the most, deepest and most beautiful extent they, whose outer splendor is shattered by the storms of time.’

...But how does someone come to such thoughts? 

‘Yesterday, Sunday august 1st, 1948, something utterly incomprehensible happened. Since many years I felt myself standing close before the gate of an inconceivably immense new world. But I could not find the bolt that shut the gate to me, for I was blind, blind because of fear. Now I came to see, after I had experienced all fears a man can feel, valid and invalid, and thrown them out of me. I came to see, found the bolt and the gate flew open, light came into and around me, so incomprehensibly sudden, as shattering as when at midnight the sun with one blow were thrown above the horizon.'

This is how Max Prantls mystical journey begins. He was then 35 years old, the classic age for experiencing cosmic consciousness, enlightenment. Man sleeps, man dreams. When he wakes up, the dream, the sleep, he himself has gone. The slow awakening is what we call evolution and the sudden: mysticism. But in fact mysticism is just the end of our old and, possibly, the beginning of a new development. Let us hear what an awakening man has to say: ‘During the past months I experienced myself as a bodiless being, as a wanderer in the unearthly. Since then I was able to free my inner powers and radiate them: a blue and white, blinding archangel fire and a purple and violet flame, that I experienced as radiation of peace. But I felt I still was missing one: the radiation of joy'.

‘And then it happened. With a soundless and yet shattering clash, like when a grenade or a lightning strikes very close and one stands in a pulverizing blaze, not hearing any sound any more, the deepest and highest depth of my essence tore open. For many months I had been able to fly in there, but I always saw it over, outside of me. Now I experienced myself in the center of a space that also was me, though. From above this center poured a weaving, consuming fire like a living sun. It did not pour into this space from outside, it streamed inside of it. Below stood a softly breathing bluish light, that lost itself in the depth as in an abyss. This I saw in immeasurably short time. Then everything was a golden sea of gold. Like a blow I was struck by the recognition: the divine and earthly members of my being have united. Above and below, the higher and the lower self, spiritual and earthly man are one: the mystic wedding. What in the meantime happened to my body, I do not know. I lived without it and only afterwards found it back again. I rose again as a totally different man. Me thought as if an abyss separated my former life from me. This abyss is the mystic death'.

But four years before he already wrote as a soldier: ‘Death went through my heart like a plow, tearing apart the last depths. Beyond the God-mountain my life sun sets. A new sun rises, having no more name....’ And before that, in the twilight, the desert between two worlds: ‘A great change is awaiting me...’.

The intimate to whom he opens his heart unconditionally, is his sister Elisabeth. ‘Max’, as she describes him, ‘was 1,86 m tall, slim, tender. He had wonderful brown, shining eyes. On intense inner activity they became a green glimpse. His hands were slim, his voice warm, melodious, loving. He was the most helpful, chivalrous man......’

‘I have too much destroying elements in me. Doesn't that force me to be alone all my life? I keep going through one new change after another and have to raging and passionate break apart all bonds that hamper me. My love does not warm, it burns. I know I belong to the damned and yet so blessed people, who with devils arms elevate the light. It is not the way of the children of the sun...’

Not reverence of God, but love

In an Innsbruck church a voice comes to him, that seems to come from within: ‘For you I am not present here. You'll have to find me otherwise.’ When he thinks about it in the evening, the voice is within him again.

‘The voice was like a soft whisper, it came up as from a spring in myself, and yet I felt it as the voice of someone else. It did not change into comprehensible words, it did not enter my thinking, word-forming consciousness before I myself in the depth of my being had accepted and affirmed this whisper.’

In this whisper he believes to perceive God who does not wish reverence, but love. For all of us are His children, begotten in the creating womb of the Godhead and born from it. God does not punish. God is not a demon of revenge, of retaliation, of everlasting damnation. God does not sentence. Everyone is his own judge. God also is not 'He', God is an 'It', beyond all earthly sexual conceptions. God, primal cause and source of us all, is Father and Mother at the same time, God is endless love, who wants endless freedom for all. Max Prantl acknowledges that he did not push open a new gate to the light just and only for himself. A gate that is being harassed and threatened by demons. He calls them 'lords of the other side' He concludes:

‘I will have no fear of anything or anybody.
Nothing or nobody can harm me, as long as I am brave and sincere.
When I am not able to act any more, then I always can keep my thoughts and feelings completely calm.’

On the afternoon of August 2nd - the second day of his mystic journey - Max Prantl starts out for a walk in the forest:
‘On a spot I always had felt sinister, in a bend of a deep narrow pass, suddenly before my eyes something like a curtain was torn in two, and I was standing in a new world that till then I had only experienced in trances and sudden visions. I could still see my earthly surroundings, but they were and are no more than a foreground that did not interfere with my inner sight and hearing. Without any contact to this foreground (which is not meant here as relating to 'space') an abundant mass of appearances closed in upon me.'

