The Philosopher's Stone by Henry T. Laurency
3. ESOTERIC LIFE VIEW
3. ESOTERIC LIFE VIEW
1The world view is our total knowledge of the matter aspect of reality. The world view includes the physical and natural sciences and their offshoots. The life view concerns the consciousness aspect of existence and is the sum total of man's attitude to life, to its meaning and goal, and his view of mankind and man's ways.
2Without a world view, a knowledge of reality, the necessary basis of life view is lacking. A rational conception of reality is all the more important since the life view is of fundamental, indispensable importance. It is from his life view that man derives the bases of his valuations, his viewpoints for judgement, motives for action. The life view includes the conception of right and what is contained in the concept of culture.
3The present expose of a life view means to orientate in the jungle of life, to be Ariadne's thread in the labyrinth of life. Never before has the need for such a view been greater, for never before has disorientation been greater. People recognize more and more clearly the fictitious and illusory, the arbitrary constructions of ignorance, in traditional conceptions and historical views. The all-demolishing powers, which frantically work for a return to the stage of barbarism, have unveiled their destructive tendency manifestly enough. The universal disorientation has resulted in a general sense of lawlessness and arbitrariness in all domains of life, also in the world of material reality. A working hypothesis has been lacking, one unifying the scientist's realistic view of existence with that of the seeking cultural man who strives to find a synthesis. Such an hypothesis would incorporate the essential of mankind's general experience of life and the indispensable idealism advocated by Platon.
4In the heritage from our fathers there are esoteric axioms of life which ignorance has misinterpreted. These pearls can now be inserted again in their original setting. The ideas have thereby regained their import, and have become understandable.
5This Life View is termed esoteric since it is based on the esoteric world view and on esoteric facts about the goal of life. There is no such life view that suits everybody on any level of development. What is common to them all is the knowledge of the laws of life, which everybody applies according to his understanding of life. Anyone who in addition wishes to practise all manner of conventions may certainly do so for his own part.
6There are laws in everything: laws of life, or laws of consciousness, in the consciousness aspect. Anyone who knows about the laws has an insight into reality and an understanding of life. Before you can say how things ought to be you must know how things are. The laws of life grant freedom. The laws of life are no prohibitions. Those who need prescriptions do not have a knowledge and judgement of their own. In understanding the laws of life we make it possible for us to solve our problems of life rationally. By that the conditions of individual development are clarified.
7Esoteric life views satisfy legitimate demands of intellectuality and ideality. Everybody has to decide for himself. Nobody who knows what responsibility means will take on him the responsibility for prescribing to others. You can always say: This is my view of the matter. Sooner or later the individual must form his own view, one suited to his understanding of life. Everybody is responsible himself for his own vision of life. Responsibility means the individual's settling up with the laws of life, and has consequences in future incarnations. The individual must himself develop his concepts of right, must himself seek his ideals. The wise man refrains from constructing concepts of right for others. Everybody is somewhere on the gamut of development, and has the conception of right that corresponds to his level.
8The life view of another can be of interest as a synthesis of individual experience. Its value for others can possibly be that it shows an individual vision of life liberated from paralysing traditional ways of looking at things, and is able to give impulses to other people to form their own attitudes to life. Of course, there is nothing to prevent you from accepting the life view of another person. Most people will probably lack the necessary possibilities or opportunities of forming their own ones. But this is a temporal emergency. That day will come in some life when the individual is brought face to face with the necessity of making his own view clear to himself.
9In incarnation upon incarnation, from the cradle to the grave, life is a series of problems. His first tottering steps apart, everybody has to solve his own problems without any help, problems that cannot be solved by another in the one right way. The wise man discovers the problems and finds their solutions. Most people see neither problems nor solutions, and many people do not care about them, or bungle them away from themselves by means of authorities.
10What an author wishes above all is to have readers who desire to understand even when he fails in making himself understood. Old words and expressions have their conventional meaning. Certainly there are difficulties in trying to describe new things by these words, to give a new import to the old words. More often than not it is only from the total view that you will have a chance of understanding the meaning intended.
1Law is the condition of freedom. Law is the condition of unity. Law is the unity that man has always sought.
2No universe is built without law. Conformity to law characterizes the world of matter as well as the world of consciousness. Conformity to law is a condition of the possibility, existence, evolution, and continuance of life.
3The concept of law contains the attributes of immutability and impersonality as the two most valuable ones. The concept of law is a "let there be light" in the chaos of arbitrariness and lawlessness. Conformity to law is the cliff on which we can build our faith and trust in life. Conformity to law makes a rational view of reality possible, makes it possible to realize the meaning of life rationally. Admitted that nature appears cold and hard; it is nevertheless true, just, and incorruptible. It thereby affords us the basis of knowledge, freedom, and power. It grants to human reason the position due to it. All these things are invaluable realities, possibilities, and rights.
4The number of laws appears to be unlimited. The more the boundaries of consciousness expand and the vast our knowledge of reality becomes, the more laws we discover. And this gives us greater and greater confidence in the rationality of life. If laws were lacking, we would be victims of arbitrariness. If we lack a knowledge of laws, we fall victims to fictions and superstition. Like the knowledge of the laws of nature grants us power over nature, so the knowledge of the laws of life shows us how we can shape our lives.
5The laws of life are the legislation of life. Before mankind realizes this, it will speculatingly devise more or less abortive legal systems according to the stage of development it has attained.
6The laws of life are all one with our being. According as we discover ourselves and realize ourselves, we discover laws as the condition of our realization. We become these laws by liberating ourselves from the fictions and illusions of our ignorance.
7Laws indicate that forces act, the ways in which forces act, and the conditions under which they act. As regards the three aspects of reality, all laws can be brought together into three main groups: the laws of matter, will, and consciousness. Only those required to comprehend the Life View outlined here are enumerated below.
8The fundamental law, the law of dynamic primordial matter, the natural law proper from which all other laws can be derived and on which the immutability of all laws depends, has several names, for example: the law of balance, harmony, restoration, or stability.
9The causal law, or the law of causality, says that if all conditions are present, then a certain course of events follows inevitably; that given causes have their bases in manifested forces; that the effect, or event, is a resultant of a great number of forces.
10The law of reaping, the law of sowing and reaping, is also a law of consciousness.
11The law of development is a law of purposiveness, or finality. It says that all life, from the lowest to the highest, develops; that forces act in certain ways towards certain ends. Every primordial atom is a potential god and will some time, through the process of manifestation, become an actual god (= the highest kind of consciousness).
12The law of form says that every form of life is adapted to the stage of development of its indwelling life, that each higher kind of consciousness requires a higher form of life, a more purposive possibility of acquiring increased consciousness.
13The law of transformation says that the form of life constantly changes and dissolves only to be renewed.
14The law of re-formation says that every being, when its form is renewed, receives a similar form of life, until its consciousness expansion requires a specifically different higher form.
15The law of destiny indicates what forces are to influence the individual in each form of life with respect to the need of his individual character for necessary experiences and to its endeavour to acquire the requisite qualities and abilities.
16The law of freedom says that every being is its own freedom and its own law, that freedom is gained through law. Freedom is the right to individual character and to activity within the limits of the equal right of all.
17The law of separation, or isolation, says that every being must — in order to develop the selfreliance and self-determination of individual character — become conscious of itself as something separate from everything else. The human stage marks that phase of development during which the atomic consciousness is isolated from the consciousness of other beings.
18The law of unity says that all beings form a unity and that every being must realize its unity with all life in order to attain super-individual consciousness expansion.
19The law of self-realization says that every being must itself acquire all the qualities and abilities requisite for omniscience and omnipotence, that it must itself realize its divinity.
20The law of activation says that life is activity, that life develops through activity, that individual development is only possible through self-initiated activity of consciousness.
1Freedom is a mystery to ignorance. Because if freedom is viewed as arbitrariness, then it abolishes itself both in the individual and in the collective. If freedom abolishes itself, then it is an illusion.
2To the ignorant of life, the supreme being is supreme arbitrariness. Little do they suspect the necessity of law and of finality, the fact that just one arbitrary will would make all development, all laws of life, impossible. Absolute freedom would be arbitrariness and would abolish itself.
3Without a knowledge of the worlds of material reality, of the worlds of consciousness corresponding to these worlds, and of the laws of life, "rational" or purposive action in life is impossible.
4Freedom is law. Full freedom is the law of unity. Before there can be outer freedom there must be inner freedom (spontaneous conformity to law).
5Without law no freedom. Without freedom no law. Freedom without law would be arbitrariness, chaos. Law without freedom would be freedom from responsibility, mechanicality killing individuality. Freedom and law are equally necessary.
6Freedom is omniscience and omnipotence, since it is omniscient and infallible in its application of law. Bondage is ignorance and impotence.
7Consciousness feels free when not encountering any obstacles to its activity. Through manifestation it eventually learns that activity unrestrained leads to chaos. Having acquired omniscience it knows that law is the condition of freedom, since the greatest possible freedom can only be acquired by omniscient application of the laws of life, that conformity to law is a condition of a cosmos that does not degenerate into chaos.
8Man wins freedom by discovering and applying the laws of life by himself.
9The individual is potentially free being a potential godhead. Full freedom is godhead actualized.
1Ignorant intellectualism believed that man can be rapidly reformed just by enlightenment or other tricks. This is a cardinal mistake. Conditions of insight, of understanding and ability can only be acquired slowly during a great number of incarnations.
2Before there can be any question of insight and understanding at all, man must acquire a vast general experience of life as a basis to build on. That basis is laid during the 400 developmental levels of the stage of barbarism.
3There are no innate ideas, no innate knowledge, no innate abilities. But there are greater or lesser predispositions, conditions of a more or less rapid acquisition of knowledge or ability.
4Premising these facts we understand what Platon meant when, through the mouth of his Sokrates, he formulated the axioms: "Virtue is knowledge. Anyone who knows the right, does the right." By "knowledge" Platon meant a sufficient experience of life; the conditions of insight, understanding, and the power of realization. Suggestion will be enough for anyone who has in previous lives acquired knowledge and ability. He immediately catches the hint, sees the obvious, and then does the right automatically.
5By these sentences Platon has formulated the law of good, saying that man always obeys the highest good he really sees and understands, because he cannot do otherwise, because it is a need and a joy for him to do so. This law is valid at all levels of development.
6Ignorance preaches the same conception of right to all. But it is impossible to follow prescriptions that are alien to your being, that conflict with your destiny, or are chosen arbitrarily; it is impossible to impress someone with understanding of a level too high to be conceived by him as purposive.
7The ignorant and impotent are unfree within the sphere of their ignorance and impotence. The individual is free to the extent that he has acquired insight, understanding, and ability. Every limit to insight, understanding, or ability is a limit to freedom. Total freedom presupposes total knowledge and is the same as total power and total law.
8In all our doings there is a constant choice, even though we be unaware of it. Most people are on those levels where the conscious choice is replaces by parrotry and mimicry, habits and complexes of various kinds.
9The highest reason to the individual is his own common sense, which is developed by being applied. The opportunities of free choice multiply with each higher level. On the highest level the choice is always free.
1The term "freedom of will" is misleading. It meant the arbitrary choice of consciousness between different actions. But the question is not of the choice of action but of the choice of motive. Because action is determined by the strongest motive.
2This problem is connected with that of the freedom of consciousness (mental and emotional life). Anyone who can always cherish, is free. Anyone who thinks uncontrolled thoughts and feels uncontrolled emotions, is unfree. In most people, thoughts and emotions come and go as they please, except when attention is occupied with, fascinated by, a certain content. When concentration ceases, however, the consciousness content is just sporadically controlled.
3The freedom of consciousness is determined by the laws of life, especially the laws of development, reaping, and activation.
4The freedom of choice depends on the knowledge of reality, insight, and understanding. Lack of freedom, or impotence, indicates either a low level of development or a bad reaping.
5You can, by proceeding methodically, make any motive whatsoever the strongest. In the ignorant, his strongest motive is unsuspectedly determined by seemingly accidental occurrences, which have actually been caused by factors of the law of reaping.
6The strongest motive at the stage of barbarism generally consists in emotional impulses; at the stage of civilization, in the strongest subconscious emotional complexes. The ability of freedom to choose increases with each higher level of development. The ability of self-determination in the cultural individual is the result of his foresight, of his methodical work at strengthening his motives by cultivating purposive complexes.
7The primitive man neither seeks nor finds any possibility of choice. The intelligent man prepares his choice. The wise man has predetermined his motive for ever.
1Like the essential knowledge of material reality is the knowledge of the laws of nature, so the knowledge of the laws of life is the sum of the knowledge of life. Laws of nature and of life are similar expressions of the immutable conformity to law of existence.
2Only men domineer and prohibit. No power of life may do so, for that would conflict with the law of freedom and with the individual's divine sovereignty. The law of freedom grants to man the right to be his own freedom and his own law, as long as he does not infringe the right of all beings to that same inviolable freedom. This right of the individual is inalienable and divine. All life has its freedom on the hard conditions of its own responsibility. Men's abuse of the word responsibility demonstrates that they have no idea of its meaning. Would it not be incomparably easier to conform just sufficiently to a number of poor commandments? Every mistake as to the laws of life (known and unknown ones) entails inevitable consequences in lives to come. The number of incarnations is unlimited, until all the bad sowing has been reaped unto the last grain. None will escape his self-formed destiny. Most people blithely continue sowing their daily seed of hatred in thoughts, emotions, words, and actions. They need grace to go on abusing freedom with impunity. Nobody has told them the truth, just lulled them into the absurd belief in the possibility of escaping the consequences. The simplest reason ought to tell them that freedom of responsibility would abolish freedom, that arbitrariness of any kind would abolish all conformity to law.
3Philosophers construct moral laws and moralists increasingly more prohibitions. Life does not know of any moral law, nor of any prohibition. Commandments are circumvented by means of Jesuitical casuistry and arbitrary grace. Life does not know of any grace, only of unerringly just law. Prohibitions are psychological blunders of moralists, abortive attempts of the helpless to force the unwilling into obedience. The moralists in their ignorance of life make the mistake of turning human fabrications into divine dictates, something akin to blasphemy. The gods are no dictators but incorruptible administrators of the immutable laws of life. The moralists' greatest idiocy on life, however, is their self-assumed right to judge. In their presumption they think themselves capable of acquitting and convicting, to which not even any god has a right. And these blind leaders of the blind — who daily crucify man, these fault-finders ignorant of life who every now and then make the most fatal mistakes as to the laws of life — appoint themselves guides of mankind.
4Individual development takes place under the balancing of freedom and law. Freedom abused limits, abolishes freedom. Freedom rightly used affords increasingly greater freedom. The individual's freedom is secured by the freedom of all, and is perfected by the individuals realization of unity.
5Men believe they are free, being ignorant of the fact that since long time ago they have by their idiocies on life forfeited the right to and possibility of freedom for many lives to come. In the compulsion of the hard circumstances of life is hidden a purpose, which slowly but with unerring certainty will teach those most defiant towards life. Men are to learn under increasingly harder conditions of life, until they have learnt that freedom does not exist for the pursuit of arbitrary self-will. Everybody has a right to the most erroneous view of life for his own part, naturally to take the consequences in respect of life. Here mankind has never cared about the cost to itself. But then men have developed a monstrously perverted instinct, so that, when making a choice, they will inevitably choose the one wrong thing. They still do hardly anything but make life harder for others and for themselves. Man's ability of causing suffering to living beings is phenomenally well developed. His inability of spreading cheer, joy, happiness around him is as manifest. Mankind's misdeeds in the past are an accumulated gruesome sowing that must be reaped. Men are anxiously eager to see that "justice is done". If they could imagine how efficiently it is done, they would be anxious about their own blunders instead. More than a hundred thousand human beings die every day, most of them downtrodden by their fellow-beings and crushed under the merciless lashes of their self-formed destiny. It is not he fault of life that men prefer learning only through painful experiences.
6Mankind, in its ignorance of life and presumption, has preferred the path of hatred. The consequence has been that "man is a wolf unto man", that life is a war of all against all. All violate every now and then the right of others to inviolable freedom and all are accessaries, also those who impartially witness to the violation of freedom. Only when the individual's freedom is not violated any more, only then can development continue quietly and harmoniously, and life grant to every being its greatest possible joy and happiness. The only way to regain a lost right to happiness is to make others happy and not to increase the hardship of living for anyone. People are a long way short of the self-evident understanding of life.
1The meaning and goal of existence is the actualization of the potential consciousness of the atoms and the activation, subjectivation, objectivation, and expansion of atomic consciousness. Through this process atomic consciousness acquires knowledge of the kinds of matter of all the different worlds, of the different kinds of consciousness corresponding to these kinds of matter, and of the laws of life.
2The process implies, in respect of knowledge, development from ignorance to omniscience; in respect of will, from impotence to omnipotence; in respect of freedom, from bondage to freedom conditioned by law; in respect of life, from isolation to unity with all life.
3The path of development is self-realization. The atom is to actualize by itself its potential divinity in all respects. Self-realization is to have experiences and to learn from them. Individual character, knowledge, insight, and understanding, as well as all requisite qualities and abilities are acquired through experience.
4Ignorance acquiring knowledge is a search that for aeons means a roving, until insight and understanding finally find the way to apply the knowledge of reality and life purposefully.
5The life of ignorance is a life of fictions and illusions. Fictions are the attempts of ignorance to explain reality. Through his illusions the individual is enticed to get the necessary experiences. The path to knowledge is a continual replacement of fictions and illusions of lesser reality content by others of greater reality content. The illusions that cause suffering finally prove to be so manifestly unserviceable as to be discarded without regret.
6In the negative, freedom is freedom from fictions and illusions. In the positive, freedom is knowledge of the laws and the ability to apply them unfailingly. Until this goal has been reached, freedom is "the right to have experiences" within the limit of the equal right of all.
1The self incarnates in order to have experiences and to learn from them, to acquire knowledge of the world and of life, to acquire qualities and abilities. In the lower kingdoms, the individual atom is guided in this by the common instinct of its group-soul. In the human kingdom, the individual must himself, according to the law of self-realization, develop his own instinct of life and try to find his way by means of it. Of course he will get some meagre orientation from the experiences of mankind. But his own experiences and his own working up of them remain the determining factor of his development. Through thousands of personalities (incarnations) the self gathers more and more experiences. They are utilized in two ways. Firstly, they are preserved latently in the self. Secondly, their quintessence is sublimated into causal superconsciousness. When this is activated it first becomes unfailing instinct, subsequently guidance through inspirations, and, finally, directly accessible in the waking consciousness.
2The path is long, going through many stages of development. At the lowest stage, the individual learns slowly through his own experiences, so slowly that these involvations must appear unsuccessful on the whole to a superficial observer. As time goes on, however, that fund of experiences of life is formed, which is the condition of the development of the power of reflection and, with it, the possibility for the individual to work up his experiences. At this stage, the individual has no need for any guidance but that by his desires. With the next stage, the individual's thought begins to be his guide. Reflection grows increasingly stronger and the advances of his reason strengthen his confidence in his ability to think for himself. It is only when he begins to be interested in life as a problem, in the meaning and goal of life, that he begins to suspect the fact of his ignorance of life, to recognize his inability and to feel the need for guidance. The authorities of public opinion are his guides to begin with. Eventually, their hypotheses and theories appear all too short-lived and uncertain as well as incapable of answering the basic questions. The various dogmatic systems, which more and more manifestly conflict with the definitely established facts of scientific research and with a purposeful common sense view of life, cannot any longer satisfy his methodical principle thinking. When he has reached the stage of culture, and begins striving to ennoble his personality, then his own instinct of life and the inspirations from his unconscious prove more and more reliable. He begins to acquire a conception of life of his own, which accords with that of the great humanist geniuses.
3Those beings who have left the human kingdom to continue their development in higher kingdoms, do not lead men. Instead they become administrators of the laws of life. In this they see to it that implacable justice is done to all. That injustice of life which ignorance complains about, is the injustice of the individual himself; bad reaping from bad sowing. Higher beings take no responsibility for mankind's misdeeds and idiocies in life. Consequently, they can do nothing to mend the distress into which men have put themselves by their own doing. According to the law they can help but those who have acquired a right to be helped. The individual receives help according to the law of reaping. It is his good reaping from his good sowing.
4The doctrine of prayer in the accepted sense is the doctrine of arbitrariness and miracle (special divine intervention). What is mistaken for the granting of prayer is the fulfilment of desire. A desire is always fulfilled, however, if it is not counteracted by some other power, by an obstacle raised by a bad sowing. The intense desire found in ardent prayer is a considerable power, and the concerted emotional power, led by "one-pointed will", of a congregation closely united, is certainly capable of bringing about the apparently inexplicable effect of a so-called miracle.
5We do not need to fear life, however forbidding it may appear, because the purpose of life, like its end, is always good. Anyone who distrusts life, deprives himself of the power that is born from confidence in the laws of life. Ideals are our lodestars on the boundless sea of life. They are the powers of life that lead him aright who follows their prompting.
1Ideal right is the right of the individual. The fact that it will be generally understood and recognized only in cultures of the future does not nullify its absolute validity.
2The laws of life grant freedom. Because only freedom in relation to the laws of life can involve full responsibility for mistakes as to the laws of life. The laws of life can never be invoked when measures are taken to restrict freedom.
3Divine right is individual sovereignty. Man is a potential godhead. No power has any right to take away the freedom that life grants to the individual. The individual has an inalienable, divine right to think, feel, say, and do whatever pleases him, as long as, in so doing, he does not violate the right of anybody else, and the equal right of all to that same inviolable freedom.
4The state (society, the community, the people) has no greater right than the individual. State, collective, religion, morality, science, etc., are no authorities of superior right. The state exists in order to defend the right of the individual. The individual has no right to have a disposal of the individual. The individual can only demand legal protection from the state. The state has no ideal right to outlaw anything but violations of the equal right of all. The individual has no duty to sacrifice himself for the community when so commanded. The individual has a right to decide for himself what he will regard as useful or conducive to happiness.
5Power is the enemy of freedom when used to any other end but to defend ideal right. Any power that is not based on ideal right lacks a legal basis and is power abused. All laws that do not conform to ideal right violate justice. Abuse of power includes all government measures that do not benefit all, that are not to the interest of all, that are not of advantage to all. Patronizing of any kind is abuse of power.
6The principles of reciprocity (measure for measure) is the legal principle of justness. All rights and obligations, all relations between individuals, rest on the basis of reciprocity, which can never be disputed. Duty is the obligation incident to the rights. Nobody can claim rights that do not correspond to as binding obligations. Nobody has any right to demand more from the state than what corresponds to his own contribution.
1The state is a collective of individuals formed to furnish a common protection against outer and inner enemies, to safeguard the individual's freedom in relation to other individuals and collectives, to regulate matters which the individual has no possibility of controlling, to make it possible for the civilization of the civilizational individual, the culture of the cultural individual, the humanism of the humanist individual, and for the idealism of the idealist individual to arise and to be preserved.
2It is the task of the state to further social unity and counteract tendencies to division, corruption, and abuse of power. The danger of corruption at the stage of civilization is always greater than ignorance thinks. Corruption is counteracted by guarantees against insecurity and arbitrariness. Incorruptibility and justness are the most eminent state virtues. It is the task of the state to work for international unity. Nationalism as opposed to other nations can no more be defended than violent is superior to the state. If the state does not fulfil ideal requirements, then it is ruled by individuals ignorant of life. The basic tasks of the state are given, being unchangeable and independent of the demands of the spirit of the times.
