You have met the person who knows everything and understands nothing. Every fact at their fingertips, and somehow no weight to any of it. And you have met the other kind — someone who has read almost nothing, and yet you would trust them with the thing that matters most. The difference between those two people is not information. It is posture.
Steiner was blunt about this. The higher senses, he said, are not handed to you at birth. They are dormant — dark organs waiting in the soul, the way the eye waits in the womb before there is any light to see. And they don't wake by study. They wake by moral work first. You restructure the inner life before anything higher becomes visible. The perceiving comes last. The kneeling comes first.
Hall names the reason from the other side. He says there are two kinds of knowing. Ordinary knowledge stands you on one side and the thing on the other — separated, in his words, by "a state of otherness." You over here, the fact over there, a gap between you that looking never closes. You can study a thing your whole life and stay outside it.
The other knowing is not like that. Quoting Iamblichus, Hall says an innate knowledge of the divine is "co-existent with our very essence" — a knowing that "subsists prior to reason and demonstration." It cannot be reached by argument, because it sits underneath argument. We do not look at it, Hall says. We are "filled by it."
And there it is. That is why reverence comes before sight. Looking is the posture of otherness. When you look, you have already decided you are big enough to stand apart and judge — that the thing is smaller than your gaze. But the deepest things are not smaller than your gaze. To know them you have to give up the distance. You have to let them be larger than your current frame, and lower yourself until they can come in.
That is what kneeling is. Not grovelling. Not obedience to some man in a robe. It is the simple, physical admission that the thing in front of you exceeds you — and that you would rather be filled than be right. Hall puts the whole of growth after that first move. Knowledge, he says, is only the ground for what he calls enlightened obedience — you cannot follow well what you refused to bow to first.
So the order is not cruelty. It is plumbing. A cup held level with the jug stays empty. It only fills when you tip it below the source. Reverence is that tipping — the head going down not in defeat, but so that something can finally be poured in.
Look, and you stay dry and separate, holding your little facts at arm's length. Kneel, and the level drops, and the thing you were trying to understand stops being across the room from you. It comes in. That is the whole secret the old teachers kept saying in different words. You don't reach the high things by rising to meet them. You reach them by getting low enough to receive.