Knowledge of Life One
8. THE CONCEPTION OF RIGHT
8. THE CONCEPTION OF RIGHT
1That old word, morality, has been idiotized to the extent that it should not be used any more. The pertaining concepts have been formulated by theologians and other people ignorant of reality, life, the laws of life, stages of development, rebirth, etc. Those concepts are in many respects useless in life, or even hostile to life.
2First of all we must distinguish social concepts (belonging to the legislation of the community, which is necessary for a communal life free of friction), developmental concepts, and “esoteric” concepts (the latter including the twelve essential qualities). The definitive formulation of such a system of justice does not exist and so the matter must rest for the time being. Concepts of right are necessary, however, if a chaos as to right and wrong is to be prevented. The present essay on the conception of right is an attempt at orientation in this matter. In connection with it, an attempt is made to indicate some necessary concepts of right and qualities of life which enter into the twelve qualities termed essential by the planetary hierarchy.
3The terms “morality” and “ethics”, the true meaning of which nobody knows any longer, if anybody ever has understood it, should best be replaced by the word “conception of right”. That word has not yet been abused, with a confusion of ideas as a consequence, and so it may indicate what the matter is about.
4The juxtaposition of “moral” and “mental” in the French and English languages demonstrates that “morality” is thought to belong to emotionality. And that is correct at the present stage of mankind’s development. When the normative part of mankind has reached the mental stage, then the understanding of the Law (the sum total of all laws of nature and of life) and obedience to law will supersede the present confusion and moral fictionalism.
1No attempts made at constructing an ideal system of justice have been successful. They have not even been able to agree on definitions of right and wrong. The history of philosophy demonstrates the negative result of the attempts made by the most acute minds in this respect. The basis of right has been absent.
2This basis is the laws of life. Without this basis, any system of justice will be a construction of ignorance and arbitrariness.
3In most problems of right and wrong, wiseacreness has inexhaustible possibilities of apparently or truly correct objections or arguments. Sokrates could have argued with the sophists for thousands of years still. If they cannot agree on the basis of right, then discussions will result in nothing.
4If instituted law conflicts with ideal right or the laws of life, then it cannot be a basis of ideal right.
5“Supreme justice can be turned into supreme injustice” if egoism, confusion of right, or formalism drives formal law to its extreme, absurd consequences.
6According to Schopenhauer, wrong or injustice means to inflict suffering or damage in some way on other people, be it persons, liberties, property, reputation, etc. This also gives us the possibility of rationally defining duty. Duties are such actions the omission of which harms anybody. Of course, this includes unilateral violations of agreements.
7Also according to Schopenhauer, the aggressor or violator alone carries the responsibility for the measures that are necessary to check his behaviour.
8As for judging the individual, Schopenhauer thinks that we should not consider his ignorance and inability, his fictions and illusions, but his sufferings, anxiety, need and agony.
9The impossibility of agreement on what is right and wrong depends on the fact that everybody has the conception of right that belongs to his individual character and level of development. In all problems of right, the individual must try to reach clarity for himself. By trying to convince others you easily violate the principle of tolerance. Everybody has his ideals.
10The question of how to meet the evil of individuals and protect oneself against the manifestations of evil cannot be answered generally but must be judged from case to case. There is no general method of correction. Every individual must be treated individually. The procedures of course vary according to the individuals, their stages of development, power of judgement, the tendency to repulsion in their individual characters, their modes of self-realization, the degrees of their aggressivity, and the existing circumstances in general. If the violation is of a type that is criminalized in common law, then the simplest way out is to turn to the police. However, there are many instances of psychic torture against which the individual must find remedies himself.
11A cultural individual who by circumstances has been placed in an environment with individuals at lower levels having repulsive tendency, may have difficult problems to wrestle with in facing all expressions of hatred, intolerance, and arrogance, of self-assertion, and thirst for power. The greater the distance of developmental levels between the individuals, the more easily friction arises at daily confrontation in irritating circumstances. If the individuals he faces are not amenable to kindness and goodwill, reason and humour, if they exploit his forbearance and indulgence, then he probably has no choice but to take it all as a trial or seek another environment.
12How inconceivably complicated life is, how impossible (in the absolute sense) it is to act rightly, the hylozoician (who nevertheless has access to the hylozoic world-view and the basic knowledge of the laws of life) may vaguely imagine when he learns that even those in the fifth natural kingdom (with their enormously superior knowledge) need to discuss problems concerning mankind and its individuals. No wonder then that those who have assimilated the collected life experience of mankind think that the fourth kingdom can be likened to one big nursery more than anything. Regrettably, these children may “play with dynamite” in many different respects. In the wisdom of their self-glory, men commit nothing but stupidities.
13Manners, customs, conventions, ideas of virtues and vices, etc., form a historical heritage. They say nothing of what, from the ideal point of view, is right or wrong. They have originated from attempts at applying on existing conditions principles taken from world views and life views. If conditions or views change, then these conceptions of right change. The esoterician researching the problem of right and wrong, knowing about the various stages of development, the origin and growth of races and nations, the conditions of their life and changes, has no difficulty in explaining this continuous change of ideas of right.
14There are conceptions of right without number. And they have all had a relative (!!) justification. Only total injudiciousness, however, can from this fact draw the perverse conclusion that any conception of right is illusory. There is always an absolute opposition between right and wrong, which must not be “relativized” lest the individual or nation end up in chaos of right and wrong and absolute arbitrariness. Right must be right and wrong must be wrong on any given level of development.
15If the general conception of right changes whereas the laws are not changed, then laws are issued that war against the traditional, rooted conception of right, and the respect of law is destroyed. Respect for law is an indispensable asset, a necessary condition of law-abidingness, which only life ignorance, frivolity, and cynicism will waste. Contempt for law results in lawlessness.
16Everybody sees the necessity of hindering arbitrariness and self-will, lawlessness and barbarism, the rule of violence, the outlawry of the law and the unrighting of the right.
17The struggle for right is a basic life-task that regrettably has been completely misinterpreted and falsified by ignorance’s superstitious belief in a god whom they suppose to have taken on him what Life has made clear is the duty of men. He who fails to take measures against a violation of right, to uphold the principle of ideal right also for his own sake, makes a mistake as to the law of unity, the law of development and, very particularly, as to the law of freedom. Law of life grants rights of life but thereby also duties of life. To fail the right is cowardice, desertion, treason. It is failing to assume our inescapable part of the common responsibility in life, increasing the burdens of others, their struggle for the right. It is not a matter of inhuman or arbitrary laws, of dogmatism and litigiousness, of self-assertion and querulousness. The thing concerned is ideal right. And that cuts deeper.
1The conception of right must be based on the knowledge of the Law and the life-view of unity. Based on egoism, the conception of right will sooner or later prove untenable in its consequences. Anyone who is loyal from egoistic motives, stops being loyal when these motives are dropped.
2Very often it will help the confused if he considers what would be the consequence if all took the same view. That was the idea that Kant had in his mind when searching for a formula that would make it easier to judge: can this maxim of mine be made a general law? Kant’s formula is untenable. It leads to absolutification and doctrinairism.
3The apostles of spurious wisdom in the spheres of legal philosophy and jurisprudence (and they are many) will of course explain that the principle of “freedom within the limits of the equal right of all” is useless as a principle of right, since those limits cannot be defined and there will always be disputes about where these limits go. That principle of right falls within the framework of subjectivism, as individual as the rule of wisdom proclaimed by Christos (according to the law of unity). But the principle is good enough as a regulator, as a basis to build on, as a “standard of right”. Whatever wars against that principle lacks a tenable basis of right and conflicts with the laws of life as well.
4“The greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number of individuals” is a basic ground of judgement. The issue is not “what is best for the individual”, but “what is best for the many”. The esoterician says: “Only those who are able to think with the vision of the many as one can formulate the true principles satisfactorily”.
5The basis of man’s action is his view of life. It is the reality content of his convictions that makes him fit or unfit for life, a useful member of society or a public danger. If that conviction proves to be untenable, he loses his foothold.
6“The protagonists of religious morality usually present only two alternatives: either a morality based upon the belief in a supramundane order or moral nihilism. As we cannot live by the latter, we must accept the former. From where should we otherwise get norms of right and wrong, good and evil?”
7If the so-called moral injunctions (“commandments of god”, simplest rules for social life) have their legality based on theological fictionalism, then this legal base is lost when the fictions are abandoned. Right and wrong can only be based on the knowledge of the laws of life.