3It is the task of the state to furnish the individual with opportunities of education, to protect him against helpless destitution by welfare organizations, to guarantee him the greatest possible freedom within the frame of everybody's right to the same inviolable freedom. The state lacks the right to infringe the individual's freedom of opinion (that ideal right always violated by barbaric states), to try to "reform" otherwise lawabiding citizens, to disrespect the needs and just demands of existing "minorities", to demand more from the individual than what is inevitable for the continuance and serviceability of the state, to exploit the individual unreasonably. It is true that conditions can become so complicated that there can be doubt about what is necessary or reasonable. But these principles hold good.
4The state is not any kind of "superior being", Those certainly would be strange superior beings, which throughout world history have committed such an unbelievable amount of idiocy and violation. The collectives that are legal power factors in a civilized state consist of very imperfect individuals who have a limited insight, a conventional conception of right, idiosyncrasies, preconceived opinions, conflicting interests; in whom the will to unity is but faintly developed. Ignorance of life does not become knowledge by being multiplied by however great a number, or by being given titles or decorations. The state is a very imperfect institution. The essence of the state is its laws. No state reaches higher than its laws. As yet, no state has lived up to the name of cultural state. Until this will be the case, all attempts at constructing an ideal society must fail. Every such attempt only results in unnecessary suffering for a considerable portion of the members of the state. Change is not the same as development. The will to unity is destroyed through abuse of power.
5The slogans which always rule the masses at the stage of civilization include in our times democracy and equality. Democracy presupposes ideal men. There can never be any equality. Classes are the natural order of things in all kingdoms of nature, lower as well as higher ones. The natural classes indicate different age classes. The difference in age between human individuals can amount to seven aeons. The immense difference on experience of life is greater than ignorance can possibly grasp. That nobody really believes in equality appears in the fact that although pride refuses to recognize anyone as its superior, yet contempt always sees untold multitudes below itself. The principle of equality implies a denial of development, of the difference between potential god and actual god. Democracy counteracts development by continually lowering all requirements of ability, knowledge, insight, and understanding; by allowing the incomparably more numerous younger part of mankind to oppress those at the stages of culture, humanity, and ideality. Democracy is no guarantee of freedom, no more a guarantee against abuse of power than any other kind of government: one-man rule, clique rule, rule by a class, or by the majority. Freedom is in danger anywhere where power is concentrated. The lower level of development, the greater the risks. It is true that there are no ultimate guarantees against oppression if corruption is allowed to eat away public spirit. But the greatest guarantee will be afforded by those systems in which the political influence of the various social classes are balanced against each other, and the supreme level of power is a discerning authority that demands responsibility and has an absolute veto against arbitrary legislation.
6In normal epochs, individuals are born into the social classes that correspond to their developmental levels. The division of labour in society is facilitated thereby, and the social balance thus obtained prevents the elements of eternal discontent and rebellion from giving vent to their hatred. However, in that condition of discord in our epoch of division, which has characterized the past twelve thousand years of world history, the castes have been mixed and the arbitrariness of ignorance has ruled, with results familiar to all.
7As a citizen the individual has no other natural right but that of legally protected freedom. Every other right must be earned through the corresponding obligations. In principle, rights without obligations are a social error, which just results in continually increasing claims to new rights. The more society does for the individual, the greater the service that it has a right to demand in return. Of course, this is equally true of the individual in relation to society.
1The concept of law is the most important of all concepts. Law is the condition of all life. Law is necessary to freedom, unity, development, to society, and to culture. The state is built through laws. At mankind's present stage of development, laws are so necessary that - if the state did not exist - it should have to be formed just for the sake of the laws. Education which does not inculcate the inevitability of law does not live up to its name. Only law prevents arbitrariness and chaos.
2Laws indicate the developmental stage of the nation in civilizational, cultural, humanitarian respect. The condition of an international conception of right is to understand that the super-state is superior to the state.
3The nation has the laws that it deserves. Laws made by beings so ignorant of life are by no means sacrosanct. It can be said that the conditions of really purposeful legislation are still lacking. To seek to invest the products of frailty with some kind of sanctity is blasphemous. Anyone who wishes to uphold a respect of the law must not contribute to arbitrary legislation and arbitrary interpretation of law. Too often, the laws are abused by the dictatorial tendency. In addition, they reflect idiosyncrasies of the legislators and dogmas of the ignorance of life. If the laws are inhuman and if it is impossible to bring about a change, then the individual may defy them, willingly to take the consequences. To omit taking advantage of all opportunities to ennoble the laws implies missing opportunities to strengthen good and weaken evil (that is, to sow a good sowing), and entailed implication in the collective responsibility for bad laws.
4Too many laws are likely to diminish the sense of solidarity and to increase the unwillingness to comply with law. The prohibitory mentality has a destructive effect on the ideas of right, breeds contempt of law, defiance, desire to damage; and stunts the sense of social responsibility. Defiance appears in the inclination to act against the law when penal consequences are deemed unlikely. In addition, it is a psychological error to try to check through laws all possible mischief wrought by barbaric individuals (which laws such individuals never care about) and for this reason to pester loyal citizens with unnecessary and irritating regulations. It is safer to counteract "lawlessness" by enlightenment and education. The state has in its various organs of propaganda, and especially in its neglected educational system, a means of arousing and developing a loyal public spirit. It does not seem to be understood that this spirit is destroyed when political antagonists spitefully cast suspicion on each other. The simplest rules for living together without friction and the respect for the equal right of all can, at all events, be instilled in a more efficient way than through catechism.
5The laws can be considerably simplified, especially the penal laws. Those who infringe the right of others need a special social education, to be continued until it leads to concrete results. Here is a marked inability of taking the individually different kinds of asociality and prospects of reformation into necessary consideration. Clumsy penal execution often increases hatred by the meaningless psychological torture it implies. To try to circumvent absurd punishment by declaring as many delinquents as possible mentally deranged is to make propaganda for the psychiatric superstition that everybody is insane. The fact that nobody is considered fully same is a clear proof of how thoroughly the ignorance of life fails to understand individual character.
6Truly rational laws will be possible only at the stage of culture. Then the laws will be in harmony with the laws of life. Until then, an ever continuing principal investigation as to what can be done to ennoble the laws will always be necessary.
7Necessary laws are such laws as are required to the protection of the individual and the continuance of the state, and to the furtherance of the respect for law and right. Unnecessary laws are such laws as could better be replaced by information, general directions, and instructions by the police.
8Just laws guarantee to the individual his freedom against the injustices of the state (including the legal ones). Such injustices can never be defended by claiming some kind of superior right of the collective.
9Good laws generally coincide with necessary laws. They are as few and as simple as possible. They accord as much as possible with ideal right. They are purposeful, principal, general, also stating the spirit and purpose of the law. Thereby formalism is counteracted and interpretation is simplified. Assuredly, this demands very much of the capability of the courts, and presupposes the education to be completely different from the current one and particularly to aim at common sense.
10Bad laws are: too many laws, badly prepared, arbitrary, continually changed laws; such as conflict with the general conception of right; have a brutalizing effect and counteract education into humanity; work changes without making anything really better; abolish justified differences; confer rights without duties and power without responsibility; satisfy social envy, intolerance, fanaticism, indignation; become weapons for the majority to oppress the minority; such as confer authority on ignorance and power on incompetence; obstruct development; counteract unity. Loyalty presupposes reciprocity. Bad laws or arbitrarily interpreted laws destroy loyalty, arouse resentment and contempt of the law. "A bad law is worse than no law at all"; ought to be the motto of every legislator.
1Rights guaranteed by law are illusory if they are not upheld by a public spirit defending the law. That is demonstrated by the various freedoms of liberalism. Freedom of thought is restricted by the dogmas that rule in all domains of life. Often, the freedom of speech is dangerous on account of the arrogance and aggressiveness of intolerance and fanaticism, and is recommendable just in case you have a strong party behind your back, or are willing to be a martyr to your opinions. The freedom of the press does not exist for an individual ho lacks a publisher or a private capital. Moreover, he is defenceless against persecution by the "printers", should he happen to become the object of their malevolence. Without a general justness both freedom and justice are but empty appearance. The whole of society's cult of appearances and its lies of life would not be so radically worked out if freedom existed.
2Legislative assemblies are dominated by prohibitioners and patronizers. They would prefer having everything prohibited. The tendency to prohibit is strengthened with each new prohibition. Because there are madmen at the stage of barbarism who delight in abusing freedom, all other citizens must be pestered with all sorts of ridiculous prohibitions. They make laws for the lawabiding, who do not need directions, without in the least influencing just those lawless elements who do whatever pleases them, in obvious defiance of every law. Often enough, the disadvantages of prohibition are greater than its advantages. The psychological perversity of the mania for prohibition is best seen when considering that the innumerable prohibitions only the more incite the lawless, but paralyse initiative and joy of enterprise in the law-abiding, if not nursing in them - in their desperation - contempt for both laws and legislators.
3The ones to be blamed for the increasing general lawlessness are mainly the pedagogues, the educators, the schools, the gangster writers, and the politicians. Modern coddling pedagogy, with its idiotic harping on complexes and other ridiculous subtleties, has so completely paralysed the power of discrimination in parents that they no longer dare to bring their children up, but let them grow up savages. Primitive types, which it is about in most cases, are not so easily affected with any dangerous complexes of inhibition, but the more easily with complexes of self-will. Undiscerning pedagogical sharp-sightedness can discover symptoms that do not exist, and is as often blind before the most obvious. The imaginative speculations of some psycho-analysts are given out as definitely established scientific results. These uncalled-for pedagogic twaddlers, who compete in spreading all manner of fictions, are ignorant of the most essential things. They have no idea of human consciousness development, the stages of human development, and the immense differences there are in psychological respect. Idiotized by the nonsensical talk about the equality of all, they believe that the individuals at the stage of barbarism must be treated with that subtlety, seldom found in the pedagogues themselves, which is required for exceptional people at the stage of culture. As regards school, it has wholly neglected everything belonging to the building of character and has not conveyed to the young even the simplest conception of right (which a catechism cannot do), but rather, by glorifying the brutalities and intrigues of times past, it has done its utmost to confuse their ideas of right and wrong. Seductive literature with its criminal madmen, all manner of lawlessness and sadism, must bear a large share of the blame. Politicians and the press have contributed to barbarization by their poisonous propaganda of hatred against people of other opinions and social classes than their own.
4At the stage of barbarism, there are not even the simplest concepts of freedom. Such individuals, born into civilizational nations, conceive of freedom, about which they hear others talk so much, as a right to self-will and lawlessness. They would never even have felt the need for "freedom" if not the democratic propaganda of equality had put a hatred of everything superior into their heads. The entire religious, psychological, pedagogical and jurisprudential system of education has sufficiently unveiled its absurdity and uselessness. Asocial elements, who lack the simplest conception of right, need to be given a special treatment and an efficient education by medico-social educators. They should by appropriate means be impressed with the necessity of respecting the equal right of others, until they clearly recognize the inevitability and rationality of that conception of right. These educators must have a sufficient sound judgement for them to see the illusoriness of the ruling psychological fictions, and possess that vast experience of life which liberates from the idiotization wrought by the complex fanatics of today.
5Freedom is necessary to development. Without freedom the individuals will not learn to realize what freedom is, recognize its immense importance, and never learn to use freedom rightly. Neither can there, without freedom, be any rational conception of right. The bounds of freedom and right are where the understanding and respect of the equal right of all end. According to Schopenhauer, the concept of right actually gains its correct content in being contrasted with the concept of wrong. Wrong simply consists in doing harm to somebody in some manner; and human rights, in everybody's right to do everything that cannot harm anybody.
6It is the duty of the state to protect the citizens against encroachment by public officers. They have greater possibilities than others of causing harm to individuals. Their motive is often to try to check undesirable, displeasing opinions. Therefore, it is important that the state by firm constitutional laws guarantees the freedom of opinion, is itself neutral in all matters of opinion, and does not favour any particular opinion. From this follows, among other things, adherence to no creed.
7All power is abused. Therefore, those in power should be put under a law that exacts a real responsibility from them; the greater their power, the more effectively this should be done. If this is not observed, then arbitrariness is inevitable even in societies which regard themselves as highly civilized. Only he is ripe for power who wields it to defend freedom.
8Power and freedom are the enemies of one another. The enemies of freedom have always been religion, morality, state, caste, and wealth. They will always demonstrate this anew, whenever they are again allowed to have an undue influence, which rational constitutional laws must prevent.
9The state should be the individual's protection also against inner enemies. Only as regards criminal elements can the state be said to fulfil its task. But it does nothing to protect the individual from the hatred of other individuals. It does little or nothing to counteract the terrible institution of sacrifice. It often supports power factors in society which oppress or ruin individuals.
10Freedom is life's greatest gift to men. It is abused to deprive others of their freedom. When seeing how easily and willingly they sacrifice their freedom for all manner of chimeras, you understand that they would prefer slavery if only guaranteed the flesh-pots. Also this is part of the irremediable illusions of life. Having lost their freedom, they will gradually lose everything else.
1The law of unity, the most obvious of all the laws of life, is the last one we discover, because there is no law that men care less about in their egoistic self-glory. Everything else seems to them more essential than the one essential thing. The law of unity is without comparison the most important to man's development, harmony, happiness. The law of unity is the law of salvation, service, brotherhood. Unity is everybody's freedom, everybody's law, everybody's goal. Insofar as the individual realizes unity, he approaches the final goal, superman, who is one with the all. This law implies that good is everything that furthers the development of all and everybody. Evil is everything that counteracts the development and ennoblement of the individual, the group, mankind, and of all other life. Everything that unites has an irreplaceable value. All the pertaining factors are normative. The greatest contribution a man can make is to rally and unite; the greatest harm, to divide and disunite. Anyone who seeks his own ends does not know what unity is.
2The basis of unity is the potential divinity of all life. The only difference between individuals is that their paths from potential to actualized divinity are of different length. But the final goal of all life is given. The life we see in this world, the lowest and to the normal individual the only visible of all the material worlds, has the same task: to develop. The very fact that this life is divine in essence, secures the divine and eternal right of every individual life against any attempt of disparagement. Unity is not based on equality, which is a fiction of envy. In the entire universe there will be no equality until all have attained the highest divinity.
3The demands of compulsory conventions have the effect that we concentrate on them as though they were essential, whereas they are but temporary and more or less unessential. Through this erroneous attitude of ours, we strengthen everything which divides and separates, and we become unable to appreciate the good qualities of an individual. Without these the individual could never have become a man. Hatred can never discover anything good, just deny and dissolve unity. Compulsory conventions may have their function at a primitive stage, if there are no other ways out and if aggressive asociality violates the right of others. It is a mistake, however, to prescribe moral laws to people of a higher type. The so-called moral law is a fiction of ignorance. The law of reaping takes charge of those who abuse freedom. Love can never be commanded either in outer or inner respect, it can just be lived forth. Norms of action are at best bases for judgement to be used when orientation yourself in life, and are no imperatives. When reason assumes dictatorial manners, it is on the wrong track. When the spontaneous urge to do the right as far as one sees is hampered by demands and directions, then the right is replaced by its opposite.
4We all make up a unity, and anyone who excludes somebody from unity has thereby excluded but himself, until he has learnt, through the bitter lessons of life, to recognize the universality of the law of unity. There is no mistake in life more serious, more fatal to our future lives here on earth, than that of excluding anyone from his divine right to our heart. By excluding each other men become accessaries to that war of hatred, which perpetually rages on this planet of sorrow. How immensely far from unity we are is clear from the fact that, in the eyes of others, the individual has scarcely a right to exist. The striving after unity is always counteracted by the massive resistance, dullness, and need for disunion of the compact majority. There is much separating man from man. At the lowest developmental level everything does. At the highest nothing can separate. Our insight into and understanding of unity, our striving to realize unity, indicate our level of development. To strive after unity is the way to reach our goal as men in the shortest possible time. The will to unity is expressed in, among other things, the will to help matter-of-factly, efficiently, where help is needed. It has nothing to do with the sentimentality of masked egoism.
5Unity is the greatest mission in life for the individual as well as the collective. No mission in life which counteracts unity lives up to its name.
6Mankind is a collective unity. By contributing to unity the individual acquires the right to conditions that favour a more rapid development. If we do not try to realize unity, our selfrealization does not reach far. If man does not sense his unity with all life, he will remain a stranger with a sense of antagonism and fear of everything in life. The law of unity also makes itself felt in the collective responsibility. We make up a unity, whether we know it or not. It is a lengthy record of misdeeds from lives past which we increase daily by our so-called truths, our indifference before inhuman social and economic conditions, etc., and our spreading of hatred of all kinds.
7One step beyond the human unity is the union with all life. The first step on this long path is the wilful resolve to confide in unity, despite everything, the unity which is the power of life. By weaving this confidence into his conscious, and thereby gradually also into his unconscious, mental and emotional life, the individual will approach nearer and nearer to reality. The more confidence he acquires, the more often his experience will bear out the power of confidence. Anyone who has become one with things, cannot be injured by them. But the most insignificant exception can be turned into a Baldur's mistletoe or an Achilles' heel. If our life view were true, unity would long since have been a clearly recognized fact, and union would not, as it is now, be an absurd and grotesque thought. The individual who sets about work for unity on his own, takes on him all the labours of Hercules. But that is the path to superman and to the gods.
8The individual is an indispensable part of unity. The law of unity demonstrates the infinite value of the individual. Throughout history the value of man has been the least value (in religion not in theory but always in practice). The mad ideas of power, glory, wealth, etc., have held sway. And men are slaves to their ideas, that is, their superstitions. It is inevitable that with this attitude to human dignity history will always be the history of suffering.
9Consciousness is one, only one, a unity, the unity of all. Development means, as seen from the consciousness point of view, expansion of consciousness through the merging of the individual self — with its self-identity intact — into greater and greater units of consciousness, until cosmic consciousness has been achieved. Unity does not imply any abolition of individual freedom. On the contrary, it means increased freedom. Because the merging into ever vaster units of consciousness means a greater insight into the worlds of material reality, greater understanding of life and its expressions, a greater knowledge of the law.
10Of course, unity is a "mystery" to those who have not experienced it. The advaitee imagines that the self is absorbed by and drowned in the "ocean". But the self can never be lost. Union with the universe means that the individual has himself become the universe.
1The individual is the primary unit, and individualism is a condition of collectivism. Individualism is necessary for the individual as an individual, and collectivism for the individual as a part of the collective. Both individualism and collectivism are conceptions made by the individual. Collectivism is an ideal and a reality. To the ignorant it remains an ideal. To the primitive it appears a utopy, which can only be realized through dictatorship. To the esoterician it is an inevitable reality, the goal of mankind, the kingdom of superman and of happiness.
2We all make up a unity. Mankind constitutes a collective of consciousness, a collective on different levels of development. At the same time man is an individual, a group being and a unit in mankind. The individual belongs to a group, whether he know it or not. As an individual he has his own isolated self-consciousness; as a group being, a potential group consciousness; and as a human collective being, a collective consciousness, which embraces all mankind. During the course of development this group and collective consciousness is activated. The basis of unity is the individual's second self collective. The individual's path to the worlds of the second self, the kingdom of superman, goes via his realization of collective consciousness.
3Insofar as the individual sees his participation in the collective and realizes his community with it, his freedom as well as responsibility increase. He becomes responsible for his collective, independently of the insight and striving of others, and nobody can prevent him from trying to realize collectivism. Nor can he relieve himself of his responsibility, or free himself from his implication in the collective destiny, even if for his part he has done everything in his power to do.
4Individualism secures the individual's right against the collective. The individual has always a right to individuality, to freedom within the collective, against all the demands of others of selfsacrifice, against claims violating the individual's right. The collective can never assert collectivism against the ideals, in which the higher ideals have priority over possible lower ones. The fundamental principle of the collective is ideality, which is always the supreme right. Else the collective nullifies itself. There are individuals who are on a higher level of development, either because they are elder brothers or because they have hastened ahead of the others through devotion to their purpose. Many ideas are rejected as freaks, utopies, fantasies, and are treated as illusions hostile to the collective. But even if fantasts mistake vagaries for ideals because of their deficient sense of reality, yet it is their own business, if they do not violate the right of others. Nor has the collective any privilege of being infallible. There are always individuals who can be in the right where the greatest collectives are not. To ignorance ideals are always madness. The ideals, which like signposts have marked out the course of development, have always appeared as irrealities to ignorance.
5Individualism is justified until the individual has acquired a certain fund of self-reliance and self-determination. The same applies to egoism, within certain, narrower, limits. Without it, the individual could give up his individuality, not acquiring the qualities necessary to independence. When the individual has developed his individual character, however, egoism becomes selfassertion at the expense of others. If his abilities are not put at the service of the collective, he will counteract unity and his own consciousness development. There are those to whom individuality is the one essential thing, and who principally and with all means fight unity. They eventually form a special group.
6There are two kinds of collectivism: the unfree and the free one.
7Compulsory union abolishes individualism, has a hampering and a debasing effect. Egoistic group collectivism, which desires solidarity in order to line its own pocket at the expense of society or of other groups and individuals, counteracts unity and has a destructive effect. In such a collective, the mottos of hatred may rule, the psychoses of hatred may influence misdirected loyalty, and compel the most reasonable and noble members to remain passive before actions which they, as free outsiders, would dislike and condemn.
8True collectivism is based on individualism, freedom, unity, and ideality, and understands the necessity of the collective.
9The individual's increasingly greater understanding of others is the sign that his activated collective superconscious begins to be conscious to himself. Thereby the first step is taken towards culture.
10The individual always sacrifices something for the collective: some of his sovereignty, among other things. The higher level the collective is at, the less it encroaches on this sovereignty, because all compulsion hampers activity and initiative, and because everybody is himself the best judge of his contribution. The more ideal the collective is, the more the individual puts the ends of the collective before his own ends and interests. The more the individuals live for the collective, all serve all, with benevolence, understanding, interest, sympathy, and mutual appreciation, the more important will it be to cooperate for the common cause. The result depends on the spirit of solidarity. A collective with their emotionality and mentality closely welded can accomplish stupendous work, to say the least of it. Regrettably, the conditions of such an insight are nonexistent at lower stages of development.
11The group is an harmonious association of individuals united in their concerted aspiration for a given mission in life. The group individuals' superconsciousnesses increase the insight, clarity, power of everybody in the group and compensate for he individual failings. Also the work on self-realization is made easier through the group work. It is a great mission in life to search out your group, help it form itself, establish its goal, and try to realize it.
1As seen from the supreme point of view, all life makes up one single collective. The condition of development is unity in diversity. Consequently, collectives are of very different kinds. Mankind makes up a collective, every race and nation too. All have as their mission to contribute their share to universal development. The task of the fourth root-race is to ennoble emotionality. The fifth root-race is to intellectualize emotionality and to direct imagination towards the ideal. The task of the sixth root-race will be to realize unity in social forms. Also the nations are expected to make their contributions. Hitherto, in their relations with each other they have hardly seen any other purpose than to rule, oppress, exploit. The human kingdom is the only natural kingdom made up of isolated individuals. According as the individual develops, he will recognize his solidarity with greater and greater collectives: family, clan, class, nation, race, mankind. His development towards unity is his self-acquired realization of the necessity of collectivity.
2The nation is the most tangible collective: geographically defined, formed throughout history, with a common language and traditions handed down. In the present world-epoch, the individuals in any one national collective are found at all the different developmental levels, and, from that point of view, they have little in common except language and public opinion. The nation makes up a collective of collectives, however. And in this the differentiation of consciousness finds expression. The differentiation is always the essential one in developmental respect. The more collectives of consciousness there are, the better, since then all the more ideas activating consciousness contribute to the individual differentiation. These collectives can be determined by external conditions, common interests, psychological factors, etc., and form social classes; occupational groups; social, economic, scientific, artistic, literary, etc. associations. The most important ones are the collectives of consciousness which rally to common ideals. They need not therefore belong to external associations. Suffice it to mention the ever unknown elite of culture, humanity, ideality, and unity, respectively. The silent work done by this elite is invaluable. Their exactly chiselled, lucid thought forms make it easier to think for the mentally untrained and counteract the bad suggestions of mass opinion. After them in importance follow consciousness collectives of similar world views and life views, philosophic schools, etc.
