Knowledge of Life Two
8. THE STAGES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
8. THE STAGES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
1Classes are the natural order of things and indicate different stages of the development of consciousness. Without a knowledge of these stages it is impossible to assess the individual even superficially. It is true of the human kingdom as well as of all the other natural kingdoms that individuals can be at different stages of development and levels of development determined by the point of time when the individuals entered the respective kingdoms. This appears the most clearly in the animal kingdom, where consciousness development manifests itself in the successively higher animal forms.
2During his sojourn in the human kingdom, the individual (the monad, the ultimate self) goes through five stages of development divided into different levels. The stage of development is of course not apparent in the human organism, which largely is similar regardless of the individual levels. Instead it appears in the individual’s emotional and mental envelopes. For it is in these envelopes that consciousness development goes on after the monad in the animal kingdom acquired consciousness in the organism.
3Consciousness development appears in the acquisition by the monad of consciousness in ever higher molecular kinds, six in the emotional envelope and four in the mental envelope. The higher the molecular kind acquired by the monad, the greater the percentages of the higher molecular kinds in its envelopes.
4The lower the stage of development, the more experiences of a similar kind are required for comprehension and understanding. That is why development at the stage of barbarism takes such enormously long time.
5The following tabulation indicates in which emotional and mental molecular kinds the monad normally can be actively conscious at the different stages:
Molecular kinds emotional mental the stage of barbarism 48:5-7 47:7 the stage of civilization 48:4-7 47:6,7 the stage of culture 48:2-7 47:6,7 the stage of humanity 48:2-7 47:4-7
6The figure 48 denotes the emotional world (improperly called the astral world); and the figure 47, the mental world (including the causal world). Of the subsequent figures, 7 denotes the lowest molecular kind within the respective worlds; 2, the highest molecular kind.
7The individual’s level of development depends on his ability of activity in emotional and mental molecular kinds, his ability to receive, to perceive, and to use the material energies pouring through these molecular kinds in his envelopes. The higher the kind of consciousness he can assimilate, the higher is his level.
8The limits indicated are not absolutely valid in the individual cases. Consciousness expands beyond limits in a manner that is completely unpredictable. And these limits often depend on where the monad is at the moment. Many people who have reached the stage of culture perhaps are on levels of consciousness that actually belong to the stage of civilization. Many people who are at the stage of civilization can in psychoses, ecstasies, etc., spontaneously rise to levels that are far beyond their normal ones. Through education and influence from his environment the individual can assume a pattern of behaviour that is above or below his true level.
9In any case it is impossible to indicate the individual’s level. In contrast, the stage is as a rule evident from his general understanding of life independently of what experience and learning the individual has obtained during his incarnation. The individual’s understanding is a direct result of what exists latently in his subconscious, experience acquired and worked up in previous existences. Often only a few per cent of it is actualized in the new envelopes of incarnation, seldom more than 25 per cent.
10It very easily happens that man, when upset, suddenly sinks below his level, or, in ecstasy, under some influence, rises far above it.
1The emotional stage includes the stages of barbarism, civilization, and culture.
2The people found at the stages of barbarism and civilization are dominated by the lower emotional consciousness; those at the stage of culture, by the higher:
the physical stage the emotional stage: lower 48:4-7 higher 48:2,3 the mental stage: lower 47:6,7 higher 47:4,5 the causal stage 47:2,3
3The emotional stage can be divided into six hundred levels. At the stage of barbarism, consciousness in the two lowest emotional molecular kinds (48:6,7) is activated; at the stage of civilization, consciousness in the next two higher molecular kinds (48:4,5); and at the stage of culture, consciousness in the two highest emotional molecular kinds (48:2,3) is activated.
4Mankind has developed three races: the Lemurians, the Atlanteans, and the Aryans. The Lemurians are the organismal root-race, the Atlanteans are the emotional root-race, and the Aryans are the mental root-race. The Lemurian root-race has accomplished its purpose: to perfect the organism. It is fast dying out. The Atlantean root-race has far from accomplished its historical mission: to perfect emotional consciousness. The young Aryan root-race has some two million years to develop further before it has perfected the mental envelope.
5Races and incarnating individuals must be sharply distinguished. The Lemurians can be left out of account. The individuals of the two other races are found on all the levels of development. It is not possible to infer an individual’s level from his race.
6The great majority of incarnated mankind (about 85 per cent) are found at the emotional stage. Mankind consists of some 60 billion individuals. Some six billions of these are in physical incarnation. The others are found in the emotional, mental, and causal worlds.
7Individuals belong to clans. These are different in size, from some hundred to some million individuals.
8The individuals of some clan are on approximately the same level of development, in any case at the same stage of development. In contrast, the various clans are at different stages of development. The epochs of world history that we can assign to barbarism or inhumanity displayed mainly clans that were at lower stages. The epochs of splendour were characterized by clans that were at higher stages. In all times and in all nations, individuals of the highest levels have incarnated on account of bad reaping or to make a contribution.
9Poetry and prose fiction, art and music belong to emotionality. Those who “need something for their feelings” belong at the emotional stage. Moreover, practically everything in our culture belongs there. There is no market for things of higher mentality, and little understanding of it. The pertaining ideas are far above the powers of estimation there are in the current sense of reality. They are regarded as tokens of starry-eyed sanguinism, fantasy, utopianism. Scarcely two per cent of mankind have reached the 47:5 stage. You cannot expect to meet their representatives in remote Scandinavia with its academic dogmatism and technology. It would be pointless to incarnate in countries where there is no hotbed for ideas of higher mentality. Those are unable to live in the world of ideas who are interested in gossip and individualities (biographies) beyond the necessary facts and particulars.
10What interests people is the temporary and accidental in the individual’s envelopes of incarnation. They have no idea of the self (largely a “victim” of its envelopes). How could they have any such idea? They have not learnt to distinguish between the self and its envelopes in themselves.
11A rather common fiction, which to be sure easily becomes an idee fixe in too many fantasts at the emotional stage, is the “Messiah complex”. The individual afflicted with this becomes increasingly aware of his superior capacity for insight and understanding, becomes the unchallenged authority in every assembly. In that case there is a risk that either he will become increasingly estranged to the viewpoints of other people, the “too common”, the “too many”, or he will live in a world of plans that are impossible to realize in reasonable time, or in his enthusiasm for his ideals he will play the fool’s part to his contemporaries. Generally, it is the destiny of the pioneer to be laughed down.
1The mental stage includes the stages of humanity and ideality. Just as the emotional stage, the mental stage can be divided into three subordinate stages: in this case, the lower and higher mental stages and the causal stage. The lower mental stage is characterized by activated consciousness in the two lowest mental molecular kinds (47:6,7); the higher mental stage, by activated consciousness in the two next higher kinds(47:4,5); and the causal stage is characterized by activated consciousness in the two highest molecular kinds (47:2,3).
2The lower mentality develops at the emotional stage; the higher mentality, at the stage of humanity; and causal consciousness develops at the stage of ideality.
3How far mankind can reach with inference thinking (47:7) and principle thinking (47:6) is demonstrated by speculative thought as well as modern technology.
4It is too early to fantasize about what will be the results when a considerable part of mankind has acquired perspective thinking (47:5). In any case, we shall see an end of wars and other brutality and inhumanity, the infallible sign of the idiologies of barbarism still ruling.
1The stage of barbarism with its primitive physicalism has not been treated here. Ethnologists can supply the requisite materials for the study of the pertaining faculties of consciousness. They can be studied by all parents as well, since man from birth runs through all the levels of development up to his true level.
2Everything that in our times is included in culture belongs to the stage of civilization, because men do not yet know what is meant by culture. Only esoterics can answer that question, which, moreover, is true of all problems of life. In addition to religion, philosophy, and science, also literature, art, and music are treated. What is given below is, therefore, a brief orientation about the ruling idiologies (from Greek idios = one’s own, in contradistinction to ideology composed of reality ideas) within the domains indicated.
3Similar “cultural phenomena“ are found at all the different stages of development. Their quality determines the stage to which they should be assigned.
4As the knowledge of reality and life becomes common property, the “spiritual” quality will of course change. Man has a seemingly enormous capacity for imitation of examples that are above his own stage. In such cases only the “connoisseur” can determine the depth of the understanding of life expressed in the “work of art”.
5Esoterics makes it clear how much barbarism still remains in our much-vaunted civilization. It will take centuries, after the esoteric world view and life view have been recognized as the only rational and tenable ones, before all barbarisms and idiotisms have been weeded out of inherited cliche and conventional thinking.
6About 60 per cent of mankind are found at the stage of civilization. The pertaining individual has objective consciousness in the three lower physical molecular kinds (49:5-7), subjective consciousness in the four lower of the emotional world (48:4-7), and the two lower molecular kinds of the mental world (47:6,7).
7The monad is centred in the lower molecular kinds of the emotional envelope or in the lower of the mental envelope. Generally, the monad is centred in the emotional envelope, which is the most activated of all the envelopes. In emotional respect, the self is a lower emotional self; and in mental respect, a lower mental self. At this stage, the individual identifies himself with his egoistic feelings and with the content of inference and principle thinking. He intellectualizes lower emotional consciousness, barbarian desire, into feelings (union of desire and thought). The motives of speech and action are consis tently determined by emotional factors.
8On the lower levels, fear, envy, and delight over other people’s misfortunes are the strongest feelings.
9The civilizational individual lives in repulsive regions (those of hatred), is largely envious, delights in the misfortunes of others, is discontented with everything and everybody.
10The stage of hatred – hatred is hell. Hell is formed in the emotional world by people’s hateful imaginings.
11Consciousness develops through activity. At the two lowest stages, hatred is the most efficient factor of activity. The history of the world is an eloquent witness of what the results have been for mankind. Men have largely satanized existence. Sowing must be reaped, and the world’s history is the world’s tribunal.
12On higher levels, desire is more and more intellectualized, which results in a more nuanced life of feelings.
13Life in the emotional world after the physical envelopes have been put off becomes dependent on emotional life in the physical world. The physical conditions fall away. As for the rest, the individual’s emotionality and mentality remain unchanged with the illusions and fictions he has acquired.
14The causal envelope has only a passive consciousness, perceives everything that is recorded in the envelopes of incarnation, sees and learns in an instinctive way.
15The individual learns eventually to develop inference thinking from ground to consequence, from cause to effect.
16On the higher levels, he develops principle thinking or philosophical and scientific thinking. Philosophy is a typical product of civilization. It is a collection of reflections on existence without the knowledge of the facts required for this. The individual generally becomes a dogmatic or a skeptic, as a rule acquires some sort of world view and life view, often based on physical facts or fictions determined by emotional needs and mental guesswork and suppositions.
17As he acquires the faculty of principle thinking (47:6), he compares different world views and life views, and so doing chooses the ones corresponding to his own insight and understanding.
18At this stage, the individual is injudicious in respect of reality and life. He accepts almost any absurd suggestions. He can be made to believe almost anything.
19Everything affecting his own personality with its interests (economical, social, religious, etc.) established in engraved opinions, prejudice, dogmas, etc., precludes a matter-of-fact judgement.
20As he acquires principle thinking, emotional ways of looking at things begin to dominate in all domains. They remain ineradicable until the majority of mankind has reached the stage of culture.
21Man’s emotional envelope at the stage of civilization is chiefly composed of the fourth and fifth molecular kinds (48:4,5). This is the envelope that the individual is the most intensively conscious in, that he practically lives in, that the monad is centred in.
22The etheric envelope largely belongs to man’s subconscious, and he perceives the pertaining energies mostly as vitality or lack of vitality.
23The organism makes itself felt when diseased or when particular needs are being satisfied.
24However, the consciousness of man is mostly centred in the emotional envelope. The emotional envelope is thrown between happiness and misery, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, courage and fear, confidence and despair, exhilaration and dejection, etc.
25Man is his desires, feelings, and imaginings.
26His task at the stage of civilization is to try to reach the stage of culture by, popularly stated, ennobling and refining his desires, feelings, and, imaginings. In actual fact this implies an increased possibility for vibrations from the higher molecular kinds, a liberation from the lower and an identification with the higher, in which process the percentage of the higher molecular kinds (48:3 to begin with) increases, and the self attracts these and identifies with their consciousness.
27Without esoteric knowledge, the civilizational individual has no idea of the nature of existence, its meaning and goal. He rejects, if he is acute enough, all metaphysics, “belief” in the superphysical, and keeps to the visible world as the only one there is. In philosophical respect he becomes an agnostic and an antimetaphysician. The soul is to him a function of the nerve cells and besides that a beautiful fiction created by poets and artists in general.