An abundant mass, that he is only able to look through for the least portion. Hundreds of figures, some of them shining luridly, fall upon him. Under angel masks demons grin. They speak with him, he reads their words as thoughts that vibrate in their figures. They tempt him with power and impressive names. He loathes them.

‘No. My name I will give to me myself. From my inmost depth a name rose to my consciousness. A very common name. Many people carry it. But I felt: this is my name. The inner name designates the essence of being. The being, as whom I recognized myself in the spiritual world, is what I also want to be here on earth..’

Together with the name a melody rises in him, prosaic and hard like a war cry, and also this one he recognizes as his own. Following a sudden impulse, he hurls his name together with the melody into the spiritual world. It stands like a streaming and waving orbit of light above the world, and then extinguishes in a long-lasting reverberating thunder, which seizes him icily in the heart. The light figures have disappeared, and a wall of black froth shoves against him. He sees that these are demon figures. From them a repulsive whiff as of putrefaction wafts to him. They attack. He destroys the demon wall with a flash of his blue fire. The attackers become invisible. They cannot cross the sphere of his aura, as long as he does not let himself be seized by fear. When he is seized by fear the aura extinguishes and then everything can get to him. His spiritual figure is completely different from his earthly figure. Not beautiful and not ugly, not tall and not little - a prosaic, clear warriors figure.

Male and female united

‘My way as a presentient and dreaming man is completed. I have waked up. I am an Eternal Sun. Light of the Primordial Light, I am endless Love.’ For the first time he sees himself as others see him, as it were from a distance: ‘I saw myself as a high, dark blue figure in a transparent, softly in itself streaming aura, just like one would imagine a death angel. This figure is so to speak built of waving light. It does have a human figure, but is an 'It'. Male and female are united But only the head, breast and arms have clear outlines, everything else is streaming light.’

And then there comes a day, when the whole spiritual world is covered as it were under a foul gray blanket. From the smog, that draws ever closer, comes an invisible whisper: ‘You lost your inner light again You cannot hold the fear off you any more. It will be night around you and in you. The night of madness, the night of spiritual death. Let yourself go, let yourself fall, let yourself be extinguished.’ But he fights, and with every ring of fear he breaks asunder his consciousness becomes broader and clearer.

‘I am you and you are Me'

‘Suddenly, as with a soundless blow, again before my inner eyes something like a curtain tore apart. A royal shine, weaving in the boundlessness, a velvet-red but nevertheless sun-bright, unspeakably gracious and pure sea of fire was around me. I was no more, and yet I was endlessness. All conceptions, all boundaries had submerged. I dissolved in this sun-filled sea, whose endlessness became voice, an incomprehensibly love-breathing voice: YOU ARE ME AND I AM YOU. I still was an autonomous personality, and yet I was one with God. I and You became one single IT. God, in love surging and blowing endlessness, breathed in me and I in it as an endless abundance of joy. Melting together of all separating boundaries, union of the child with its father and mother, with its eternal source. Union of two lovers, endlessness of love: UNIO MYSTICA.’

Way to enlightenment

Being an enemy of sects and 'trained waking up' the Austrian mystic advises just one single practice, that of course has to be exercised often and ever again: ‘Let your physical heart, just as a vivid picture, flare up to a radiant sunball and tell yourself::

‘My divine heritage flashes up in me as blissfullness, freedom, light and love. I let my whole body be filled with this light, I even let it radiate beyond, till in me and around me all becomes brilliant as if sunlit.' This mystic sunrise, which you in your physical body only experience as a vivid picture, is in your aura an immediately effective, visible reality. With the fire of your divine will you literally and in reality burn all blackenings and deformations of your consciousness.’

The earthly personality

‘Christ is the leading star in the night of spiritual dreamers. Around me there is no more night, around me there is morning light. I am the guardian of the threshold to endless freedom and endless love. I wake up the dreamers who are ripe to wake up, who want to wake up, and I lead them over the threshold - during earth life or in death. This threshold or gate is a spiritual state, not a place, just as little as hell or heaven. I am the obstetrician to a new level of consciousness. Depending on whom I stand opposite to I am arouser, liberator, destructor, death.'

How is a man, who dares to speak up like this? Elisabeth, his younger sister, answers: ‘simple, modest, unpretending. Without pathos. He dressed very simple, but loved colors. He did not like stiff collars. On special occasions he wore a black corduroy jacket. He lived in a simple room with a piano in the Anton-Rauch-Straße 41 in Innsbruck. He loved flowers and animals and, as a youth, gems; these he did not wear as ornaments, though.’ ‘As an Eternal Sun I carry my earthly personality as the utmost, outermost, for all visible solidification, as an earthly instrument, as the eye and ear of my spirit that built this earthly personality with its capacities and tendencies, its powers and weaknesses, and that will give it up again when my task on earth is fulfilled.’