3During periods of stability the social classes form collectives that preserve culture. In times of social disruption (so-called democratic times) they lose their roothold. In such times it is essential that initiatives are taken in forming associations for common emotional-mental needs.
4The caste institution — estate and class society — is expressive of the different levels of development in the human kingdom. Estates and classes in a purposively organized society form meeting-grounds for individuals on the same levels of development. This facilitates understanding between individuals. Within domains of similar knowledge, the linguistic means of expression gain the realness of personal experience. This is also true of common emotional domains, such as religion, art, social, and other group ideas, as well as common fictional domains, such as hypotheses and theories of all kinds. Even if, as a rule and where most people are concerned, just the superficial layers of consciousness are involved in this, yet the isolation of loneliness is removed and ennobling collective needs are developed.
5Estates and classes make it possible to preserve and cultivate the cultural heritage. Culture is heritage. If this heritage is scattered, no culture can arise, or decay sets in. Only very slowly, through assiduity and reverent tradition the conditions that make culture possible are eventually gathered. Culture has its true soil in the family. The family is too few in number, however, to guard in the long run those treasures of tradition, which one day will make culture possible. Only the class is sufficiently numerous for this. The class is then held together by similar emotional and mental interests as well as closely related social tasks. The sense of unity is fostered more easily in the class. If these classes are dissolved, then the first tender signs of culture are ruined, and the individuals become socially rootless and culturally disoriented. If conditions were normal, which they have not been in historical times, then we would find a society in which all classes cooperated harmoniously for the welfare of all. The ruling caste has abused poser to oppress and exploit instead of serving life by guarding, helping, raising. Abuse of power leads to loss of power. The castes are split by the incarnation of more highly developed individuals into lower castes and of undeveloped ones into higher castes, which results in social mobility and that social upheaval called democracy. In our period of equality it passes for an axiom that all are equal. Thereby they nulligy all the distance there is between a man recently causalized from the animal kingdom and a man standing on the border of the next higher kingdom, that of superman. They do not suspect the fact that it is the same distance (embracing a difference in age of up to seven aeons) as between the lowest and highest animal species. By equality the social philosophers meant equality before the law, the right to human dignity, the right to open competition, the right to be judged from competence alone. But the ignorance of life took charge of that slogan, incapable to discern distances between different stages and levels of development. All are regarded as having the same prospects of insight into life, discernment, competence, ability. The proclamation of equality is one of the greatest, most serious mistakes of mankind, because it leaves the power to ignorance and incompetence. We shall all reach the goal some time in the future. The time for this is not the same for all, however.
6Like the classes in societies normally differentiated would be found on different levels of development, so the different races and nations would correspond to different stages of development. Thereby the different individual needs would best be satisfied. The same is true of various kinds of art and music performance, etc.
7Exoteric knowledge or history does not afford us any facts by which to judge this development. To do this it is necessary to have the facts of the esoteric world view.
1The law of development in its limited application to the human consciousness indicates the universal conditions, the different stages and levels, and the final goal: the merging of the first self with the second self. The subject is of course inexhaustible. It will be reserved for future sciences to furnish an all-round elucidation of the pertaining realities. The intention here has been to demonstrate the reality of the stages and to prepare for a new view of the most important cultural factors. In a period which fancies about equality in all respects, the discussion of different developmental stages is likely to arouse indignation. Our modern psychologists probably will not tarry to refute this esoteric fact by an overwhelming evidence. Future epochs, however, will present psychologists of quite another kind.
2Consciousness development is a very slow process. The individual spends seven aeons on the average in each one of the natural kingdoms preceding one another. The human kingdom can be accomplished in one aeon if the individual does not fail in any single incarnation, but develops in each one the highest possible consciousness activity, and with an instinct that senses the goal strives to realize unity.
3In the human kingdom consciousness development can be divided into five stages or 777 levels. On 700 of the levels, or at the stages of barbarism, civilization, and culture; emotional consciousness is the dominant one. Emotional thinking rules in all domains that can directly or indirectly affect personal interests.
4Consciousness is conditioned by the vibrations in emotional (48:2-7) and mental (47:4-7) molecular kinds. Consciousness domains that are mainly superconscious are, at the stage of barbarism 48:2-4, 47:4-6; at the stage of civilization, 48:2,3; 47:4,5; at the stage of culture, 48:2; 47:4,5. The emotional vibrations at the stage of culture are mostly found within the middle regions, 48:3-5. The two lowest ones have then disappeared for lack of the pertaining interests, being expressive of the grossest egoism. Superconscious domains depend on the fact that they are not vitalized in the emotional aeon by interstellar or interplanetary vibrations, and that the individual is still incapable of vitalizing by himself the corresponding spirals of his triad units, and also that the individual has not acquired the ability of self-initiated consciousness activity within the layers of consciousness "accessible" to him.
5The emotional vibrations are either attractive or repulsive. The vibrations in the higher two (48:2,3) molecular kinds have an attractive effect; those in the lower four (48:4-7), a repellent effect. In the first four aeons the repellent vibrations predominate, unless their individual characters have acquired an attractive tendency. All emotional expressions can be divided into two basic, principal groups: attractive (love) or repellent (hatred). Everything that is not love is hatred. Love includes all altruistic feelings and qualities, hatred all egoistic ones. Emotions are woven into complexes which are easily vitalized and are unfailingly intensified if attended to. At lower stages the state of hatred is the normal one. Hatred lends life and colour to existence, which would be dreary, empty, meaningless if it were not for the emotions. Hatred stimulates like an elixir of life without which people cannot live. The tendency of hatred always seeks for motives that stimulate it, and almost everything can be made a motive. Religious and moral, social and political, philosophic and scientific fictions, all kinds of personal relations, all barriers to egoism, can inflame hatred. Two examples may be cited to demonstrate the reality of hatred. To destroy an individual's good appearance ("good name and reputation") is, with the moralist cult of appearances which still prevails, about the same thing as to assassinate him. He then becomes a social leper, an outcast from society. Gossip and slander are vital needs for almost everybody. Nobody omits to spread the pestilence more and more abroad. Another sign of hatred is the total absence of that respect and veneration for every living creature that typifies attraction. The fact that mankind speaks of love as of a familiar thing, evidences a total blindness in life. Just the selfdeceptive locutions are familiar. In most cases even admiration, affection, compassion, are dictated by egoism. What the Christians call love is not love but sentimentality. The moralist, with his indignation and unending judgements, makes the most fatal mistakes as to two of the most important laws of life, the laws of freedom and unity.
6Religion and art need no introductory remarks. The conception of right, on the other hand, requires an introduction on account of the confusion of concepts caused by the illusory morality ignorant of life.
7The individual's conception of right is determined by his individual character, and belongs to his level of development. The understanding of a certain conception of right is innate. When the individual again comes into contact with a conception of right previously acquired by him, it immediately appears correct to him. What belongs to his level expresses itself instinctively and spontaneously. The individual lacks an understanding of conceptions of right and ideals that are above his level, but he can of course be drilled to conform to a higher pattern of behaviour.
8Good and evil (right and wrong) are and are not absolute, relative, objective, and subjective; depending on different viewpoints and standpoints. They are absolute in their opposition on each level. For the individual there must be an opposition between good and evil, which must not be made relative if the individual does not want to end up in a chaos of right and wrong. They are relative inasmuch as good and evil on one level are not necessarily good and evil on another. They are objective as a synthesis of universal human experience, laid down in social convention and legal code. They are subjective in so far as the understanding of right and wrong depends on the individual's self-acquired experience of life, and therefore is part of his individual character.
9There must be some kind of conception of right. Otherwise communities could never arise. Without a conception of right a war of all against all would rage, and mankind would be annihilated. The individual who lacks the understanding of basic concepts of right and wrong, is so primitive or asocial that his social education comes under the self-defence of the community. A defence of any violation of the right of others, lawless arbitrariness, or self-will. Anyone who does not want to understand the right of others, must be taught to respect it without understanding it. To give assistance in the prosecution of every violation of the individual's freedom and right is to the social interest of all and everybody. The rules which are necessary if we are to live together without friction are so simple that the most stupid man can be taught to see that they are just, inevitable, rational, and purposive. No catechism is needed for this, a catechism which presupposes a religious conviction and loses its power when reason revolts against the religious fictions.
10For the individual, good is the steps above his level, and particularly the immediately higher step. Evil is the lower, that which is below his level and, usually, in particular degree just the one he has recently left. In this is the subjectivity of the conception of right but not any relativity, which nullifies the necessary opposition between good and evil. Good is everything that furthers the development towards unity, evil is everything that counteracts unity, that becomes obstacles to the achievement of the goal. Every mistake as to laws of life can also be called wrong. All these mistakes fall under the law of reaping, the law of infallible justice.
11Ideals are models for life, examples, goals of life that man sets up to himself, milestones on the individual's path towards unity, truths of life that indicate the shortest path to the world of ideals, developmental factors of an importance seldom understood. Without ideals there is no realization. All ideals will be realized some time. Not all ideals are suited to all. There are physical, emotional, mental ideals. For every conception of right there is an ideal corresponding to it. In the understanding of a certain ideal he level appears. Ideals must be realizable. Therefore, they must not be set too high, out of reach of the individual's vision, so that they lose their attractive power, are regarded impractical, do not urge to action, discourage by their remoteness, lead to a cult of appearances and to self-deception; but, on the contrary, are set up so as immediately to attract, encourage, inspire, enthuse, spontaneously to arouse admiration and rapture, with a certainty that the ideal can be realized. Freedom is the vital air of the ideals. Ideals ought to be understood as rights and favours. Ideals must never be demands, for thereby they become complexes hostile to life. Ideals are brought into ridicule if they are preached to those who do not understand the ideal, do not desire it, do not long for it. You must never demand that anyone shall come up to his ideals. Just having an ideal is a great thing. In certain cases, many incarnations can intervene between wish and realization. Many people deceive themselves by their ideals.
1Those individuals of our mankind who belonged to the lowest barbaric levels, left our globe with the second root-race. With the exception of the remnants of the third root-race, who are rapidly dying out, there are no opportunities of studying the most primitive men. Nor can the developmental stages of different races be determined. Pure races do not exist. The mixture of races is nowadays so efficient that most of the original physiological and psychological distinctive traits of the races have been levelled out. Barbaric clans incarnate into civilized nations. The white nations have so much outraged savage peoples that the latter are allowed, according to the law of reaping, to incarnate into civilized nations and to make up their slums. Besides, social conditions in civilizational nations are often so primitive that the simplest intellects can orientate themselves in them. Many civilizational individuals are found among uncivilized nations, incarnating because of bad reaping.
2More than half of all the levels of development are at the stage of barbarism. The distance between the different levels is minimal as compared to those at higher stages. Nevertheless, each level requires a much greater number of incarnations. This is due to the faint self-initiated consciousness activity. The barbaric individual lives in the physical. Any kind of work, any unnecessary exertion, disgusts him and is considered foolish by him. Only urgent physical needs or excited affects cause him to abandon the indolence which to him is happiness and the meaning of life. Typical is the inability to learn from anything but physical experiences. Everything remains to be learnt. The personality is exclusively a product of reaping, since there is no need for considering consciousness development specially. The difference between the lowest and highest barbaric levels existing appears principally in a more rapid apprehension of sense and in the increased fund of general experience of life, which fact of course facilitates the activity of reason and makes more differentiated emotional states possible.
3For individuals with a repellent basic tendency of their individual characters it is necessary to have egoistic interests to neutralize their instinctively inflammable hatred, and to have stronger motives the stronger this tendency is. The emotions of hatred express themselves as envy, bitterness, fear, contempt, cruelty, vengefulness, suspiciousness, disrespect, malicious pleasure, irreverence, anger. The higher the level, the more differentiated are these emotions, which fact also appears in their modes of expression. There are many degrees between brutality, cunning, or egoism inclined to show some consideration. At low levels, before feelings have been developed, emotionality is mostly the desire to own, rule, destroy, annihilate. Naturally, the activation of emotionality mainly depends on the individual's general circumstances and special experiences. In savages of attractive basic tendency the globe vibrations have not the same effect. The two opposite basic tendencies appear, for example, in one individual wishing to rule by strength, violence, fear, etc.; the other by admiration, affection, etc., aroused by joviality, kindness, generosity, etc., which can also be egoistically motivated (desire to be loved, etc.). In general, individuals of different basic tendencies belong to different clans. Thus, entire ethic groups can, even at the lowest levels, display either predominantly attractive or repellent qualities.
4There is no absolute ignorance as to life. Even the atoms of involutionary matter have experiences, although they are unable to work them up. In plants and animals organized experiences become instincts. In an animal on the border of causalization, instinct is almost infallible within the limits of the animal's necessary experiences. Because of this, however, one must not credit the animals with the ability to judge humans. Those on higher levels cannot be correctly judged by those on lower ones. On the other hand, it is correct that plants and animals perceive whether they are loved or hated. Reason, the ability to use reflection to work up the content of sense, is gradually activated through the routine matters of experience and the adaptation to the conditions of physical existence. At the stage of barbarism, the activity of reason is predominantly imitative, and thinking is some sort of tribal collective thinking. The enforced conventions counteract attempts at independent reflection. Superstitions are handed down from the fathers and are made ineradicable by being engrafted from early childhood. The individual is born into his milieu of opinion, religion, etc. Where divergent opinions do not exist, the possibility of seeing through the absurdities is precluded. The expositions of fables satisfy the need for explanation. The arbitrariness of existence is sovereign. Thus thinking is based on tradition, conformity, and the simplest analogy. The character of faith appears early as blind acceptance and conviction made absolute by emotion. Emotion reacts against departures from habits and ways of thinking once acquired. Should doubt appear, aroused by foreign opinions, doubt would of course be as absolute and indiscriminate. On the highest levels of the stage of barbarism, and in civilizational nations, mental activity can reach a certain strength. Then the need for knowing what ought to be thought and said is characteristic. The content of reason is determined by ruling authorities or by class thinking. The toilsome work in trying to grasp correctly the opinions of others is the emotional proof of the correctness of your opinion. Then if you can account for your opinion in your own words, you have given proof of independent judgement.
5Religions at the stage of barbarism are mostly animistically coloured. Also simple intellects seek some sort of explanation of what is and happens. These explanations vary with everyday notions within the limits of tribe and language. But they accord in certain basic traits, which fact is due to universal human experiences. Primitive conceptions of god are analogies with arbitrary, cruel rulers, and often intensify into terror the understandable dread of unknown powers of nature, which are regarded as wrathful, blood-thirsty, jealous, and vengeful, but can also be bribed and appeased by sacrifice and adoration, so that their assistance can be counted on in all egoistic matters, victory over enemies, etc. It is easy to see that such and similar superstitions can always be in some manner exploited by the powerhungry and the more cunning. In order to exact obedience to taboos and enforced rules, and to raise them above all discussion, an absolute and arbitrary power is required as an authority, ruthlessly punishing every departure or presumptuous individual opinion. This fiction of terror is engrafted through suitable mumbo-jumbo, until it completely dominates the emotional thinking of the tribe. Then the time is come for the teaching, revealed through an appropriate mouthpiece for a being otherwise inaccessible. This prophet, invested with divine authority, announces rules of primitive social life and lays down dubious manners and customs. This lays the foundation of a superstructure. For this dreadful being can, of course, announce new decrees as he chooses, if the successors of the prophet would consider it advisable. (The fact that it has been possible for philosophers to search for rational grounds of such fictions gives sufficient evidence of their discrimination. On the wings of abstraction they rose to the highest abstraction ever and invented "moral law", that divine dictate void of any content, useless.)
6The regulations necessary to the continuance of the tribe: those against homicide, theft, etc., apply but to the tribe. Out in the jungle the law of the jungle, or the right of violence and of the stronger force, still prevails. The absurdities of traditional conventions remain intact, since nobody dares to question changes of what nobody comprehends. Characteristic of the stage of barbarism is the contempt for man. Human dignity, human right, human happiness, are not only unknown but also unimaginable concepts. Only the members of the tribe have a right to exist, and this only on condition that they observe taboos and other superstitions. All other living beings are possibly allowed to live if it is deemed suitable, desirable, useful. Might is right and right is maintained, if need be, by terror. Punishment is brutal. Robbers' expeditions against and attacks on weaker tribes are lawful enterprises. Rather early haunts the fiction of outraged honour, etc.
7At this stage of development, ideals coincide with idols, understandable only as qualities in legendary heroes. Matchless in crude strength, the idol always conquers in battle, triumphs in cunning over his enemies, wins a rich booty, becomes the chief of the tribe, and exterminates all nearby tribes, or makes them his slaves. If the barbarian is born into a civilized nation, certain external traits of his idol are changed, but he remains the triumpher, outshining, outwitting all. The idol satisfies the needs of vanity and pride, the desire to rule and dominate, etc.
1At the stages of barbarism, civilization, and culture, the individual in the emotional aeon is in all essence an emotional being, determined by emotional motives in his feeling, thinking, and acting. The qualities acquired by individual character which automatically make themselves felt belong to any of the 700 emotional levels, 600 of which belong to the lower emotionality (48:4-7).
2Every expression of emotional consciousness brings about vibrations in the emotional world. Those who are reached by these vibrations are unwittingly influenced by them. if the expression is repellent, then repellent emotions are called forth in the receiver. if such emotions are attended to by the receiver, then subconscious complexes are vitalized, resulting in "affects". At the same time, new vibrations of the same qualities are emitted, influencing other people. It can be said without exaggeration that more than 90 per cent of all consciousness expressions are in some respect repellent. One understands the symbolic expression of the gnosticians, saying that "the world is in the power of evil".
3The individual identifies with his dominant being. The emotional individual's emotional consciousness is his "being". It is his "true self". If his emotions are not active, the individual feels dry, listless; life seems grey, empty, meaningless. He wishes that "something would happen", so that vitalized affects might lend colour to life. Most people are the sport of their emotions and are dependent on a periodical emotional intoxication. The purpose of "amusements" is to satisfy this need. Parties, music, literature, art have the same purpose where most people are concerned. The "taste" of choices in these matters depends on the level.
4Perhaps it is not strange that the experiences of life hitherto have resulted in the view that man is incurably evil. It is certainly possible to drill the individual to put on the external respectability and the characteristics of sanctimoniousness, which always deceive the ignorance of life. And this is important as counteracting overt ruthlessness and brutality. But just the ignorance of life believes in any of the boasted and patented panaceas. There is only one way of becoming good and that is to strive to reach higher levels.
5For those at lower levels, the lower emotionality remains the dynamic force of their consciousness expressions. Envy, vengefulness, malicious pleasure, are efficient motives. There is much at the stage of civilization which ignorance believes to exist only at the stage of barbarism. Civilized hatred appears most clearly in the prevailing intolerance and morality. Intolerance has many degrees from antipathy and tactlessness to arrogant aggressiveness. The reason why religious intolerance has not appeared violently in the last decades is that religion has lost its powerful position, and that a common world view and life view have not been agreed upon. Freedom of speech, so much boasted about, is not even one hundred years old. Already the signs of the times are beginning to presage the end of this short period. After the abuse of power by religion and morality, the political lies begin their tyranny of thought.
6The intellectualization of crude barbaric desire at the stage of civilization has resulted in the more and more differentiated and nuanced modes of expression of egoism. It is increasingly difficult for the psychologist to trace these back to their true origin. But the change is merely superficial and does not deceive the man experienced in life. The emotional illusions lying near to barbarism reveal their undiminished strength on suitable occasions. Imagination has served the barbaric instincts with wars and revolutions, which incessantly ruin anew what has been built up, and destroy values that could have contributed to emotional ennoblement.
7At higher civilizational levels, imagination (the "intellect") develops powerfully. This has entailed a grotesque over-estimation of the discerning power of the still undeveloped intellect. The emotional thinking of imagination has ended up in absolute subjectivism. It has flooded mankind with its fictions within all domains - not just those of aesthetics and philosophic speculation — fictions emancipated from all criteria of reality. Naturally, such an "intellect" and its humanism — ignorant of the prerequisites of the stage of humanity - must evince its impotence.
8The striving by the elite to raise mankind through humanist ideas has failed in important respects. Only when faced with the danger of total annihilation, the "conscience of the world" begins to wake up, in panicky psychosis seeking for possibilities of preventing war. The ideals of higher stages have of course survived to be abused as stupidizing adages and fair promises, blinding those who measure themselves by their Sunday theories, and who, moreover, use the ideals as motives for moralist hatred for condemning other people.
1It is necessary to survey millions of years in order to ascertain consciousness development, individual and collective. Historical periods correspond in mental respect to what the recapitulation of biological evolution by the embryo is in physiological respect. Historical development is just a repetition on other conditions. An inevitable source of error for the exoteric researcher is his ignorance of the different stages of development of the clans incarnating periodically.
2The power of discrimination is poorly developed at the stage of civilization. Most intellectuals think according to crammed-up theories without being able to judge the relative or temporary validity of these theories, or how the theories have originated. Study, or learning, is not the same as insight and understanding. They have not learnt to discriminate between what they know and do not know, but still defend their opinion by the fact that they believe it. General credulity is so great that anyone who is not "protected" by fictions already deeply rooted or by egoistic interests, will unfailingly be a victim to any cleverly planned propaganda.
3The stage of barbarism is characterized by belief (opinion), the stage of civilization by comprehension (study). Comprehension is the result of the logical process of reflection. This process need not at all result in knowledge (correct apprehension of reality). But never resting reflection is a prerequisite of searching and of the struggle against tyranny of thought. Increased reflection brings with it the ability of abstraction, of generalization, of searching after the causes of events, of laying down rules, etc. Reflection finds patterns of thought, develops schematic methods of inference, and demands increasingly more material to work on. This marks the beginning of the long period termed sophistry, scholasticism, conceptual romance, and the rule of logic. Reason becomes sovereign, decides what is true and false, constructs philosophic systems, and comprehends "reality". "Empiricism" did not furnish ignorance with logical certainty, and, consequently, did not really have a justification. Reality was even slighted. Mathematics demonstrated that absolute knowledge was possible. They overlooked the fact that this infallible construction of the space and time axioms dealt with these real facts. These facts were conceived as merely constructed fictions. Facts which already existed and which were not serviceable were replaced by fictions without any contact with a thing as "unreliable" as matter. If reality did not agree with the logically constructed, infallible system, then the fault was with material reality. Still many people do not see that logic cannot conjure up knowledge of the qualitative properties of matter. Constructivists of all sorts live unconcernedly in the illusory world of their fictions. Even scientists still make the mistake of compensating for missing facts by constructions. The prevalent world views and life views can still be termed fictional systems.
4Scientific discoveries and technological progress are often mistaken for intellectual development. But the former have nothing in common with the latter. The innumerable discoveries that natural science and its technological offshoots have made ever since Galilei united natural research (ascertainment of facts) with experimentation and the mathematical method, have continuously increased our knowledge of physical material reality. Gradually, research has liberated us from the fictions and superstitions handed down from our fathers; it has expanded our horizon, and developed our sense of reality. But the ability of inference and conceptual comprehension is the same. They do not comprehend better, although in a totally different way, namely in accordance with the explored. An ever deeper realization of the absolute conformity to law of existence begins to make itself felt. Without conformity to law research would be utter nonsense. They begin to see that ignorance depends on ignorance of the laws, or of the constant relations.