8You cannot lay down tenable norms for the conception of right in various domains of life by starting from prevalent views of such norms. Men are too ignorant of life to decide what can be harmful or harmless. Even science can do so but exceptionally (much more seldom than the expertise can decide).
9Anyone who rejects “any authoritative life-view” has thereby proclaimed the principle of arbitrariness, be it then collective or individual. The knowledge of reality and life remains authoritative for all who have not entered into the Platonic world of ideas.
10“The idea that there is an objective moral world order is a basic idea in Greek thought. Nobody violates with impunity the commands of the right, ‘Dice’s holy law’, which at the same time has the character of natural order and legal system and is valid for both men and gods.”
11In this connection it may be pointed out that “the wise men of Greece” were initiates of esoteric knowledge orders.
12Esoterics is the only world view that affords firm facts about the meaning and goal of life. According to this view, the individual consciousness develops in a series of ever higher natural kingdoms and in accordance with immutable laws of nature and laws of life. Inasmuch as this view cannot be comprehended by others than those who are numbered among the intelligentsia trained in philosophy and science and even to those must long yet remain an unproved working hypothesis, it only remains to base the conception of right on a universally valid and inescapable social principle of right. And that principle is “the will to unity”. It should not be difficult to demonstrate that mankind has to choose between accepting this principle, at long last, or put up with “a war of all against all” (open or masked warfare). There must be some system of right that enables people to live together without friction, a system without which society cannot endure. “The will to unity” can also be called “goodwill”.
13Western ethics (the study of the conception of right) is soon three thousand years old, and people today are more disoriented than ever before. We understand why Hagerstrom refused to regard ethics as a science. Certain fundamental principles for social life have been accepted internationally, however, principles without which a society cannot endure.
14There is already an international legal system based on fundamental and inalienable human rights, a system that has been accepted by all truly civilized nations. Those who refuse to recognize these rights have thereby taken their stand outside the human community. The ruling cliques of dictator and police states tread all fundamental human rights under foot and must to every unbiassed right-thinking person stand out as enemies of mankind.
15Only by implementing right human relations in a spirit of goodwill shall we be able to build up a peaceful world for further cultural progress.
16It is part of the illusions of religious ignorance to believe that the deity will put everything right, that it will do such things as mankind can very well do itself. God does nothing that men are able to do. It is the business of mankind to find the way to peaceful social life.
1Against all moralists it must once and for all be asserted that, according to the law of freedom, the individual has the divine right of life to think, feel, say, and do whatever he wants to, as long as in so doing he does not infringe the equal right of all to the same inviolable freedom, and, as for the rest, does not commit criminalized acts. Man has life’s divine right to have his private life alone. Gossip, poisoning everything and inevitably degenerating into slander, implies a violation of the law of freedom.
2Moralists violate the laws of freedom and unity and so fall under “the judgement”, the judgement they pronounce on others. To defend oneself against attacks on one’s private life is part of the right of self-defence granted by life itself. The private life of other people is the concern of nobody. It is only in his relations to the surrounding world, thus outside his own sphere of life, that we have a right to criticize the individual, if there is a reason for it, which by no means everybody is able to decide.
3The esoterician does not answer any personal questions, since they just serve to satisfy universal curiosity with its gossip. At the present stage of mankind’s development, it can be said that the less people know about your personal life, the better.
4The esoterician is particularly interested in preserving his personal integrity. He is different and you are not allowed to be that. He holds another view on almost everything, since he has a true knowledge and looks on people and life in a quite different way, the one rational way. That does not weaken his interest in people, but his interest is justified, for he just wants to benefit everybody, an attitude that otherwise seldom or never exists.
5The esoterician must be clear about whom he is able to help and in what manner he is able to help without encroaching the individual’s right to think and feel in his own way. The desire to serve develops an instinct for how to approach others and help them in their need of a right conception of reality. Instinctively, he learns to know this need by experience and makes others sense that his one desire is the desire to help and that he does not desire anything for himself.
6The monkey instinct to go by the tendency of “everybody says so, everybody does so”, to be an echo of the views of one’s times and society, has been a necessary pattern of social behaviour in all times and among all peoples. No wonder that those who finally start developing common sense with its possibility of self-determination, react against these tyrannical moral rules, against the fact that the moral dictators of the community are allowed to practise the worst of all vices, namely stigmatizing the “different people” as anti-social psychopaths. That is the same life-ignorant barbarism and fanaticism as invented torture and burning, as persecuted all pioneers and benefactors who did not go by the prevailing manners and customs, who dared to be different.
7Conventional hypocrisy and false piety in conjunction with stimulative life-hatred and desire for objects of contempt, has formulated the cynical eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not be found out.”
8The planetary hierarchy, too, speaks about an eleventh commandment, and that sounds different: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”. How long will it be before we realize the necessity of obeying this advice? Before this has happened, mankind will have to be content with reaping the sowing of hatred. Mankind should not complain. It has known that law for two thousand years and has never cared for it. If mankind perishes, then it gets its deserts. Law and logic grant such a mankind no right to exist.
1The meaning of life is consciousness development.
2Development means that consciousness learns to dominate matter by discovering the laws of existence and utilizing the “omnipotence” of will.
3Our boundless life is an instinctive, then a more and more conscious, mode of gaining the requisite insight, understanding, and ability.
4Everything that counteracts this development can be termed evil. The condition of development is, partly, the individual’s freedom to think, feel, say, and do whatever he thinks fit within the limits of the equal right of all, partly, freedom from material worries, so that the individual has opportunities of working for his consciousness development.
5Human consciousness development is a continual identification of the self with the higher and liberation from the lower, and evil is whatever tends to hinder liberation.
6This can of course be expressed in many different ways. It is, for instance, justified to say that good is the will to unity and evil is the will to power, since the latter will precludes unity, which is based on freedom.
7Nothing is good or evil in itself. It all depends on how we use it. The same is true of human qualities, what use we make of them (our intention, motive), whether they are used to further or counteract consciousness development and unity, whether they are used for the part or for the whole. You benefit the part by always keeping the whole before your eyes (as a fundamental principle). Any dividing-line drawn between the whole and its parts is a crime against unity. The egoist, thinking just about himself (and whatever he regards as his property), thereby comes into opposition to unity.
8All evil hampers us on our path towards the goal. But at the same time it teaches us how we should not think, feel, say, and do. It is by reaping bad sowing that we learn to tell the difference between good and evil. If the basic tendency of individual character is chiefly repellent, then these individuals mainly learn through painful experiences. They must be made to experience how others feel before they refrain from inflicting suffering on them.
9Wisdom begins by seeing the importance of “evil” for development as an impelling factor, by seeing the importance of the appearance of the latent faults, by understanding the importance of mistakes and failures. Until then, the passivity and omissions of the negative attitude have been prevalent, laissez-faire has been the most comfortable, the fear of making mistakes has strengthened cowardice. Correctly Dante answered the question, “Who knows good?” by “He who knows evil.” The perversion of evil, which we experience daily, finally teaches us to see the necessity of good. Evil is lawlessness, and the basis of evil is life-ignorance. Because anyone who has true knowledge and insight (which includes the knowledge that existence is incorruptible) does not act against the Law. When that insight has become axiomatic in mankind at large, then man will have come of age, not before.
10Law and right is a problem that philosophers have not yet been able to elucidate. If by law is meant the products of legislation, then there is a long way to go before the concepts of right and wrong have been clarified. You could even say that right begins where law ends. When mankind has learnt to see that everything is hatred that is not love, then it will begin to grasp what is “right”.
11Good is love, evil is hatred.
12Of course, good has nothing to do with sentimentality, the inability to say no.
13Among the many falsifications of the sayings of Jeshu there are in the gnostic gospel novels there is none more misleading than the one according to which we should not resist evil. It would mean that the planetary hierarchy gave up the power to the black lodge. In that struggle there is no “third standpoint”, no neutrality. “He that is not with me is against me.”
14Good is comprehensible only in its opposition to evil. Good-evil has its original significance in connection with the higher-lower of consciousness development. Evil arises as the lower is allowed to dominate the higher. Good is all that furthers evolution, evil all that counteracts it.
15“As evil you can regard everything that once had a function but then became an obstacle to further development, old forms of religious, political, and social kinds.” (D.K.)