28Literature is an excellent gauge of so-called culture. Novels written in our times depict individuals at the stage of ignorance mainly possessing bad qualities, and so those literary works reinforce universal illusionism. Biographies revel in the lowest qualities. The lives of individuals are interpreted from rash words they uttered under emotional stress; their actions, from motives invented by others. Good qualities are not at all interesting. It is just as in social life; when somebody starts saying good things about someone, the gossip falls silent and they switch over to something more interesting.
29It is the same with literature as with everything else. You become whatever you take in, thus what you read. “Show me your book-case, and I know your stage of development.”
30Classical authors painted in black and white and thereby did an invaluable service to mankind. They did not blur out the distinctions between true and fa lse, right and wrong, human and inhuman. Authors of the Strindberg type, not to mention scandal writers, do a veritable disservice by their envenoming hateful propaganda. The specialists on the worst things in the lowest region of the emotional world are no guides out of the labyrinth. But at the stage of civilization we are not to expect any ennoblement. The greater is the risk that the type of people that Voltaire called l’animal mechant par preference* will be admired and encouraged by Nietzschean epigones. [*See endnote.]
31What at lower stages of development is called culture is often masked barbarism manifesting itself in ugliness, disharmony, the countless expressions of hatred. The cultural prophets of our times, who have tried to spread understanding of everything spurious, ugly, false, wrong, demonstrate their inability to understand true culture.
1Starting from the fact that everything is hatred (repulsion) that is not love (attraction), you can assert that the individuals at this stage are dominated by hatred in all its countless modes of expression. It sounds better, but it is basically the same thing, if you say that they are egoists.
2During incarnation, the emotional envelope at this stage is interwoven with the mental envelope so that both envelopes are like one envelope. This has the effect that desire and thought can seldom be separated, that most people think under the action of emotional impulses. Since the emotional envelope is incomparably more vitalized and active than the mental envelope, emotionality determines even thought and we have so-called emotional thinking.
3The most common emotions at the stage of civilization can be divided into five principal groups. The strongest and most common emotion is fear. It is fundamental and is emotional evil in the real sense. Man fears disease and death, the loss of friends and loved ones, of health, money, income, property, position, esteem, making mistakes, disasters of all sorts. He fears the loss of emotional illusions and mental fictions, the future, his feelings, his thoughts, fear itself.
4This evil lies deeply rooted in animal nature. Also animals fear. Fear lies in instinctive, subconscious experience. It lies in the ignorance of reality and life and the Law. It lies in the sense of powerlessness in the face of unknown forces, in the sense of bad sowing to be reaped, in the sense of ignorance, impotence, limitation. The “sin in the world”, which theologians talk nonsense about, is not “sin” (a crime against an infinite being) and did not come through man but consists in the repulsive basic tendency of the monads, which manifests itself already in the parasitism of plants and the predacity of animals, which conflict with the great law of life, the law of unity, the meaning of life, the basis of all happiness in the cosmos.
5Fear is ignorance of the fact that there is no death, that every primordial atom has an eternal life, that life is joy, happiness, bliss, that the change and dissolution of the forms of life lead to better forms, a richer life, that the emotions of others can be “infectious” at lightning speed through telepathic transference, so that we become the victims of psychoses of all kinds without knowing it.
6Emotionality is illusoriness and therefore an inevitable falsification of reality, however real it may appear to us when we experience it. Only mentality can liberate us from this dependence. Emotionality can be overcome through the fictions of faith. Fictions win over illusions, and this is the “salvation from evil through faith”. However, doubt will always present itself anew until certainty is based on the knowledge of reality.
7Subconscious experience of the sufferings of previous envelopes of incarnation in combination with imaginative ideas of the possibility of similar things in the future results in uneasiness and anxiety from which nobody can liberate himself until the individual has acquired self-consciousness in his causal envelope and thereby is and knows himself to be definitively free.
8Religious wars, torture, and burnings of heretics are eloquent testimonies to the fact that religion at the stage of civilization has not had an ennobling effect on mankind.
9It was the elite that sacrificed themselves for freedom and right, tolerance and brotherhood, the simplest humanity, that broke the tyranny of the church. The philosophers of enlightenment were a heterogeneous group of thinkers and poets but united in their struggle against the dogmas of barbarian metaphysics.
1Mental types at the stage of civilization always are mentally active, often very active, not seldom extremely analytical in a permanent discursive thinking with restless reflection. They attach great importance to exactitude of language, stringency in reasoning, the capacity for separating the main issue from side issues. If they have acquired principle thinking (47:6), analysis of concepts, definition of concepts, often becomes their hobby. Then they suit well to be philosophers, can be absorbed in and comfortable with their intellectual constructions, which they can make so solid that they do not even comprehend them themselves. Others make them so airy that they lose themselves in empty abstractions. They take their fictions to be sheer realities.
2At this stage there are plenty of mental geniuses who are great as philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, technicians.
3The intellectualization brought about through universal literacy, technological development, literature (including newspapers), the advances of science, a philosophy that attempts to eliminate superphysical knowledge and limits itself to a belief in physical reality only, entails an increasing faith in the individual’s own judgement, a faith that involves great risks, first and foremost a philosophical and scientific tyranny that will not be less efficient than the religious tyranny nowadays neutralized.
4The faith of the physicalist in his own capacity for judgement increases ever more. He has no idea of his own total ignorance of the nature of matter and energy. He believes that the physical laws he has managed to discover are valid for the cosmos as a whole – a grotesque error. He has no idea of the existence of higher worlds, the matters, energies, and laws of those worlds.
5The physicalist world view, starting from the assumption that there is only physical life, results in the opinion that the meaning of life is pleasure and happiness, whereas in fact it is consciousness development. The feelings of pleasure and discomfort, which determine the action of people, then become accepted norms in the assessment of the realities of life and the entire attitude to life. Add to this the social view that holds society responsible for the individual’s discomfort rather than himself, then we obtain the social attitude that strengthens the demand on society to do everything for the individual.
1Phenomena of the stage of culture include mysticism, Indian yoga philosophy, and the esoteric conception of art explained by Goethe and others, and moreover everything falling within the higher emotionality dictated by the striving of attraction to community and unity.
2By acquiring consciousness in the third emotional molecular kind (48:3), man enters the stage of the mystic, or the stage of culture.
3The self is centred in the higher emotional (48:3), reaches 48:2 in the course of incarnations. The pertaining vibrations are attractive, expressing themselves as admiration, affection, sympathy. The mental molecular kinds activated at this stage are 47:6,7, which cannot control the higher emotional, which is the explanation of the illusoriness of mysticism.
4Emotionality becomes sovereign. “Gefuhl ist alles”* (Goethe). [*See endnote.]
5At the stage of culture begins the vitalization of the centres above the diaphragm, but it is only at the end of the causal stage that all of them are fully functioning.
6You must be alive to the fact that consciousness development is a slow process, collectively as well as individually. Before he is able to reach the stage of culture, the individual, while still at the stage of civilization, has come in contact with immensely much belonging to higher stages, impressions that, eve n if not been clearly apprehended, have entered into his subconscious and eventually throughout his incarnations have enhanced his understanding into a vague perception that in due time makes conceptual thinking possible.
7The stage of culture begins as the individual acquires attractive feelings. Without them, the individual is rather an intelligent animal that is the more dangerous for the lack of these feelings. That is why it is important that children may grow up in an environment that arouses such feelings. If they are fostered in a spirit of hatred (fear, anger, contempt), the faint first signs of attraction are destroyed, and their higher emotional development are made more difficult, if not impossible altogether. If they have previously reached a higher level and thus possess innate dispositions to attraction, they become very unhappy and disoriented.
8As a rule individuals who have an attractive basic tendency are the ones most easily influenced by the attractions of the higher molecular kinds and experience the happiness that follows upon every kind of striving after unity. Admiration, affection, sympathy become natural aptitudes for them. They easily bring in their wake all the other noble feelings, which in due time grow into noble qualities. In life upon life the individual has opportunities to cultivate such qualities. So doing he will eliminate qualities of the opposite tendency, which perhaps are required on lower levels but prove to be obstructive to the sense of happiness. Virtues that have become vices by being exaggerated become ever more balanced.
9If incarnations are compared with each other at the individual’s transition from civilization to culture, it may appear as though he did not possess the same intellectual capacity, and you understand the familiar saying, which surprises many people, that “the children of the world are wiser than the children of the light”. Intensive egoism, harnessesing all forces to achieve its goals, is not easily superseded by an equal intensive altruistic urge. Fanaticism, which could have afforded the same degree of force to the individual’s motives, is mitigated through attraction.
10The incarnations that lead to the acquisition of attractive consciousness are as a rule trying. Efficient experiences are necessary to make the individual realize the illusoriness of his egoistic aims. Mistakes often serve to force bad qualities out of the subconscious into the daylight to be eliminated. The individual is made to learn that man harbours all the possibilities of good and evil, that the good qualities must be acquired and the bad ones must be starved out by not being heeded.
11At the stage of culture, the individual’s emotional envelope is filled with molecules from the third molecular kind (48.3). Only now it is possible to speak of self-realization and the individual begins to long for ennoblement. He learns to avoid the repulsive vibrations and lets himself be influenced more and more by the attractive ones, so that “ennoblement” progresses more and more in each incarnation. He becomes a nobleman in the true sense of that word. He loses his interest in all the things that make up “culture” at the stage of civilization.
12From the technical point of view, the pertaining consciousness development consists in the acquisition of consciousness in ever higher molecular kinds. To begin with, the envelopes are filled with the molecular kinds that predominate in the environment. Through being activated by higher consciousness, higher molecular kinds are attracted to the envelope, and the lower ones are exchanged for higher ones. If the individual allows himself to be seduced by the lower that in the beginning still entices him, this exchange of course goes in the opposite direction.
13Ennoblement of the cells of the organism through a vegetarian diet, the use of water inside and out, air, sun, exercise, hygiene, all of this facilitates the acquisition of higher emotional molecules.
14The higher the molecular kind, the finer and stronger the vibrations eventually become.
15Repulsive vibrations are little by little superseded by attractive ones, and as the feeling of happiness accompanying this process becomes stronger, it affects the individual so that he strives after such states more and more.
16The mystic realizes how abortive it is to try to force other people to understand such experiences as belong on higher levels. He realizes the errors of the current methods of upbringing through inculcation of the taboos of moralism hostile to life instead of stimulating attractive feelings.
17At the stage of culture, the individual begins to take an interest in the meaning and goal of life. Before then he is fully occupied with other problems, with orienting himself in the physical world and acquiring the requisite fund for insight and understanding.
1Common usage makes no distinction between culture and humanity, since there is no historical experience of either. It is true that both mystics and humanists have lived in socalled cultured nations, but they have seldom occupied leading positions.
2“Cultural philosophers” define culture as the sum total of material, emotional, and intellectual values, development of science and technology in a harmonious union with ennobling literature, art, and music. Culture is also thought to include the understanding of man’s inalienable rights, the assertion of duties and responsibility, tolerance and brotherhood.
3In such definitions three different stages of development are brought together: the science and technology of civilization and its attempted solutions of the problems of physical needs, the ennoblement of emotionality by culture, and the mental sovereignty of humanism with the understanding of all things human pertaining to it.
4These different stages of course do not display any marked limits because of all that is unrealized in the subconscious of the individuals, but in individual cases the tendencies are relatively easily discernible in the understanding demonstrated.
5In respect of consciousness culture is attraction.
6In a nation that has attained the stage of culture, the domains of consciousness that have of old been assigned to “culture” (literature, art, music) prove to be ever more expedient means of refinement of the conception of reality (“ennoblement”) and so doing serve consciousness development. Mentality (47:6,7) is emotionalized, and the immensely rich emotional life produces works of art that become models for those on lower levels. It is another matter that these works of art, however unattainable they may appear, cannot be compared with those which some time (in about 500 years) will be formed by individuals at the causal stage and at the stage of unity. “Modern art” is a parody of art, a return to the stage of barbarism, a consequence of the total disorientation of mankind, after the old systems of orientation have demonstrated their unfitness for life. Also the sense of beauty is in a state of dissolution.
7Regrettably, literature, art, music, and other products of culture in our times are of such a quality that they drag the minds down rather than uplift them. Could not the cultural people who understand the emergency organize to encourage writers and publishers, artists, etc. by exclusively buying their works and refusing to concern themselves with the culture garbage?