5Sense provides us with knowledge of material reality, objective infallible facts. If reason, being subjectivity, just worked up the content of sense, then learning would be exact. For the most part, however, the content of reason is still made up of fictions. The criterion of truth of sense is reality. To logicians, the absence of logical contradictions is reason's criterion of truth. To most people, the proof of truth is that the idea accords with the prevailing opinion, that it is possible to insert it into their fictional systems. The real proof of knowledge is the tenability of the hypothesis and theory in technical application, and the infallibility of prediction by means of knowing all the conditions of a process. Knowledge consists of facts put into their causal, logical, or historical contexts devoid of fictions. Insufficient facts have the effect that the part is taken for the whole. Often even basic propositions just sum up groups of facts belonging to a still greater, unknown group.
6The distances between the different levels of the stage of civilization are somewhat greater than those at the stage of barbarism, but they are of course unnoticeable to ignorance. A race that can indulge in fancies of "equality" of course lacks all the prerequisites of insight into these matters. Psychologists fail to notice any difference where a developmental lead of one or two aeons may be the fact. Not suspecting the importance of the latent experience of life, they judge the results of tests on principles conditioned by hereditary dispositions from ancestors, intellectual milieu during childhood, education, etc. The results of education are as illusory. Discursive intellects (47:7) working laboriously can be taught the technique of logical inference and of mathematical formulation. If in addition they are given the results of scientific research in an easy-to-grasp exposition, then the ability of intellectual imitation is all that is needed to be splendid logicians without any sense of reality and glib speakers on subjects they do not understand. Intellects who deal with ideas (47:5), who later in life get opportunities of actualizing their latent experience of life; can prove to be impossible in school, since their mental activity takes other paths than that of slow discursivity. Memory geniuses are nearly always brilliant in school. Besides, the factors of the law of reaping make all judgement impossible.
1Religion is a matter of emotion and not one of reason. Therefore, it can be wholly devoid of reason. Intangible "spirituality" is undifferentiated emotional ecstatic or mood states. True "spirituality" is essentiality, out of reach of the individual at the stage of civilization. At this stage, religion satisfies the repellent emotions, which manifest themselves in intolerance, tyranny of opinion, and persecution when circumstances so permit. The Christian religion is totally ignorant in all matters of world view and life view. It knows nothing about consciousness development and its different stages, about reincarnation and the laws of life. It cannot furnish a rational explanation of trinity, soul, or spirit, nor describe the hereafter. Fancy such ignorance of reality speaking of truth! One thing it has made perfectly clear: the absence of any criterion of truth in certainty of belief, individual as well as collective. That it is the "faith of our fathers" is certainly not enough. All university faculties gradually correct their erroneous doctrines, with the exception of the theological faculty, which cannot possibly see that "there is no religion higher than truth", than the knowledge of reality.
2All religions are nowadays based on historical documents. These are all, without any exception, falsifications. When they demand to be recognized as the "true and unadulterated word of god", the absurdities of which you must believe in lest you be eternally condemned, then the truth must be spoken out. Fortunately, esoterics has documents of another kind at its disposal, namely the "esoteric archive", which is accessible to researchers with higher objective consciousness.
3All religions originally had their "mysteries". In these secret schools of knowledge, the intellectual elite were taught the knowledge of reality and the interpretation of the symbols of the exoteric religion. The mysteries declined on account of persecution by the ignorant, fanaticized masses, which were led by the unworthy who had been refused initiation into the mysteries. Esoteric research has in our time investigated the mystery schools, thereby ascertaining that no initiate of the third degree, the only one to afford real knowledge, ever broke his pledge of silence. What the history of religions teaches on these matters is thus the speculation of ignorance. The falsification of history begins with the rumour-mongering of today, thereafter never to cease. Another example is the canonical books of the Jews (the "Old Testament" of the Bible) They are wholly modern in their mixture of fiction and historical facts. Only hopelessly disoriented historical research attempts to solve problems of historical authenticity by philological examination of so-called original texts. The history of religions occupies itself with sheer fictions, and is the most chimaeric of all historical disciplines - quite apart from the unconscious falsification that is the inevitable result when you judge things by a dogmatics previously accepted.
4The history of the Christian religion can be called the neverending systematic falsification of history. They still give the ignorant the description of gnostics as philosophic speculation on a Christian basis. Apart from the fact that all the documents of the "New Testament" are gross falsifications, the history of religions has moreover methodically incorporated with the Christian doctrine everything that has been deemed suitable. Without hesitation they have put on the Christian patent stamp to everything that paganism (common sense and nobleness in union) has produced. Everything great, noble, ingenious, everything that unresting critical reason has brought into the light and succeeded in forcing to a final recognition, despite furious resistance and bloody persecutions, has eventually been incorporated with "Christian views" and been given out as an eternal truth and merit of Christianity, as a necessary result of the belief in the Christian absurdities. A history of the tyranny of thought would clarify to the amazing ignorance of history the unbelievable obstacles that Christianity has put in the way of truth, and the horrifying intolerance that has tried by all the means of barbarism to suppress all attempts to find the truth. This falsification goes on continuously. It is falsification when those who at the universities have profited by the result of the hard, unrewarding struggle of the humanist geniuses for tolerance, humanity, brotherhood, ascribe the merit of this enlightenment and ennoblement to Christianity. The falsification also appears in the fact that the "preachers of the word" steel ideas from the cultural people wherever they get a chance, and incorporate them with their preachings as being Christian views.
5The so-called historians of religions ought to meditate on the words of the father of the church, Augustine (in De Civitate Dei): "The identical thing that we now call the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and has not been lacking from the beginnings of the human race until the coming of Christ in the flesh, from which moment on the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christian."
6At the stage of civilization, that man reaches farthest who, abandoning all the fictions of belief, lives but to help and serve without claims and expectations. Thereby the higher emotionality is awakened and shows the path. The egoist's religion is self-deception.
7The Christian religion is a typical civilizational phenomenon. Like philosophy it is a product of imaginative ignorance. It has been called a Jewish sect, which originally it was not. It has become one because the canonical books of the Jews, called the "Old Testament", were put together with the "new Testament" to make a Bible (the Book of Books). This Bible has been declared to be the "pure and unadulterated word of God". The fact that the Old Testament, contradicting the New, is also the word of god, means that the Old is as infallible as the New, and that the contradictions are also the work of god. You are equally godly of you murder your enemies as if you forgive them. The Old Testament has in all essentials directly counteracted Jeshu's teaching. But then those who understand make a sharp distinction, in contrast to the Christian churches, between Jeshu's teaching (the "Sermon of the Mount") and Christianity.
8A few words on the origin of the "Old Testament" to begin with. The Jews were an uncivilized pastoral nation, living to a certain extent by robbery. They had a tribal god, Yahweh, who demanded bloody sacrifices, jealously watching to see that no other gods were also given sacrifices. The captivity in Babylon was the Jew's first contact with a more rational world view and with culture. Upon returning to their country they concocted their canonical books. They had learnt that canonical documents were necessary to religious authority. Yahweh was given other attributes, qualities with a cosmic touch. By means of historical facts acquired and, partly, their own oral traditions, a history of the Jews was constructed. The writings of their prophets were their own adaptations of what they had picked up from various sources during their captivity. A by no means insignificant portion of it was of remarkable antiquity, excerpts from Atlantean records.
9The New Testament has a similar eclectic origin. Throughout the Bible there are many esoteric axioms and adages, pearls in a very imperfect setting. It will be a task of future research to pick these out and give them a worthier framework.
10Gnosticians were called the members of a society of esoteric knowledge. They were called so because they possessed the Gnosis (the knowledge of reality). This society had lodges in Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Asia Minor, etc. Its actual time of prosperity was in the third century "before Christ". The initiates belonged to the elite of their time. They were very prolific writers, and elaborated very carefully selected, profound symbols, often personified, often depicted as historical events. The gnostic symbols include, among others, trinity: the father (also called the great carpenter), the son Christos (the carpenter's son), the holy ghost. These three terms were made additionally unintelligible when, in different contexts, they were given different interpretations, those already mentioned as well as the three aspects, the three triads, the three beings of the second triad.
11A quasi-gnostic literature arose from this genuine gnostic literature. A Jewish gnostic by the name of Matthew was present when the governor of Palestine, Pontius Pilate, executed the leader of a social revolutionary movement. The occurrence furnished him with a literary idea. He resolved to write a religious novel based on reality. Into it he worked together gnostic symbols, what oral tradition had preserved of the parables of Jeshu (born in 105 B.C.), an ancient Egyptian tale of man crucified on the cross of rebirth, some facts about the communist agitator. Not being content with his work, he sent it to a good friend of his, who was the prior of a gnostic monastery in Alexandria, asking him to let the brethren try to improve on his novel. The monks were interested, being educated literary men, and set about the work, and some fifty adaptations came into existence. The novels of the monks met with a tremendous success. Innumerable copies were spread in all directions and brought about a religious mass movement, which gained ground quickly and had its name from the gnostic symbol, Christos, the son of god. The doctrine caught on especially with the socially discontent, the destitute and enslaved. At long last, after some 300 years, the most realistic and mutually most harmonious novels were put together in the so-called New Testament, as being true accounts of the life of Jeshu, along with an equally fabled account of the first Christians in Jerusalem, and excerpts from a kabbalistic document in the form of letters, distorted beyond recognition.
12The gnostic doctors realized in terror the danger of this degeneration. They tried to the best of their ability to give the distorted symbols a more rational interpretation. But the ignorant masses had got what they needed, a doctrine they thought they grasped. Ignorance regarded the doctors as superfluous, to say the least of it, and voted them out of the congregations according to that wellknown principle which says that the majority know everything better. Thereby the doctrine was established and continued its march to victory. The gnosticians were persecuted, the genuine gnostic scriptures were systematically destroyed, and gnostics disappeared. It has remained secret. What has been given put as historical gnostics is the confusing accounts of the church fathers. With the loss of gnostics, Christianity lost its "mysteries", its basis of knowledge. The gnostic terms became names of fictions. The result was the familiar, irremediable confusion of ideas.
1Characteristic of the stage of civilization is the rule of subjectivism. Reason becomes sovereign and proclaims, without a knowledge of reality, the dictatorship of reason. But without a knowledge of the laws of life, reason is arbitrariness. Subjectivism is that principle of arbitrariness which must lead to lawlessness, formlessness, and chaos. Aesthetics is as divorced from reality, as disoriented, as the rest of philosophy. That sense of beauty which is uncorrupted by art theories sees the degeneration of art in our times as just one more confirmation of the esoteric axiom saying that the prerequisites of understanding the essence of art exist only at the stage of culture.
2Everything in nature would be perfect in form if the tendency of the atoms were attractive instead of repulsive. The repulsive tendency is always a mistake as to the law of unity. As a rule, it also entails mistakes in respect of the law of freedom through infringement of the equal right of all. The inevitable consequence of this is has been that beauty as well as all other benefits of life come under the law of reaping. Deformity is bad reaping. The bad sowing may have innumerable causes. The most obvious ones are. abuse of a formative talent, envy of the beauty of others, abuse of one's own beauty, ruining the beauty of others. Those who purposely misrepresent reality and cultivate ugliness at the expense of beauty, those who revel in disgusting things, they will have their desires granted according to the law of freedom. How common the sowing of ugliness is can be seen from the rarity of beauty. And there is nearly always some flaw, some imperfection, even in the otherwise beautiful.
3Form is the mode of existing of matter. Thus form is the general, that which determines. Art is the culture of form. The purpose of art is to show us the perfect form, such as it should have been, would have been if no other factors but those of beauty had contributed.
4The few genuine artistic geniuses who have appeared in the course of centuries, have worked at the perfection of art. Those eternal seekers have instinctively strived to express the beauty. Those eternal seekers have instinctively strived to express the beauty they have apprehended in the forms of nature, being upheld by their certainty that their goal will be reached some day and the essence of art be revealed. The geniuses were misunderstood by their contemporaries. All bunglers live on this fact. But the geniuses are misunderstood still, and will remain so at the stage of civilization. If they were understood, the artists and art doctors of the modern sort would be impossible phenomena. That the geniuses are tolerated at all is due to the fact that, over the centuries, cultural and humanist geniuses in other spheres have established the greatness of the artistic geniuses so solidly that the art doctors are compelled to keep their inability of appreciation to themselves in order not to make them selves still more ridiculous. By praising the inferior, however, they witness to their incompetence.
5So-called art experts have their art theories by which they judge everything. But those who try to apprehend art by concepts never understand art. They try to comprehend the incomprehensible. All art shall be experienced. Visual art shall be apprehended by contemplative observation.
6The geniuses had no masters to teach them. They had behind them many incarnations of hard work and frustrated efforts. They had a self-acquired latent apprehension, so that they instinctively got everything without effort. Talents study models. They observe the individual artifices of the geniuses, what appeals in the geniuses, and assimilate it by reflection. The result is reflective art, eclecticism, when not imitation or mannerism. The art produced by comprehension never rises above the level of handicraft. Modern bunglers in the profession lack the most elementary talent for copying. They can but ruin even what nature perfected. Being ignorant of the immense technical difficulties they think they are gods who arbitrarily create as they please. Their "art" is aimless activity, play, whims, freaks. By deforming the beautiful forms of nature they ruin all sense of beauty of form. By adoring ugliness, crudeness, formlessness, the lowest expressions of life, they follow out the democratic envious striving to annihilate everything that rises above vulgarity. Form is despised. Colour is precisely what arbitrariness and incompetence have use of. In the objects of nature colour varies with light and shade. But when colour becomes the principal thing, and form of secondary importance, then we get parody of art. Modern painting is the selfassertion of ignorance, incompetence, arbitrariness, presumption. To call it barbarous would be to depreciate savage peoples' sense of beauty of form and colour, evident from their art handicraft.
7"When nations approach their decline, ugliness appears in their art. Long before the war began I saw it in the art museums and heard it in the concert halls and in the theatres." The eminent esoterician prophesied only too correctly. When a world epoch approaches its end, the destroyers of form appear and vandals ruin the acquisition of culture. The striving of art in our times is destructive and counteracts development intentionally, besides making it clear that also in art the arbitrariness of subjectivism leads to dissolution and chaos. Disorienting sophists suddenly appear in all domains like mushrooms out of the ground, and preach the wisdom of the day with the mien of experts. These authorities "understand" everything impure, ugly, false, wrong. They appoint bunglers and charlatans geniuses. They bewilder the discernment of taste in the every uncertain people by praising the inferior and turning attention away from the genuine. The fact alone that doctors of literature, art, and music are created is typical of our time. As though art and understanding of art could be taught. Formative talent is replaced by oratory excesses. A doctor of music could certainly read a hundred papers on the counterpoint of "Jingle Bells". It seems necessary to point out that art twaddle stupidizes. "Bilde, Kunstler, rede nicht" ("Shape, artist, speak not." Goethe).
8Literature becomes art by cultivation of the higher emotionality. Poetry, novel, drama, are beautiful when genius has formed their characters. Art can ennoble. It can also, in a horrifying degree, further stupidity, crudeness, ugliness. Modern literature works frantically at tearing down everything sublime, noble, beautiful. Murders and horrors of all kinds are described with sadistic revelling in all disgusting details. Primitive types are depicted as though there existed no others. Nobler types are apparently beyond the experience of the authors. The work is called nontendentious when its intention is masked. As if the types of settings and happenings have not often been chosen with hatred's intention of arousing envy, ridicule, or contempt of entire social classes. Particularly disgusting are the scandalous writings about and intellectual plundering of deceased geniuses by the doctors of literature. The former have certainly paid a high price for their geniuses. The slander and calumny of rumour during their life-time follow them into the next world. Also the hyenas of posterity must have their fill of it. Hatred must drag everything great into the dirt. Highness must come down so that democratic equality may reign.
9Like all art at the stage of civilization, music may also be said to belong to the experimental stage, or to handicraft. The harmonies and melodies of the musical geniuses are exceptions to this. The products of the majority, using dissonance or meaningless monotony, evidence immature experimentation. "Sense of art" is a sum total of many different abilities previously acquired. It takes many incarnations to educate the sense of music, the understanding of the essence of music (rhythm, harmony, and melody). The sense of harmony is ruined by learning to "understand", to enjoy, dissonance, atonalism, noise. The corresponding applies to all art. Once ruined, this sense is difficult to regain. In this respect, music is in the lucky position of being able to determine mathematically the tones that are mutually harmonious. Such a resource does not exist for those who have learnt to apprehend the ugly as beautiful, the disgusting as pleasing.
1At the stage of civilization, dictatorships and democracies succeed one another. The continual social changes are due to the fact that the human intellect is unable to solve social problems permanently, that men lack the will to unity, that men are never content with their conditions, that they always blame society for their own shortcomings, that social envy creates eternal discontent, that ignorance always believes that society can raise the standard of living for everybody without further ado, that power-hungry demagogues always succeed in making the credulous believe in their false promises of paradise. Dictators believe that people will let themselves be enslaved indefinitely. Democrats believe in the equality of all, that education can abolish the inequalities of nature. Anarchists believe that men are angels who are corrupted by being brought up to lead orderly lives, etc., that if the stage and the laws are abolished, then man will be perfect. Fantasts believe in the ideal state, that societies can be constructed and the established order of things can be safely overthrown. All are believers, and with belief you can prove anything.
2Public spirit, the basis of the conception of right and of the solidity of society, develops but slowly from permanent conditions and unaltered social prescriptions. If these are changed arbitrarily, then public spirit is dissolved and, with it, the confidence in the sanctity of law, and thereby the obedience to law. These indispensable values can be preserved by carrying out social changes in a long-term policy, so that the social outlook has ripened for reforms, and the generation has been given time to prepare for the adaptation, which otherwise causes unnecessary suffering to many people. Public spirit is also destroyed by the attempt to base society on the principle of envy, or by granting rights without duties, by giving people social benefits that do not correspond to their contribution to society, by giving way to unjustified demands of the eternally discontent. According to the law of reaping, there must always be some people who are better off than others, since they have already earned that right. If they fail to use their benefits according to the law of unity, then the result is a bad sowing.
3The conception of right develops slowly step by step. More and more actions are eventually stamped as improper to begin with, then to be prohibited under certain circumstances. Finally they are prohibited altogether within one's social territory under normal conditions, or in time of peace. Atrocities, murder, plunder, in time of war, are deemed appropriate and justified. War and revolution are not as yet outlawed, since the states still prepare for war, and since social minorities are allowed to openly prepare for violent social subversion.
4The stage of civilization is characterized by the striving (with continual relapses into barbarism) to eliminate brutality. Slowly the insight is reached that barbarous punishment fosters barbarians. Likewise it is gradually realized that sympathy and understanding considerably reduce the effects of unsuitable penal provisions. In legal judgement, they begin to consider the circumstances, the individual's level and motive. But all expressions of egoism that have not been prohibited by law are regarded by many people, possibly by the majority, as fully justified. The development of the judicial system by the continually increasing number of legal fictions is also a characteristic thing. The entire judicature becomes more and more complicated, difficult to survey, hard to comprehend; more and more fictitious. The arbitrariness of the legal definitions of crimes and punishments they nowadays try to mask through international harmonization. How slow development is can be seen from the fact that Roman Law is still studied. Rational and unitary principles are lacking, being necessary bases of humane and purposeful legal concepts. It is still not understood that historical traditions do not furnish any rational bases of legal norms. The judicial bureaucracy with its cult of fictions, its circumstantial and unwieldy apparatus, counteracts legal reforms. They use a pompous ceremonial trying to surround the judicial procedure with the halo of infallibility, although it is clearly recognized that no court is able to define "the truth", but can only judge the legal case on circumstantial evidence that is often very unsatisfactory. Those who deny in principle that might is right still regard might as a condition of right. The necessity of violence in a nation shows the remoteness of the stage of culture.
5Whenever the "conscience of the world" reacts, it still is the result of propaganda in each particular case. Without such a psychosis it prefers to sleep. Its reliability, besides, is never greater than the egoist's conscience. The institution of sacrifice is dreadful in its dimensions. A hundred thousand people die every day, most of them in some respect the victims of the egoism or indifference of universal hatred. Only exceptionally people act more unselfishly than outer or inner compulsion, interests or advantage, bid.
6The laws of society and their spirit are not, as a rule, above the general conception of right, especially not in times of continual changes of the laws. The seemingly higher level of conventions deceives but the inexperienced. Their rules are applied when judging others. The appearance of outer respectability is the essential thing. If you do not give anyone an obvious reason to blame you, then you have fulfilled all righteousness. You console yourself by "I am only human, after all". The general conception of right appears only during the most severe hardships of life, when social conditions are radically overthrown, when the laws of society lose their force, the moral cloak of decency (hypocrisy) can be put off without any risks of consequences.
7The concepts of right and wrong change with different view-points: the religious ones with different manners and customs, the social ones with class egoism or altered definitions of criminal actions, the national ones with nationality ("my country, right or wrong"), the scientific ones with changed scientific hypotheses and theories. The great number of mutually contradictory ideologies is typical. Almost all conceptions of right have their advocates, even such conceptions as obviously belong to the stage of barbarism. The brutality and inhumanity of the Old Testament thrive splendidly in the book that contains the idealism of the Sermon of the Mount. Hatred and love alternate in the everyday locutions: an eye for an eye, and turning the other cheek. The looseness of the entire conception of right appears in that panicky confusion with followed upon the belated discovery of the subjectivity of the concepts of right and wrong. It was thought that this furnished the proof of the illusoriness of any conception of right.
8The purposeful ideal is always the next higher stage of development. Ideals that cannot be realized become set phrases and fair promises, which nobody takes seriously and which but enhance self-deception. The ideal of the stage of civilization is culture, but true culture, not that masked barbarism which is called culture.
9Typical of the stage of civilization is the general recognition of the justification of egoism. The egoism of the civilizational individual is insatiable. "All the gold of the earth is not enough to satisfy one man." (Buddha) When having such ideals as power, wealth, fame, loafing, love of amusement, etc., striving after unity or self-realization must of course appear as foolish utopianism.
1Emotionality at the stage of culture is characterized by the realization of the necessity to cultivate, as well as to strive to acquire, attractive emotions. Universal hatred can only be overcome by making admiration, affection, compassion, and other noble emotions determine our view of people. Those who have already reached this stage belong to the elite of mankind. The stage of culture is the goal of those who are at the stage of civilization. There are always exceptional cases, since the tempo of development is individual. Many people would be able to reach higher levels relatively quickly, many people who never try on account of ignorance, or are prevented by the theories of ignorance, which are hostile to life, from seeing the path that they are to wander. Many people at the stage of barbarism, whose individual characters of the attractive tendency make it easier to get a one-pointed fixity of purpose, of course succeed in their striving.
2All development is the result of work and toil (voluntary or involuntary), and higher levels are not reached just through theories, adages, good resolutions, and assumed patterns of behaviour. Such appearances always deceive the ignorant of life. Worse still is that the individual deceives himself by them. Egoism entails an incurable tendency to judge your splendid character from noble feelings you have had or good resolutions you have made. The motive is falsified whenever the emotions determining the action must be influenced by reflection or persuasion. Emotions of the corresponding quality have been acquired when they make themselves felt unreflectingly, automatically, spontaneously, unconditionally. Self-blinding is also the flaming enthusiasm that results from the mutual influence when being together with other people. Everybody feels noble and capable of achievements. Everything appears obvious and natural. When intoxication is superseded by the tiring grey humdrum routine of everyday life, then the good resolutions are as far from their realization as ever. However, the memory of how noble you were is retained, so that thing is settled. You do not suspect the fact that through the psychosis you were temporarily raised some hundred levels. Higher levels are reached through the perseverant activation of higher consciousness, through the acquired ability to apprehend and to produce yourself the vibrations in higher molecular kinds, and through the continual cultivation of this ability until it has become automatic.