16Evil is the lower in intentional opposition to the higher, in counteracting development, unity, self-realization, in power abolishing the individual’s right to freedom.
17The lower is not in itself evil. Evolution presupposes higher and lower. The three higher “principles” of a septenary are called good, since they imply a relative perfection, knowledge, freedom, etc. The four lower ones are called evil, since they evince a relative imperfection, ignorance, unfreedom, etc.
18The higher strives for attraction and union. The lower often passes through a state of repulsion.
19True evil arises when the lower has consciously decided for repulsion and separation and systematically counteracts unity.
20There must be power. Power is order, organization, freedom of friction. The whole universe is an organization, a perfect “machinery”. All power is limited, relative. It justifies itself inasmuch as it exists in accordance with laws of nature and of life and brings about freedom of friction.
21Esoterically, the problem of evil is too profound for the apprehension of ignorance.
22Evil is a matter of misdirection of energies. Just as the atoms are of two kinds (positive and negative ones), so all kinds of energies have two main directions: the downward path of involution (from the highest to the lowest world) and the upward path of evolution (from the lowest to the highest). For monads in the evolutionary kingdoms, those energies are “good” which go up, and those are “evil” which go down. The good energies further evolution, the evil ones counteract it. The envelopes of evolutionary monads consist of involutionary monads on their way down to physical matter; therefore they have the effect of dragging down. The energies which are “good” for these involutionary monads are “evil” for evolutionary monads. All such consciousness expressions of evolutionary monads as promote involutionary monads in their “development” downwards, counteract evolutionary monads in their development upwards. To these harmful energies belong all the “egoistic ones”, those that do not further the development of all evolutionary monads; all those that have an isolating effect, that war against the unitary collective of universal evolution; everything that can be called selfish or group egoistic. The individual always makes mistakes when living (thinking, feeling, acting) for himself against the interests of others.
23It is typical of life ignorance that the individual’s development towards good is gradual. He first lives for himself, then for his family, then for an ever widening group (his relatives, clan, class, nation, etc.). Wholly good is whatever benefits not just all mankind but also evolutionary monads in lower natural kingdoms. When the individual has come that far, he is ripe for the fifth natural kingdom.
24In this gradual development appear the various stages of development.
25The esoterician understands that the motive is the essential thing. About this so-called moralists can know nothing. They make grievous mistakes when they usurp the right to judge, exclude anyone from unity (which all expressions of hatred do), quite apart from the fact that they judge from appearances.
26Evil can be said to include everything that counteracts a right orientation in life and a possibility of acquiring knowledge of reality and life. Evil is everything that deprives the individual of his human rights. Evil is everything that counteracts truly human relations, everything that arouses hatred of individuals, nations, races, etc.
27Evil includes self-assertion. Self-determination is, in contrast to self-assertion, objective determination, a mental state where you let facts, real factors and conditions determine. Self-assertion ensues whenever the personality with its irrelevant desires, its illusions, prejudices, dogmas, etc. asserts itself. This often happens under the self-deceptive motivation that “you must follow the highest idea you see and understand”. By this you can defend any follies whatsoever. The trick is very simple: you refuse to see and understand whatever does not suit you. The subconscious complex of self-assertion is a specialist in such tricks. A typical example of self-assertion is the refusal to learn either from direct experience or from books. Self-glory wants to assert itself and refuses to be in a disciple position, must assert itself against authority. This often appears when the pupil tries to find reasons for contradiction, wants to assert a different opinion. The end of it often is that he completely rejects the teacher. And he will never lack reasons for doing so, if he is seeking for them.
28Evil includes the tendency to separateness, hatred. Enough should have been said of that in The Philosopher’s Stone.
29Mankind is responsible for the fact that evil holds sway. It is our duty to hinder this as far as possible. It is our duty to resist evil. In so doing, everybody must act in accordance with his view on the matter. Such views are of course different at the different stages of development. The principle is that we may only resort to legal means and must not administer justice on our own. For those at the causal stage, it is vital that they in everything act in agreement with the laws of life.
30Tit for tat, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, is the automatic reaction at the stage of barbarism. That principle is not accepted by the civilized individual. But you are perfectly right to exact effective amends. It is the business of the state to educate madmen into law-abiding citizens. It is in any case wrong to declare people irresponsible and authorize individuals (doctors at psychiatric hospitals, for instance) to license them to commit new crimes without penalty.
31Anyone who does not make a clear protest when wrong is done before our eyes or when hatred is proclaimed, makes himself an accessary to the rule of evil.
32The hateful thoughts and feelings people entertain increase suffering, evil in the world. This collective sowing becomes a collective reaping. The world’s history is the world’s judgement.
33Poverty, unemployment, lack of legal protection and many more social iniquities are evils resulting from lack of love and indifference to the welfare of others. They make up the evil sowing of the community.
34If people do not want to relieve need and poverty, do not want to change the social structure when it proves to be inefficient, then the inevitable consequence is that this social form is dissolved. Anything that counteracts freedom, unity, and development is bound to perish.
35Wars and revolutions are the outcome of collective bad sowing, of collective mistakes as to the laws of life, of lack of love and ignorance of life.
36Crime is the result of wrong upbringing, unsuitable education, hatred between individuals, and inhuman social conditions. Crime will gradually disappear as the community is rightly organized.
37Esoterics regards everything as “theft” which the individual does not need for a purposeful physical life and for his consciousness development.
38Evil people are those who try to enslave others in any respect; who hinder freedom (any of the “four freedoms”); who amass wealth at the expense of others, who seize the products of nature for their own good; who idiotize mankind, hinder social reforms, proclaim hatred between people, cause poverty; who seek power in order to rule.
39The relation of good and evil is a problem that people still dispute about. The corresponding is also found in the relation of truth and lie as well as that of love and hatred, these being the most kindred relations. The basic problem arises through the relation of higher and lower in the seemingly endless gamut of development from the mineral kingdom to the omnipotence of the supreme cosmic omniscience. The lower is an evil in relation to the higher as good. Evil is whatever hampers life. The lower becomes evil when becoming a hindrance to development. Denying the existence of evil is the same as denying the reality of consciousness development, denying the existence of anything imperfect.
40The logical absurdity of illusionist philosophy as well as Christian Science consists in their denying that reality is real, in their asserting that everything is imagination. To the esoterician, such assertions are signs of the absence of common sense, which is due to idiotization of the conception of reality and the “principle of mind”.
41Nobody having common sense can deny that there is evil in the world, that there is pain, suffering and disease, that there is hatred, persecution and wickedness, counteraction of development, etc. This is due to the repulsion of the atoms and, in human beings, to their ignorance of life.
42On the other hand it can be stated that evil has a function in consciousness development, which largely is the result of the play of the pairs of opposites (goodevil, etc.). By studying the opposites of life we gain knowledge of reality and life. Without evil, we would not know what good is and we would never be able to choose. Without errors, sorrows, and sufferings we would learn nothing, we would not grow and become strong by overcoming these difficulties.
1The expression, “ethical relativism”, when used by ignorance always knowing what everything means, has inevitably entailed a confusion of ideas resulting in the abolishment of all concepts of right. That misleading term was introduced in order to prevent arbitrary application of principles of right. Mistakes and abuses lie in the erroneous application of principles. Life consists of relations. Concepts of right and principles of right arise, change, and develop out of relations between individuals and ensuing conditions. In order to understand these concepts and principles you must know the relations. This is the first condition of a rational application of principles of right. And that is not the only difficulty.
2There has always been confusion about the concepts of right, but in our times this has degenerated into a chaos as to right and wrong, and reversion to barbarism. The ground for this condition is that they have not clearly grasped the difference between the laws applying to the first self and those applying to the second self, nor the difference between man as an individual and man as a member of society and of mankind, nor the difference between justified egoism and necessary altruism.
3It is a psychological error to present rules of right as dictated by a god, when they actually were the most basic rules for common sense and the necessary conditions of an organized society without which no community will endure. No divine wisdom was needed for that, quite apart from the fact that no god dictates any laws. He does not need to, since laws of nature and laws of life regulate that matter.