8The cultural individual realizes that the purpose of art is to afford us beauty, harmony, and joy. Ugliness and disharmony lower the emotional vibrations of consciousness, depress and bring about joylessness. Moreover, art at the stage of huma nity corresponds to mental visions of beauty and mental relations of harmony and is given new tasks to perform in ever higher worlds, facts that probably are understood by those who have found their way out of the aberrations of modern art.
1At the stage of culture, the individual identifies himself with his noble, altruistic attractive feelings.
2Those who are at the stage of civilization may be as intelligent, acute, and profound as those who are at the stage of culture. But they have no longing for ennoblement, for the acquisition of the qualities of attraction, and they live for their egoistic interests. Those who are at the stage of culture try to serve development and are willing, if need be, to sacrifice themselves for it.
3Emotionality is no source of knowledge but, at the present stage of mankind’s development in the emotional eon, the most important factor of activation.
4The stage of culture marks the highest stage of emotional development. The mystics of all ages belong here, sufis, raja yogis (bhakti, karma, and gnana yogis). The goal of their aspiration (the highest level of 48:2), the last incarnation at the emotional stage, is the incarnation of the saint, in which most of the emotional qualities and abilities acquired by the individual have opportunities of actualization. This involves the acquisition of at least 25 per cent of the essential qualities. When they have been acquired at least 75 per cent, the individual is ripe for the stage of ideality (47:3), and when they have reached one hundred per cent, he is ripe for the stage of essentiality, or the stage of unity (46).
5Most of the pertaining perfections never have any opportunity of being reactualized until at the completion of the mental stage. But of course they exist as latent dispositions in the subconscious and could soon enough be reacquired, should the individual consider this necessary. It is sufficient for him that they manifest themselves as instinct.
6Anyone who (without his knowledge) has already attained the stage of culture must have acquired patience, endurance, self-discipline, and judgement at least 25 per cent. Thus it should be relatively easy to reacquire those qualities in a new life. As a rule, life gives opportunities of doing so. Such a reservation must always be made, since a “bad reaping” can make a reacquisition exceedingly difficult or impossible altogether. Even if qualities are actualized anew, the conditions of life may be so trying that the percentage is insufficient. This is true of higher stages as well, and that is a matter which moralists are utterly unable to comprehend (understanding is totally precluded by the very moralism, being an expression of instinctive hatred). Mankind has not yet realized that it is at the stage of hatred and that moralism is the defence of life-ignorance for hatred.
7When man has attained the stage of culture, he has become human. Before that, there is a risk that he demonstrates his subhumanity. He begins to apprehend the attractive vibrations of the higher emotional world and acquires ever more of the qualities of attraction through the many higher emotional levels of development.
8He acquires understanding of all kinds of noble qualities, the result of vibrations within the higher emotional molecular kinds. The understanding of idealism and ideality grows on each higher pertaining level. It becomes possible to contact the tendency to unity of the essential world, belonging to the fifth natural kingdom, a contact that releases sublime ecstasies and sublime feelings of all kinds. To what extent such feelings make the individual give up his egoism, cause him to develop the will to sacrifice, the desire to serve, etc., depends on the level and strength of the attractive vibrations. More often than not, many repulsive feelings remain, especially on the lower levels, to which the individual (also on higher emotional levels) easily falls down.
9Imagination develops according as his desires are ennobled, and in this process intellectual interests grow ever more in significance.
10On the lower levels of the stage of culture, the individual is characterized by an ongoing striving for adaptation accompanied by an increasing sense of affection and responsibility for his relations to people (chiefly, of course, to his family and friends).
11He defends the rights of others while therefore not forgoing his own rights in any way.
12On higher levels we find a striving for ennoblement, refined religious egoism with the saint as the ideal.
13The cultural individual strives after good manners, good form, understanding of music and all kinds of art. Crude manners, crude speech are abominations to him.
14The self is centred in the higher emotional, thus is a higher emotional self, but still a lower mental self.
15Lack of mental clarity obtains in emotionality when consciousness in 48:2 and 48:3 cannot be influenced by 47:5.
16The mystic seeks to vitalize and acquire active consciousness in 48:3 and later in 48:2. The humanist seeks to acquire consciousness in 47:5.
17At the stage of civilization, the two lowest kinds of emotional consciousness (48:6,7) are vitalized by the lowest mental kind (47:7), and the two next higher emotional kinds (48:4 and by the lowest mental but one (47:6).
18At the stage of humanity, emotional 48:2 and 48:3 are intellectualized by mental 47:5.
19Therefore, the mystic in his superetheric emotional consciousness (48:3) is quite unable to use his mentality to control his emotionality, which expands in its own fantasy not suspecting its illusoriness in the least. Before a contact with the higher mentality (47:5, the stage of perspectives) has been achieved, he believes that he can do without reason, not knowing that what he calls reason is a lower reason and that there exists a higher reason, which is the only way out of fantastry.
20The mystic loses himself in the highest regions of the emotional world without any possibility of rational orientation. He lives in states of rapture with all manner of visions, believes himself to be all-knowing and all-wise, to have cosmic consciousness, to be one with the absolute, to have been absorbed in Brahman, entered nirvana, etc.
21The mystic falls a victim to fictions the reality content of which he cannot determine, being a lower mental self.
22The principal fiction: that saints are all-knowing, although they still lack experience of higher worlds and do not possess esoteric knowledge, not yet at least.
23The mystics do not see that the path to causal consciousness goes through the development of mental consciousness.
24Add to this a fact that emotionalists overlook. Essentiality cannot control emotionality except through mentality, through mental knowledge and mental will.
25Those who cannot learn from “imperfect people” are idiotized moralists who do not understand what knowledge is.
26Those who regard the saint as all-knowing or the mentalist, who might be repulsive, as life-ignorant so doing demonstrate their own life-ignorance. Anyone who has his incarnation as a saint behind him has taken his stand under the law of unity and subsequently serves development, mankind, and life whenever he is able to. That he will suffer for his higher level by being generally calumniated is certainly often due to people’s malicious pleasure and desire of persecutio n as well as his own bad reaping.
27A manifest trait in the individual at the stage of the mystic is his tendency to fanaticism, blinding him to all but a very limited part of the horizon, where his compass points. The nobility of devotion blinds him. He cannot grasp that he who “wishes only the good, the best” is not necessarily right. Whoever does not follow him must be on the wrong path. That is part of the illusion, the illusion of the “good”.
1The emotional world is the world of illusion. In this world they vainly seek the fulfilment of their inmost longing. They find only creations of their own and other people’s imaginings, masquerading representatives of higher beings at the utmost.
2Christian mysticism, Islamic sufism, Hindu bhakti yoga all lead to the highest emotional stage (48:2), the stage of the saint.
3Regrettably, spurious mysticism can be easily confused with the genuine one, and man so readily deceives himself. The revelling in feelings, fantasies, and ecstasies easily turns into a life of unreality that only reinforces egoism and self-blindness.
4Regrettably, the Catholic Church has combined the ideal of the saint with irrelevant motives: obedience to the Church and its ritual, demonstration of religious zeal, the most strict observation of the taboos of moralism, asceticism, celibacy, flagellation, mismanagement of the instrument that the monad should bring to the highest functionality.
5The saints of the Church all too often are characterized by fanaticism, bigotry, intolerance.
6The Church teachings of vicarious suffering and the saints’ works of supererogation, which supposedly blot out the sins of other people, are at variance with the law of reaping, the law of eternal justice. There are strange patron saints. Saint Hubert, the patron of hunters, is supposed to give people luck when they murder animals.
7Religions that promise freedom from the repercussions from all manner of misdeeds and so abrogate the law of implacable justice cannot demand to be counted among the cultural religions. Only a small fraction of all that the individual has latently in his subconscious can be actualized in one incarnation.
8The cultural individual is “by all his nature” religious, even though, like the German poet Schiller, because of his true religious ness he cannot accept any one of the existing forms of religion.
9Religion is in essence feeling, not reason. But anyone who has developed a wee bit of common sense cannot possibly accept inhumanities and absurdities, blasphemies against the almighty love that is leading all life to final perfection.
10The two biggest mistakes of the Christian religion are the concepts of sin and forgiveness. They are human concepts, all too human. According to theology, sin is a “crime against an infinite being and so requires infinite punishment”. But human mistakes are no crimes against the godhead. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge of laws of nature and laws of life. We shall have to make good the mistakes we have made out of ignorance of those laws. The law of sowing and reaping is an unshakable law of life. We are to reap both the good and the evil we have sown in life after life. All suffering in the world is a consequence of ignorance. All life makes up a unity and all kinds of lack of love are mistakes as to the law of unity, or the law of love. All is hatred that is not love.
11This insight is won at the stage of culture. The cultural individual, having reached consciousness in the higher emotional molecular kinds, experiences the vibrations in those regions of the emotional world, assimilates that irresistible attraction of life which unites him with every living creature. And this is the salvation from all the life expressions of hatred, which make up evil in the world.
12On the highest levels, the cultural individual becomes a mystic. He experiences the mystery of love, which he, being without the esoteric knowledge of reality and life, cannot possibly explain. True mysticism is everything entering into that attraction to all life which the individual is unable to explain rationally, the striving to enter into the unity of life. The mystic has no need of further explanations, is not interested in such things. He experiences unity beyond all the speculations of ignorance, beyond all too human reason. And he knows that he is right against the egoistic lack of love of the “whole world”. He feels instinctively that life is divine and that the divine is unity. That is his religion and he has no need of any other.
1On the higher levels of the mystic, the individual aspires to union with the divine, devoting all his energy to the attainment of this ideal. When, in spells of contemplation, he reaches contact with the vibrations of the unity of life, everything becomes divine, since everything appears included in unity. Our mistakes appear to depend on the fact that we have forgotten our divine origin. Human beings appear to be gods in exile. Salvation is the emancipation from identification with everything repulsive. The world appears to be the best possible, since it is a work of love. The deity cannot be blamed for the fact that men want to live in appearances, deceive themselves and in their shortsightedness think they can line their pockets on the expense of other people without detriment to themselves.
2The mystic is filled with peace and serene harmony, being free from fear, anxiety, worries and concerns. If man is unhappy, it just demonstrates that he excludes himself from unity.
3Three different phases in the mystic’s developmental process can be distinguished: assimilation, illusionism, and dedication. Assimilation has the result that the individual is infatuated by the energies of attraction which appear to contain the absolute. The individual attains liberation from this blindness by becoming absorbed in dedication to an ideal, a noble mission in life, and in this work of service forgetting himself.
4The mystic lives in the “spiritual”, in the sense of the presence of god, and considers his states to be incomparable superior to anything mental, although his experience is limited to the lower mental (47:6,7). Often, in his states of ecstasy, he loses his contact with the matter aspect and drowns in the seemingly boundless ocean of consciousness. Perceptions become so intense that they completely overwhelm him. Everything appears possible. The self thinks that it is omniscient, beyond space and time, nothing but bliss, in Brahman, in the absolute, in nirvana, one with the infinite, etc.
5The mystic dwells in emotional regions that have not yet been activated by mankind at large, so that their vibrations have not been coloured by human longing for such virtues as respect, reverence, gentleness, humility, devotion, will to sacrifice, etc., which would facilitate the acquisition of these virtues. The pertaining vibrations (48:3) pass most people by unnoticedly in their superconscious.
6The mystic does not find words to express the feelings that in ever finer nuances fill him with enthusiasm and beatifying ecstasies, since language has not yet been enriched with terms for the pertaining experiences. When a great part of mankind has reached the stage of culture, this condition will of course change under the influence of common emotional experiences. At that time, there will be a prospect for the pertaining emotionality as well to be intellectualized by that elite at the stage of humanity who have acquired perspective consciousness. Then the word “mysticism” will no longer have any connotation of incomprehensibility to the masses, since they will believe they know what it is about. Also the communications between the mystics, who previously had their individual languages, will be superseded by expressions that are mentally clearer. Even now you can find in the ever richer mystic literature trains of thought that in continually new variations render something of the common traits of experience.
7To many people, their entry on the path of mysticism appears as a spiritual discovery of an undreamt-of reality, an “awakening of the soul”, as it were, in ecstatic states of intoxicating happiness. The individual can feel himself “caught up to heaven”, the Elysian Fields, or the Meads of the Blest. In exceptional cases, this can involve a contact with direct vibrations from the essential world (46:7), from which the individual, after returning to his senses, retains feelings of ineffable bliss and indelible certitude of the existence of what he will most often clothe in a personal expression of god. Even in the quiet moments of future lives at the mental stage, his subconscious will yield some instinctive reminiscence of this experience, which can instil a sense of emotional insufficiency, of paradise lost to the humanist individual, elicit from him, like Schopenhauer before the portrait of Rance the Trappist, a longing after the subconscious sainthood once acquired. You will not miss what you have never had.