3The cultural man is still an emotional being. However, it is not any longer the lower but the higher emotionality that is the dynamic force in his thought and action. The vibrations within the lowest two molecular kinds (48:6,7) have dropped out for want of the pertaining interests, being expressive of the grossest egoism. When the third emotional kind (48:3) is activated, the vibrations of the fourth kind (48:4) become mainly attractive, and those of the fifth kind (48:5) remain perceptible, it is true, but are not any longer expressive of his true being. It is inevitable, with the moral fictionalism ruling, that these lowest ones are particularly attended to by the civilizational individuals, are the object of gossip and slander poisoning everything; are particularly emphasized in the biographies by the doctors of literature. The feelings and outlooks corresponding to the higher vibrations are apprehended ever more intensely with each higher level, and result in a further ennoblement. They become most important, however, in the activation of causal consciousness, previously inactive. This finds expression in the strengthening of the right instinct of life, the development of the sense of reality, and inspirations that guide.
4As long as residual barbaric views have any power in the civilizational nations, visits by small cultural clans will be but sporadic. Historians seek in vain to account for those brief glorious periods in the life of a nation. The treatment those advanced individuals got demonstrates that they were not welcome. When a considerable minority has reached the stage of culture, it becomes possible for more and more cultural clans to gather in a nation, which will thereby deserve its name of cultural nation. Then life becomes easier to live also for the non-cultural. Those who strive after self-realization need not any longer use up the greater part of their powers to counteract the innumerable influences of lower kinds and unserviceable suggestions. "The struggle for existence" comes to an end. Where there is struggle there is no culture, technological advances be as great as they may. The cultural individuals feel their solidarity and regard it their mission in life to help and not hinder each other. The serving attitude to life becomes instinctual and spontaneous. Egoistic calculation is superseded by the urge to help where help is needed, without demands, reservations, or expectations. In working for the welfare of all and ill of none, the individual grows beyond his personal limitation. The natural prerequisite of group solidarity does not exist until then. The collective, at lower stages rather hampering and counteracting the individual's development, facilitates its subsequently in an unsuspected degree. Universal joy of life supersedes that anxiety, depression, agony, which had paralysed the courage of life. Even the animals give up their fear and spontaneously seek refuge with man.
1At the stage of civilization, reason takes the fictitious world of its own subjectivity to be reality. This unrealistic attitude is but gradually forced to yield as the facts of experience come into direct opposition to all the fictions of traditional views. The realization of the impossibility to explain the process of nature entails the assumption that we have explored just a fraction of reality. It is quite natural that, after the metaphysical excesses of ignorance, more and more people refuse to have anything to do with such barren speculation and with anything that lies outside the range of the normal individual's experience. But even if the range of consciousness of sense be enlarged to include the physical etheric molecular kinds, yet science will soon enough ascertain the limits of possible research. Neither will reason be contented in the long run with a positivist?agnostic?antimetaphysical standpoint. It is this attitude that prevents the scientists from examining the tenability of esoterics. Besides, everything new and unknown is rejected by those who have already incorporated into complexes a conception laboriously acquired. Radically new truths never find grace with the adult generation.
2The philosophers of enlightenment held the view that if mankind could be taught their opinions, then everybody would thereby be instantly raised to the level of humanity. Nowadays we laugh at that amazing ignorance of life. Only esoterics, however, explains how enormous that mistake was.
3Belief (opinion) is typical of the stage of barbarism; comprehension, of the stage of civilization; understanding, of the stage of culture. Thousands of incarnations, in which the experience of life increases continually, intervene between each one of these developmental stages. Comprehension requires but power of reflection, whereas understanding presupposes power of judgement. Understanding is immediate, an instantaneous recognition of what is essential in permanent general relations in life, independently of what is typical of the period in ever changing outer conditions. Understanding requires an enormous latent fund of one's own experience of life, of things experienced and entered into. Characteristic of understanding is also the life instinct's marked sense of reality, which immediately rejects the fictitious, illusory, false, spurious. The intolerance and fanaticism of the fictionalist are alien to it. Understanding grasps without any words, in any case a hint will suffice. The civilizational individual needs explanations and elucidations, connections with all manner of relations, generalizations and particularizations. The understanding man has done all this ready long ago. Philosophers in all ages have comprehended everything, but have understood little or nothing of everything comprehended.
4Those who believe, comprehend, and understand, speak different languages, even though they use the same expressions, since the content of latent experience of sense and reason, which is put into the words, is of different characters, qualitatively and quantitatively. The faculty of intellectual imitation, which is considerable even on the higher barbaric levels, can easily avail itself of phrases and theories, along with all the external characteristics that always deceive the ignorant. The understanding man discovers at once whether the experiences of life necessary to understanding are lacking. However, this faculty of imitation facilitates the outer "culturing" of those on lower levels.
5The piteous fiasco of the philosophy of enlightenment, which fiasco entailed the revolution which is still in progress, confirms the truth of the experience of the ancients that truth is intended for those who are able to understand, that truth is harmful when forced on those without understanding, that anyone who does not understand idiotizes everything he believes he has grasped, that the undiscerning must not be given occasions to pronounce their opinions, that truth must not be given out to the contempt and scorn of hatred, that truth cannot be kept from those who are prepared to receive the knowledge and have a right to it ("When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears").
6You do people a disservice by depriving them of opinions that meet a need in them, correspond to their level, make it possible for them to learn to comprehend. They are harmed by being taught opinions that they cannot understand, and therefore misunderstand, or that intensify their conceit. It is a mistake to foster an artificial proficiency in "independent thinking", which in the obtrusive results in that over-estimation of themselves which later, in positions of power, often characterizes those corrupters of men or of culture who ruin the nations. It is perhaps not always a blessing to spread literacy among those who are incapable of understanding anything but fairy tales, who misunderstand everything rational, who helplessly become victims of all superstitions. Schiller gave expression to the danger of bringing to the eternally blind the heavenly torch of light, which does not enlighten them, but can only kindle and lay cities, nations in ashes. Even on the civilizational levels knowledge often increases the power of hatred. Literacy breeds a conceited faith in one's own power of judgement, faith which borders on idiocy. How thoroughly unjustified the individual's confidence in his judgement is can be seen from Bacon's observation, that in the philosophic schools the adepts learn to believe. If they had ever understood, then philosophy, at least the one we have had hitherto, would have been unmasked long ago. Anyone who really comprehends discovers the errors in thinking of the thinkers.
7Esoteric truths belong in exclusive societies of individuals who have shown that they understand, in which the cultural individuals can find each other, and do not have to live in that cultural loneliness which is the result of the impossibility of making themselves understood, and which has hitherto been the lot of all serious seekers. Esoterics is not for those who are content with their opinions, who do not long for truly rational views, or lack the prerequisites of judging the justification of the esoteric knowledge (at least as a working hypothesis). The avatar comes ever to "his people", the small elite who possess the prerequisites of understanding him.
8At the stage of culture man begins to deserve his name of rational being. Till then, his intellect has all too easily been idiotized by all manner of fictions and illusions. Cultural men are also influenced by emotionality. But this influence is in the direction of unity. They understand more and more clearly that the life view must contain and provide for all ideals that reason is able to grasp, that emotional ennoblement is more important than the ability to make mental constructions, that emotional culture alone makes it impossible for ever existing barbarism to attempt its never-ending revolutions. They grow more and more keenly aware of the stupidizing and brutalizing influence of civilizational so-called cultural products in the form of literature, art, and music.
9The few who have hitherto attained the cultural levels have been compelled to form their world view and life view by themselves, without the broader basis of judgement and the vaster content that is the result of a more general cultivation of all human spheres. Of course they must be critical of the opinions of the day as a matter of principle. The cultural man holds no "opinions". He makes himself acquainted with the ruling fictions within most domains of general importance. He follows all so-called cultural activities, being keenly alive to the illusions of masked barbarism, in order to be able to help the seekers, to follow the general development, to get material of ideas for mental activity and analysis. But he does not believe anything. He is careful even in his critical "assumption for the time being". He does not commit himself by temporary standpoints forced by circumstances. He does not recruit any partisans of opinion, who deceive themselves and others with their crammed-up views. Now and then he takes stock of his store of ideas, discarding the fictions that have crept in without his noticing it. He provides his subconscious with nothing but facts, and receives his reward in the form of more and more realistic ideas. According as his superconscious is activated, its ideas are more and more easily available. The more of them he experiences, the greater is his confidence in the hitherto inaccessible experience of life there is in his superconscious.
1The normal individual lacks the prerequisites of forming his world view and life view by himself. The individual is therefore dependent on authority. It is important that this authority on matters of life view remains stable. It must be impossible for any justified criticism to find points of attack. It must be impossible for any authority to contradict any other in important respects. Religion must not proclaim "truths" that conflict with the results of scientific research.
2The task of religion is to ennoble emotion, counteract hatred, comfort the distressed, calm the anxious; give courage to face life to those who fear, certainty to the doubting who need certainty, confidence in life to the timid; support those who stagger, supply ideals that are attractive and realizable.
3Religion is emotion. "Spirituality" is the sum total of all noble feelings belonging to the higher emotionality, such as admiration, affection, sympathy, respect, veneration, devotion, adoration. They are expressions of the striving of attraction after the unity of life. Religion thus is particularly suited to the devout. But also men and women of action need emotion as an impelling force. At the emotional stage, action is dictated by emotion, necessarily following from emotion when this has been sufficiently activated.
4The individual belongs to someone of the seven departments. Religion finds different expressions in these seven main types. The first and seventh departmental types are particularly people of action for whom the path of service is the most purposeful one. Those who belong under the second, fourth, or sixth department strive after unity through devotion. The third and fifth departmental types pursue the path of reason.
5Feeling contains a rational element, which is sometimes overlooked, sometimes overemphasized. This element can be more or less important depending on the type. Reason is least essential to the sixth departmental types, the mystics proper. The mystic does not deny or disdain reason. He has no need for reason. In states out of reach of the conceptions of reason he seeks union with the ineffable one in all. He uses symbols that he alone understands. Anyone who tries to imitate or parrot the mystic deceives himself. Studies of mysticism are studies of originality and utter individualism. Mysticism is not subjectivism in the ordinary sense, since all concepts are unessential. The mystic strives after union with the god within, whom he often places without him, then calling him the all. He attains the essential consciousness of the second self by availing himself of all the means of expression of attraction, and renunciating all personal desires. When unity is attained, the activation of mentality begins for him. Therefore his short-cut does not mean that the mystic can omit any stage of development, just that he assimilates the experiences and abilities of mental levels more easily afterwards.
6With the exception of the mystics there is a mental need in the religious. And religion must supply this need. The mental needs are different, due to different individual characters and stages of development. The difficulty of a universal religion is for it to be able to meet these different needs. Not all teachings are suited to all. The historical forms of religion have supplied existing needs, otherwise they could not have arisen. The more everything is internationalized and all learning is made available to all, the more and the stronger do the common mental needs become. A religion suiting all at the stage of culture must seek to supply this common need but also to find possibilities of reaching those at lower stages.
7The following points would be considered in a religion that is to agree with the esoteric knowledge.
8The demand for blind faith must be given up. Nobody shall have to accept any view whatsoever of which he is doubtful. Doubt is a divine right incident to our freedom. Doubt is always preferable to blind conviction. Anyone who denies his own reason makes a cardinal mistake. Instead of the demand of faith it can be required that the religious accept the principles of tolerance and of universal brotherhood.
9No absurdities must be contained in the religion, no statements that conflict with the definitively established fundamentals of science. The demands of reason that the religious views accord with reality must be met.
10No demands must be made for absoluteness or perfection. Such demands are unreasonable and hostile to life, evidence a total lack of understanding of life, and must result in falsification of life and self-deception. Everyone strives after self-realization, everyone to his ability. Sincerity, earnestness, intensity of purpose, are up to the individual. You "serve god" by trying to reach and arouse the god who still slumbers in the individual. When the self in the personality has achieved contact with, and activated, superconscious causal consciousness, then religion has fulfilled its purpose where that individual is concerned.
11The laws of life are of course contained in the "creed" of an esoteric religion.
1The aesthetics (theory of beauty) of the philosophers has led to the intellectualization of art. However, art belongs to the higher emotionality, and its purpose is to ennoble feeling and imagination into ideality. Without a knowledge of reality the art theories of aesthetics remain nothing but fictions. Discussing art — as well as nay other aspect of culture, religion, esoterics — with those who have not reached the stage of culture is as meaningless. Art must be understood by experience and cannot be comprehended. Reflection is part of handicraft, not of art. Reflection evidences absence of an instinct of reality. Reflection is detrimental to that formative ability, which appears in the unerring sureness of aim, unreflective spontaneity, and unintentional purpose.
2At the stage of culture, the principle of harmony becomes the determining norm of all art. Harmony is the means of unity of expressing itself in emotionality. Harmony is the basis of the appreciation of all beauty and makes it possible to understand the true form of beauty, the causal form.
3Quality, ability, insight, and understanding are not simply to be assumed by oneself or to be learned. Everything genuine must be innate, acquired in previous lives. Understanding of art is not acquired by studying art theories in just one life. True understanding of art presupposes a certain level of development, as well as practice of art during several lives. Without your working up of all matters in a certain domain of life you lack the necessary experience of this particular domain. Not all studies promote the development of the individual or of the collective. If studies divert from reality, it may take many wasted incarnations to remedy the idiotization of the intellect's conception of reality.
4An artistic genius at the stage of civilization also has, because of his instinct for the essence of art, the certainty of anticipation that he is striving to express something that is finally attainable. But this will not be possible until at the stage of culture. Not until the pertaining levels are attained is a contact achieved with the superconscious world of beauty, or of the ideas. Art is the culture of form. What do those know of the beauty of form who value colour more than form? Without refinement, ennoblement of feeling and imagination, and understanding of life, no genuine sense of beauty or ideal conception of art is acquired, which particularly for the artist represents the highest conception of reality. Art is the quickest means of activating the superconscious for personalities belonging to the fourth department. Artistic humility supersedes the ignorant insolence and self-willed presumption that imagines itself to be a creative god. Gods do not create. They shape out of that which exists, conforming to the eternal, imperturbable laws of existence. The self-glory which does what pleases it, is alien to the artist. All arbitrariness is easy. It is more difficult to be faithful to the ideal, and to disclaim all false pretensions.
5Art requires both a perfected technique and the ability to apprehend beauty. As long as the artist is at the stage of technical experimentation, the conditions are absent for this very reason. To learn to master the technical handicraft at any stage whatsoever always takes a long time. Those difficulties are not overcome until the test of mastership has been passed by reproducing reality in such a manner that the work of art appears lifelike. This presupposes intense contemplation of reality and requires much labour. To be able to concretize ideally, the artist must have perceived the general, universal, typical, unloseable, in the forms of reality; that, for example, which makes a pine a pine, but not just any pine. If one is a newcomer into the world of art, then thousands of pines must be studied. Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that several lives are needed to study the forms of nature and to experiment. After that it is possible for the artist to perceive at once in the rapidly volatilized vision the ideal of the concretized pine, as well as of all other forms.
6The artist is a herald and as such he is conscious of his responsibility. Ugliness in art is equivalent to blasphemy in religion. His mission is to spread beauty and joy, thereby contributing to ennoblement and refinement. Nothing in life exists for its own sake in the universal development. Everything has a mission, and art has one also. It is in the artist's power to communicate to the spectator the understanding, veneration, and devotion that filled him.
7The artist is a former and ennobler. He ennobles the imperfect forms of physical reality, confers to the physical forms their original perfection of form, and makes them what they should have been.
8The artist is a discoverer. He discovers the forms of ideal reality in physical reality, and puts purpose and harmony into the seemingly irrational and disharmonious. He reveals beauty and shows that the imperfect is something that can be perfected. By reproducing the ideal the artist performs his worship. By discovering the ideal form he gives to the spectator a knowledge of the ideal world and its beauty, and intimates that the ideal forms are also symbols of secrets not discovered by us, he arouses aspiration to, and understanding of, the world of ideals, the goal of all human endeavour.
9The artist is a visionary. Vision or inspiration is necessary to art. It is in the vision that the artist beholds the individual ideal form of every individual thing. Every causal form is individual. In his inspiration the artist suddenly knows how he will shape that which he has been striving to reproduce. Vision belongs to formative art, inspiration to all art. Vision or inspiration comes via the higher emotionality (48:1-3), which consequently must be activated. Being sporadic and spontaneous to begin with, inspiration presents itself whenever the artist becomes absorbed in the exercise of his art.
10The cultural writer possesses a knowledge of reality, life, and men at higher levels. The fictitious characters formed by genius are truer than those of history, since they have been stripped of the unessentials of deceptive appearances, and are expressions of the characteristic, essential, universally human, and typical. He does not try, like the doctors of literature, to seek out the worst in the geniuses. He understands that descriptions of the trivialities of Mr Average belong to handicraft, not to art. It is not the vulgarities or brutalities of the barbaric levels, which are below the levels overcome, but the insight and understanding of higher levels that raise and ennoble. He does not seek to arouse disgust, contempt, indignation, or envy. He finds it his mission to teach men to appreciate the good, noble, and beautiful. To make life easier to live is to accelerate development.
1Culture is freedom. Patronizing is alien to the spirit of culture in its entirety, therefore also to its political views. The individuals at the stage of culture have learnt that that social system which is in all respects the most free is the best one; that every infringement of the individual's freedom of thought, speech, and action; of his initiative and enterprise; impedes cultural development and its material conditions.
2International political formations arise through associations of nations. Wars, revolutions, national chauvinism belong to the past. The knowledge of reincarnation has demonstrated the idiocy of racial hatred, religious hatred, sex hatred, etc. As we know, the individual alternates in being born a man or woman; with white, yellow, red, or black colour of his skin; a Buddhist, Jew, Christian, or Moslem; sometimes in the highest social stratum, sometimes in the lowest. According to the law of reaping, the fanatic is born (often immediately) into the race, religion, nation, etc. that he intensely hates, in order to have the experiences necessary to him. Then he goes on throughout many incarnations, hating alternately all races, religions, the opposite sex, etc.
3No nation of historical times has attained the stage of culture. Efforts have been made, but the cultural elite have been all too few in number to assert themselves. What has been called culture has been the realization of a uniform style, a typical phenomenon at the stage of civilization. The overestimation of style (also in literature) degenerates into a purposeless mania for originality and revelling in subtle, sophisticated unessentials. A considerable minority of the nation must reach the stage of culture in order for public spirit, or the striving after unity, to assert itself. That stratum in society which sets the tone, leads, must regard it their duty to serve the other classes of society, to organize society so that living together without friction becomes the natural thing, and so that no demagogues shall be able to arouse the discontent of hatred by their false prospects of Eldorado. Institutions and laws agree with the conception of right attained by the determining portion of the nation. Only with this are the possibilities obtained of realizing the purposeful in what has been dreamt of the future state as depicted in the utopias.
4Knowledge, insight, and ability, not party zeal or glibness, entitle to posts in society or in the legislative assembly. Rights are balanced by duties. All get their share of the national income according to their competence and contribution. What is necessary to subsistence and education is guaranteed to all. Everybody is helped to get his place in the social organization, since unsuitable work is regarded as a waste of those national assets to be the most valued. All who work for the advancement of culture receive a state pension. Culture is attained by relieving the individual of his worries of livelihood and giving him the opportunity to dedicate all his power to consciousness development and unpaid cultural work. Everything that belongs to the life domains and modes of expression of attraction becomes a standard of what is to be regarded right and proper.
5At the stage of civilization, the conception of right is generally connected with legal concepts as embodied in enactments. Legislation is dictated by accepted usage and conventions already commonly applied, and sanctions (with the exception of the actions of fanaticism and panic) what has been incorporated with the promote culture and humanity. Disputes are settled without legal proceedings. Decision in court is regarded as a final emergency. The judge rather becomes the mediator, defender, helper of the erring. Nobody is caused unnecessary suffering through government measures. Lawyers are public employees and regard it their duty to help, console, and support even in personal trouble those seeking legal assistance. The higher the level, the more rational the legal concepts, the more purposeful the directions, and the greater the prospect of their influencing the individual to respect the law. The inevitability of law is recognized, and this all the more easily since only immutable constitutional laws exist, and the public is informed as for the rest by directions without penal threat. The laws aim at the individual's actions. But the conception of right at the stage of culture looks to his motive. The intention, thought, feeling, becomes the essential thing. The moral fictionalist with his arbitrary taboos is regarded as an atavistic phenomenon.
6The cultural individual stands up against evil by legal means. He does not passively witness that freedom and right are violated by any power whatsoever. He knows that all share in the responsibility for the violation of freedom; that anyone who does not uphold freedom also for his own part, gives up power to evil; that we are all at the mercy of evil, since we have all contributed to it and still allow it to continue. We have lost all our original rights through our own negligence, and we can regain them only through our own doing.
7At the stage of culture, man is regarded as more important than anything else. Whatever at the stage of civilization was considered worth striving for (power, wealth, honours), has lost its charm after the knowledge of life has demonstrated the greater responsibility bound up with these things. The individual does not any longer regard it his mission in life to make a career in society, elbow his way along, push others aside; but considers the "right" of the stronger to help and assist the weaker.
8Humanity has become the universal ideal of the stage of culture.
1The prerequisite of attaining the stage of humanity is to have activated the two highest kinds of emotional consciousness (48:2,3). This does not mean that all layers in the emotional molecular kinds become fully activated. There are still domains — due to the absence of vitalizing cosmic vibrations — that remain inactive until the second self sets about fully automatizing its emotional and mental envelopes and, with that, its lowest triad. The second self cannot dispense with its first triad, nor be sovereign in the lower worlds, until all the pertaining problems have been solved.
2Like the stage of civilization brings with it an intellectualization of barbaric emotionality, so the stage of humanity entails the same as regards cultural emotionality. Intellectualization implies that feeling, poor in intelligence, becomes increasingly more rational, and the latter in its turn by clear ideas. Intellectualization occurs at the same time as mental consciousness becomes selfactive and the mental body emancipates itself from its dependence on and coalescence with the emotional body. The process begins with the activation of the fifth molecular kind (47:5). When the higher layers in this matter are activated, then also the mental body can assist in activating the causal body. Until then, the contribution to this by the mental has been limited to the faint impulses at the end of the existence of the personality in the mental world, when the experiences of the life just concluded have been sublimated into causal ideas that the causal has been able to assimilate. The now double influence soon makes consciousness self-active. A consequence of this is that causal ideas become increasingly easily accessible to mental consciousness; inspiration and vision, to emotional consciousness.
3If the higher emotionality is developed exclusively by cultivating devotional intense longing for, aspiration towards merging in, essential unity (46), then the mental activation is neglected. The mystic remains mentally undeveloped. This is the cause of the infantile, rationally helpless trait of most mystics. They appear undeveloped, and are therefore totally misjudged by always presumptuous ignorance. The mystic who has succeeded in his efforts, however, has developed an understanding that has no need for comprehension, that in respect of life is incomparably superior to the greatest mental ingenuity. The higher remains "esoteric" to the lower. Understanding presupposes both the activation of the requisite domain of consciousness and the corresponding latent experience, qualitatively and quantitatively. If understanding is lacking, there is always a risk of misunderstanding even by those who have comprehended clearly.
4The stages of barbarism and civilization are those of ignorance, fictions, subjectivism. With the advent of research, sense began to prevail over arbitrary reason. And with that the foundation of culture is laid. At the stage of humanity, the higher two kinds of mental consciousness (47:4,5) are activated, which at the stage of civilization have been part of the superconscious. With that man begins to deserve his name of rational being. His latent experience of life, acquired during thousands of incarnations, eventually makes itself felt. Higher mental thinking (47:5) is acquired partly by research, partly by meditative activation of the superconscious. Research, ascertaining the facts and laws of material reality, formulating axioms and basic propositions, develop the sense of reality and thereby the power to see through more clearly the fictitiousness of the lower mentality.