4In esoterics there is much talk about “the pairs of opposites”. It is always the matter of higher and lower (naively expressed: goodevil, rightwrong). The self in the lower wants to reach the higher. This always results in an opposition between that which is and that which will be. It is of course wrong to regard the lower as evil merely because it is lower, as the moralists do. It is evil just when it becomes an obstacle to the efforts of reaching higher. The moralists judge the individual by an idea of perfection, an ideal that cannot be realized in the human kingdom even though it is seemingly but then just seemingly realized in the incarnation of the saint. Almost totally life-ignorant as people are, groping as they are in darkness (without any idea of what may happen in the next moment), it is even criminal to make demands on people which they are unable to match up to. Wisdom requires essential consciousness and superhuman ability. Moralists are not only blind in life. They are also hateful, for any moral judgement is the outcome of hatred. Love cannot judge. Despite its inhumanity, however, moralism will always exist as long as mankind is at the stage of hatred (48:4-7). These people are victims of the pertaining vibrations. Nevertheless they are responsible for the fact that they do not strive to overcome this bondage. And there is much which they will never concede to call hatred. The gamut is very long from the lowest and coarsest to the highest and finest. It is infinitely important that people realize this. It is the first test to see whether you know yourself and your fellow man.
1“There is no single human action that the community did not at a time approve of and at another time condemn. Although standards change, life appears meaningless without them, and so the myth of morality was invented, and scholars tell us how this illusion arose. Morality is an efficient arrangement, and its sanction is a social measure. As morality is a matter of convention, the community has a right to change it or improve on it, if it finds such modifications to be contingent on its interests.”
2Arbitrariness as legislator. We are back among the Greek sophists again, not just in the theory of knowledge but also in ethics. The sovereignty of self-will. In a dictatorial manner they rule what is to be true and false, right and wrong.
3Our times present the same dissolution of concepts in all domains as during the epoch of Greek sophistry. Of course public opinion does not notice anything, in any case not until it is too late and the catastrophe has already happened. The watchful observer, however, can daily ascertain dissolution in all spheres: in politics, economy, and the judicial system. Arbitrariness rules and might is right though it is all well masked behind all manner of sophistry.
4Total disorientation in the views of reality and life also includes the general confusion of ideas in the matter of morality. Everybody has his definitions of right and wrong. When prominent government officials may say that “the law exists in order to be transgressed,” then the dissolution of all ideas of right can hardly be better expressed. The esoterician’s conception of right is based on the laws of life, and no tampering is possible with them.
5“Probably we are almost constantly in need of new moral norms. They have a tendency to lag behind, not quite agree with the course of events quite simply because they are hammered by social development rather than being the basis of our positions. On the individual level, the problem is even more complex. There are probably as many moral norms as there are people and there must be, since it is our own conditions and social maladjustments, as it were, that determine our opinions and actions. Who is able to live without conflicts by certain set rules the testimony of which he perhaps does not accept emotionally?”
6It is clear from this profound analysis how the very word “morality” is apt to confuse the ideas, so that they cannot keep apart rules, norms, customs, manners, conventions, views, emotional reactions. It is all in a mess with confusion of ideas as a consequence.
7In any case the ideas of goodwill, the will to serve, tact and consideration, right human relations, must not be confused with the other concepts but make up a group of their own.
8Our time shows the risk of basing the conception of right on religion (more correctly: the dogmatic system of theology). When people have begun to see the fictitiousness of the theological message, then the respect of the social conception of right weakens and the dissolution of the concepts of right becomes a general phenomenon. It has not been explained to people that the conception of right has nothing to do with theology but that it is a social view (or legal, if you wish) of how people are to live together without friction, that the legal system is a social necessity existing in order to protect individuals against attacks and infringement on the equal right of everybody. A society cannot be based on the law of the jungle, the law of the strongest, which leads to a war of all against all.
9That mankind in legal respect has always (in historical times) been at or near the stage of barbarism is a fact that is clear from the individual’s lack of legal protection. Arbitrariness has ruled and those in power have decided what is to be right and wrong. Generally it can be said that might is right, glory, wealth (by right of disposition). Moreover might is wisdom, truth, beauty.
10Theologians as well as politicians and now also scientists demonstrate by all their inhumanities that the individual has had and still has a very poor legal protection. In our times just he is legally protected who has a strong political organization behind his back.
11The stage of culture with a true conception of right is achieved only when mankind has acquired a knowledge of the laws of life. Only then will mankind be able to tell the difference between right and wrong.
12What people call morality are social conventions, concepts of right formulated by the various kinds of society on the basis of experience or regarded as necessary for the continuance of society. These conventions were later incorporated with prevalent religious fiction systems as dictated by some higher power, as divine commandments, which gave them the requisite nimbus of inviolability and sanctity. The fact that some of these moral ideas agree with the laws of life (the law of unity, the law of freedom) seems to be due to coincidence more than insight, when you consider how they are applied and, above all, how the state thinks itself to be above all laws of life, murdering, stealing, and cheating as it likes. After all, these are states that boast of their civilization as well as culture. Those states that have got into the hands of a clique of bandits are as many proofs of the general stage of development mankind is at. The masses are fooled by sundry absurd promises and believe blindly in false ideals.
1The word “morality” is derived from the Latin word mores, customs, and meant (before the theologians introduced the fiction of sin and so absolutified all ideas of right) a system of conventions intended to inform the barbarian about how to behave among people.
2The usual abuse of words by ignorance has of course had the result that the word “morality” has come to mean a multitude of things, chiefly a collection of prohibitions and taboos, psychologically as perverse as possible. They have absolutified the negative, which paralyzes, instead of emphasizing the positive, which liberates.
3“The basis of morality is the idea of good.” That is of course easy to say. However, the philosophers have not yet been able to agree on the content of that idea. Only esoterics can solve that problem. It is connected with the meaning and goal of life.
4Morality is standardization, the conventional proof of the equality of all.
5Moralists think they have any right of life to make demands on other people. They judge all who do not make a fetish out of decency. They are blind to their own lack of judgement, their intolerance, their arrogance.
6Moralism is a typical example of life ignorance, self-blindness and intolerance placing itself on the judge’s seat.
7“Thou shalt, otherwise thou art condemned.” This prohibiting and condemning have characterized morality in all times. Conception of right is something quite different. Among the wise, it is application of the laws of life. Among those at the stage of culture, the basis of judgement is a free social life, the equal right of all, uprightness, freedom and peace.
8That current morality with its absurd demands and eternal judging is hostile to life is most clearly seen when contrasted to the insights that every individual is found somewhere on a ladder of development that seems endless to us, and that his understanding of life and behaviour are the outcome of the level he has reached.
9“People never forgive.” Then it is asked: Who has given them any right whatever to forgive? Since they totally lack any right to judge, a right they in their self-sufficiency have usurped in conflict with the Law of life (those who judge will be judged), then the right to forgive is just a self-assumed right without any ground. Together with “sin and grace” forgiveness is the most diabolical means the satanists have ever invented to idiotize and so tyrannize mankind. According to esoterics, there is no sin, no grace, no forgiveness, no right to judge. There is just Law, the law of sowing and reaping. That is a law of life, necessary to the continuance of life, and not even the gods are able to change it.
10On the other hand, there are social laws necessary to the continuance of society, thus laws without which no society can exist. There are social laws necessary to the regulation of relations of right between individuals, necessary to a society in which people are able to live in peace with each other. But these laws have nothing to do with morality. Morality is the invention of satanists. Morality will exist as long as hatred is mankind’s elixir of life, for morality affords people the appearance they need in order to hate and judge. Morality will always exist as long as mankind is dependent on its emotional consciousness. Morality is one of the many proofs of the fact that “the world wants to be deceived”, that people want to deceive themselves.
11It is not difficult for an esoterician to decide which sayings in the New Testament gospels really derive from Christos. Most gnostic sayings have been attributed to him. But there are also true sayings by Christos, and among these are: “Judge not...” The true words they have consistently omitted to heed and, above all, to apply. Judgement is the strongest expression of hatred and the gravest mistake as to both the law of freedom and the law of unity. Judgement excludes the judger from the community of life and so it can be said to be a “blunder worse than a crime”.
12We are here in order to have experiences and to learn from them. On account of our almost total ignorance of life we largely make nothing but mistakes, which (when we have learnt from them) we call follies. That morality is hostile to life is seen in the fact that morality puts it into our heads that these follies are unpardonable. Instead they were necessary experiences, which have taught us wholesome, not to say necessary lessons. It is by making mistakes that we learn. Instead of being grateful for them, many people torment themselves by blaming themselves and so poison their entire lives. Thereby morality has a self-destructive effect on man. The psychological error we make is that we identify ourselves with these follies of the past whereas our very disapproval shows that we are different. We identify with our experiences, and this is what makes morality hostile to life.