8The contact the mystic obtains with the vibrations of the world of unity becomes a factor in his subconscious instinct of life, a factor that will always disturb, spur, urge him.
9To the individual caught by the attractions of mysticism, self-realization appears simple, the ideals within reach, the goal easily attained. However, the periods of ecstasy are followed by others, in which depressions set in with feelings of impotence before recognized tasks, problems appear insoluble, things strived for seem out of reach. Add to this the fact that bad sowing, which the individual could not have reaped on lower levels without harm to himself, must now be reaped.
10It would have harmed him previously, since he would not have understood the experiences brought on by it, but they would have been meaningless, embittering his life, whereas now they can contribute to liberating him from old identifications.
1The intellectual capacity remains largely the same at the stage of culture as it was at the stage of civilization. It has other problems to occupy itself with, however. The vibrations of attraction (the currents of material energy pouring through the highest molecular kinds of the emotional envelope) eventually bring about a change of the individual’s attitude to life, a change of mostly egoistic motives for altruistic ones, an identification with the ideals of attraction, and a liberation from egocentric ones. The desire to be useful, to help, and to serve grows ever stronger through life upon life on each higher level. In this process, human insufficiency becomes increasingly evident and other, fresh sources of power are instinctively sought after. The metaphysical need becomes ever more ardent. The seeker strives in various ways (best illustrated in the Indian raja yoga methods, karma, bhakti, and gnana yoga) to get into contact with his superconsciousness. The individual becomes a mystic aspiring with increasing one-pointedness towards the stage of the saint. Seeing ever more clearly the insufficiency of the intellect, he seeks, with his heart wide-open to the unbounded consciousness, to partake of the unutterable, the “One”, the Absolute, with many names. Filled with ineffable joy, he thinks himself able to “enter into the All”, “unite with the Godhead”, etc. On the wings of imagination he flees to the heights whence the sweet message is perceived. Ramakrishna’s ecstatic experiences are typical of the mystic and the saint. Lacking the corresponding consciousness, he is unable to judge the pertaining experiences in any realistic manner. He avoids instinctively everything that he senses has a debasing and brutalizing effect. He preferably pays attention to things that he can admire, that have a refining and ennobling effect. At a mature age, he finds it easy to see through the disguises of hatred and the illusoriness of egoistic aspirations.
2He understands that the forces of attraction are stronger than those of repulsion, that the law of attraction is universal.
We can best assimilate the food we love.
We can best perform the tasks we love.
We can best understand the beings we love.
We learn the best from everything we love.
3The cultural individual learnt principle thinking at the stage of civilization and so he quite understands principles, although perhaps he does not see that principles are important to logical thought. Moreover, he remains largely unaware of the two highest mental faculties, which still remain to be acquired for him: perspective thinking (47:5) and system thinking (47:4), even though he construct however many natural systems for his orientation in the physical world or logical systems for his thinking. His principle thinking (47:6), however, unites with his higher emotionality, resulting in his emotional thinking, which becomes imagination rather than feeling. In the union of desire and thought, thought becomes ever more dominant so that, instead of the dominance of desire prevailing at the stage of civilization, resulting in feeling, or desire tinged with thought, the union becomes thought coloured with desire, which precisely is imagination. The gain is greater than ignorance may realize. Not only does the largely repulsive tendency of the stage of civilization change for an attractive tendency with everything that this implies in the matter of refinement, ennoblement, and spontaneous action in agreement with the laws of life. Also, the imagination becomes a source of energy that, if put to the service of life in various domains, far exceeds what the individual has been able to do in both emotional and mental respect until then.
4The emotional life of the cultural individual after the end of his physical life does not on the whole last longer than that of the civilizational individual, but his sojourn in the bliss of the mental world may very well last three to four times longer.
5When the individual has acquired the ability to produce vibrations in the third emotional molecular kind (48:3), he is for the first time able to achieve a direct contact with his permanent causal envelope and supply it with mental molecules of the corresponding degree. In that process, the causal envelope begins to grow in extent.
1As he concludes his incarnation as a saint, the individual has worked through the stages of emotional consciousness. His development goes on with the activation of higher mental consciousness, perspective consciousness (47:5) to begin with.
2For individuals at this stage it was possible, before 1875, to be initiated into some secret knowledge order instituted by the planetary hierarchy. There is a great number of other orders, but only the original Rosicrucian, Maltese, and Masonic Orders possessed (in symbolic formulation) the knowledge of reality.
3After 1875 nobody has been initiated into any one of these orders. The orders that exist nowadays and have assumed the ancie nt names without authority to do so are not approved by the planetary hierarchy. These modern orders were not instituted by essential selves (46), the only individuals commissioned to do so.
4It is true that the original orders can never be “disbanded”. They have been closed, however, perhaps for good.
5Ever since 1875, when the planetary hierarchy decided that certain parts of the knowledge, kept secret until then, were to be publicized, more and more esoteric facts have gradually been given out through disciples of the planetary hierarchy.
6Many writers have appeared, driven by the commendable motive of presenting these facts to seekers of the lost knowledge. Not being in possession of the requisite basic system, however, they have been unable to present these facts in accordance with scientific requirements of intelligibility and exactitude. The deplorable terminology used has made it all appear spurious and at the very outset deterred many people from wasting their time on examining this system replete with unknown facts.
7The assertion that only causal selves are able to write on esoteric matters is erroneous. All are able to do so who have once been initiates and possess the system latently, who have been trained to think methodically and systematically, and who have received the necessary facts. Unfortunately, at least one of these preconditions has been absent in esoteric writers.
8The secretary of the planetary hierarchy (D.K.) considers that higher selves than causal selves are unsuitable as writers, since the distance between writer and readers in those cases is too great. Also, 45-selves cannot waste their time on going into the prevalent mentality, which would require a repeated down-scaling of the teacher’s perception.
9It is at the stage of humanity that the need of a real knowledge of the nature, meaning, and goal of existence requires to be satisfied. Since initiation into a genuine knowledge order is a recourse that is no longer available, all too many people end up in skepticism or agnosticism. Also, by ridiculing theosophy everything has been done to deter researchers from examining the pertaining problems of knowledge more closely.
10Where Laurency’s two works on esoterics are concerned, they have chosen the tactic of complete silence. In Sweden, no newspaper or journal has reviewed them.* That day will come, however, when even that method will prove insufficient. In their ignorance of life they do not understand the liability incurred by those who have hindered seekers from finding their way to the knowledge of reality. [*See endnote.]
11At the stage of humanity, the individual conquers the two highest mental faculties by learning to apprehend vibrations within the third and fourth, or the two highest mental molecular kinds. In respect of consciousness this means perspective thinking (47:5) and system thinking (47:4). By acquiring these faculties the individual becomes a higher mental self.
12Through his mental stages he acquires, unintentionally so to speak, and without understanding how and why, perspective thinking, and, on the highest levels of his stage, finally system thinking or the all-embracing ideas pouring down from his subjective causal consciousness of the lowest kind (47:3), which is now activated.
13Humanist is the esoteric term for the individual who has attained the stage of humanity. This is achieved by anyone who in some incarnation has attained the highest emotional level and crowned his long emotional development at the three lowest stages with an incarnation as a saint. In his new incarnation, he strives to acquire real common sense (a term that of course has been abused by all ignorant people). Common sense is the highest human reason and is acquired at the stage of humanity. It constitutes the necessary basic condition of the possibility of acquiring intuition.
14At the stage of humanity, the individual identifies himself with the content of perspective and system thinking.
15The monad is centred in the higher mental, thus is a higher mental self.
16The mental self is based on knowledge and insight.
17At the stage of humanity, the monad becomes a “sterling” personality. The individual is his fictions.
18At this stage, the individual has acquired most of the qualities and abilities necessary to fully understanding things human.
19As a rule he is totally misjudged by those at lower stages. He learns to assess a human being by some rational principle, not by the external qualities of the personality.
20He acquires subjective consciousness in the four molecular kinds of the mental world 47:4-7, especially 47:4,5. So doing he intellectualizes his higher emotionality, the noble desires of the stage of culture, into ideals.
21When the mental is able to control the emotional, resolutions are carried into effect. Before then, they arouse the emotional defiance complex, which demonstrates to the self which one of them is the ruler.
22The humanist becomes the master of his destiny to an ever-increasing extent, learns the import of the saying of the ancients, “the wise man rules his stars, the fool is ruled by them”.
23The more noble qualities he acquires, the stronger becomes the guiding instinct of life.
24The humanist has the development of the emotional stage behind him. He has learnt to receive and to use the emotional energies. There is for him nothing more to be mastered in his emotional envelope.
25The qualities and abilities he acquired in his incarnation as a saint remain latent in the subconscious of the self. Which of these are actualized in the new consciousnesses of incarnation depends on many grounds and causes.
26Having concluded his emotional development, the humanist concentrates on his mental development. The power of mentality makes itself felt more and more. He directs his attention to areas that he formerly, as a mystic, touched upon with his imagination but could never grasp mentally and work at. So doing he unfortunately often neglects to revive that attraction of unity of which he was formerly capable. Everything latent must be activated anew in each new incarnation. And often he suffers from this neglect of his and, like Schopenhauer, longs to return to those sweet states about which he perhaps reads in the writings by saints and fully understands.
27Through a perverse upbringing, the repulsion (hatred) lying latent in the deposits of the subconscious can be roused to life and make the resuscitation of latent attraction difficult. It is true that this attraction remains as an instinct in those who have their incarnation as a saint behind them, but it may be difficult for it to assert itself. This is often seen in those who have attained the stage of humanity and make their contributions to development but nevertheless may appear repulsive.
28An individual on the higher levels of the stage of humanity has acquired most human qualities and abilities. But probably only about five per cent of all this subconscious and latent faculty has been actualized in most incarnations. In order to judge an individual it is necessary to be able to see the 95 per cent as well.
29Then it is another matter which qualities and abilities have been acquired 100 per cent. None must be below 25 per cent, which is much as it is.
30In the final incarnation at the stage of humanity, the twelve essential qualities must have been developed at least 75 per cent.
31Human nature is constantly changing. Until the age of 35 years the individual strives to attain his old average level. Some people never reach it. The individuals at the stage of ideality can attain it between 21 and 28 years; those at the stage of unity, at 14 years.
32Approximately fifteen per cent of mankind have succeeded in attaining the stages of culture and humanity. They make up clans that are busy with exploring reality and comprehending existence.
33How many of these clans simultaneous ly incarnate to serve development, mankind, and life depends on what the conditions are that their contributions will be appreciated and utilized. By and large their work for mankind has been of little importance, since in their research work they have been hampered by human ignorance and inability to understand, by distrust, by repugnande, by the fanatical adherence to all manner of superstition. They have had to be content with striving to reach higher levels themselves. Utterly few of these forerunners of mankind have succeeded in attaining the highest mental stage and correctly apprehending the vibrations in the fourth mental molecular kind from below with the possibility of system thinking that it affords.
34Those at the stage of humanity are about one in a thousand. Of the new clans incarnating, however, several are at the stage of humanity, so that the presence of humanists in the “cultured nations” will probably rise to one per cent.
35Of the mankind presently incarnated only about two hundred thousand people have attained the higher levels of the stage of humanity and so doing have become mental selves. Hitherto the conditions have been such that mental selves have had nothing to learn and have not felt attracted to incarnation.
36As a rule, these higher mentalists have only been able to apprehend the vibrations of the third molecular kind from below (47:5), which make perspective thinking possible. A pronounced character of this type was Nietzsche. He had liberated himself from slavish dependence on principle thinking, being the first step towards emancipation from the concrete form-thinking of mentalism.
37In work after work he went against his fundamental problems to extract new viewpoints from them. His contribution was mainly negative and critical because he lacked the basic facts of the esoteric knowledge, which are necessary to a correct conception of existence, its meaning and goal.
38Still mankind lives in an emotional chaos and only a minority of those who are in position to understand esoterics can be made to examine the logical tenability of the existing esoteric systems, which is the individual’s only way of convincing himself that they accord with reality, until he has acquired causal consciousness and is able to ascertain the facts for himself.
39It is characteristic of the stage of humanity that man lives in the world of thought and is able to control the emotional by the mental. He liberates himself from the life of illusions through fictions, being fully aware of the fact that they are fictions, which he regards as temporary hypotheses.
