Success Quote by Gustave Meyrink

Meyrink writes like a novelist who’s smuggled a manual for metaphysical self-improvement into literary fiction. “This goal can and must be attained in this life” is a hardline refusal of the spiritual procrastination tactic: the idea that enlightenment is always for later, for the afterlife, for someone else. The sentence is built to sound ethical as much as mystical. “Can and must” turns transcendence into a responsibility, not a luxury.

Then he pivots to the safety net: even if you fail, the work isn’t wasted. That’s where the subtext gets interesting. Meyrink isn’t really soothing the reader; he’s keeping them in the game. The promise of return “to this world” carries a reincarnationist assumption, but it’s also a psychological claim: once you’ve had even a partial awakening, you can’t fully go back to innocence or denial. “Found the way once” implies an initiatory experience - not constant bliss, but orientation. You’ve got a map now, and that changes how you suffer, desire, and choose.

Context matters: Meyrink’s early-20th-century Europe was crowded with occult revivals, Theosophy, Rosicrucian fantasies, and modernist disillusionment. His fiction (especially The Golem) treats spiritual development less as piety than as an escape from mechanized, sleepwalking life. “Internal maturity” is his quiet rebuke to external respectability: titles, doctrines, even “belief” are secondary. The real progress is an inner reorganization that survives failure, even death. The line is both carrot and goad - you’re accountable now, and you’re not starting from zero ever again.