13The Christian fiction of “salvation from sin” has the psychological effect that it liberates the individual from his past: “it is forgiven”. And for many people this liberation has been the basis of their “Christian faith”. The esoterician, who cannot accept this injustice, finds consolation in the thought that he will some time have an opportunity to make good.
14The psychological error of morality is prohibition (thou shalt not). So you tell children who understand nothing until they have learnt to behave among people. But you do not say so to adults. Moreover, prohibitions violate the law of freedom. (It is altogether another matter that there must be rules to ensure a social life without friction. The law of reaping neither says “thou shalt not” nor “thou shalt”, but “if you do so and so, then the consequence is that and that”. Choose success or failure according to the law of freedom. All this presupposes so much power of judgement that you know what it all is about before you choose. All this twaddle about morality is meaningless when there is no knowledge of the stages of development.
15Shakespeare was an esoterician and only an esoterician can rightly understand him. His plays witness to the fact that he had a knowledge of the stages of mankind’s development and of reincarnation. They have blamed him for not being a moralist. But he depicted the various human types on their respective levels. All were right, because they were such as they were. The moralist is unable to see that the individual is such as he is on his level, and that he cannot help that he is not different. They have blamed Shakespeare that he did not let crime be followed by punishment. But such is life. We cannot see the consequences of our mistakes, because they show in a later incarnation. The sophists of our time hold that all are right, that all views are equally justified, and that all views are equally good and right, as if there were nothing in itself true and right. But the fact that you do not moralize does not mean that you accept the view held or action taken. The esoterician does not judge. But he sees the mistakes and know what they are due to.
16The view of life is different on different levels in a long series of ever higher levels with more and more correct views, until the individual reaches the world of Platonic ideas and can himself ascertain all the facts and judge, realize and understand what is in itself true and right.
17One proof of the psychological injudiciousness of moralism is that “blamelessness” (of conventional hypocrisy) is regarded as a mark of capacity. As if insight and the ability to realize ideals were the same thing and indivisible, which is possible just for those in the fifth natural kingdom. Besides, where is the logic? The Christian is forced by his religion to confess his absolute sinfulness but demands to appear sinless before the masses. Moral self-blindness is also a proof of psychological imbecility. Add to this that the cowardice of morality is as great as its hypocrisy. Moreover, we have the cynicism of morality in the eleventh commandment and the unforgiving condemnation of anyone who has let himself be caught. And these people are the ones to speak of morality! The bottom has certainly been reached. Still worse is that it is incurable. “He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” And the Christians have daily cast their stones for two thousand years ever since this was said. How many thousand years will they go on? Ask the canting moralist when he will stop, when he will realize his idiocy.
18The moralists, who are all either unaware or aware of their own cant and hypocrisy, demand agreement of life and teaching, condemning those who “fail”. With such demands nobody could be a teacher. The qualities we have acquired in previous lives we can reacquire easily enough. But most qualities are slowly acquired in the course of development during millions of years. When will mankind be liberated from the moralists?
19Many people have once acquired all the qualities of the emotional saint but have not had the opportunity to develop them anew, as a rule because other qualities or abilities must be acquired and demand all their time and energy.
20We judge ourselves by our good resolutions and other people by their actions.
21The moralists judge a man by his faults and failings. The esoterician, however, judges him by the level of development he has reached and his greatness within the given limits of his capacity. Often, faults and failings are the price he must pay for his greatness.
22The moralist is self-blind. He is mostly unaware of what stirs in his own subconscious. Poul Bjerre, the psychoanalyst who had opportunities to look somewhat behind the front, stated about the Oxfordists, those public confessants, the fact that is self-evident to every esoterician: “Becoming peccadillos come out well on the platform, but what has shaken the foundations of the soul does not lend itself to publicity.” They would not even dream of owning to their inner conflicts at confession meetings. And then people believe they know themselves!
23What kind of a human being am I? And what kind are you? The history of the world testifies to that.
24Anyone who knows himself ever so little never speaks ill of anybody. That is the proof.
25When the moralists speak about a “misspent life” they mean that the individuals has not made the most of his possibilities of development or contribution but has “failed”. They do not realize that the individual has not yet acquired certain qualities which are necessary for him in order to succeed and rightly use his visible qualities. Without a harmoniously shaped fund of thousands of qualities, individual “brilliant” qualities do not have full scope for development. We know so little of all the qualities we have acquired and have latently and of all the qualities we still lack. If the moralists suspected their enormous ignorance of life, they would not act judges and assessors. The fact alone that you have become a human being, is a proof that you have acquired countless qualities.
26The moralists know nothing about reincarnation and the law of sowing and reaping, about life in between incarnations, about the law of development and the various stages of development. The less you know the more certain you are of your illusions and fictions.
27If the moralists had any knowledge of life, they would not be so surprised at mistakes that even those at the humanist stage can make, at the faults, failings and various imperfections of these people. For one thing they know nothing about the workings of the law of reaping, that in certain respects terrible law. For another thing they can never grasp the motives of those on higher levels and they do not know that the motive is the essential thing in all actions.
28Moralists demand that the genius be humble. We have every reason to react to that as Goethe did: “Nur die Lumpen sind bescheiden.” (“Only wretches are humble.”) What demands have moralists to make? The mere fact that they are moralists demonstrates that they are lying pharisees and hypocrites.
29There are lots of esoteric ideas in Goethe’s writings witnessing to the source of his knowledge, lots of sayings typical of esoteric insight. One such saying which would be very good for the moralists, in particular, if they would care to remember it, is: “Es irrt der Mensch so lang er strebt (Man goes astray as long as he strives).” We all largely make nothing but mistakes, however wise and well-meaning we think we are, and so it is because we are ignorant of life and the laws of life.
30In our times they have instituted chairs in the history of literature. Such professor-ships make it possible to take a doctor’s degree by parasitizing on the literary output of other people, a sort of intellectual body-snatching, in which disclosures of all vices, faults and failings of literary persons are regarded as important scholarly discoveries. These professorships should soon be ripe for shutdown.
31The maxims of Larochefoucauld are on the whole a scathing satire on moralism, without effect as always, for people must have their motives of hatred. Trying to fight moralism is like whipping the billows of the Hellespont with iron chains. It just billows more. The hydra of the Grecian tale was the symbol of slander. For each head that was cut off two new ones grew out. The Greeks of prehistoric times were fully alive to the fact that people are found at different stages of development.
32The following statement by a 45-self could perhaps make some readers reflect on the effects of moralism, something that most people instinctively try to avoid (which explains much): “As long as women do not defend the cause of the so-called fallen women instead of participating in the outcry of the moralists, for so long they will fight in vain for full equality. They make two mistakes: they are moralists and therefore hypocrites and they condemn their own sex.”
33There have always been a few courageous men and women on higher levels who have done their best to fight infamous moralism, cynical hypocrisy, that most efficient weapon the satanists can wield in their struggle against all pioneers. Blavatsky did her best to challenge that life-poisoning gossip. She used to wear men’s clothes, ride astraddle (a terrible thing in those times), smoke like a chimney, swear like a trooper and boast of her illegitimate children. No wonder she was calumniated and condemned. Later she deplored her challenges, not for her own sake but because the slander also affected the work she had been assigned to do for mankind.
34The war against moralism, against the cynical hate-mongering of social hypocrisy, is probably fruitless as long as people are at the lower emotional stage where hatred is the individual’s elixir of life.
35When, some time in the future, mankind has reached the stage of culture, has acquired the qualities of attraction, then the individuals will have realized that moralism is hostile to life and stopped condemning others (and themselves) for their “faults and failings”. Until then, self-blindness will reign.
1Evil is whatever counteracts unity, development, self-realization. It reaches its extremity in those individuals who have sufficient knowledge of the coarse physical, physical-etheric and emotional “forces” to be able to consciously and systematically control matter in these worlds in order to counteract evolution. They do so by working with and for involution, which for mankind means a return to the barbarian stage. Those satanists are the true rulers of the worlds mentioned. They have seemingly greater power than that collective being which supervises mankind’s evolution. But they are supervised by the collective being of the law of destiny without even suspecting the fact. All their plans and plots are brought to nothing unless they serve the law of reaping. They serve, unbeknownst to themselves, as scavengers, as the agents of bad reaping. Beyond that they can do nothing. Within the bounds of the law of freedom, however, they can mislead and seduce the life-ignorant to be their unconscious servants. In so doing they avail themselves of false promises which meet all the illusions of egoism and entice the unwary to sow bad sowing, which also delays evolution.