The inner urge to help people

‘ September 1st 1943. It is remarkable that every now and then the idea to study medicine befalls me like a storm. Also this time it came like a sudden fever. I almost had come to the decision to become a doctor after the war. Then I took my horoscope and saw that there exist about forty bonds to arts against twenty to medicine respectively illness.’

‘ September 22nd. Now again I am full of nice plans, music and paintings, which makes me almost loose the ground under my feet. Moreover, ever and ever again the unsolved problem of being a doctor pushes me up. The propulsive inner force to be a seeker fights against visions that are stronger. The main thing is that I must help. And do I help enough with arts? It is also the will to have power over bodies and souls, that wants to urge me to be a doctor.’ ‘February 20th 1944. The pains in my stomach and bowels sometimes are devilish, but they do not influence my psychic mood and attitude. Moreover, they save me in general the heavy headaches I often have. Do not worry about me. Something must be transformed in my body, and there is nobody who can prevent it.'

‘If I am to free others from their afflictions - and that is what I always wanted, as a doctor and then as an artist - I first will have to have learnt to conquer the sorrow myself, out of my own strength. For then I will have to be able to help on my own. Real help does after all not come from theoretical knowledge but from own experiences. Because I managed to deal with immoderateness and anxiety myself, I can now help others. For many years I had the intention to be a gardener, to save flowers that were in danger of dying. Maybe I can return to this old love again, but now with people.’ Shining in the archangel fire, Max Prantls recalls the moment when he came out of God into an independent existence. In the meantime hardly a day has passed, in fact no time at all, although millions of earthly years have gone by.‘An angel does not have a human figure. It is a vibrating cloud of light. When called upon, it appears to the inner senses as a human being. All beings have once been angels. In every earthly life we repeat our development from the beginning. The earthly birth corresponds, as likeness and allegory, to the heavenly birth, to our coming forth out of God. Every few years of our life on earth correspond with immeasurably long periods of time of our entire development. Before his waking up nobody knows his inner name, that indicates the essence of his being and is not the word to which we earthly translate it. It is a spiritual vibration, a fiery being of some special character.’

A sun of the other world

Of what nature his vibration and life movement may have been, is revealed by a self-made horoscope that Prantl recorded during the war:
‘I am standing at the very brink of the scorpion hell (where I still meet love). Things are tended to freedom. What kind of freedom however, here or there, I cannot yet decide. Both are possible and are probably more dependent on my subconscious attitude. Also here, in my horoscope, an overthrowing change is being indicated. There will be work awaiting me, above which an immense beaming sun is shining. Its light is not that of our daily sun, which of course means acknowledgment. It is an almost frightening, consuming light with a mystic glow, a sun of the other side. As far as the great publicity is concerned, I will be lonesome.’

And so he remained, going through the time between ruin and economic revival as through a desert. Who would understand the pure spirit of his myths? Or of his paintings of flowers, of which the light-borne souls are pouring out of all calyxes?
His main work, the story of his own mystical journey, is called 'Der Mensch ohne Angst. Licht aus der Herzmitte’ ('Man without fear. Light from the center of the heart').

‘Nobody has the right to punish. No enlightened power, least of all God, imposes any mischief whatsoever. Live free from fear and tightness, then you resolve any guilt, any karma as in a joyful play. Do not ponder on past injustice you inflicted upon others or others upon you. Live free, shining and full of love, but also strong and attentive. That is all the divine light leaves of the dark law of karma, of the law of guilt and penance. Do not fear anything or anybody, do not worry about anything or anybody. This way you will live in union with Gods will.’

His God was beyond the churches, as an 'above all horizons sparkling fire, a beyond all boundaries and conceptions flaming light’. As a flaming man Max Prantl speaks to us: ‘I am death, the force of transformation. I, Michael...’ The inner name. The essence. The fighter. We recall the very meaning of this archangel! He is the guardian of the threshold, watchman at the boundary between day and night. He sends dreams and interprets them as well.. He is the blue angel of death, who protects our souls from demons and leads us into the other world. He heals the sick and overpowers chaos, the dragon of darkness. Michael is the messenger of the light.

Completion of his work and his death

‘He is very ill’, Elisabeth writes on April 1st 1953 about her brother Max. ‘Just a shadow of a human being any more. Medically speaking, his liver has been totally destroyed. He meets nobody and does not write to anyone.' He refused every medical treatment. His isolation became total.

When his book was ready he said: 'I will not very long be here any more.’ Then his being changed essentially. Max Prantl who - having a modest, reserved character - radiated a kind of untouchable sovereignty, seemed to loose the nucleus of his personality. For in 1952 he once writes to a friend: ‘That, what you call Michael, has since long disappeared, has already returned to the eternal homeland.’

On February 21st 1957 Max Prantl, the unknown mystic,died - without complaining, without even saying anything. As cause of death the doctor diagnosed perforation of the stomach and peritonitis. He died at the threshold of the Aquarius age, that transforms us more impetuously than any other time before. Max Prantl reached the age of 44 years.

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