5At the stage of humanity, causal consciousness systematizes ideas received for subjective orientation, and studies their causality objectively. During this process of orientation, the causal being has little time for the personality, lest its problems are important to the knowledge of reality. With the activation of the highest mental consciousness ("mental intuition", 47:4) follows a mutual influence. The mental supplies the causal with its worked up experiences, and the ideas of the causal are concretized into mental ideas.
6Humanist nations are realized when the individuals are servers and nobody feels a master. When all serve something higher, something above themselves, something for several, for many, for all together, everybody to his vision and ability, then that harmony of living together is obtained which can be called humanity. The individual knows that he exists for the community, and the community for the individual. Social systems are purposeful, legislation shows understanding, the application of the law is dictated by good-will and the desire to help. Nobody needs to defend his right against the authorities. To protect the rights of the individual is a selfevident official duty.
7The idea of brotherhood, at the stage of civilization a fair locution, becomes self-evident and realized. That brotherhood which is limited to race, creed, sex, etc., is not universal, and is part of the self-delusions of egoism. Mankind makes up a unity, which fact appears in the responsibility of all for all. The humanist has always waged an unremitting struggle for the never realized ideas of human dignity, tolerance, and the right to a self-acquired view. He knows that genuine religion is the path of feeling to unity, like true humanism is the path of reason to the same goal. He does what he can to teach mankind a world view and a life view that is free of all dogmas, and scientifically acceptable. But he also knows that the ruling fictional systems can be changed only gradually. Of course it is harder still to overcome all the expressions of masked hatred. The humanist's tolerance is not that of indifference. He does not in the least wish others to share his views. The higher the level and the greater the exact knowledge, the greater the differences of the subjective modes of expression of individual character. He helps everyone to acquire his own views by himself and to view in his own way everything that belongs to the subjective alone. He knows that ideals are incompatible with outer or inner compulsion. Noble feelings, thoughts, qualities, are strived after as means to reach unity. He knows that if egoistic motives contribute, then the result is moralism and self-deceptive appearances.
8The nearer the individual approaches the stage of ideality, the more strongly the ideals influence him and appear as necessary factors of development. "Ideas rule the world". This sentence of Platon is an esoteric axiom. At the stage of humanity the humanist ideas are sovereign. Right becomes the ruling power. The entire human development appears more and more clearly as an instinctual groping towards freedom and unity.
1The causal consciousness of the first self is originally passive. It is gradually activated according as the self's personality at the stages of culture and humanity acquires the ability of activity in the consciousnesses of the highest two emotional (48:2,3) and highest two mental (47:4,5) molecular kinds. According as the lower bodies are automatized, the self becomes able to centre itself in the next higher ones, until it finally enters into the inmost centre of the causal body, and thereby becomes a perfected causal being possessing a knowledge of the laws of matter and of consciousness as well as the ability to apply these laws. The relations between causes and effects of events in the five worlds of man (47-49) are entirely elucidated to causal consciousness. Causal ideas reproduce these realities undistorted.
2As an undeveloped causal being man in becoming is "imperfect". As a perfected causal being man is always a disappointment to the moralists, since he clearly sees through the illusoriness and self-deception of moral fictionalism. He knows that man is not improved by nagging homilies and passing the judgements of moralist hatred, but only by loving forth the good; that the moralist with his morality counteracts the end he thinks he promotes. Neither does he witness to himself before a mankind that is ignorant of all higher reality. That would just evoke the ridicule of the ignorant, obtrusiveness of the curious, insatiable demand for more sensations of the sensationalists. When mankind has reached the stage of culture, has overcome hatred, has acquired respect for life and veneration for the unknown, only then will it be possible for it to walk with noble beings without detriment to itself.
3At the stage of ideality, the ideals are realities. Only there is it known that ideals are the most important factors of consciousness development. Until this stage one does not understand their power, their purpose, their necessity. Only when ideals and reality coincide, one has, in accordance with the law of self-realization, realized unity and that freedom which is a law. We are all wandering towards the world of ideals, and we shall some time enter into possession of it. In that connection it matters but little whether, at the stage of civilization, that world appears an absurd, impractical fiction; at the stage of culture, an unrealizable ideal; at the stage of humanity, still remote. We are guided by our superconscious as it becomes an instinct guiding the personality step by step towards this goal.
4The causal self allows freedom to all beings, recognizes the importance of individual character for the collective, perceives the harmony of the dissimilar. Ignorance strives after standardization, a similar view and attitude.
5The self, having been involved into envelope upon envelope of ever coarser matter, strives back to its original home, disposing envelope upon envelope as it acquires active objective selfconsciousness in ever higher worlds, and through its knowledge of the laws learns to master every envelope in its particular world. This emancipation is done through a more and more intimate union with all life in an ever greater extent, that life whose freedom becomes greater and greater the more the self-consciousness of the monad expands to include an ever greater self. When it embraces the universe, it is finally emancipated.
1The stage of unity is attained when the self acquires essential consciousness. The stage of unity is beyond the scope of the life view here presented, limited as it is to the consciousness domains of the first self, man I becoming. Still loftier, incomprehensible ideas are of little avail to a mankind at the stage of civilization, for the majority of which the stage of culture lies in a distant future, their highest stage attainable in the current emotional aeon. But some prevalent misconceptions require correction. Gnosis, the knowledge of gnostics, has been replaced by fictions. Without esoterics it is absolutely impossible to understand the realities underlying the generally symbolical accounts of the gospels.
2According to immemorial wisdom, it is more than dubious to give out knowledge to those who either abuse it or misinterpret it, and to proclaim too lofty ideals to those at the stage of hatred, who disdain everything they do not comprehend and ridicule everything they do not understand, an attitude that has consequences according to the law of reaping.
3Essential consciousness is for those who are ripe for brutally frank self-effacement, who are without personal desires and who have as their one need to sacrifice everything in order to unite all. The essential self is one with the essential total self, which embraces all the lower worlds. To reach this state is the "salvation" (from evil, or the lower) and the "atonement" (with all life). It is obvious that a self that does not wish to live for this unity, only to serve all and everybody, but has its own pretensions, desires, and needs, as yet excludes itself from this unity. With his discordant, atonal noise, a civilizational individual would appear as a cacophony in that world of eternal harmony.
4Essentiality is freedom and unity. Demands, claims, force, everything in the line of the desire to rule and dominate, infringe and restrict, are alien to it. Personalities with such tendencies need the experiences of the stage of civilization. Essentiality is attraction, but of a kind totally different from emotional attraction. Emotionality always contains some sort of egoism, as the desire to own. The gnostician called the higher emotionality eros (caritas), and essentiality agape. Without understanding these terms, Christianity, as usual, patented them.
5The attraction of essentiality desires but to give, help, serve, in order to bring everything together into unity. It cannot demand anything for itself, because it has everything worth having. It can but afford of its own inexhaustible abundance. It does not say - as the ennobled personality does - that to understand all is to forgive all, for it has overcome those illusions to which the concept of forgiveness has any meaning. It responds to all vibrations of hatred with vibrations of such a kind, that if the hater could but perceive them in his receiver, he would be elevated into a sphere of bliss where hatred would be impossible. They are beyond his power of reception. When the self has become an essential self, it has become one with life, it has entered into that state which gnostic symbolism termed "Christos".
1The law of self, or of self-realization, applies to all life from the lowest to the highest, to the individual and the collective. Self-realization is to actualize what you potentially are. Every atom is god potentially and will some time be god actually. In the great process of manifestation the atomic being gradually acquires everything — its individual character, its freedom, and its divinity — by developing its individual character.
2This law says that the individual's development is his own business, that only the individual can develop himself. Everybody develops by experience, his own working up of individual experiences. It depends on the individual himself whether, when, how, to what extent he will develop. Infallible insight and understanding are acquired only through his own experience. What is freely given to the individual is lost again, unless the understanding he already has can by its own work incorporate this with his general fund of experiences of life.
3The path of self-realization is the path of arduous work from ignorance to omniscience, from inability and impotence to omnipotence, from bondage to freedom. The path to truth is the path of your own experience of life through reality seen and lived. You must walk every step of that path yourself. Nobody else can walk it for you.
4Everybody believes in his hypotheses, constructs his theories. By experiencing their fictitiousness himself, the individual feels his way forward. Erring is a necessary part of seeking and finding. Each level of development implies new problems of life to be solved by the individual on his own. Problems wrongly solved, unsolved, or solved by the help of others (even of avatars, if that would be the case), come up again, until the solution by individual character is conclusive. What in the problem is purposeful for the individual is only found by individual character. Of course, this should never prevent intellectual enrichment be exchanging different experiences of life and ways of looking at things. But to force one's opinion on others is meaningless or harmful. The individual's truths of life are self-evident to him with his individual character or on his level. To teach people to comprehend all too lofty ideals or drill in a certain pattern of behaviour is easy. But character is not changed in that way. What is taught to you, whatever you comprehend but lack the experience of life to understand, remains alien to your being and is often turned into something hostile to life in your subconscious. It is easily turned into the self-deception there is in the cult of appearances or into conscious hypocrisy, usually both. The refined egoism is extremely subtle, capable of true sacrifice and grandiose gesture, and it is impossible for self-analysis to distinguish it from altruism. Outer compulsion can have other harmful effects. Anyone who, for the sake of comfortable adaptation, waives his individual character and yields to unjustified infringement, makes his self-realization more difficult.
5Self-realization is done by stages. With each higher level the possibility of perceiving finer vibrations increases, the individual is liberated from fictions and illusions ruling until then, a reappraisal of accepted valuations follows; the self acquires a stronger instinct of reality and life, and necessary qualities and abilities.
6The first stages of self-realization are slow processes. It takes a long time before the self has acquired that fund of general experiences of life which is the prerequisite of incipient insight and understanding. The lower stages are largely the stages of ignorance and inability. Self-realization makes no leaps. The change of individual character requires solidly established experiences. On the other hand, the personality can evince marked changes for the better or worse. Overwhelming influences can break it down. A bad reaping can prevent an earlier attainment of the true level. The tempo of development depends on individual character and on its tendency, as well as on the stage of development. That one-pointed purpose which makes a rapid career possible is rarely seen before the self succeeds in contacting causal consciousness, which comprehends and understands reality. When the self begins to see the goal, the self strives to reach it, and thereby the tempo is heightened in a continuous crescendo.
7Self-realization is to realize the ideals you begin to understand, to live your life in service, to ennoble your emotionality and develop your mentality, to strive towards unity. When finally you have gained an insight into reality and an understanding of life, you will be able to apply the laws of life without friction.
8The perfection of the personality is the causal being of the first self. The perfection of the first self is the second self. The perfection of the second self is the third self. The third self can strive after divine perfection when it has actualized its divinity. Only the second self is perfect, or infallible, in the five worlds of man (47-49). The first self can certainly make mistakes. And there are always possibilities for the personality of making the most fatal blunders in life. Perfection can also be defined as the highest possible ability of vibration in the emotional, mental, and causal bodies.
1Self-reliance is understanding of life; knowledge and understanding of the fact that existence and all life are ruled by inflexible laws, which make any kind of divine arbitrariness impossible.
2Self-reliance is reliance on the laws of freedom, unity, and self-realization; knowledge and understanding of the individual's potential divinity, inalienable right to freedom, and the indestructible unity of all life.
3Self-reliance is reliance on the individual's unconscious as the source of all his light, of all his guidance. All powers of life are at his command. It is his task to find the ways in which these inexhaustible powers can be put to use.
4Self-reliance is the prime factor of development, the basis of self-determination and selfrealization, a condition of that one-pointed purpose which implies an unwavering perseverance and efficiency in striving towards the goal.
5Self-reliance is not anything you simply assume. As a latent, previously acquired quality it manifest itself in unreflective directness and spontaneity. If it is not innate it must be acquired through insight, be worked forth into a matter of will-power by using thought and feeling.
6Self-reliance has nothing in common with life-ignorant conceit, self-important obtrusion and presumption.
7Self-reliance is independent of success or failure, the illusions that are shattered when put to trial, the praise or blame of men, or one's own insufficient ability.
8Self-reliance is courage (physical, emotional, mental). The individual having it dares to be as he is: simple, unstudied, spontaneous, dares to think, feel, act, dares to be ignorant, dares to defend freedom and what is right.
9Self-reliance appears in the freedom from the always paralyzing fear of a wrathful, capricious god, the fear of the blows of fate, of bad reaping, of people, of making mistakes, of being deceived, of obeying noble impulses, of all hostile outer and inner powers.
10Self-reliance is counteracted by all dogmas, which are hostile to life and paralyze the self.
11It is a lie which says that man is irremediably evil and will be lost for ever without the grace of divine arbitrariness. It is satanic to declare the individual incurably corrupt and then to demand that he be perfect. It is satanic to deprive the individual of his self-reliance on his own potential godhood. All fictions that break the individual down, weaken, paralyse him; lead to resignation, despair, agony of life; are satanic. It is satanic to engraft the fear of a wrathful (evil, spiteful), capricious, condemning, jealous god. It is satanic to engraft the fictions of shame, sin, and guilt.
12All life develops. All life is found on the ladder of development that stretches from ignorance and impotence to omniscience and omnipotence. On each level of development the individual is relatively perfect as compared with all lower, and relatively imperfect as compared with all higher. The individual has the imperfections that belong to his level. To judge is to blame a man for being where he is, for not having attained higher, for not having acquired the qualities missing in him. Any comparison with other individuals, higher or lower ones, is a proof of ignorance of life, is unjustified and erroneous. The individual is inferior to all on higher levels, which he will reach in due course of time. Only hatred, which is blind to life, has feelings of inferiority, envy, or superiority. To recognize one's limitation is a sign of greater insight and understanding. Nobody who desires what is right is on the wrong track.
1Self-determination is to be determined as to that which you have experienced and examined yourself. Self-determination is either knowledge or critical assumption. Belief is not selfdetermination. Complete self-determination presupposes a total knowledge of man's five worlds of matter and consciousness.
2Either you have a knowledge of reality or your have not. Study is not knowledge. Study, or learning, includes not just facts but also hypotheses and theories in such a mixture that even experts find difficulty in separating facts from fictions (assumptions, theories). The knowing man is either critical or uncritical. The comprehending man can be however uncritical, for comprehension alone does not suffice to differentiate facts and fictions. The believing man is cock-sure and allows emotion to absolutify whatever he wants to believe. He believes in fictions and defends them by "proofs". He can accept almost any pseudo-facts, particularly the historical ones.
3The critical man starts from the idea that we have explored but a tiny fraction of reality. He knows that all knowledge is fragmentary. He avoids all absolutifying. He accepts nothing but what has been ultimately explored, whereupon new facts are precluded. In practice this means that he is content with a provisional assumption (an hypothesis). Therefore, when faced with the choice between doubt and belief, the critical man will remain a doubter. To him, belief is an evidence of ignorance. The critical man is self-critical, for he is keenly aware of the suggestive power of the fictitious and illusory.
4The more his intellect develops, enabling him to work up his study and experience, the less believing and the more critical the individual becomes. Individual working up is important for anyone who wishes to develop. Individual examination liberates from the dependence on others. A thorough examination demonstrates the insufficience of learning.
5The condition of self-determination is a knowledge of reality, a critical examination as to what you know and do not know, what is knowledge, assumption, or belief. From time to time there arises the need for a new general stock-taking of the reality content of your opinions. Fictions often slip down into your subconscious as though they had been overlooked. The more strictly you proceed in this scrutiny, the more fictions are discarded, and the more easily you see through the fictitiousness of new "truths". The examination demonstrates the dubious and faulty there is in prevalent views. The traditional views are largely imaginative constructions. The opinions and valuations of the civilizational individual are of such a kind that we should be grateful for being made independent of them. Public opinion is no source of information. The saying "everybody says so, everybody does so", provides a very strong reason for examining whether we should not think, feel, say, and do differently. Scientific research has begun providing us with a knowledge of reality. But almost everything remains to be explored.
6The law of self-realization compels the individual to seek by himself, find by himself, realize by himself. History shows that this seeking in many respects resembles a roving. The individual is to decide by himself what he wants to accept or doubt. He will also be the one responsible for the idiotization of his reason. Authorities may well go for what they are worth. But they must never be invoked as proofs, never be obstacles to our own thinking, and never be any final instances. Self-determination does not become possible to any greater extent until at the stage of humanity. Self-determination makes us independent of, but also tolerant to, the opinions of others.
7Without self-reliance we have not the courage to think independently and form our own valuations, the courage to liberate thought and, above all, feeling from traditional views and the valuations of public opinion, the courage to avow our ignorance and inability, which are always profound. Anyone who does not believe, speak, and act as everybody else, has almost the whole world against him. Demands for that right to freedom which the laws of life grant, at the stage of civilization lead to a never-ending struggle against the powers that curtail freedom and restrict life. It can very well be said that freedom does not exist. The outer freedom is an illusion because of the general intolerance and tyranny of convention together with people's lack of independence and their arrogance.
8The philosophers live in a world of fiction, which does not have any correspondence in reality. Experience is the only path to knowledge and is necessary to understanding. Whatever cannot be experienced is a fiction. Fictions are necessary for the mentally undeveloped. Through fictions the individual learns to think or to acquire mental activity. But without experience he does not learn to "think correctly", or in accordance with reality. The prerequisite of a total experience is sense (the ability of objective consciousness of reality) in the five worlds of man (47-49). In the matter of knowledge, reason (subjective consciousness) remains but a surrogate. Nobody who sees can explain to the blind that which must be seen in order to be grasped. His explanations are inevitably misunderstood. And sight is just one way of experiencing. Anyone who has acquired essential consciousness experiences reality in still another way, not by observation from without but from within, by the identification of consciousness with material reality. He no longer has any need for concepts, since he can instantly experience anew the reality referred to. And so he appears touchingly "naive" as a constructor of fictions when making his hopeless attempts at explaining even relatively simple matters to the "fictionalists", especially so if he is unfamiliar with the fictionalism peculiar to certain nation.
1The tendency of self-acquired individual character can be attractive or repellent. The attractive one is an instinctive tendency to unity. The repellent one is a tendency to division. As to the repellent individual character, development consists in transforming his tendency into the attractive one. This is done by acquiring noble feelings and qualities, allowing imagination to be occupied with everything belonging to the world of ideas: everything good, true, beautiful. Thereby the receiver and sender of the emotional vibratory capacity are raised to the molecular kinds of the attractive vibrations. In the course of development, all mankind finally attains to the stage of culture. By this, the collective becomes a mutual help instead of a hindrance, as it is at lower stages.
2He has the greatest difficulty in acquiring the tendency to unity, who has the opposite tendency and strives after ennoblement in an environment that is without understanding, egoistic (spiteful), and moralist (blaming). It is not easy for him to acquire esteem, admiration, devotion, respect, reverence, who has imbibed the disrespect and contempt for everything higher that is in the spirit of the times and in literature, which is apparent in the universal calumniation, casting of suspicion on everybody's motive, debasing of all greatness, and sullying of all geniuses in biographies. It is not easy to acquire trust in people when the spirit of the times tries to show how unreliable everybody and everything is. It is not easy to acquire directness, openness, and sincerity when the spirit of the times brings with it the abuse of these qualities, they being at the same time ridiculed as evidence of narrowness and stupidity. It is not easy to acquire generosity and magnanimity when the spirit of the times furthers the cultivation of all manner of pettiness and commonness. It is not easy to acquire kindness, affection, heartiness towards all when the spirit of the times is indifferent, negative, unkind. It is not easy to acquire tact, consideration, forbearance when the spirit of the times encourages tactlessness, obtrusion, arrogance. It is not easy to acquire noble qualities when the spirit of the times exhibits and fosters the diametrically opposite tendency. It is not easy and it is not done without our own methodical and systematic work for ennoblement. That work would be facilitated through mutual support in associations of likeminded people.
1Understanding is the self's actualized, latent knowledge and worked-up experience. The self in the personality is the self in its temporary limitation. The self has an incomparably greater experience of life than has the causal consciousness. The self has passed through all the preceding kingdoms (of involution and evolution). But just a tiny fraction of the self's knowledge, qualities, and abilities, which have been acquired during all its involvations and have subsequently become latent, are actualized by the experiences of the new personality. The causal consciousness still slumbers in the individuals at the stage of civilization. It is brought to life momentarily at the end of the dissolution of the personality, when it receives the synthesized mental ideas, if such ones be there. Once self-active, causal intuition gains infallible knowledge of the five worlds of man (47-49). But that knowledge will be part of the superconscious until the self enters into the inmost centre of the causal body.
2It depends on the quality of the etheric body (the envelope of reaping), whether understanding can be actualized or find expression. If the vibratory capacity in the corresponding physical molecular layers is lacking, then understanding will remain latent. If there is nothing to prevent it, the self in its new personality can rapidly re-attain its former level of development.
3The law of understanding says that the understanding the self has once acquired is never lost. Understanding is instinctual, automatic, and instantaneous. The ignorant confuse the immediate recognition at the first experience with intuition. Without the necessary new experiences, acquired knowledge, qualities, and abilities remain latent.
4The waking consciousness is a collector of experiences and material for knowledge. Everything the self has once acquired becomes understanding, predispositions, ability in its new personality. Memorized knowledge, study which is not worked up and synthesized into mental ideas, is on the whole useless. The more thoroughly the experiences are worked up, the clearer the ideas will be when remembered anew, the more marked the predispositions. The work that has been spent in this is done ready for the future.
5It is necessary to have a solid fund of general and similar experiences before the impressions can be synthesized into ideas. Primitive man learns extremely slowly from all experiences. It is this that makes consciousness development at the stage of barbarism such a slow process.
6In all their incarnations men have picked up fictions of all kinds. These they recognize immediately, and they can rapidly assimilate entire fictional systems as though the fictions were self-evident. If such a system has dominated the individual previously, then when met again it reassumes its former power by right of its evidence. Many people take this evidence as a proof of truth, divine inspiration, intuition. If the fictional system is assimilated anew, it will be a real obstacle to the development of the sense of reality, the understanding of reality; and this is typical of philosophers, theologians, jurists.
7Misunderstanding arises when different contents of experience, different perspectives, different degrees of experience of life, different degrees of realization and understanding, are put into the same words. Those who do not take this into consideration in their relations with other people, will be misunderstood. Absolutely speaking, no personality can understand any other, just approach understanding. You understand most easily those at the same level; those in the same clan most easily of all. But there is no guarantee, because everybody's individual character differs from everybody else's. Essential consciousness brings with it a community of consciousness, and thus full understanding.
1Morality is the theories of the moralists and moralism is these theories put into practice. This probably covers the essential that should be said concerning the real value of the moralists' view. Without a knowledge of reality, the laws of life, development, and of the method of achieving the goal of life you have a conventional morality, but not a rational conception of right.
2Man is not basically an evil being. At the stage of barbarism, he is a primitive emotional being with an undeveloped reason, a helpless victim of the activity of his emotional elemental. This activity is determined by the influences of the environment: vibrations in the lowest kinds of emotional matter. These vibrations do not further his development. Those he emits himself cannot be nobler. During thousands of incarnations man has been like a wolf unto man in that war of hatred which still rages on our Earth. Also at the stage of civilization dominates the egoistic, spiteful attitude he has acquired long ago. It is not to be wondered at that man is evil. The guilt of it is the common guilt of us all. Everybody is to make good his part, which is large. The quickest way to make it good is to strive after unity.