2What makes the difference between the planetary hierarchy and “the black lodge” is that the white ones use only evolutionary energies and the black ones only involutionary energies. Since also involution is a necessary process of manifestation, the black ones benefit the process of evolution by forcing higher kinds of matter down into lower worlds and molecular kinds. However, this is done involuntarily and by no means with the intention of benefiting but for counteracting evolution. The purpose of the elementals formed out of involutionary matter is to influence the envelopes of evolutionary beings and in so doing worsen the monads’ prospects of controlling these their envelopes, since the formidable elemental energy is stronger than that of the monads before they have acquired the ability to profit by the stronger evolutionary energies there are in the three highest molecular kinds (1-3) of the envelopes. It is in the highest degree unjustified to try to defend the work products of the satanists (the existence of elementals) by calling man’s idea of evil mistaken because the very process of involution is necessary. Again and again the Westerner is astonished at the Indian mentality which can deny the existence of matter as well as evil. Both are real, and evil is a ghastly reality which must in any case be called evil. You help nobody by causing a confusion of concepts. There are other ways in which to establish differences than by making concepts absolute. Any absolutifying is a mistake which we should have left behind us at the higher mental stage with perspective thinking.
3All political or religious regimes that prohibit freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of the press are the agents of the “black lodge”. The total life-instinct of mankind is sound but the nations easily let themselves be idiotized, above all if they allow themselves to be dominated by fear, which is the foremost weapon of the satanists.
4How deep-rooted is the fiction of the satanic teaching that “man is born in sin” is clear from the fact that occultists who are informed that also 45-selves marry, doubt this fact. But the organism is a divine product of nature and has its great function in consciousness development. All that is natural is divine. But the satanists have managed to idiotize and brutalize mankind.
5One moment’s reflection should have told the occultists that 45-selves must marry in order to ennoble the race and also to offer incarnating 45-selves and still higher selves suitable organisms and suitable families and environments to grow up in.
6“The best with man is the dog.” Or, as Schopenhauer puts it: “The more I come to know men, the more I love dogs.” That is reasonable. The dog has reached as far in the animal kingdom as a man at the verge of the superhuman kingdom. The majority of mankind is still at or near the barbarian stage. But the others have nothing to boast about either. Led astray and idiotized by the satanists we all have through millions of years made unbelievably many mistakes of all kinds. And anyone who thinks that he is free from failings, faults, and vices is likely to have still necessary experiences in this life or in incarnations to come. “We all have our parts in mankind”, and this esoteric axiom says more than moralists are able to grasp. Many who have reached the stage of humanity and thus have the stage of the saint behind them (once and for all have acquired all the qualities of emotional attraction, which are latent in subsequent incarnations) have according to the law of reaping been forced to make mistakes that are incomprehensible to outsiders, insoluble enigmas to their contemporaries and posterity. Those may count themselves fortunate who have not been in need of such experiences. It depends on themselves whether they are to be spared such things in the future.
7It may be called one of the constant triumphs of satanism that the black ones almost always succeed in “neutralizing” the spiritual pioneers and frustrating the efforts the planetary hierarchy has intended them to make in the evolution of mankind by mobilizing the moralists with their cynical conventionality to pass moral death sentences on the bringers of light. That too is a factor to consider for those thinkers who study the laws of life and, in this case, the common sowing and reaping of the human collective.
1An old wise man said that history and experience had taught him that the worst that could happen to anybody was “to fall into the hands of men”. That says a great deal about the present stage of mankind’s development. In many respects mankind is still at or near the stage of barbarism.
2You can learn much by studying the conceptions of right at lower stages. By realizing how it should not be you can perhaps gradually learn how it should be. Wisdom is in many respects knowledge of the negative. The experience of life consists mostly of such insights. Mankind has had all too few opportunities to learn from individuals at higher stages how they should react in a number of the innumerable situations of life. The risk of uncongenial imitation is of course always there. But that risk is ever greater as the historical personages are stripped of their individuality and temperaments and stand out as bloodless abstractions. Biographies should be written only by those who have long lived with the great ones, have some prospects of understanding them and do not misinterpret everything; not by “historians” who construct, believe, and assume and base their biographies on guesswork and “psychological” conclusions.
3There are many different kinds and many different degrees of hatred from the most intense repulsive tendency at the barbarian stage to remaining tendencies at the cultural and even humanist stage (47:5). These kinds and degrees have been given many various designations. Life-ignorance, which believes that it can judge everything, often sees no difference between various kinds and misinterprets everything that has to do with individual character and temperament. It is impossible for those at lower stages to judge those at higher stages. It is also obvious that it is impossible for them to realize this. And the democratic disrespect and irreverence makes correction impossible.
4The life-ignorant have no idea of how trying, irritating, power consuming it can be for “higher beings” to be constantly misunderstood by these always presumptuous, irreverent, spiteful individuals, of whom it may be said that their “merits” chiefly seem to exist in order to mask their faults.
5The sense of what individuals think to be right and wrong brings about a spontaneous reaction whenever somebody’s right is violated. This reaction has different expressions depending on the level of the individual and the degree of violation. At the barbarian stage, the principle of tit for tat is understandable.
6The mankind of this planet of sorrow, by letting itself be led by the black lodge, has hampered its consciousness development and sown the sowing of horror with unspeakable suffering as the consequence. We all have by and large just cultivated all the bad qualities to a high percentage, and have omitted to acquire the good ones. That is a fact which all moralists should ponder instead of thinking themselves splendid, which is an enormous self-blindness. Rightly Bertrand Russell thought moralist conventional hypocrisy to be the evil in man that was hardest to get at. The theological fiction of the forgiveness of sins, an insult to the laws of life and the implacable justice of life, has also contributed to the moralist self-righteousness. You make yourself free from sin, so that you can “cast the first stone”. With such a conception of right also goes the general confusion of right and wrong we all have suffered from during millennia.
7Instead of heeding the good and helping all to develop the good qualities there are as predispositions in everybody, theologians as well as moralists do their best to concentrate on evil and so strengthen it. It is difficult to get any further in life perversion. It is high time that people began to see the satanism of such theology and morality. Those who judge are spiteful people.
8In this connection it should be observed that the individual by some people may be thought to be very good, and by others very bad. Those who always see the worst, so doing testify to their repulsive vibrations and to the fact that they are living in the lower emotional regions. We unconsciously affect all with our vibrations. A very noble man strengthens by his vibrations whatever is in other people and so makes the bad man even worse. Therefore, he is most often hated, and the more so the nobler he is.
9The principle of intolerance implies the abolition of individual freedom. It must lead to the war of all against all. The esoterician has been taught to rejoice at everybody’s opinions, being glad that the individual has indeed bothered to form opinions. It is a step forward anyway. We must not demand too much of people.
10In their present formulations, religion and morality are the real foundations of intolerance. They are repellent and serve hatred in all its innumerable modes of expressions. There can never be any real freedom of expression (corresponding to the various levels of development), as long as hatred rules mankind.
11For an esoterician, the art of living, the way of living is no morality but the logical application of the insight he has gained into the laws of life. Moral valuation is the fiction of life-ignorance and has always proved to be due to a total lack of self-knowledge, always connected with unconscious hypocrisy (regrettably also conscious) and the wish to disparage others.
12With few exceptions, the so-called saints have given proof of fanaticism as well as hatred and condemnation. It is high time to “dethrone” the saint’s patent on omniscience. The true saints I have known were always humble and had realized their almost total unfitness for life (“imperfection”). It was impossible for them to pass moral judgements on others.
13Among the innumerable misinterpretations of reality and life that religion has put into mankind, there is the fiction that a saviour must be a teacher, a preacher, a prophet, etc. The planetary hierarchy emphasizes that everybody must become a “saviour” before he can move on into the fifth natural kingdom. All are saviours who take a share in the work for evolution: statesmen, “philosophers”, scientists, artists, etc. Moralists with their complex of inferiority and their repulsion (hatred), which must drag all greatness down into the mud, have always condemned these great ones on account of their inevitable defects. (As a rule bigger than normally, partly because they have left some aspects of their reacquisition undone, partly because their mightier energies enhance their failings.) So doing the moralists bear witness to their own ignorance of life and inability to assess truly. A human being shall be judged (if he should be judged at all) by his contribution, by the supernormal he has done and not by his faults and failings. Also of a genius it is true that “the heart knows its own bitterness”. But against the reproach of men he can raise his head high. If he should judge others by the standard used by the moralists in their judgements, then they would be pitiable. The only thing the moralists have to put forward is their poor hatred, the worst of all defects. But so great is life-ignorance that children from their earliest years are trained to despise.
