Example is con­ta­gious. Espe­cially a bad example. And yet it is true that whatever example a great per­son­al­ity sets, people will fol­low. Some rightly and authen­tic­ally, oth­ers only in semb­lance and imit­a­tion. The demon­stra­tion effect is that pecu­li­ar phe­nomen­on whereby an example proves irres­ist­ible. In most cases this fol­low­ing or iden­ti­fic­a­tion takes place sub­con­sciously. If a youth takes an old man as his role model, it may eas­ily hap­pen that he adopts his tone of voice and his man­ner of speech, and even, for all his twenty years, starts walk­ing with a stick. But such form­al imit­a­tion does not by itself make any­one great. When a pen­ni­less man strives to imit­ate the life of the rich, to match, in some­thing at least, the example he longs for, if only in a single spend­ing habit – he is a vic­tim of the very same effect.

Now, teach­ing is a strange thing – what you wish to pass on is taken in only with dif­fi­culty, while what were bet­ter for­got­ten lingers in people's memory. It was the same with you when, see­ing your par­ents' example, you vowed that this was how you would not live, and then repeated the very mis­takes you had wanted to avoid. The pos­i­tion of role mod­els is a del­ic­ate mat­ter in any case. It is said that even the whitest lily has a shad­ow. If you get too close to someone, you will also see the shad­ow side. So it is wise to keep a prop­er dis­tance until you are able to sep­ar­ate the good from the bad, the inspired from the ordin­ary. Once you can sep­ar­ate folly and weak­ness from the authen­t­ic and pure example, you may step closer to your fel­low men.

It is held that in the golden age the weak­er man was able to rise to the purer, fuller role model. Today it seems the reverse pre­vails, and the role mod­els sink to the lower level. If the adored idols turn out to be merely ordin­ary people, a cher­ished image may be shattered, but you come a step closer to the truth.

Every sys­tem is driv­en by the dynam­ic inter­play of three prin­ciples: the dom­in­ance of upward align­ment – that is, when the good example raises those who are weak­er; the dom­in­ance of down­ward align­ment – when even a man of refined think­ing is able to put things simply, so that any­one can under­stand; and the healthy bal­ance between the two.

The crys­tal, too, fol­lows the demon­stra­tion effect – it reflects whatever set­ting it is placed in. On red vel­vet the trans­lu­cent crys­tal is itself ruby red, and on yel­low silk, sun-yel­low. It has an exist­ence of its own, and its dis­tinct­ive trait is trans­par­ency, but it is pre­cisely this that makes it reflect its sur­round­ings.

Is man not a crys­tal too? As is his set­ting, so will he be.

A par­able of the secret teach­ings likens the human skull to a drink­ing cup. Its mouth faces for­ward, the gob­let itself is full of glory, and all around its rim sit ancient sages. Unrav­el­ling the poet­ic meta­phor is instruct­ive: the mouth of the gob­let is the mouth of man, and its foot is the back plate of the skull. Its con­tents – the glory – refer to the glory of forms, which shows itself through the sense organs, while the seven sages on the gob­let's rim are the per­ceiv­ing senses (two eyes, two ears, two nos­trils and the mouth), with speech, or the tongue, as the eighth. What mat­ters for our inquiry is the gob­let's con­tents, the glory, that is, all that the sense organs pass on to con­scious­ness: exper­i­ences, per­cep­tions, joys and dangers, attrac­tions and enlight­en­ments. Man's con­scious­ness repeats the work­ings of the crys­tal in inverse form. The crys­tal reflects its outer sur­round­ings, tak­ing on their col­ours, just as the human intel­lect reflects the image of the outer world passed on by the sense organs. But while the crys­tal keeps its sur­round­ings out­side, man's con­scious­ness engulfs them. It is said that the world is in con­scious­ness, and not con­scious­ness in the world. Yet what you take in, what example you fol­low, what you reflect back, depends on you as well. How­ever strong the outer influ­ence, guard your inner­most, pure treas­ures. The star­fish may live beneath the water, yet it is a star.