40There are humanists who, being without a direct contact with the esoteric knowledge, have by themselves succeeded in emancipating themselves from idiologies still ruling and most of ignorance’s ways of looking at things. Such individuals often feel uncertain whether they can “be right against the whole world”. They are without that certainty and unerring sureness that the esoteric knowledge alone can afford.
41The individual at the stage of humanity, when in physical incarnation, still has no idea of higher worlds, of his higher envelopes, or of the fact that his subjective emotional and mental consciousness belong to different envelopes. Consequently he cannot on his own acquire a knowledge of existence, its meaning and goal. In this respect he remains dependent on the knowledge he has received as a gift from the planetary hierarchy.
42Perspective consciousness is still part of eternally restless reflection, endlessly analysing the same problem and arriving at nothing but temporary and mock solutions.
43It is not only those who have esoterics latent in their subconsciousness who feel disoriented, uncertain, insecure, who overrate others and underrate themselves until they have once again entered into possession of their old knowledge. This is all too often true even of the others at the stage of humanity or the stage of culture.
44Those who have reached the stage of humanity (47:5) and thus are far ahead of the rest of mankind in evolutionary respect must be prepared to walk through life without being understood. If in addition they possess the esoteric view of life latent in their subconscious and never have had any opportunity to contact it anew in their new incarnation, they appear almost unfit for life to outsiders. They see that the ruling views of reality and life are “erroneous”. They have an instinct telling them that “it cannot be that way”, but they do not know in what way it should be. This makes them often highly uncertain and unsure of themselves. In particular, they are “defenceless” against all people at lower stages who are sure of their ground. Their uncertainty has the effect that they allow others to rule them, and they often become victims of ruthless exploitation. The find it difficult to say no and put up with unjust treatment out of fear of acting wrongly.
45The Danish literary historian Georg Brandes gives a vivid description of his impressions from his first year at the university and the intercourse with his fellow-students. He thought every acquaintance he made was a treasure. If he met curious politeness, he thought he hade met understanding and benevolence. If he met benevolence, he believed it was intelligence. If he met intelligence (arid and sterile), he exulted, believing it was a superior talent that could teach him something. It took time before he saw what they were worth, those stultifiers, corrupters, confusers, parasites, etc. on whom he had wasted valuable time. Many people realize it too late.
46The individual’s transitio n from the emotional to the mental stage seldom takes place without a struggle, which can go on for many incarnations. Sometimes it results in a personality where emotionality, hitherto sovereign, asserts itself against all reason. For the monad the transition marks a revolution in almost everything pertaining to world view and life view. The individual views with skepticism, indifference, or contempt whatever has hitherto made up the principal content of his consciousness. More and more seldom such things manage to assert themselves against the new ideas for very long. The individual grows ever more distrustful of everything emotional. If he takes an interest in the products of emotional thinking, he does so in order to scrap the emotional element and cultivate the mental.
47The individual who has just left the stage of the saint behind him feels very disoriented in existence. His old need of something certain and firm increases his disquiet. For several incarnations ahead he will appear unbalanced and often unreliable to the people around him. He will be unable to defend his own statements, his own viewpoints and standpoints. Absolute, hundred per cent thinking is more and more superseded by relativized percentage thinking in which the content of truth has a tendency of falling towards zero. The probability of generally held views and opinions shrinks continuously, the authorities of the day carry less and less weight in his eyes. It takes a long time before that fund of pellucid ideas, which is the outcome of his mental activity, grows powerful enough to enable him to use synthetic perspective thinking, operating from a higher position.
48Young people at this stage often have difficulty in adapting to societies on too low levels and in finding some mission in life. School is a martyrdom for them. All too often they choose in desperation an unsuitable profession for the sake of their livelihood.
1When entering the stage of humanity the individual can be considered to have acquired the twelve essential qualities 25 per cent. It remains for him to acquire them 75 per cent. Those who think that the stage of humanity exclusively consists of mental development are in grave error. That stage involves a series of incarnations where the individual wholeheartedly sacrifices himself for mankind, life, and evolution. And he will not do that as long as he is governed by egoistic motives. Those sacrifices are so natural that they are never felt as sacrifices. It is no sacrifice to sacrifice the lower to the higher.
2The humanist has his incarnation as a saint behind him with everything that implies as to qualities acquired. On the lower levels of that stage, where the individual in his eternal search for the knowledge of reality and life often neglects to reactualize his latency, he may appear very unbalanced. The human nervous system has not yet been refined so that it endures a large dose of the pertaining vibrations. Also, a humanist with a “robust physique” is still a rare phenomenon.
3Exoteric ignorance, judging the individual according to “appearances”, his temperament, social conventions, his speech and outer demeanour, may often find the humanist caustic and unpolished and, being injured in its ridiculous vanity, put him rather low on its scale. That is, after all, part of the common indiscernment. A psychiatrist would probably consider him to be in need of treatment at a mental hospital. That is part of that kind of discernment. If Christ had lived in our days, he would hardly have escaped confinement.
4Most people at the stage of humanity are still dominated by their emotionality. Will (dynamic power) is almost always still emotional will.
5The individual is dependent on feelings and modes to feel “in high spirits”, “less dry”, to show affection, understanding, and sympathy for others in their difficulties, etc.
6It is only on the higher levels of the stage of humanity that the individual succeeds in liberating himself from his dependence on emotionality. Then his mental enve lope is not interwoven with his emotional envelope but strives to reach a contact with the causal envelope, which in this process is more and more filled up with the pertaining mental molecules (47:3 to begin with).
7The individual who has entered the stage of humanity generally is so captivated by his new interests that he totally omits to develop his best emotional qualities. He who just recently was regarded as a saint, was the object of respect and reverence, may now appear as anything but a saint. Those around him may even assign him to the stage of barbarism. That is one of the many consequences of moralism, religious lack of understanding, and intolerance.
8The unlosable emotional saintly qualities are latent in the humanist’s subconscious. In order to make themselves felt in a new incarnation, they must be actualized in his new emotional envelope. The mentalist often deems it to be a waste of time and power that could be better spent. If he is to work among people as a teacher, however, he is wise to resuscitate the dormant qualities, since otherwise he will easily have a repulsive effect on those around him, and those undiscerning people refuse to listen to him or “believe in” what he says. Many mentalists find it hopeless to work among those undiscerning people, as is the case with the Brahmins in India. They consider that the undiscerning have to make efforts a couple of hundred incarnations more before it will be worthwhile to try to make them grasp something. When they have come that far, they will be born into the Brahmin caste and receive the knowledge as a gift.
9Since the humanist has not bothered to learn anew how to control his emotionality, desires and feelings often are given free scope, which can make him appear as an unbalanced emotionalist to the moralists having decency as their fetish. Appearances are deceptive, however. He can control all of it if he deems it to be of any importance. He is independent of the judgement of the multitude and demonstrates openly his indifference to their taboos, a feature of his that envy seizes upon particularly in order to “neutralize” him.
10The fiction systems that the individual has assimilated at lower stages live on in his subconscious and make themselves felt anew during his adolescence and school years. In a new incarnation, he seldom reaches his old insight level before 35 years of age. Should he, as an old expert on esoterics, contact it in his school years already, he will soon be taken down by his teachers and fellow students, if he has not learnt to be silent about what he knows and others cannot understand. At school, besides, you are not supposed to have an individual opinion. Only officially recognized authorities are right. And nobody can be an authority unless he has been recognized by authorities. An apostolic succession of sorts. Preferably you should parrot the prevalent dogmas. Then you will get high marks or grades. A comfort for all old esotericians: if we cannot manage to follow along in the slow, discursive harping on things that are self-evident to us and because of that drop behind in school, it is not a proof of stupidity!
11Those who have reached the stage of humanity are by no means aware of it, since nobody at this or lower stages knows his actual level of development. But they are guided by their superconsciousness to activate their waking consciousness and this activation is strongly selfinitiated and often intensive. To begin with, their motives are markedly selfish, not to say manifestations of both glory and pride. They want to assert themselves, outshine others, become sovereign in some certain specialized sphere. They are regarded as “geniuses”. Then they attract the attention of the planetary hierarchy and become unconscious instruments in the service of life with the mission of influencing others through their work to activity in science, philosophy, music, art.
12Often their endeavour is of such a kind that they would lose themselves for millions of years in such mental spheres that their harmonious development would be obstructed. They are retained, however, by the fact that qualities they have not yet overcome bind them in lower regions. The ignorant of life often wonder at the opposition they find incomprehensible between so attractive and repulsive qualities in those great historical figures, not understanding that the violent vibrations of higher kinds of matter not yet controlled bring about imbalance.
1Of course the humanist is influenced by emotionality.
2Acquired qualities, being latent in his subconscious, find expressions as instincts. However, reason and not feeling nowadays claims to be the highest decisive authority as the humanist faces the problems of life. That mental chiaroscuro, which is the mystic’s delight, yields to the demand of increasing clarity and exactitude. The true intellectualist considers that “an obscure saying is an obscure thought”. So-called divination or presentiment can be of an emotional as well as of a mental character. It is the result of a process going on in the unconscious, the super-or subconscious. It is the preparatory stage before the conception of ideas of differing quality.
3What has made the assessment of many historical phenomena difficult is the ignorance of the stages of human development, people’s belonging to different classes and clans, quite apart from their division into departments, which has made the judgement of human beings difficult.
4Civilizations and cultures are creations by clans on higher levels of development. When these cultures have served their intended purposes and crystallized so that they impede further evolution, they must be dissolved. In such times, clans with a destructive tendency incarnate. In the manner of Vandals they demolish what the constructive clans have built up.
5The general course of development is characterized by the individual learning to control the physical by the emotional, the emotional by the mental, the mental in due time by the causal, etc. The lower kind of consciousness is overcome by the next higher kind only. That is why it is important that the humanist, being a mentalist, does not neglect the cultivation of emotionality (the higher emotionality, of course, the noble feelings).
6When being on the lower levels of the stage of humanity, the individual’s comparing himself with those who are on lower levels easily leads to the arrogance that the ancients called hubris. The individual counteracts that tendency by learning to see his – in spite of everything – almost total ignorance of life and the immensity of what remains to be done by him before he has acquired omniscience and omnipotence in his own worlds. Eventually he reaches the Sokratean realization that he knows nothing worth knowing, that man on his own is not in a position to acquire a knowledge of the goal of existence and of the method of reaching that goal. He realizes the insufficiency of religion, philosophy, and science in that respect.
7He strives to become an integrated personality (which means the development of the physical as well as the emotional and mental into a harmonious personality). The envelopes interpenetrate, and the next higher envelope acquires the ability to control the next lower one.
8He strives to make a contribution of some sort: in religion, philosophy, science, social work, culture, to enrich mankind.
9He desires cooperation with others in groups, but no organizations.
10The humanist has learnt to see the stupidity of striving after wealth, glory, or power. He knows that the researcher (the seeker after knowledge) is a higher type of man than those who pursue things that they cannot take with them when their physical lives are finished and that on the whole just entail bad sowing to be reaped in the following incarnation.
11The humanist has acquired a respect of all life, a respect of everybody on his level of development. Everybody does his best according to his insight and ability. It is only a matter of time when all have reached the final goal of all life.
12Of course, the humanist, as well as those at lower stages, is ignorant of the meaning and goal of existence. If his creed is accepted as authoritative knowledge, the consequence generally is just a new kind of idiology of illusions and fictions. The conclusion he must reach is the Sokratean one, that he knows nothing worth knowing, or that life remains an unsolved riddle, or, as Buddha said, that human reason cannot solve that problem. Usually, however, they received some knowledge from a Pythagorean or a Rosicrucian such as Francis Bacon, Newton, Leibniz, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, etc. In the writings of all those men you will find esoterisms, which they presented as their own speculations. Cusanus, Galilei, Bruno, and Copernicus had all got opportunities to read Pythagorean manuscripts.
13In contrast, such representatives of spurious wisdom as Hume and Kant were not initiates, nor such fantasts as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
14The Swedish philosophers of personality, E. G. Geijer and Bostrom, had studied Leibniz, who in his Monadology asserted that everything in existence consists of monads on different levels of development.
15American writers, Emerson and others, had studied Indian yoga philosophy and found valuable ideas in it; some of them had studied Isis Unveiled by H. P. Blavatsky.