14Now and then all mankind is upset about some giant scandal that shows the developmental level of the nation in question. In a somewhat lesser format this shows in a scandal comprising certain highly placed persons in the community. The ignorant says that such and such are like that. Individuals are singled out as particular “black sheep” or “ugly customers”. The man experienced in life takes an entirely different view on the matter. The individual traits of the phenomenon disappear and the general ones appear. Such is mankind whenever circumstances make such things possible. At the present stage of mankind’s development, such things happen everywhere on a large or a small scale. But it is just in rare exceptional cases that it becomes a matter of public knowledge. Those who are without protection are without rights, since nobody cares to “sacrifice” himself for the cause.
15It is part of the law of eternal justice that everything commands a price and that all loans must be repaid sooner or later. When the balance of life finally is struck, then the question is: do the two sides meet? He who gives will receive. All life is a give and take, willing or unwilling. When the final account is settled nobody has got more than another. Therefore, envy is an instance of gross ignorance of life, apart from the fact that it is the injudiciousness of hatred.
16Everybody feels that he is not understood, misunderstood. That should teach everybody to see that he, too, underrates everybody else. After that there is perhaps a prospect of some serious attempts at studying the conditions of understanding.
17Only in those at the cultural stage, in those who aspire for the higher emotional, is there the necessary resistance to the eternal gossip and slander. The others accept the poison as it stimulates repulsion.
18Since everything that is the mark of a higher level inflames the complex of equality, anyone who “casts pearls” that are his own ideas must pay for it. The risk is perhaps not so great when you quote what others have said, as it is then taken as an instance of “bad judgement”. Writers have the advantage that they can put their words of wisdom into the mouth of another and moreover make somebody duly deride it, so that the sting is taken out which otherwise the moralist always senses to be aimed at himself.
1If the primitive moralist ideas of right and wrong virtue and vice should be used at all, then according to esoterics everything is vice that conflicts with the laws of life. Among these “vices” is curiosity, since it violates our right to a private life protected from the encroachments of others.
2Virtue is the ability to choose right, to find the golden mean between the extremes.
3The opposition of right and wrong shows man a middle path to go, the “golden mean”. The more the individual conception of right is ennobled, the narrower is the path until it becomes the razor-edge path the planetary hierarchy speaks about. Only then you are on the sure path.
4The laws of the land indicate the outside limits. The norms, which in a cultural environment are ever more refined by the instinct of right, develop into tact, in which process the path becomes ever narrower.
5Those who talk about the justification for “white lies” are still pursuing a rather broad path. This is also the path of curiosity and gossip, interest in the personality.
6The level of development appears quite clearly in the conception of right.
7Insight discovers the golden mean. But the art of using it depends on the emotional balance between attraction and repulsion.
8Where goodness is not combined with common sense, goodness turns into a vice and becomes the basis of the phenomenon that unreason and arbitrariness to a great extent may rule.
9The goodness that is weakness leaves the field open to insolence, cynicism, exploitation.
10The goodness that allows evil to rule is accessary to whatever evil brings about.
11Self-criticism is a good thing. But it must not be exaggerated, morbid. There are people who always take sides against themselves all the way to self-resignation. They do not realize that right is right regardless of you or me. I cannot possibly always be wrong. Such a view is injudiciousness made absolute. I may be right despite the fact that it is me. Such states are evidence of moral complexes destructive of life, which Christianity has done everything to foster and strengthen.
1You shall love your neighbour as yourself but not more. In all actions the important thing is to avoid extremes. To help so that you are ruined yourself to no avail and become a burden to others is a mistake.
2Give to anyone who asks you, if you have and can give with discrimination so that you do not bolster up vice. Everything must be done with discrimination. The fault of the so-called Christian commandments is that they have been absolutified to be valid under all conditions, which is sheer madness. They were no commandments but hints to those who had acquired common sense, not for the life-ignorant.
3Demands from others, absurd and insatiate, demonstrate that no rule must be made absolute, which always leads to extremes. Anyone who is always ready to sacrifice everything for anything has lost sight of his own life task. Demands from others are all too often unwarranted trespassings into the prohibited sphere, across the border of the individual’s private life (his life of thought, feeling, and action within the limit of the equal right of all). Such violations the individual has a duty to repel.
4There are people who always take sides against themselves all the way to self-resignation, driven to this by a mistaken view of duty. This is not common sense. It is morbid when the individual allows himself to be eaten by vermin rather than freeing himself from it, if so by killing it.
5Human sentimentality has to a large extent hindered a sensible attitude to life and sensible relations between people.
6“Consideration” all too often means that you quite unnecessarily put up with insufferable conditions.
7When we “feel sorry” for a person it makes us bolster up vice and suffer idiocy to rule.
8There is a great difference between compromise and adjustment. Development is a continuous adjustment. Compromise, on the contrary, implies that you square your conscience, which ruins your character.
9The English expression “the benefit of the doubt” is a good testimony to the English sense of fair play and common sense.
10The erotic licence of our times is partly a reaction against the sexual taboos of puritan fanaticism and the unpsychological secrecy about everything related to sex, partly an inevitable result of the heated erotic atmosphere that has ensued since films, theatre, pulp magazines and fiction literature have sunken down to the level of pornography. New exaggerations to both extremes should be expected before the balance has been struck.
11Asceticism counteracts inner freedom. The puritan is hostile to life as is every “paragon of virtue”.
12An exaggerated desire to possess breeds envy. Exaggerated desires for sensations of pleasure make the individual a glutton, a drunkard, a sensualist. Exaggerated desires for mental sensations make the individual a fanatic. All faults are instances of imbalance, and in some respect or other we all lack that necessary quality, balance.
13At the stage of barbarism, work is viewed as an evil (a “curse”). You must have reached beyond that stage in order to realize that when life is at its best it is work and toil.
14We fail in life if we do not understand how to make use of “evil”, sufferings and misfortunes in the right way.
15Evil is imperfection and the result of ignorance and inability. The history of mankind, as of any individual, is the story of mistakes in life. By making them we have learnt to avoid them, to find our way. Evil is whatever counteracts freedom, unity, development, and self-realization. Evil is bad reaping. Evil is bad sowing.
1To conceive the positive there is in all ideals is the main problem of the art of living; to survey them all in their connectedness is the final goal of human wisdom.
2All true ideals can be derived from the striving for perfection.
3As a rule many lives come between gaining knowledge of an ideal, the insight that it is desirable, the understanding that it is necessary, and finally the ability acquired to realize it.
4Ideals adapted to some certain level of development, that is: next to the level the individual has reached, can be realized if the individual strives purposefully for it.
5Many ideals appear utopian, are too high, which the history of religion seems to imply, since the dogma of Christianity teaches that man is irreclaimable.
6Life-ignorant moralism makes an absolute demand of agreement between life and teaching. Those at the humanist stage have always understood that this demand is absurd. If man were perfect, then he would not need to incarnate. Add to this the fact that the serious faults have been forced on us in order to teach us not to judge. For those who judge will be judged. This is connected with the fact that we cannot see our real faults.
7Life and teaching coincide when the teaching is suited to the level the individual has reached.
8The qualities we have once acquired are there as predispositions. But in order to be actualized they must have opportunities of activation, to be developed again.
9Many of our faults and failings are below our true level and then are due to the fact that we have considered them to be so unessential that we have never bothered to do something about them. Some people have an instinctive feeling that such things are “uncongenial”. Others think they have neither the time nor the energy to reacquire the abilities that would easily have remedied the failings.
10It is only when the qualities have been acquired 75 per cent that we are able to resuscitate them more or less automatically as soon as we have seen that they are desirable or necessary.
11The distance between ideal and realization can in some cases be considerable even at the humanist stage but is insignificant at the causal stage and non-existent at the essential stage.