3In their ignorance the moralists do not suspect the importance to the individual of obvious failings and faults, which are also factors of development and helpers in life. Failings show a lack of the necessary insight and understanding, the need for the opposite good qualities, for balance and moderation. Failings teach us to recognize the errors in life of morality and moralism, and to discover in ourselves that which we persist in noticing only in other people. What the moralists see fit to call faults and failings need not conflict with the laws of life in any respect, but can be apparent or, especially, non-existent failings.
4We need a new basic view of man (to supersede the one the moralists have engrafted, which is hostile to life), which will help us not to concentrate on faults and failings but on good qualities, will help us to accept the individual as he is, and thereby to help him in his struggle in life. For "the heart knows its own bitterness", however deceptive appearances are. We do not help by blaming, just by embracing all with our goodness. By being the one he is, man (with all his obvious imperfections) is as perfect at his level of development as the rock in the sea, the lily on the ground, and the beast in the wood. He has left those kingdoms behind him in his development, and even though he is still far from the kingdom of the second self, yet he will some time, by the inalienable right of his potential godhood, reach that goal as well as the other goals of life.
5Throughout the various natural kingdoms the individual has acquired innumerable qualities and abilities. The lower ones are prerequisites of the higher ones and are gradually superseded by new ones. Most of them the individual has no use of any further. The fact that numerous abilities that are still desirable cannot make themselves felt, can have various causes: the individual does not need them in this particular incarnation; they would be obstacles by diverting his interest from more important ones; the personality shall perhaps be forced to specialize in less developed or absent talents; inability can also depend on a bad reaping. If they are needed in the future for his further development, these qualities once acquired but now latent can be rapidly actualized.
6Each level of development entails the acquisition of new qualities or abilities. They can be graded from zero to one hundred per cent, from the first fumbling efforts to perfection. Those achieved one hundred per cent are dropped. They have fulfilled their function and the pertaining experiences have been acquired and incorporated with the individual's understanding of life.
7On every level we carry a great number of qualities, which through experience have the opportunity of slowly climbing the centigrade gamut. If they are found far down the gamut we call them failings, since they fail in perfection. These failings are remedied during the further development.
8Failings do not necessarily depend on the level of development, on the fictions and illusions belonging to that level, or on the absence of positive qualities (undeveloped or inactive ones). They can be expressive of individual character or of virtues that (as in the moralists) have become vices through exaggeration. When they are obviously harmful to the individual, this always depends on a bad reaping.
9As faults can be regarded everything that belongs to a lower level than the individual's true level. All faults are bad reaping. All obvious faults are very bad reaping. We have incurred them through deliberately making mistakes, not through making mistakes as to still unknown laws of life on account of ignorance. We have incurred them by our presumption, abuse of knowledge and power, crimes against unity. Ninety-nine per cent of them depend on our judging the faults of others or casting suspicion on the noblemen of life on higher levels. By our gossip and judging we counteract the individual's striving to be a better man.
10Faults are forced on the individual. Only experience, often long and bitter experience, can efficiently teach the individual what he must learn but does not want to learn. In being ourselves affected with the faults we condemn, we finally learn to understand not to exclude anybody from unity. Of all faults, judging seems to be the most difficult one to cure.
11It can be part of bad reaping that the individual cannot possibly recognize his own faults. Then they need to be intensified as to finally become sufficiently evident.
12The individual can be relatively good, truthful, just, tolerant, magnanimous, etc. ad infinitum. At the same time he can be relatively evil, untruthful, unjust, intolerant, smallminded, etc. ad infinitum. One thing is known for certain: his ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, belong to his level and develop with each level.
13Man at the stage of civilization is a totality of all the contradictory that he has inherited, that has been forced on him through education, that he has picked up automatically and learnt by himself. He is by and large a chaotic centre of reactions with opposite modes of thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting, of complexes arisen by "chance".
14The moralists try to classify people according to their faults. And even if you succeed in convincing the highest intellectual classes of the harmful effects of morality and moralism, yet there will always be moralists as long as hatred exists in the world. Therefore it should be emphasized once more that the individual cannot be classified according to his faults. The most serious faults can occur even at the stage of humanity, because they are bad reaping. And nobody can escape that.
1At the stage of ideality, man is home in his true world at last, the self as a causal being is free from the always great limitation of its personality. Before that, the self is that which has been revived through the experiences of new incarnations. When evaluating the personality you must consider the self's latent knowledge, qualities, and abilities, which can be quickly revived by new experiences.
2The essentialist can evaluate the personality. Because this requires not just a knowledge of the individual character, level of development, previous incarnations, meaning of the last incarnation, and reaping allotted, but also community of consciousness.
3The psycho-analyst could analyse the personality for a hundred years without reaching clarity, since the self's superconscious remains inaccessible. What can be brought out of the subconscious through interpreting dreams may be interesting, but still just concerns superficial layers of the ocean of consciousness. The analysis of consciousness, or characterology, can never reach farther than to a knowledge of types and to general inferences; it cannot judge the individual character. Analysis is a difficult enterprise, from which particularly the moralists with their ignorance, inability of objective judgement, fanaticism, and lack of the most elementary understanding of life, ought to desist. Even systematic generalizations easily become arbitrary derivations and divisions. Different individuals can gain the same qualities through totally different experiences. An examination of previous incarnations is inevitable. The superficiality is evident from the fact that the psychologists have not yet discovered the two opposite tendencies and their fundamental importance. Individuals who are older by aeons, and thus at a higher stage of development, can by the psychologists be assessed as on a lower level than an individual at the acme of the series of incarnations of his level, with the perfected qualities and accumulated good reaping of that level. The other personalities of a series are incarnations of specialization in which but a fraction of the self's latent qualities appears. The personality that has been given an opportunity to improve imperfect, or to develop missing, qualities and abilities in new domains of life, may seem very lost and imperfect before his experiences have been synthesized in subsequent incarnations.
4Evaluations made by the ignorance of life are always erroneous. Men judge from appearances, good or bad reaping and their manifestations, success or failure, the judgements of other people, and, above all, from themselves. Were it possible for us to evaluate, then the cult of appearances would not be so completely realized and so efficiently infatuating.
5The appearances in which the individual stands out before his time and posterity can be as illusory as the Fata Morgana of the desert. Appearance, for as well as against him, can be a reaping determined by destiny. His appearance is often the role the individual has chosen to play at the masked ball of the world theatre. His appearance is often the pattern of behaviour he has been forced to assume in the milieu he has grown up in or is working in. What do men know of motives, which are often hidden even to the protagonist himself? They analyze a mask, a role, a robot of conventions, or, perhaps, an indignant protest against all the humbug. What do they know about those closest to them; parents, brothers and sisters, children? Still merciful life grants the hypocrites, the worldly wise, and the conventional people — those who make a fetish of decency — to have appearances for them. Those who refuse to participate in the cult of appearances, who appear as they are, often have appearances against them in a harder way than life meant. The meaning of the old saying, "the world wants to be deceived", is that appearances deceive those who choose appearances themselves. The more the doctors of literature attempt to describe personalities "truthfully", the more clearly they demonstrate their dependence on the appearances of accidental events, of trifling circumstances. Much would be gained if psychological interpretations and moralist evaluations in biographies were regarded as proofs of unreliability.
6The worthlessness of judgement is evident from the often extremely contradictory evaluations bestowed on different incarnations of the same self, depending on the working out of the law of reaping. The "failing" is remedied through "unsuccessful experiences", the "fault" is cured by bad reaping. Men do not suspect that on the whole they make nothing but mistakes, even when believing that they are very clever.
7What do men know about motives? Just one example may give some indications. You can show your gratitude because it is good form, it is wise, it pays, doing the opposite would be foolish, people gossip and exaggerate, gratitude is a noble quality, you are of course grateful, you are of course very noble, etc. ad infinitum. Gratitude can be felt as a debt, a duty, a benefit. Qualities have different degrees. Degree, motive, level go together. Nothing is as easily falsified as your motive. Self-deception ascribes to itself the highest thing it has heard of.
8The lack of independence in judgement is evident if you explore public verdict. What other people say about an individual is gossip and slander. Their uncertainty is clear from the fact that, with the eternal emotional instability of their judgements (when emotion is not directed by complexes), men wave to and fro like reeds in the wind as gossip blows.
9The individual judgements of men are extremely subjective, made from their own level with its limited experience and perception, their individual idiosyncrasies (fictions and illusions which they have unsuspectingly accepted), and the manifestations of egoism (which they likewise regard as infallible).
10The level of judgement appears in the extant that relativization is used. The judgements of most people are absolute. But the qualities of the individual are seldom developed one hundred per cent. "Do not say that Caesar is brave. Say that he was brave on this occasion and on that." That was benevolence, judging from the best side. Hatred always sees but from the worst side.
11The motives of egoism, antipathy, hatred are without number. Books could be filled with reasons and expressions. Fatal is the eagerness of hatred to find faults and failings with noble souls on higher levels, not to say avatars. The unreliability of the final verdict of history is clear from the fact that all descriptions of avatars are falsifications. Concerning them, that principle is true in a still higher degree which says that what is known about a man, living or dead, is but the legend of him. "The just verdict of history" is part of the price the geniuses pay for their opportunities of serving mankind. To be misjudged, to put it mildly, to be disdained by contemporaries and be vilifies by all of ever blameless posterity, is a phenomenon that perhaps should be considered when an elucidation of the concept of "sacrifice" is to be attempted.
12It is impossible for us to evaluate the individual. On the other hand, it is possible to make those general summations which are implied in the concepts of types, stages of development, epochs, generations etc. The unattainable individual disappears, the typical or universal in the mass realities appears. Usually men proceed in the opposite way. They reject indignantly, for example Schopenhauer's misanthropy, which was understandable, but are instantly ready blindly to believe any unbelievable evil thing that gossip has to tell, and they applaud enthusiastically Strindberg's caricatures. The general is rejected and the individual is accepted. The usual perverted mode of judgement.
13When evaluating we move those on higher levels down, and those on lower levels up, to our own level. There are risks to this. Many noble characters have made the most fatal mistakes in judgement, presupposing in others their own idealism, respect for confidence given, inability of exploitation.
1The Delphic Oracle would never, not even in its most profound degeneracy, have given its motto ("know thyself") that interpretation which ignorant posterity has accepted as obvious: gain wisdom by self-analysis. Its motto was no exhortation but the sign of recognition among the initiates of the highest mysteries, in which it was taught that only the second self can understand the first self. Not to seek to know yourself but to forget yourself and your comical insignificance is the essential thing.
2Self-realization is to seek everything yourself, to find everything yourself, to experience, comprehend, understand everything (reality, life, and the laws of existence) yourself, and to realize everything yourself. It is a long, hard, heavy path to wander. And there is no short cut.
3In order to know himself, man must know who he has been, his latent possibilities, the full meaning of his incarnation. Man's unconscious is his contact with all the worlds of man. These are not known through self-analysis. And he must know them in order to understand himself. Man is self-blind until he has become Man. Self-knowledge presupposes knowledge of everything else. The last thing he comes to know is himself.
4At lower stages, man acquires self-activity through his instinct of self-preservation inciting him to struggle for existence, and he develops qualities and abilities that make it possible to increase his activity and intensify it in ever higher worlds. His development proceeds under the protection of the unconscious. If self-analysis could afford any knowledge, it would enhance selfcentredness. The more man deliberately seeks to be unselfish, the more egoistic he becomes. The more he analyses himself in order to be good, the more self-opinioned he becomes. Only by forgetting the lower he is can he find the higher he will be. This is the meaning of that paradox: become the one you are. He learns to rely on his unconscious through his experience that in spontaneity and directness the highest realization and ability of his level find expression.
5Self-analysis increases irresoluteness and helplessness. Self-blindness is a protection. If man could see himself as he is, in a truthful mirror (this ridiculous, ignorant, arrogant, disdainful creature), he would never get over that chock. His analysis is that he knows, comprehends, can do much, has achieved things, is very virtuous, noble, etc. ad infinitum. Without this self-esteem, most people would break down; and in this appears their ignorance of life. The deceptiveness of the confession of sins appears in the fact that what man believes to be sin is just very superficial manifestations, but not the cause, of evil: egoism and hatred. All admit their imperfection in theory. But they are deeply hurt when, at their own request, their imperfection most evident to all is pointed out to them. On the other hand they find lots of faults in their neighbour. If man calls himself mean, it is just because others are so much the meaner. He does not suspect that anyone who thinks he is better than others is very far off from unity. Self-deception is infinitely subtle. When the individual thinks he has rid himself of his self-importance, then he is important in that he does not feel important at all.
6The following anecdote is typical of self-evaluation. Somebody wrote about a particular society that all its members except one were idiots. The society was flattered because every member thought he was the exception. One recalls Schopenhauer's dictum that there is always one idiot more in the world than everybody thinks.
7In his egotism man feels that he is the centre of the universe. Everything is valued according to its importance to himself. Wisdom begins where he ceases to be the centre of his circle, instead placing an ideal in it, not on order to become ideal but to forget himself.
8The path to self-knowledge is the study of mankind. Ignorance says: so is that individual. Behold Man! That immemorial expression did not refer to any particular person but meant: so are you. You are such as the one you admire. You are such as the one you disdain. Such are your best and your worst possibilities. Such are you as bound up with mankind. Such have you been. Such you can become again. Such is your destiny.
9Higher objective consciousness reads the consciousness expressions of other people: the emotional one, their emotions; the mental one, their thoughts. Most people would not stand those sights. It is however, the path to the knowledge of yourself through the knowledge of man.
10On the base of the statue of Isis the inscription was read: "No mortal has raised my veil". The self as just a personality can never raise that veil. When the self, become a causal self, is able to do this, it will discover itself.
1The ennoblement of the personality is the result of the work of the self. It is one of the ways the self uses to attain higher levels.
2Like the diet is of significance for the organism, so what the individual sees and hears, and thus assimilates into his waking consciousness, is of importance. Impressions rapidly sink into the subconscious with an inevitable effect. They influence of course also the feelings and thoughts of waking consciousness.
3It is not easy to acquire a new, positive quality. Each quality presupposes quite a number of other qualities. The greater their capacity, the greater is the possibility of having this new one. Obstructive, negative qualities make this task more difficult, especially where their bad sowing must first be reaped. The tension there is between the old and new qualities often results in a lack of balance, failings that are strengthened by the environment, which almost always is without understanding, and by the moralists with their indignation and malicious pleasure.
4Everyone admires certain qualities, or finds them more desirable than others. Admiration facilitates their acquisition. Interest also guides. Through paying attention to it, a content of consciousness is impressed on the subconscious. Certain qualities have key positions in the unconscious, and foster others closely related to them. The abilities of admiration, affection, sympathy can from the very faint beginning embrace all other noble qualities. Some few desirable qualities are cited below as examples. Everybody can complete the list for himself.
5Goodness is the sum total of all noble qualities. Of course ignorance abuses this word, a confusion of ideas and falsification of the conception of right and of the ideals being the result.
6For the ideals to be realizable they must take the place of self-importance. This entails simplicity. You stop being what you are not, feeling anything else but what you recognize to be right and true, pretending in order to dupe or please others. Simplicity is the great manner of being great. Ignorance often takes simplicity as a recognition of the fiction of equality. The cultural individual must reckon on being misunderstood in everything he says or does, everything he does not say or do.
7Directness is the instinctual genius of life, the spontaneous manifestation of the certainty and sureness of the unconscious. All deliberation, calculation, dissimulation, affection are alien to it. It is a wondrous quality that facilitates everything in life, splendidly simplifies and solves otherwise unsolvable problems. In directness the superconscious can find expression. Directness is destroyed by self-analysis, self-complacency, moralism.
8Invulnerability is a quality that is absolutely necessary in the physical and emotional worlds with their repellent tendencies. Vulnerability makes attraction impossible, makes you dependent on the hatred (lack of appreciation, etc.) of others, is defenceless against baseness. Invulnerability must be unconditional and total, the armour must reach from head to feet. Balder the good was killed by the weak mistletoe spear, Achilles by his vulnerable heel. The vulnerable man poisons his own existence by his idiotic attitude. The first prerequisite of self-realization is the acquisition of an invulnerability complex. You never ask how it feels, and you become invulnerable because you want to.
9Anyone who spreads joy is a true benefactor in the dreary, cheerless life of most people. Joy is the sun in the dark, the oasis in the desert. Kindness to all without exception is part of ordinary good manners and the most elementary tact. Mankind is in a bad way when needing such a reminder. Helpfulness in the countless little opportunities of every day makes life rich for everybody and for ourselves. By thinking well of everybody you become better yourself and help other people to become better. By thinking evil you become worse yourself and increase evil in the world. This is the reason why even the "truth" in slander harms everybody who concerns himself with it. Anyone who makes other people happy becomes happy himself. This is also the only way to acquire enduring happiness.
10Justness means impartial, impersonal judgement independently of your advantage or disadvantage, sympathy or antipathy, friendship or enmity. The sense of fair play in sportsmanship, and chivalry, are kin to this quality.
11Magnanimity is the expression of a generous and noble mind. That wondrous quality is alien to all pettiness, vengefulness, envy, calculation, meanness. The fact that it is necessary to the activation of the emotional superconscious makes it still more desirable.
12Sincerity, loyalty, gratitude are noble qualities which have in common that they require reciprocity for anybody to be able to show them to other people. They must not be abused. Being abused they strengthen evil. To allow ruthless cynicism, daring latitude, or unscrupulous calculation to abuse noble qualities is to make goodness defenceless and contribute to its ruin.
13Sincerity is an important factor in our searching, a response organ for the perception of what is genuine and spurious, true and false. It is blunted by fanaticism. Any self-deception whatsoever is positively destructive to the instinct. Untruthfulness is the greatest enhancer of illusoriness.
14If loyalty and solidarity are abused as means of pressure against the ideals, then loyalty can be shown to the ideals only. Dutifulness is ordinary reliability quite simply.
15Gratitude is an original feeling, which is easily hampered through demands. Now being subjected to "charity", now to iniquitous treatment, does not breed any gratitude. In the epoch of hatred this quality is much rarer than the ignorance of life believes. Anyone who tries to unburden himself from his debt of gratitude by fair words, pays with counterfeit money. Words are vibrations in the air.
16Without setting a good example all upbringing will be merely a tacit invitation to dissimulation. Ideals must never be sermonized. On the other hand, young people can be given noble characters (historical or fabulous) to admire. The goal of upbringing is not to establish good habits. Habit is an inhibition that makes a rational change or adaptation more difficult. Habit mechanizes and robotizes, dulls receptivity to valuable new things, makes one insusceptible to impressions, destroys the power of spontaneity. What is taught by force enslaves, or rouses the instinct of obstinacy. Nobody should be left in the dark about those ideals which he has even the slightest chance of understanding. With that, upbringing has made its part. After that everybody chooses for himself what corresponds to his level. Ideals are connected with the feeling of aversion by being sermonized. Kindness, as few rules as possible, and firmness are necessary. Any other punishment than the loss of privileges is unnecessary. Being allowed to assist in little household duties should be regarded a benefit. You cannot count on gaining confidence without showing confidence yourself. The immature cannot possibly judge and thus not criticize; the young cannot rightly judge for themselves. By cultivating the love of criticizing, you foster selfesteem, contempt, irreverence, and disrespect. Criticism presupposes a total knowledge of the pertaining particular sphere of knowledge. It befits nobody, least of all the young, to criticize the geniuses of the past.
1The art of living is the application of an understanding of life acquired. Like the wisdom of life it has many degrees. It is the same with the art of living as with any other art: you acquire it through work and toil during many lives, without apparent result to begin with. Those who strive after ennoblement are put, according to the law of destiny, into such circumstances in future lives as benefit their development and facilitate their striving.
2The bohemians, epicureans, bigots, moralists, pedants, and puritans of the stage of civilization lack the prerequisites of the art of living, which is not possible until at the stage of culture. It is equally radically wrong to believe that man is here on Earth in order to do nothing, enjoy himself, revel in luxury and amusement; as to preach meaningless asceticism and renunciation, not allowing himself his share in the good things of this life and opportunities of relaxation. We are not here in order to be happy but in order to have experiences and learn from them, get to know reality and life. Each personality has its special task in life, its goal in life, is a new attempt by the self to explore new domains of life. It is not to be wondered at that the personality at the stage of civilization often fails. The ignorant of life does not perceive that the meaning of life for the individual is the meaning that he can put into life himself.
3A wrong attitude to life leads to demands on life and on other people, demands that life does not furnish any possibilities of satisfying, demands for happiness, which the individual alone can procure. Our circumstances are such as destiny has ordained according to the law of reaping. Life is not suffering. Suffering is bad reaping from bad sowing, and ceases when the sowing has been reaped.
4The barbarian detests work. Civilizational amusements often tire more than work, make work disagreeable and the view of life superficial. "When life is at its best, it is work and toil" is an esoteric axiom of immemorial origin. Man is markedly little suited for amusement. Nos vrais plaisirs sont nos besouins (Our true pleasures are our needs). He has made a good choice who can be absorbed by his gainful occupation and find satisfaction in it, especially of his work benefits development and serves unity.
5The art of living includes the art of being able to forget yourself, to be occupied with other things than yourself, to keep your attention away from yourself. This it is which provides the greatest satisfaction in diversion, although those people do not understand it who are not able to concentrate spontaneously on interests that require attention. It is because of this you are wise to have several varied interests - the more the better - if you cannot be absorbed by something particular.
6The ignorance of life believes that happiness consists in external circumstances and outward things. To most people happiness consists in some illusion: being somebody, knowing how to do something, in their excellence, in glory, wealth, power, etc. That happiness which is never lost lies in the ability, acquired methodically, of forgetting your utterly, comically insignificant personality with all its insistent claims, never satisfied desires, and innumerable causes for alarm; and in cultivating the tendency to unity and in living for some ideal. Anyone who runs after happiness will never find it. Happiness comes to the man who does not need it, who lives to make other people happy.
7The art of living includes the ability to enhance other people's joy, to make life easier to live for everybody. Anyone who destroys other people's joy, makes everything heavier and harder to bear and darkens his own life.
8The art of living includes trust in life. To trust life is to trust the immutable, incorruptible laws of life. Everything can happen in life, at any time, anywhere. Anyone who has acquired trust in life can bear the hardest blows that destiny deals. The unprepared man is broken down by his own terrifying visions. Fear is our worst enemy, the traitor that paralyzes and blinds. The heroic attitude is the only rational one: to live tragically (the sowing must be reaped) but never to take it tragically. Any other attitude just increases suffering. It is part of the wisdom of life not to bereave yourself of the composure you have by fighting "disasters" in beforehand, not to enlarge disasters by concentrating on them. As a rule, "nothing will be as good as you hope, nothing as bad as you fear". Imagination wallows in excesses, making life either into heaven or hell. Wisdom says: "Take it easy, and everything will be all right".
9Two difficult things are part of the art of living: to learn to love solitude and to acquire the need for being silent about what you know. Both things are necessary. It is in solitude that we profit by what our unconscious can teach us. Anyone who gossips, chatters away himself and other people's confidence, and sows much bad sowing. "To will, to know, to dare, and to keep silent" is the sum of esoteric wisdom.
10Life is made up of an infinite series of problems which nobody but the individual is able to solve in the one right way, in the same way as everybody must find his truths on his level before he is ripe for the next level. Rules of conduct, like hypotheses and theories, make orientation easier. With that they have served their purpose. The rule is generalized experience, the construction by post facto wisdom to explain a certain course of action, and belongs to a particular level. The rule must be individualized to fit the concrete case. Anyone who needs rules lacks the ability to judge the case and to adapt the rule. Rules of conduct belonging to all too high levels confuse and stupidize. The more rules you collect, the more irresolute you will be. If the rules are made compulsory, they lay the foundation of all manner of inhibitions, with a guilty conscience, neurosis, agony before life. Not even in deliberate action do you act according to rules, but matter-of-factly, purposively, and later instinctively, spontaneously.