16Buddha clarified that men will always dispute whether there is one god or many gods or no god at all, whether man has a soul and this soul is mortal or immortal, whether man’s will is free or not free. “Human reason cannot answer those questions.” He warned his disciples against belief in authority of any kind, and directed everybody to keep to common sense and to distinguish between what he knows and what he does not know. Speculation breeds illusions and fictions that hinder us from thinking rationally and humanely. Common sense as the highest reason hinders the idiotization of reason and develops the capacity for thinking. Man has to be content with that. The day will come in some life when superconscious intuition becomes accessible in waking consciousness and affords the necessary clarity.
17The humanist’s life in the mental world can be calculated to last from 1000 to 2500 years with a subsequent sojourn of 250 years in the causal world. However, he may reincarnate almost immediately. There is no rule.
18What is the most important for mankind today is to develop common sense, which is man’s highest reason. For only common sense can liberate mankind from emotional illusions and mental fictions, all those conceptions of ignorance which men have constructed and which paralyse their capacity for rational thought. Such hindrances to the reception of new ideas include all dogmas, prejudices, theories, hypotheses, catchwords, common sayings and ways of looking at things in all domains of life, in religion, the conception of right, politics, sociology, philosophy, science, and history.
19It may be said that 99 per cent of what men have accepted as truths do not agree with reality. Men have not even solved the basic problem of the three aspects of reality: matter, motion, and consciousness; that all matter consists of atoms and that atoms have the potentiality of consciousness; that vibrations in matter produce motion, the process of nature, bring about the combination of atoms into material forms, the continuous change, dis solution, and reformation of forms.
20Dogmas hinder the reception of new ideas that are the results of research and increased experience. Strictly speaking, all our concepts need to be eliminated. We keep them, however, until they have been superseded by new ones, since the new must start from and be based on the old to be perceptible, but then only for that reason. To keep exploded ways of looking at things because they have once held authority is to obstruct the liberation from things rooted in history.
21As for the choice of books to be read, we may agree with the humanist genius Voltaire who thought that the book you read only once is better left unread, for whatever you read in it you knew before. The book you need to read many times is worth reading. The book you have never finished with is irreplaceable. You do not lend such books to other people. Demanding to borrow books from other people is, besides, a misbehaviour and, as a rule, a begging in disguise. The bestsellers of the day are better left unread. They inculcate on the subconscious what should never have been heeded.
22The perspective thinker relativizes, thinks in percentages from 0 to 100, also in the matter of skills, abilities, and qualities. He collects viewpoints on everything without any particular thought of contrary or contradictory opposites. The more paradoxes, the better, since they relativize the usual absolute or 100 percent assertions to their relative insignificance.
23Just as principles are concepts of concepts, so ideas are parts of ever more extensive ideas. You get perspectives even on ideas and begin to suspect their limited content of reality.
24The perspective thinker is declared a genius by his acquaintances. Injudiciousness, when its uncritical admiration has occasionally been roused and superseded equally uncritical envy, appoints geniuses with great generosity. Such a “genius” sometimes only requires a talent for organization or presentation, an uncommon logic or imagination, a skill at formulation, a routine technical mastery of materials or instruments. Such “geniuses” are found on all levels of development, and are produced if the individuals have been assiduous enough to devote a sufficient number of incarnations to their specialization. The term genius should be reserved for those who have reached the stage of ideality (the causal stage), have acquired causal intuition, live in the world of Platonic ideas. Not many they are who keep company with Platon in his world.
25The humanist is constructive and inclusive and avo ids such things as belong at lower stages.
26Principle thinking and perspective thinking are different kinds of consciousness. The principle thinker does not become a perspective thinker merely by collecting viewpoints and ideas. Perspective ideas are of another category than principle ideas. The different kinds of ideas are the result of unconscious remoulding processes and not of mechanical mosaic work.
27The ability to receive and produce vibrations in the highest mental molecular kind (47:4) results in “system thinking”, a transition to causal thinking or causal intuition. It is rather a process of concretizing causal ideas, which dissolve into mental intuitions, into entire systems of thought. In the lower thinking you do not see the wood for all the trees. It mostly amounts to a planless, incoherent erring at random among principles without a unifying bond. That has the result that relativities are made absolute, things are detached from their contexts in life, details are scrutinized as thought they were the whole of it.
28The humanist is the eternal seeker who is unable to make himself comfortable with some system of thought but is working tirelessly to widen his horizon. He is deeply aware of his own insufficiency, the weakness of his judgement, the enormity of his ignorance. He also realizes that mentality by nature is fictitious, that there is no causal relation between the content of thought and the objective reality that thought tries to perceive. In lucky moments, when he has succeeded in achieving a contact with the causal world, he may receive a causal idea, but then he is keenly aware of the fact that he was only the receiver, that it was the world of ideas thinking in him. Everything that has ever been thought in the causal world is there as a live force and belongs to everybody. Nobody can take out a patent for an idea, only for the form in which an idea has been clothed in the mental world.
29In the mental world, we think using thought-forms; in the causal world, reality becomes the content of consciousness. Here is the true difference between form and content, which philosophers have always misunderstood. Ideas have their validity independently of their formulation in the principle thinking of the philosophers. The fact that the forms of mental ideas contradict each other when the form is deficient is not the fault of reason, as Kant asserted when constructing his antinomies, but the fault of the constructor.
1The seven kinds of mental consciousness can be gathered in three groups: causal consciousness (47:1-3): total synthesis; higher mental consciousness (47:4,5): perspective, group idea, system; lower mental consciousness (47:6,7): concept, principle.
2It is just seldom possible for non-initiates to contact causal consciousness in a causal intuition. In order to be apprehended, inspirations from the causal world are already “mentalized” into mental ideas.
3In the following, there will be just a brief intimation of the kinds of consciousness of the four mental molecular kinds proper (47:4-7). It will be the task of some future science to map these areas of consciousness in human superconsciousness.
4Thus seven main kinds of ideas can be spoken of. The ideas of higher kinds contain, understand, synthesize those of lower kinds. To attain sovereignty in a world you must have acquired consciousness in its atomic kind. This was what Platon had in mind when he said that knowledge is the result of the soul having beheld the ideas in the world of id eas. He particularly mentioned the idea of beauty because the material causal forms are perfect.
5In actual fact, only the second self can acquire full atomic consciousness in the lower worlds, see these worlds from above, from the total consciousness of any world and so doing have the sovereign surveying capacity.
6At the stage of barbarism, the individual acquires the ability to make inferences from ground to consequence, from cause to effect.
7At the stage of civilization, the individual acquires princip le thinking, learns to distinguish between main issue and side issue, essential and non-essential.
8At the stage of humanity, the individual acquires perspective thinking.
9Perspective thinking is seen already in the paradox, which makes two opposites abolish, illustrate, determine one another. That is the first step beyond principle thinking, which is absolute and constantly gets stuck on contradictions.
10Perspective consciousness implies the ability to see anything from all viewpoints and positions, to constantly widen perspectives, constantly higher, a widening horizon.
11“We never get anything finished” because it only grows and widens until it embraces everything.
12Perspective consciousness walks around, so to speak, the object it is looking at, scrutinizing its various aspects, being aware of the fact that it is the same object but that reason sees the same thing from a variety of viewpoints, dividing into pieces what is unified. Therefore, the same thing can appear totally different, as though it were not the same thing. A perspective idea can require a long essay to be dissolved into its components. Nietzsche may be taken as the typical example of a perspective thinker. In work upon work he was concerned with the same problems and proposed different solutions in each.
13The principle thinker has solved his problem, has proved something. The perspective thinker demonstrates the insufficiency of conclusions and principles, wants to catch knowledge in a higher synthesis, far beyond the method of thesis–antithesis–synthesis.
14System thinking, the highest mental capacity, thinks ideas that in respect of concrete form involve summaries of whole systems.
15System thinking sees all facts put into their correct contexts, sees the whole in the part. It is always able to go from the universal to the particular, because it always sees the system.
16This faculty constitutes the transition to causal intuition, the world of Platonic ideas, which no philosopher yet has been able to comprehend right but all of them have misinterpreted, generally misconceived in a grotesque way. Indeed, that reality is incomprehensible to principle thinking.
17The highest mental levels are characterized by understanding and right concretion of the causal ideas.
18The power of judgement increases at each higher stage attained. In his perspective consciousness, the humanist is in a better position to rightly judge more kinds of reality. Also he is more clearly aware of the insufficiency of human learning.
19Science could be called the summary of the experience of mankind.
20Modern science rejects all old experience, starting from scratch. Using that procedure many unnecessary mistakes are made.
21Never reject the old until you have examined its content of experience!
22Never reject facts because they do not fit in a certain system! Facts that cannot be fit into the system demonstrate the faultiness of the system.
23Science is fictitious because the system is fictitious.
24Facts are always correct. However, the theory and hypothesis, the system designed to explain the facts, is always erroneous.
25Still mankind has not advanced so far that science has been able to construct correct systems.
26The esoteric mental system is absolute. The realization of this fact requires causal consciousness.
27Facts either confirm or refute a principle or a system.
28The four kinds of mental consciousness:
1. objective facts;
2. subjective representations of objective facts, abstract representations, groups of facts;
3. the combination of representations (inference; systematics), group representations;
4. system representations;
atomic consciousness (47:1)
molecular consciousness (47:2-7)
29The faculty of memory depends on the facility of recalling the subconscious.
1The life view of individuals at the stage of humanity who lack esoteric knowledge will always be in agreement with the religion that has been common to all wise people in all ages. Indeed, that religion is not dependent on the esoteric world view in the manner of the esoteric life view with its teaching of the laws of life. The humanists’ exoteric life view only concerns physical life, which is the most important one: that human rights are respected in this life, so that peace, freedom, brotherhood become possible, thus a frictionless, good, and joyous life together. Then everyone will find the best way of having experiences and of learning from them.
2The humanists are the true thinkers who are able to think the ideas and formulate them into ideals that are comprehensible for the other groups. They represent the will to unity, to universality. They become “spiritual” pioneers through their radical analyses of dominant idiologies, illusions, and fictions. They are found in all so-called social classes. If they have not had any opportunity to actualize their subconscious, latent knowledge through a renewed contact with esoteric facts, they may appear disoriented, insecure, and uncertain. However, they have an understanding of the esoteric life view wherever they meet it.
3There are many kinds of idealists, provided that what is implied are those who work for the common good.
4They are found at all stages of development.
5The stage of humanity is characterized by those who see that all life make up a unity and that all is hatred that is not love.
6The following statements by the Swedish psychosynthesist Poul Bjerre testify to the insight and understanding of life that typify the humanist.
7“There is only one miracle: that is, togetherness. And only one superiority: that is, loyal submission to unity.” “Sacrifice in the form of daily sacrifices is an inescapable condition of the life of individual man.” “Every living creature is only alive as being part of the all-life. If it is cut off from this, it will perish.” “The community with others can only be realized on the path of sacrifice.” “If the urge of togetherness is not released in a shared sacrifice of whatever separates, the result will be a shared hell.”
8Many people are surprised that humanists could be physicalists, skeptics, agnostics, atheists. But neither theology, nor philosophy or science will ever be able to offer a tenable working hypothesis for a perspective intellect (47:5). Moreover, the humanist’s latent knowledge made itself so strongly felt as an irresistible instinct that something similar to intuition often was the result.
9The great German thinker and poet Schiller declared that his religion did not permit him to recognize any of the historical religions as a religion. Consequently, he accepted only the religion that has been common to all wise people in all ages: the religion of wisdom and love, a religion without any dogmas whatsoever. The theologians of all religions have turned truth into lie.
10Religious people and mo ralists (having decency as their fetish) often turn away from the mentalist (the humanist), because, having seen through religious and moral illusoriness, its deceptiveness, cult of appearances, and hypocrisy, he often rather feels called upon to defy tyrannical public opinion.
11When he has once seen through the humbug and tyranny and has tasks to do that are immensely more important than devoting a great part of his time to becoming a saint again, he refuses to join in the cult of appearances and of course is condemned by all keepers of appearances. Though he be an ever so brilliant esoterician, he will be branded an impostor and his teaching will be rejected as false. The keepers of appearances (moralists of all descriptions) lose all their confidence in those esoteric titans, because they refuse to join in the cult of appearances.
12Those who have so little discernment that they believe saints to know everything and in any case more than mentalists (47:5) have no say in the hall of learning.
13The humanist endeavours to systematically acquire a knowledge of reality and life. He studies the history of philosophy to acquaint himself with the views of the so-called great thinkers and how they arrived at their fictions (conceptions without counterparts in reality). For he realizes pretty soon that reality cannot be such as even the most acute and profound thinkers have assumed without sufficient knowledge of facts, and that the facts of natural research are too few and insufficient to answer the basic questions concerning the meaning and goal of existence.