12It is typical of life-ignorant juvenile idealism that it never understands why everybody does not realize the ideals. It certainly is very simple, just to do it. After a few years they begin to see that it is not that easy and when they have grown older still they have compromised so far as to think that “you must aim at the sky in order to hit the edge of the wood”.
13Qualities and abilities are required to realize ideals. Only those who draw near to the fifth natural kingdom are able to realize the highest ideals. Man is found somewhere among the 777 levels of human development. He has the qualities and abilities corresponding to the level he has reached. The abilities he has not acquired belong to a higher level, and those he lacks. That is no fault of his and no moral defect.
1It is not moral responsibility that builds character. It is character that determines morality. Morality changes according to conditions, race, religious prejudices, etc. Character, however, is the one persistent feature.
2The Belgian poet-philosopher Maeterlinck discusses, in a chapter on sincerity, the prevalent view of the perfection of character. It is “a sterile abstinence, a kind of ataraxy (impassivity), a reduction of instinctual life, which yet on the whole is the only source of any other life of which we may partake. This perfection tends to suppress too violent desires, ambition, pride, vanity, egoism, pursuit of pleasure, in one word all human passions, that is, everything making up our original vitality, the very basis of our instinct of self-preservation which nothing can replace. If we in ourselves stifle all expressions of life and replace them with the contemplation of their defeat, then we shall soon have nothing to contemplate.”
3“The emphasis thus is not on liberation from passion, vices, and faults. That is impossible as long as you are a man among men and because that which is the true basis of human nature is unjustly called passion, vice or fault.” But anyone who is able to be sincere with himself will find that even the lowest and most selfish urges are harmless provided you are not wilfully evil, which is difficult to be on such a level of development.
4Of sincerity he says that “the most honest and sincere man has a right to conceal from others most of what he thinks and feels”. You must always think about whom you are talking to in order not to be misunderstood. “Every truth, whenever you are not dealing with equally developed people, must first be adapted before it can work as a truth.” And he adds that Christos himself would certainly have expressed himself differently if he had been talking to a Platon and not to Galilean fishermen. “The kingdom of sincerity begins only where this adaptation is not necessary anymore.”
5“Hitherto you have felt like a criminal and been constantly on your guard. Then you did not yet know that every man has a right to be such as he is, that there is nothing shameful in his spirit and his heart no more than in his body.”
6These quotations from Maeterlinck show what toil it costs every thinking man to liberate himself from the idiotization of religious moralism. It has brought man to the point where he feels lousy and incorrigible and is ashamed of his inevitable vices, faults and failings, is ashamed of being a man, is ashamed of not having reached a higher level, is ashamed of being imperfect. “Ich bin kein ausgeklugelt Buch, ich bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch.” (“I am no ingenious book, I am a man with his contradictions.”) We are all full of contradictions through and through, full of both good and bad qualities (mostly bad ones) in a muddle. This changes in the course of development through thousands of incarnations. But it is idiotic and satanic to make that terrible demand on man which moralists and pharisees have made in all times, that man be different than he is, that he be perfect. What priest has any right to preach such a lie of life? What priest measures up to the demands he makes on others?
1Everybody has a right to his own view. Perhaps we could wish that everybody formed such a view. But most people are unable to do so. What you have a right to demand is that nobody is forced to adopt any view but has an opportunity to choose the view that best agrees with his ability of judgement, his level of development. This also enhances his possibility of reflection. Self-initiated consciousness activity is hampered by systems of blind belief. The sense of reality and the faculty of logical reflection are destroyed by absurd systems.
2The important thing is to make the young people see that the violation of the right of others leads to a lawless community, that universal goodwill and right human relations are the conditions of a community governed by law.
3Rousseau preached “return to nature”. By this he meant a liberation from the artificialness and unnaturalness that had always characterized European culture. This social order has untenable foundations, is based on a false religion, on lying moral conventions, erroneous views of life in almost any respect. Anticonventional people make the mistake of spurning prevalent conventions without being able to present better or truer norms of life. You do not improve the existing order by working chaos. What we need is a new view of life, based on the knowledge of reality and life and, above all, on the laws of life. And esoterics presents us with such a view, which is superior to what any historic view is able to produce; we dare say, will anytime be able to produce. It is essential that lying conventions are replaced by simpleness, spontaneity, naturalness, being the one you are and not aping or pretending you are “somebody else”. As for the school, it should be possible to teach children to show tact, consideration for others, be kind, help each others, respect each other’s individual character and not demand standardization, which belongs to the aping stage. So little is needed to avoid unnecessary frictions. It is not necessary to be a barbarian even at the stage of barbarism. You can have an ideal to admire. You are not bound to despise all and everything. You do not need to ridicule everything you do not comprehend.
4Be on your guard against all who work for division, envy, hatred, slander, contempt, fear, anxiety, doubt. Their foremost poisoning weapon is morality. Be on your guard against the moralists, who are the true hypocrites. That little have the Christians learnt from the symbolical sayings of the gospels; the judgement upon the Pharisees (those who judge): “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at her,” “ye judge, ye shall be judged”, “ye who are in the same judgement” and many more similar sayings. Why? Because hatred always wants to judge.
5Be on your guard against all who foment indignation. Take no impression from those who are ignorant of the laws of life.
1The twelve essential qualities, corresponding to the twelve qualities developing during the incarnations at the humanist stage and in the twelve zodiacal signs (the twelve zodiacal qualities, performing the twelve labours of Herakles) can only be approximately intimated by comparison with generally known human qualities. The following is an attempt to group some of the most necessary qualities under the essential ones. It is obvious that they in some respects can be regarded as particularly typical of the various departments and that they are chiefly acquired through experience at various stages of development and in the seven main chakras. Definitive information from the planetary hierarchy is still lacking.
2
security, safety, assurance, lightheartedness
faith, hope, confidence
trust in Law, courage
realization that there is no failure
realization that everything is planned for the best
faith in the powers of life within us
freedom from: fear, anxiety, envy, despair
3
self-determination, self-criticism
frankness, determination to win
self-control, balance
ability to decide for oneself what is good and right
freedom from various complexes: sin, guilt, shame, inferiority,
despair, slavery to authority, bad conscience, shyness
4
sense of duty
moderation, striking the golden mean
honesty, straightforwardness
endurance
freedom from: stubbornness, self-will, fanaticism
5
truth
uprightness, justness, sincerity
integrity, objectivity, honesty
6
unconcern, invulnerability, “indifference”
self-forgetfulness, directness, simplicity, spontaneity
independence of the opinions of others
harmlessness
“not being the centre of one’s circle”
“to be naked is to be innocent”
artless, natural, unselfish
impartiality, emancipation
tolerance
freedom from: self-importance, self-centredness, conceit,
delusion, self-glory, boasting, fanaticism, vanity,
desire for recognition, self-assertion
7
altruism, disinterest
resignation of power, glory, riches, gluttony
liberality, generosity, magnanimity
service
capacity for work, capability, accuracy
sublimation
courage
freedom from: pride, greed, ambition, self-interest, egoism,
demands, claims, sense of compulsion, inner and outer prohibitions
8
loyalty, reliability, steadfastness, constancy
gratitude, dedication, sense of responsibility
commitment to duty, honesty
9
thought-control, attention, watchfulness
stillness, “let thy war-song cease”, concentration
non-resistance, accepting life
freedom from: negativism, criticism, gossip, spirit of opposition, wrath, discontentment
10
joy, happiness, bliss
intensity
“life is wonderful”
“outlet”, liberation
pleasure is power
surrender to life without reserve
optimism
freedom from: bitterness, grief, suffering, suppression, complexes,
inhibitions, moralism and idealism that destroy joy
dissatisfaction, triviality, self-torture
11
energy, power, efficiency
positivity
firmness, unshakableness, unyieldingness
will to live, self-realization
“I can, I will, I dare, I shall”
courage
staying power
freedom from: thoughtlessness, self-defeat
12
knowledge, insight, understanding
common sense, power of judgement, art of living
humility
freedom from: dogmatism, moralism, pride
13
attraction, love, goodness
admiration, affection, compassion, kindness
respect, veneration, worship
tact, delicacy, consideration
service, patience
sympathy
tolerance
identification
freedom from: hatred, vengeance, malice
moralism, tactlessness, contempt.
The above text constitutes the essay The Conception of Right by Henry T. Laurency. The essay is part of the book Knowledge of Life One by Henry T. Laurency. Copyright © 1999 by the Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation.