A Reflection on Mystical Anarchism in the Works of Gustav Landauer^213that which could be grasped by reason and the senses, Landauer
sought to raise himself to the world. The world is “unfathomably
rich,” he wrote, “the world is without language. Language, the
intellect, cannot serve us in bringing the world closer. But as a
speechless part of nature the human being transforms itself into
everything, because it touches everything. This is where mysticism
begins.”^73 Mysticism is a deep, intense experience of being, of let-
ting oneself “be grasped and seized by it. Until now everything has
been divided into a poor, weak, active I and an unapproachable
rigid, lifeless, passive world. Let us instead be the medium of the
world, both active and passive.”^74 The human being does not just
perceive the world as a reality that lies outside of it, she is herself
already the world. This will be experienced “by all who...are able
to recreate the original chaos in themselves and to become specta-
tors at the drama of their own desires and deepest secrets.”^75
Landauer’s argument of “becoming the medium of the world”
resonates with what Voegelin described as “participation in the
ground of being whose logos has to be brought to clarity through
the meditative exegesis of itself. The illusion of a ‘theory’ had to give
way to the reality of the meditative process; and this process had to
go through its phases of increasing experience and insight.”^76 Just
like Landauer advised not to limit knowledge of the world to that
which the “brain” can grasp, Voegelin warned of wanting to create
objectively verifiable theories and generically valid propositions re-
garding the ground of being,^77 because its structure can only truly
be verified experientially, through personal experience and a re-
flective-meditative process. Both Landauer and Voegelin concluded
that the “world” or “ground of being”, implicating those realms
that lie beyond sense experience, intellect and reason, is not some-
thing outside of the individual that can be explored from the sepa-
rated position of the observer, but that it is, rather, already within
the individual. The experience of being the world, of participating
in the ground of being, renders a distinction between an inside and
outside, objective and subjective superfluous.
The deeper the individual dives into herself, becoming the
world, the more she also separates herself from the arche of reali-
ty, with its supposedly isolated, concrete and autonomous bodies
that form society; it is an an-archist inward movement. Landauer