14He finally arrives at the result that nothing he knows can explain life or the meaning of life or whether life has a meaning at all. He has reached the Sokratean realization, knowing that nothing he knows can give him what he is seeking at the bottom of his heart.
15Then he is ripe and has acquired the necessary qualifications for comprehending that the esoteric knowledge possessed by our planetary hierarchy is the only truly rational working hypothesis.
16He has lost the ability of the mystic to believe in the incomprehensible and he demands reasons and facts for accepting anything at all. He refuses to believe and demands to know. And he receives as a gift all the facts that fully satisfy his need of explanation. He receives as a gift a non-contradictory and uncontradictable, incontrovertible mental system, which he is finally forced to accept as the only fully satisfying one, which explains all the things that hitherto were incomprehensible to him and that he as a seeking man needs to know. And he says to himself that this is they way reality has to be and it cannot be otherwise.
17In the present time (1950), hardly any other people than perspective thinkers are in a position to study esoterics with profit. When esoterics has been put into a mental system, has been popularized, been accepted by the representatives of culture and those who set the fashion, philosophers and scientists, then its basic facts will become a religious creed and a matter of emotional belief with the vast majority.
18People do not wish to be disturbed by new ideas. They are happy with their illusions, their fictional systems acquired perhaps with great toil. The humanist will soon find how few people who have remained seekers, who have not got stuck in any idiology. In that respect Nietzsche’s saying, that most people seem to take their “habits” more seriously than their interests, proves true. And it will probably be a long time yet before they realize that all systems of thought that are not based on esoteric facts are fictional systems with a relatively short life. Mankind is unable to acquire a knowledge of existence, reality, and life on its own. If they do not want to accept the knowledge system given to them by the planetary hierarchy, they will always be disoriented in existence. Before they accept it, they will construct new fictional systems without cease, changing illusions and fictions that contain less reality for such as contain more.
1All that is actual in the waking consciousness of the individual (monad) sinks down into the subconscious. Consequently this includes:
all that has existed in the waking conscious in the current incarnation;
all that the individual has experienced in the human kingdom;
all that the individual has experienced in the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms;
all that the individual has experienced in still earlier forms of existence.
2What the monad experienced before it started its evolution as a monad in the mineral kingdom remains hidden until it has conquered cosmic consciousness.
3The monad is able to study its experiences in the lower natural kingdoms when it has acquired objective essential consciousness. Everything that it has experienced as a human being exists in causal consciousness.
4Nothing that the monad has experienced can be lost.
5Everything that the monad has experienced becomes latent but can be resuscitated.
6For experiences to be resuscitated it is required that there are opportunities to have closely related experiences and to rapidly reacquire qualities and abilities, that contacts with things that are affined to the monad’s being are renewed, that experiences have previously been worked upon, that qualities and abilities have previously been self-acquired.
7The subconscious manifests itself as instinct. Physical, emotional, and mental instinct can be distinguished.
8The solution of problems can be achieved in three ways: in the waking consciousness through reflection, in the subconscious, or in the superconscious.
9Everything experienced and worked upon is turned into self-acquisition.
10Everything self-acquired is turned into understanding, which can never be lost. Knowledge, qualities, abilities, skills can be cut off for one incarnation or several or for a certain period in the current involvation, if it is so decided according to the laws of destiny and reaping. The corresponding vibrational domains in the etheric, emotional, or mental envelope can be cut off. Understanding always remains, however, even if it cannot find any expression whatever.
11It follows from this that an individual may lack all the qualities and abilities he has acquired and only understanding remains of it all.
12A loss of the possibility to recall a self-acquisition may depend on: abuse, judgement, limitation for the purpose of specialization in, and concentration on, something particular.
13The more thorough the experiences and work upon them in one life or several lives, the more rapid the reacquisition, the greater the ability.
14There is a possibility for the individual to deprive himself of the fruits of all his work and his very understanding by idiotizing his reason against the Law.
15The memory of the past becomes latent at rebirth. It is turned into instinct, into the possibility of increasingly rapid apprehension, possibly the acquisition of qualities, abilities, skills. Very little of latency can be actualized in each new incarnation, which moreover often is an incarnation of specialization or settlement. Physical life is too short, and the important thing is to learn as much as possible.
16If in addition the law of reaping enforces faults on the individual, cuts off vibrational domains (etheric, emotional, or mental ones), reinforce other vibrations into insuperability, even highly developed individuals may appear ignorant, unable, impaired by grave faults.
17The individual is completely new in each involvation. Starting from the primordial stage, he must pass through all his previous developmental stages in respect of matter and consciousness.
18The moralists feel that they cannot be too severe when expressing their indignation at and condemning the anti-conventional people. But those who break the moral rules may do so for many reasons. They have been made to suffer for those rules. They refuse to join in the cult of appearances. They consider any adherence to form unessential, overrated, a hindrance to development.
19It is quite possible to attain the stage of humanity (47:5) without having been an initiate in some esoteric knowledge order (and so having an esoteric view of life latent). There are many latent humanists who have not reached up to their true level. There are many esotericians who have not had any opportunity of remembering their esoteric knowledge anew. Before the individual can become a humanist or an esoterician, however, he must have passed through the stage of the mystic. Subsequently he often thinks (sometimes unjustly) that he “knows all that”. He has demonstrated it sufficiently. Now it is about something that is more important for him. In that respect one thing is quite certain. He understands the saint and appreciates him at his full worth. Sometimes perhaps he even feels nostalgic about the delightful stage he was at before he chose to become an explorer of the mental world.
1People who have consciously “renounced their humanity”, who have severed the thread connecting the incarnating, lesser part of their causal envelope and the greater part remaining in the causal world, can be considered members or servants of the black lodge. They are the sworn enemies of evolution, since they know that when evolution within the planet has reached so far that the planet can be dissolved, they have lost further opportunities of wielding power.
2The monad, being a primordial atom, is divine and indestructible. In the human kingdom, however, the monad can destroy its lowest triad and its causal envelope. And it will do so eventually after it has severed the connection between the lower and the higher causal envelopes. The lower envelope cannot be filled up but thins out (eventually losing increasingly more mental atoms), until it finally bursts. Thereupon the monad must remake its journey and acquire a new lowest triad and causal envelope. It is calculated that this will take about 30 eons. During this time, the monad’s higher triads must wait for the time when they can be connected with a new lowest triad, the second triad asleep in its superessential envelope, and the third triad asleep in its manifestal envelope. The horrible bad reaping that awaits the monad in the meantime can just arouse sympathy for such an appalling destiny.
3The ground of this deplorable behaviour is that the monad as a human being refuses to forgo its egoism, refuses to enter into unity and to serve life and evolution unselfishly, refuses to give up its power, refuses to apply the laws of the higher life.
4In doing so, it nevertheless, unknowingly and unwillingly, performs a task that benefits the great process of manifestation. It works with the forces of involution and, so doing, speeds up the involution of the monads. It serves as the agent of bad reaping when it forces people to obey its satanic intentions.
5Not any individual is able to sever the connection between his first self and second self. This requires that the individual has acquired the perspective consciousness (47:5) of the stage of humanity. He has passed through the stage of the saint and attained the highest emotional level possible for man (48:2), being driven by motives of highly refined egoism. However, he can never acquire any true knowledge of the meaning and goal of existence. He cannot become a causal self.
6Actually it is only when he is faced with the conscious choice of unselfishly serving evolution that the break occurs. He knows what he is doing when he chooses to remain in lower worlds for the sake of exercising personal power. He will soon lose the ability to incarnate and will spend his further existence in the emotional world, and from there he will control people in the physical world and do everything to hinder them from developing, try to keep them in ignorance and bondage, in their illusions and fictions, try to create destructive mass psychoses of countless kinds, everything that can strengthen human egoism, repulsion of all kinds. Nietzsche as well as Hitler and his gang are typical examples of victims of the black lodge. It is a distortion of the knowledge of these things that has given rise to the legend of Satan.
1There are levels of development even at the stage of ideality. To begin with, the individual acquires subjective consciousness in the lowest causal molecular kind and the lowest but one (47:2,3). His subsequent task will be to vitalize the three centres of the causal envelope that enable him to contact the three units of the second triad, and to build the bridge between the first triad mental molecule and the second triad mental atom. When the monad is able to centre itself in this atom, the individual becomes a causal self.
2The individual who is at the causal stage has his monad consciousness centred in the causal envelope. This brings about the dissolution of the emotional envelope. Then the self is able to distinguish between what it really knows and what it does not know, has liberated itself from the illusions of the emotional stage and the fictions of the mental stage. Only now is the individual able by his own experience to gain a knowledge of his five worlds (47–49) and of the meaning and goal of existence, study the past, ascertain that esoterics agrees with reality as far as the worlds of man are concerned.
3Many people call the causal envelope man’s soul and the superessential envelope, his spirit. It has not been clarified that the individual (the monad) is a primordial atom, which step by step during its evolution in the solar system clothes itself in eleven envelopes. The best way of eliminating confusion and disputes about words is to introduce mathematical designations.
4The causal envelope is the only envelope in which the individual is an isolated self, thrown upon his own resources. This so-called loneliness of the soul is necessary to the acquisition of self-conscious self-determination, the condition of the preservation of self-identity in the ever more intensive consciousness of unity there is in higher worlds. Everything in the human kingdom serves to confirm this egocentric individual consciousness. This done, it will be the individual’s task to shift this egocentricity to include increasingly more individuals, until the self finally embraces mankind and subsequently all life. So doing the self qualifies to become a collective being.
5It is only as a higher emotional self at the stage of culture that the individual becomes able to contact the consciousness of his causal envelope and so can be said to have become a human being. We understand how Diogenes, on the crowded market-place and with his lamp lit, could search in vain for human beings. Causal consciousness remains passive until it begins to be activated by the individual’s own vibrations at the stage of the mystic. The reason is that no vibrations below 48:3 and 49:3 can reach up to 47:3 and affect the causal envelope. On some rare occasion, the lower mental self at the stage of civilization can receive inspiration through causal superconsciousness. It is only as a higher mental self that the individual gradually becomes subjectively conscious in the causal world.
6Many esotericians term the individual soulless until he has become conscious in his causal envelope. He acquires subjective causal consciousness in the causal world (47:2,3), when out of his organism even objective consciousness, and only now a personal contact with members of the planetary hierarchy. It is at this stage that the individual ascertains esoterics to be in agreement with reality and life in both subjective and objective respect. Until then it will be just a working hypothesis. The individual realizes that without esoterics mankind will remain disoriented in existence, ignorant of the meaning and goal of existence.
7At the stage of ideality, the individual identifies himself with his causal ideas.
8At this stage, the causal envelope is fully active and the essential envelope is powerfully activated.
9When he has acquired causal consciousness, man has reached his true home. The “prodigal son has returned to his father’s house” – a parable that has been partially misunderstood, since there was no knowledge of the fact that the causal envelope is divided when the monad incarnates as a human being. Only now is man a true human being with a complete understanding of all things human.
10The vibrations are active within the two highest mental (causal) molecular kinds and the atomic kind.
11The condition of attaining the stage of ideality is liberation from dependence on emotionality. One example of this is Goethe, whose path to causal consciousness was blocked by his emotionality. His friend Schiller was better favoured in this respect, which appeared in his deeper understanding of the power of the causal ideas, although many levels of the stage of humanity remained for him as well.
12As is clear from the foregoing, at the stage of barbarism, man identifies himself primarily with physical vibrations and gains understanding of physical realities. At the stages of civilization and culture, emotionality becomes increasingly important. At the stage of humanity, the individual slowly strives to liberate himself from his slavish dependence on emotionality. The stage of ideality is characterized by a corresponding endeavour of the individual to liberate himself from concrete-formal mental thinking.
13 It is only at the stage of ideality that the individual must and can liberate himself definitively from his egoism. Man is finished as a man when he has acquired the qualities and abilities that are required for further development in the fifth natural kingdom.
14Representatives of this natural kingdom exist in physical incarnation, being unknown to others than their disciples. The other individuals belonging to the planetary hierarchy have etheric envelopes as their lowest bodies. The organism ism is an unserviceable instrument for them and their work in the service of evolution.
15The idealist (meaning the individual at the stage of ideality) realizes fully his debt to life, that he has been given all for nothing, and becomes aware of his responsibility. Just think what the hierarchy and the individuals in the seven ever higher divine kingdoms have done for us! They have shaped our cosmos with all its different worlds, which was necessary to the awakening of the individual’s potential consciousness and makes his development to omniscience and omnipotence possible. They guide the development of individuals to ever higher forms of life. They see to it that the cosmos does not degenerate into chaos and that incorruptible justice is done to all. They give men knowledge to the extent that they need it for their development and do not abuse it to the detriment of life. It is abuse that restrains them from giving us the true knowledge. For knowledge is power. And power is abused by all who have not reached the stage of ideality.
16Ideality at lower stages is always a good thing. However, it too easily leads to selfdeception, since man by and large is ignorant of human nature and its difficulties. Only at the stage of ideality is man in a position to realize how difficult it is to understand himself and others, realize that it is impossible for individuals at lower stages to judge correctly without a knowledge of reality and life.
17When objectively self-conscious in his causal envelope, the individual knows that he is a self and that the visible physical world is no illusion, as Western subjectivism and the Indian philosophy of illusionism maintain.
18Only at the stage of ideality, as a causal self, should the individual strive to acquire “clairvoyance” (higher objective consciousness). Before that stage, the power afforded by this ability is just detrimental, delays the individual’s development, and sows much bad sowing. Men will remain egoists (despite all the talk of ignorance about ideality) until they have entered into unity. Moreover, the lower kind of clairvoyance (physical-etheric and emotional consciousness) that man can acquire at lower stages is of an exceedingly unreliable kind, the more disastrous as the individual blindly believes what he is seeing and takes it all for permanent reality. The material forms in the emotional and mental worlds are (except those of the visible physical molecular kinds and the envelopes of men and devas) mere imaginative creations by life-ignorant beings in the lower worlds. The historic figures from past centuries and scenes from their lives as depicted in history and novels are likewise to be found and are taken for genuine. Ignorance always finds its fictions and illusions in plastic figures, or confirmed in other ways. Beings in the lower worlds are largely the victims of their ignorance, since they lack causal consciousness. Only the causal self can justly say that it truly knows.
19At the causal stage, man is able to satisfy himself by his own studies of reality that esoterics affords him the correct knowledge of reality and life. Before then, his acceptance of the esoteric knowledge remains a working hypothesis, however convincing and overwhelming it may appear to him.
20The knowledge of existence, reality, and life has always existed on our planet. But it has not been available for a mankind that has been unable to comprehend it or who has been able to abuse the knowledge.
21Scarcely more than the simplest common sense is required to comprehend that evolution does not end with the fourth natural kingdom but continues in higher kingdoms. It should be obvious as well that they are no longer part of the human kingdom.
22The individuals who have been so far ahead of the masses that they have been able to comprehend and have remained seekers have received the knowledge. Individuals from the fifth natural kingdom have accepted the thankless mission of incarnating to communicate the necessary knowledge. They have given men religions adapted to different stages of development so that they could live in peace with each other and have a metaphysics suited to their powers of comprehension. They instituted secret knowledge orders for those who were in need of a rational metaphysics.
23Nowadays, such a large portion of mankind have acquired so much power of reflection that the planetary hierarchy has decided to allow mankind in its entirety to receive the knowledge of existence. Religious metaphysics has proved insufficient.
24Man receives all the knowledge he needs as a free gift when he has done all that lies in his power to rightly use it. All that exists in lower worlds springs from higher worlds, be it matter, energy, or consciousness. Everything is a gift from above. And that is true of all worlds except the highest one. It is the task of the higher ones to serve the lower ones all through the gamut. Anyone who does not want to serve but only seeks his own is unripe for higher worlds. The human geniuses who serve mankind (emotional geniuses = saints, mental geniuses = higher mental selves) experience a causal idea whose overwhelming perspective with its beauty and power makes them sacrifice their lives, filled with renunciation, to communicate that idea to mankind. As a reward they are scorned, ridiculed, and persecuted.
1The causal self is the monad fully conscious in the causal envelope it acquired at its transmigration from the animal kingdom. This envelope always embraces the monad in its lowest triad in the human kingdom.
2In order to become a causal self, the individual must have seen through emotional illusoriness and mental fictitiousness and realized the relative worthlessness of everything that is the object of life-ignorant mankind’s endeavours (power, glory, wealth, erudition, etc.).
3In order to become a causal self, the individual must have bridged the “gap” between the first triad mental molecule and the second triad mental atom, which becomes possible through the acquisition of incipient consciousness in the atomic consciousness of the causal envelope.
4The transition from the higher mental stage (47:4) to the causal stage (47:3), the monad’s acquisition of self-consciousness in its permanent envelope, which it has inhabited ever since it made its entrance into the human kingdom, is the most difficult of all processes in the human kingdom. Exceedingly few succeed on their own in moving from the mental molecule of the lowest triad to the mental atom of the second triad.
5Only when the monad has become a causal self is the individual sovereign as a man, since he need not fall victim to illusions and fictions any more. This does not mean omniscience in existence. But he can distinguish between what he knows and does not know in the worlds of man.
6The causal self marks the transition from the fourth to the fifth natural kingdom. He is perfect man and incipient superman.
7The causal self can obtain knowledge of all past (all material events and all consciousness expressions) in the five worlds of our planet (47–49). He has access to the causal ideas – formed by all second selves – that have passed through that world and contain the second selves’ knowledge of the five worlds of man (47–49) and the basic facts about existence in general, facts communicated through the entire chain of successively higher selves in the cosmos.
8Even causal selves can make mistakes during incarnation, since the causal ideas on their way to the physical brain must pass through three different filters: the vibrations of mental, emotional, and physical etheric matter.
9At the lower stages of development, the normal individual is during incarnation objectively conscious in the physical world only, subjectively conscious in the emotional and mental worlds. After his transition from the physical to the emotional world, he becomes objectively conscious in the latter. After he has left off his emotional envelope as well and continues his conscious incarnation existence in his mental envelope, he nevertheless remains only subjectively conscious in so far as he takes his visions to be anything else than his own mental creations. The objective mental world, which in its material reality is independent of his own consciousness, remains inaccessible to him and cannot be objectively perceived by him. Such studies become possible for him only after he has acquired mental objective consciousness in phys ical life, or more exactly: has become a causal self.
10The eyebrow centre with the pertaining energies makes him a “white magician”, which means that he can control physical matter, the etheric as well as the “visible”. However, he cannot use this power for his own good, but only in the service of evolution. Abuse of it would have fatal consequences and preclude further consciousness development for a long time. What makes him a white magician is his ability to use energies coming from the fifth department of the planetary hierarchy, and those energies would not be at his disposal any longer if he abused them. The “black magician” can never utilize causal energies, but only mental energies.
11The individual strives to achieve a complete, unselfish adaptation to the needs and purposes of his group. His personal life is decentralized, free of egoism. He lives to serve life, development, mankind in accordance with the knowledge of the meaning and goal of existence, reality, life, and the laws of life he acquires. If this is egoism, then it is an egoism which realizes that only by liberating himself from everything belonging to the personality can the individual attain to unity, the goal of man, the quality necessary to pass to the fifth natural kingdom, to join the planetary hierarchy.
12The idealist (the designation of anyone who has attained the stage of ideality) realizes that the self’s longing is the inmost driving force of personal development – the longing after knowledge, insight, understanding, qualities, abilities, ideals to realize.
13It is this longing that stimulates the higher molecular kinds in the individual’s envelopes to heightened activity. Higher molecules are attracted to the envelopes through a joint attraction exercised by molecules already existing in the envelopes. It is on the aspiration of longing that it all depends.
14Man is said to have won “immortality” when he has acquired full causal objective consciousness, since then he can never more lose his continuity of consciousness, that is, he need never more be born without knowing his past. The consciousness or capacity he has acquired will never more become latent, or subconscious.
15Before the individual has attained the causal stage, he is too easily swayed by external influences or the latent fund of his subconscious. If the individual concerns himself with negativisms, his consciousness is dragged down to contacts with reminiscences in the strata of the past.
16In order to reach the stage of ideality and to acquire causal objective consciousness it is necessary to be initiated into esoterics, to have a knowledge of reality and life, of the meaning and goal of existence. Without this knowledge, the individual will remain a helpless victim of emotional illusions and mental fictions. Religion, philosophy, or science cannot afford him the requisite knowledge of existence or the manner in which to acquire causal intuition. Yoga philosophy (vedanta, advaita, sankhya) with concomitant yoga training can help the individual to acquire objective consciousness (clairvoyance) of the etheric world and the emotional world but not of the mental world and still less of the causal world.
17With all their yoga philosophy the Indians know nothing about our planetary hierarchy. And that means that they know nothing about esoterics and the possibility of contacting the hierarchy. They doubt the existence of such a hierarchy. The ultimate goal of the yogi is socalled nirvana about which he knows nothing real but only has fictions. His explanations of manas, buddhi, and nirvana, as well as of rebirth and karma (the law of sowing and reaping) are all of them misleading.
18The stage of ideality implies that the individual becomes a servant to the hierarchy who supervise development, that he does his part in the work for evolution. The causal world is man’s true home, since man in fact is a causal being, invested with his permanent, incarnating causal envelope. It is this envelope that makes the individual a human being after belonging to the animal kingdom.
19The causal world is, as Platon intimated, the source of all our knowledge of existence, its constitution as well as its meaning and goal. In lower worlds, the self is the victim of illusions and fictions. The causal ideas reproduce reality such as it is without any possibility of deception. The causal ideas can in a certain respect be compared to immense systems of thought containing incomparably more facts than any mental systems, and so they burst these limitations. Of what avail are they to men, however? The y are unable to understand them, they put them into erroneous contexts, and they abuse them to their own detriment and that of others. The causal ideas are for causal selves, not for lower selves. The causal self can distinguish between learning and knowledge. The knowledge that is to be found in learning generally amounts to about one per cent. The mental self believes himself to be sovereign, but the sole criterion of his knowledge is infallible prediction demonstrated in the unerring application of laws of nature (the constant relations of matter).
20Like all the other worlds, the causal world has its total collective consciousness and its total memory. The memories of lower worlds are, like those of men, chaotic and fragmentary. The causal memory is the highest and only reliable memory of our planet. The others reproduce the illusions and fictions of men. The causal memory reproduces reality in an unadulterated manner in its causal context.
21From the logical point of view, expressions such as “beyond space and time” or “there is no time” or “eternal present” are erroneous just as most esoteric expressions; they are not intended to be understood by others than causal selves. “Beyond space and time” is beyond the cosmos, thus in chaos. Time is duration, continuous existence. “Eternal present” exists in the highest cosmic world only. In higher worlds, the individual has an ever wider glimpse of the future. Each higher world widens the present backward and forward. In the causal world exists the history of our planet, in the manifestal world of the solar system exists the history of our system, etc. The more intimate a knowledge of the process of manifestation in ever higher worlds, the more can be predicted in a broad outline.
22In the causal world exist the causal envelopes of all first selves and second selves, whether they are in incarnation or not. A first self who incarnates leaves the greater part of his causal envelope in the causal world. The lesser part encloses the envelopes of incarnation. The two parts that are thus separated during incarnation were called the “twin souls” in esoteric parlance, an expression that of course would prompt ignorance to start talking nonsense.
23As a causal self the individual has a continuity of consciousness that he will never lose through all his subsequent incarnations. With an esoteric expression, the individual who had so achieved was said to have “become immortal”. Presumptuous ignorance, fancying itself able to interpret everything, has expounded that expression in profound balderdash, as usual. Man knows nothing of his past, since he has lost his continuity of consciousness and therefore thinks he is another man. The individual, being the monad, the self, can never die and is eternally immortal.
24The causal self is aware that he is a soul that has a body and not a body that has a soul.
Endnotes by the Translator
To 8.4.30. “L’animal mechant par preference” means in English “The creature that prefers to be nasty”. This saying is attributed to Voltaire (1694-1778). Earlier, his compatriot Moliere (1622-1673) wrote something similar, “L’homme est, je vous l’avoue, un mechant animal”, which means in English, “Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature.” (Tartuffe, v.vi)
To 8.7.4. “Gefuhl ist alles” means in English “feeling is all”.
To 8.13.10. The two works on esoterics referred to are The Philosopher’s Stone and The Knowledge of Reality, the only works by Henry T. Laurency that were published in Swedish in the author’s physical life time, the former in 1949 and the latter in 1961.
The above text constitutes the essay The Stages of Human Development by Henry T. Laurency. The essay is part of the book Knowledge of Life Two by Henry T. Laurency, published in Swedish in 1987. Translation by Lars Adelskogh. Copyright © by The Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation 2004.