11People may very well be deprived of their fictions, but not illusions, unless they are obviously harmful. Blindness in life is often a veil of mercy, often necessary to achieve full efficiency. By depriving the individual too early of the illusions which make life worth living for him, which fill his life with interests and sources of joy, which raise and ennoble him; we do him a most serious disservice. Many people have thus been deprived of their ideals, their joy of living, the content of their lives. The moralists are experts at such blunders in life.
1Individual character has its own tendency, acquired long before causalization. This does not mean, however, that the vibrations affecting the individual from without are unimportant. On the contrary they are determinant at lower stages. In the emotional aeon, the "cosmic" vibrations have mainly a repellent effect, and therefore the universal influences are unfavourable. Thus it can be said that the emotional instinct of the civilizational individual is more or less repellent. The Atlanteans were the fourth root-race, the emotional root-race. Their historical mission was to ennoble emotionality. In this they failed, as we know. The nations belonging to this root-race still cultivate the nationalism, intolerance, and arrogance of the tendency to division, being seduced into this to some extent by the still young Aryan root-race. But that is no defence. The older race should have been an example to the younger. Those who comprehend at all what is meant by collective responsibility can perhaps trace the results of this over the ages. It should be pointed out in this connection that the individual's bad reaping can cause him to be born into a race that has a bad reaping. Both race and individual are to be admired because of their heroic attitude to life, and are not to be hated, which is idiotic.
2Of course the civilizational individual has attractive feelings. As long as he is in conditions that satisfy his egoism, he is sympathetically disposed to other people. The repellent tendency asserts itself whenever his well concealed egoism is not satisfied. Those who are able to do so, choose for themselves an agreeable environment and pleasant acquaintances. This facilitates selfdeception considerably. The individual feels filled with nobleness, good resolutions, etc. and is happily unsuspecting of the extent of his egoism. Besides, he would regard his egoism justified, and altruism romantic and absurd.
3Pure emotionality is desire. Desire is mentally blind, is enlightened by reason and becomes united with thought. In this way feelings arise, which are desires coloured with thought where desire is the dynamic power. At the emotional stage, thought cannot dominate a feeling directly but only indirectly through another feeling, generally the diametrically opposite one. Any feeling whatsoever can be fostered by thinking methodically. Usually they arise unnoticedly (since the individual is uninterested in the control of consciousness) by attention being directed to them. Most of them are innate, latent, cultivated in many lives, and can easily regain their former strength. A feeling is developed by thought dwelling on a certain reason. Thus, for instance, man develops envy by constantly comparing his own conditions with those of better favoured people, and it can of course be so intensified as to get instantly inflamed whenever he sees or hears about somebody who has something, has succeeded in something, etc. The illusion of envy is connected with the fiction of the injustice of life, and can be weakened through the insight that all kinds of comparison between individuals are misleading. Malicious pleasure, which delights in other people's bad reaping, is related to envy. The stronger the tendency to hatred is, the stronger those negative feelings become. Feeling is intensified by repetition, from the faintest, unnoticeable consciousness expression to the most intense affect. Just how subtle feeling can be is clear from Larochefoucauld's observation that "in the misfortunes of our best friends there is always something that does not displease us". Envy is as common as the ignorance of life is great. Many people envy all who are better off than themselves, and grudge all their success. Envy is of course a fatal stupidity in life, because being victim of it you deprive yourself of that to which you would otherwise have got a right. Anyone who rejoices in and with other people, sows a good sowing for himself.
4As long as moral fictionalism, that typical product of civilization and of the tendency to division, will dominate mankind with its dogmas, so long will the censure of other people continue, and the result will be the mutual, eternal judging. They forget in this that everybody has a right to be the one he is, as long as he allows the same right to others. Hatred's analysis of other people's traits and behaviour is safeguarded by an indignant assurance that it is just a matter of trying to understand better. No analysis can afford understanding, which is always spontaneous.
5One of the most serious consequences of moralism is the idiotic contempt, perhaps the only quality that all have perfected one hundred per cent. If it has become a habit, it is gradually extended and vented on more and more people. This fantastic sharpsightedness seeks and finds everywhere motives for ever more profound contempt. Also the language has quite a number of words denoting the different expressions of contempt: repudiation, scorn, superciliousness, condescension, disrespect, tactlessness, standoffishness, irreverence, etc. In the end, contempt is vented on all living beings and provides the basis of ruthlessness. On lower levels contempt finds more and more brutal expression: wickedness, cruelty, harshness, vengefulness, unforgivingness, insolence, tyranny, exploitation.
6Another characteristic of the moralist is his self-righteousness. This smugness bears witness to a total blindness in life. We have a long way to go before we have got rid of our self-importance. Anyone who witnesses for himself always bears false witness.
7Misunderstandings are inevitable at the stage of civilization. The reasons for them are innumerable. A knowledge of human nature is lacking. Hatred wants to misunderstand, puts the worst construction on everything, breeds mistrust and suspicion, which in their turn result in bitterness, disappointment, vexation, displeasure. One way of avoiding misunderstandings is to seek your clan when choosing your company. The wise man simplifies his circumstances as far as possible, and by that his problems too. The unwise man complicates his conditions, and by that he makes everything more difficult for him.
8Subjectivism, which has spread like an epidemic from philosophy to all domains of culture, has exalted arbitrariness into a principle. That suits excellently the "go-ahead spirit" of undiscerning boldness, the "self-determination" of self-will and obstinacy. "Everybody is the master of his wisdom". The fiction of the intellectual and cultural equality of all proclaimed by democracy has even more strengthened the confidence of the general indiscrimination in the authority of its ignorance. We have the insight and understanding of our level, not what belongs to higher levels. This can of course annoy those who have all the other things. The self-sufficience of self-assertion, the presumption of self-glory, the conceit of self-importance, the whole of this all too common psychopathy, which always appears irresistibly comical to outsiders, is characteristic of the negative tendency, and originates in a wrongly constructed equality complex that seeks compensation in arrogant self-esteem.
9Men always make the mistake of taking themselves too solemnly and others too seriously. We are not by a long way as important as we think. We are very far from the goal. Other people do not mean so to offend as suspiciousness imagines. Most people are unaware of their clumsy, tactless, and stupid sayings and doings, and are sincerely surprised when realizing that they could possibly offend or hurt other people. The general irritability has the effect that most people little notice their own behaviour.
1The freedom of thought is restricted by the ruling dogmas. Dogma is the opposite of intellectual freedom. Hypotheses are necessary. These provisional assumptions are the attempts of thought to explain reality and its processes. The rational attitude is to examine all theories in order to familiarize oneself with the results of scientific research, yet not to accept any theory, but await the new results that will inevitably come. It is through the endless succession of hypotheses that science progresses. Danger is at hand only when hypotheses are made into dogmas, are espoused by emotion, and thus are made absolute.
2A dogma is a hypothesis which, having been put to the vote, has by the majority been declared to be valid for all time to come. Underlying the dogma is the principal axiom of public opinion, saying that "if ignorance is multiplied by a sufficiently large number, then the result is knowledge". When an explanation is laid down to be valid for all time to come, or when it is adhered to despite its being evidently an obsolete view, then thinking has been prohibited. Dogmas (prohibitions of free and correct thought) can be divided into religious, philosophic, moral, scientific, and social ones.
3The founders of religions have appeared in times of general disorientation following the dissolution of the fictional systems ruling till then, with chaos impending; in order to offer an outlook acceptable to the spirit of the times. These views were steps forwards from the view-point of epochal and national psychology, but of course were never understood by the majority, and after repression by the adherents of the old religion they were distorted so as to fit in with the ruling superstitions, and were made into dogmas. The rule is that no religious document is genuine, and the life of no founder of a religion has been truthfully described. However, it is not the spurious in all religions that is the point of fatal consequences; it is the patent mark of infallibility put on them. That patent mark is always false. There is no infallible knowledge. It is the patent mark that enforces blind belief and makes it possible to repress dissidents, to abuse authority, and to breed fanaticism. No literary work is improved by putting a patent mark on it. Every work must defend its justification by its content of reality, not by invoking infallible authorities. According to the implacable law of self-realization, everyone must seek and find the truth by himself. This would be brought to nothing unless everyone has the possibility of choosing, and of choosing wrong. Those who preach "infallible knowledge" take a heavy burden of responsibility on them, which is not an idle phrase even though it is abused by all irresponsible people in responsible positions.
4A moral dogma is a prescription designed to apply for everybody under all circumstances. The fact that circumstances can radically change, that people are found at very different stages of development, that "where two people do the same thing, yet it is not the same thing they do", is of no consequence where a moral dogma prevails, which ever presumes to maintain how things should be without knowing how things are. Moral dogmas reform nobody. But they afford spiteful people a longed-for and strived-after "moral right" to despise and condemn their fellow men. And this necessarily results in the generally accepted hypocrisy with its tacit supreme dogma: keep appearances up, for they are the only necessary thing. The dreadfully suggestive power of the moral dogmas sanctifies the most barbarous views. They are sacred because they have been prescribed by the holy spirit of public opinion, and their divine origin is proved by the principle of "so do all". The guilt of the religious and moral dogmas is immense.
5The only true moral command, if some such were possible, would be the command of love. But love cannot be commanded. And that should give the moralists food for thought. Love presupposes freedom and grants freedom. Want of love, however, can evidently be morality. Demands for morality violate the laws of freedom and unity. Morality is hostile to life. In adopting other people's concepts of right and wrong with demands and threats that are alien to the individual, an inexplicable compulsion violating freedom establishes itself in his subconscious, and there it becomes a "not-self", "the other man in us", a destructive hostile power, an unsuspect source always of fear, often of neurosis, and sometimes of crime. Besides, moral commands are superfluous, since nobody asks for the right who does not know by himself, by his own accord, what is right, and since the divine legislation of life appears in the law of good.
6The task of science is to explore the causal connections, to search for the laws. With a marvellously stubborn tendency science appears to forget ever anew that all theories and hypotheses are but temporary and limited. With all its immense learning it possesses a knowledge of just a tiny fraction of the total reality. It flatters itself that it is free of superstition and that its thought is free. The history of science, however, testifies differently. To reject without examination the seemingly improbable, the strange and unknown (to which every revolutionary discovery once belonged), still is not incompatible with the scientific attitude. the unexplored is called god by the religious and fraud by the scientists. The instinct for the probable, or the positive sense of reality, is still in its initial stage. Every scientific world view will remain fictitious. There is no infallible knowledge of reality. The mental superstructure of esoterics is little more than a suggestion of this reality never suspected by the normal individual. There is, besides, no possibility of constructing an exact and comprehensible system of thought for an intellect having so utterly few reality concepts. All human knowledge, even the esoteric one, of necessity remains a partial knowledge, and as such, always misleading and defective in certain respects.
7Also the social dogmas have their martyrs. For dogmas and martyrs are inseparable, as intolerance, envy, and the need for persecution provide the dogmas with their continuous raison d'etre. The total ignorance of life — not least the ignorance of all laws of the continuance and development of society — in conjunction with the mad, blind belief of totalitarian rulers in their infallibility will, as long as irresponsible power is allowed to exist, continually and ever again bring mankind on towards the verge of destruction.
1There is a conscious and an unconscious dependence. The conscious kind submits to authority. To it, the scientific hypotheses and theories of the day are gospel truth.
2The unconscious kind is partially the result of the "wisdom" impressed on man in childhood. The trustful, open, sensitive, receptive mind of the child has been infected with all manner of fictions (conceptions without a reality content). The adult never suspects where he has got all the ineradicable superstitions which he has to put up with for the rest of his life, like "innate" ideas. He has forgotten how he got them. But he knows that he has them.
3Much of what exists in the subconscious has come there by mistake, as it were, unnoticedly, unintentionally. You have read it or heard it once or twice without attending particularly to the matter. It just is there, and you accept it as something self-evident when it appears.
4The more learning expands, the more we lose our survey and ability to orientate ourselves both in the world of study and in the world of reality, and the more dependent on the judgement of others we become. There are risks to this, as is clear from the expression "narrow specialist". The partial knowledge so easily loses its eye for the dependence of the part on the whole, and of the parts on each other. The need for orientators, the exclusive task of whom would be to sum up the partial results into greater surveys, is felt more and more strongly.
5We all need authorities. We must all have authorities. None but the fool knows, comprehends, and understands everything. In most cases it is not even possible for us to judge the reliability of the authority in question, to judge what is probable or reasonable. Just exceptionally are we able to decide whether the authority is based on facts or on fictions. We are to content ourselves with provisional assumptions at our own risk. For we must not throw the responsibility on anybody else. It is for us to choose authority, choose correctly, and accept when the authority is right. Also Buddha impressed on his disciples that the individual is himself responsible for what he will accept as true and right; that the responsibility must not be thrown on authorities, the sayings of wise men, sacred writings, traditions; that one should not unnecessarily accept whatever one does not comprehend, does not recognize to be correct, has not examined oneself.
6One of the greatest obstacles to the general development of the collective is that kind of dependence which makes public opinion possible with its cult of dogmas in all domains. The infallible opinion of the majority has always been the resort of the masses, who lack independence. Parrotry is called public opinion and masks the general lack of judgement, something similar to that mimicry called fashion which masks the general lack of taste.
7Also in the learned world there is much dependence. It is seen in the immensely learned who know everything that others have written, and in those who do not dare to criticize ruling academic dogmas out of regard for their career, who are silent about what they know to be true and right, or even speak against their own better knowledge.
8The papers foster dependence by teaching, day by day, how the judicious should think in order to think correctly. For the papers of course communicate but facts, but axiomatic truths for the day, the last wisdom.
1Morality is not based on the knowledge of reality and life. Morality is an historical product that over the ages has incorporated with it contradictory conventions, arbitrary rules of conduct, and false values from all directions. Morality is the sum total of the taboos of the ignorance of life, a monstrous mixture of commands and prohibition, which idiotizes, restrains, hampers, stifles life. Manners and customs change. But the tyranny of convention and intolerance remain eternally at the stages of barbarism and civilization as two of the numerous expressions of hatred. The moralist adopts conventions that are hostile to life as thoughtlessly as he does bad laws. His blindness in life is as great as his fanaticism. His condemnation of all who do not accept the fictions and illusions of convention shows that he is ruled by hatred.
2It would be strange if man, who throughout history has demonstrated his total ignorance of life, would know how things should be without any knowledge of how things are. The moralists are ignorant of everything: the laws of life, the meaning and goal of life, the way of attaining this goal, the levels of development, individual character. And these people are the ones to prescribe for others what they should believe, think, say, and do. Nobody is as cocksure as he who knows nothing. In all ages they have sermonized morality without affecting the primitive, who regard murder as a suitable pastime. Morality has as little to do with humanity, nobleness, the art of living; as religion with a rational life view. By propaganda morality has become the atheist's religion. The moralists can seldom explain what morality is, except that it is something that gives man a right to despise others.
3Morality is but another word for the cult of appearances. Only the conventionalist, who reacts according to fixed patterns of behaviour, is regarded as normal by the moralist. Mr Average's fetish is so-called decency, and so he puts on this collectively fabricated social mask, playing excellently his part of levelled, uniform, statistical robot without an individual character. The expression "to be born an original and to die a copy" testifies to self-effacement by a being whose task it should be to develop his individual character. Commands and demands lead to the cult of appearances. We do not reach any levels by good resolutions and fair words. To the moralist, conventional blamelessness is the same thing as perfection. He does not in the least suspect that perfection means the faultless application of the laws of life. What need has he of laws of life who knows everything best?
4The moralist's false values of life depend on, among other things, the fact that he speaks about things he cannot possibly understand. They speak about that love of our neighbour, which nobody in the congregation can possibly experience. They profane sacred ideals by making them stock phrases, things familiar and used to. In order for the congregation to reach the higher emotionality, for it to give proof of the most elementary humanity, you must work on it with heart-stirring appeals. They cast pearls without heeding the intentionally biting formulation of that exhortation, which ought to have made at least some few pay attention.
5Morality masks egoism. They strive after unity, not in order to liberate, but as a means of power, in order to bind and rule. They set up all manner of ridiculour taboos. But they overlook the one essential thing: attraction, which shall save the world. This they gladly leave to a superior being. What do they know of the tendency to unity, which is the true revelation of god? How about the respect for all living beings? They cultivate their fanaticism, intolerance, and private hatred complexes. Anyone who has fathomed the false life values and self-deception of moralism, perceives the justness of the eminent esoterician's statement, that nearly two thirds of the evils that pursue mankind can be written up in the record of misdeeds of religion and morality. Morality has a monstrous capacity for poisoning, and has over all ages been the strongest motive for contempt. The moralist does not even realize that to moralize is to judge.
6Morality is mistaken for social regulations for living together without friction. Those are unreflectingly assimilated in childhood and adolescence through the examples set by adults. The simplest mind can — without quaint catechism prohibitions — comprehend that murder, violence, persecution, theft, forgery, and calumny make the continuation of society impossible.
7Many a moralist collects rules like stamps. The more of them he has, the more irresolute is he. they leave him in the lurch when they could be of use. They foster complexes in him and a bad conscience. Rules are artificial bungling attempts that restrain spontaneity, enhance selfdeception, and make the moralist imagine that he is somebody else than he is. Right action belongs to its level, is self-evident and spontaneous, and results from the necessary qualities, not from pleasant contemplations.
8Everything genuine, direct, original, spontaneous the moralist considers reprehensible. He views man as a thoroughly corrupt being, evil without bottom and beyond cure, who is actuated but by evil impulses. When the bubbling inflow from the unconscious, that source of life, has ebbed away, when the individual has become an automation of all kinds of inhibitory complexes and mechanized habits, when the ability to live in the present and take in the vitalizing and liberating power of life impressions has been destroyed, when everything has become a wellordered system of rules, commands, prohibitions, and all manner of prescriptions, confession of sins, bad conscience, remorse, self-contempt, and anguish before life; then and only then is man saved and moral. The result of this madness is that the unimpressionable remain unchecked, and the noble characters are made unfit for life or are ruined.
9The moralist distrusts life. He does not suspect the purposiveness of life or the inability of his ignorance to descry it. Fortunately, however, everything is so well arranged that even the most masterful moralist could not propose any improvement. Everybody develops by experiences the very qualities his incarnation is aimed at. Individual character and understanding of life determine the tempo. The moralist's unwarranted encroachment on the right to self-determination causes disorder and increases the difficulties.
10The hostility to life of morality appears also in quietism, being the self's attempt at suicide by ceasing to act. All individual activity (thoughts, feelings, words, deeds) is then regarded as evil. This denial of the self's potential godhood is that perversity of life called Satanism. Imperfection means that you are on your way and that your first self has not reached its final goal. Of course the attempted suicide fails. But it results in a delay, which can amount to millions of years, and in an elementary course on a lower level with activity forced on the self.
11The moralist cannot reform man, but certainly he can change his external pattern of behaviour through compulsion and psychoses. When compulsion ceases, emotional intoxication has passed off, the individual is basically the same. The false ideas of morality include the idea saying that the individual will become good by obeying principles. Sure enough, they will be very solid and fine in their moral self-righteousness when blindly following rules the meaning of which they never understand. By obedience the individual learns to obey. That necessary quality is acquired at barbaric levels. At higher stages, however, its result is that blind obedience which tolerates everything and leaves to others to control your individual character. Compulsion poisons and makes good repugnant. Enforced commands with threat of punishment are turned into subconscious destructive complexes. What is to be assimilated without harm must elicit a response, be met with sympathy, and be willingly taken in.
12"Chacun a les defauts de ses vertus." Everybody has the weak points of his good points. The same idea has been formulated more pregnantly in the seeming paradox, "Vices are exaggerated virtues and vice versa". Every virtue has its vice. Virtues and vices merge into one another. Virtues are whatever facilitates, vices what obstructs, living together with other people. What the moralists see fit to call virtues and vices are subjective notions of what should be regarded suitable or unsuitable. By their unessentials the moralists divert attention from the one essential thing: violation of unity. If the moralist's fictions were rational, they would be self-evident, and it would not be necessary to keep them alive by propaganda, incessant sermonizing, and eternal condemnation. In all ages they have sermonized morality, and the history of the world shows the result of it.
13The moralists argue that the "doctrine" of reincarnation would cause people to put off their striving after development (or becoming "good") till their next life. This argument is quite in line with the rest of their fictions and illusions ignorant of life.
14It is the experience of history that "the individual is incorrigible". Real advances cannot be discerned in physical existence. The gain of an incarnation appears from the results of working up in the mental world. This demonstrates that the moralists' "methods of improvement" were perverted. Results are not achieved by the resolutions of exerted "will", rumination, desperate efforts to lift yourself by your hair; but by being simple, natural, spontaneous.
15The man who would listlessly refrain from getting the necessary experiences of life and to learn from them, would not be any better as a moralist (rather the opposite), and would miss favourable circumstances of life in future incarnations, and would instead get into unpleasant compulsory conditions designed to teach him the necessary experiences of life.
16The man who has a favourable incarnation (a good reaping, etc.), wishes development and thereby gets experiences which entail a definite rise of his level.
17This is true of morality as of everything else: you do not understand just because you comprehend. That is the meaning of the famous metaphor: "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear".
1Moralism is a cult of the lie. The ignorance of life cannot see through the cult of the lie at the stage of civilization. But then, "everything is lie within us and without us". Anybody who spoke what he thought would make himself impossible everywhere and be regarded as a madman, one dangerous to "public safety". For such are the notions of hatred. Everything is permeated with lies: social life, business, politics, governments, the churches. "The essential thing is not who you are but who you appear to be." An Indian sage who had studied Europe thoroughly asked: Why do all people of the West anxiously pretend to possess a virtue (sincerity) which nobody can practise in his intercourse with other people? During thousands of incarnations we have learnt to lie through self-preservation, until lying has become our true nature.
2Moralism is hypocrisy. The stricter the conventional morality, the more tyrannical the custom, the greater the hypocrisy. Moralism tries to force people into being somebody else than they are. Since, fortunately, this is impossible, self-preservation forces the individual to make himself out to be somebody he is not. And in so doing he will unsuspectingly be a greater and greater humbug as time goes on. You apply convention if it is suitable, and conceal your "crimes" as best you can. But if luck is against you, you have offended against the supreme command ("Thou shalt not let thyself be caught"), and are condemned by all moralist keepers of appearances. There is a law of reaping, however, and life is merciful, finally opening up the eyes of these moralists by letting them be condemned themselves.
3Moralism includes gossip and slander. "Nobody is so black as he is painted", is the cynical admission of how fifteen fat hens can be made out of one feather. No pestilence is spread as rapidly as the evil talk about others. Nobody seems to be able to keep to himself the malicious talk he has heard. Most people slander everybody, people they personally know and do not know, friends and relatives. To talk about other people's merits is not equally pleasant.
4Moralism shows in self-poisoning. The moralist does not suspect how the process of moralist poisoning affects his own inner life. Nobody can free himself from the evil he has listened to. Whenever the memory of the slandered person suggests itself, their minds are filled with the dirt they have themselves imbibed so greedily. It is the moralists' process of purification. "The more you wash the dirt of others, the cleaner your own hands will be."
5Moralism is self-blindness. Moralism is morality put into practice. Moralism is meant for others. Everybody is almost perfect in his own eyes, "the imperfection inherent in everything human disregarded", of course. With that exception we are perfect, especially if we have procured the "forgiveness of sins", But we will not be ridded of our faults as easily as that, not even by a public confession of sins. We just enhance our self-blindness. our actual faults, however, we cannot discern. We would be deeply offended should anybody dare to complete our confession of sins with essentials. We would easily convince ourselves that we had been totally misunderstood and wrongly judged.
6Moralism shows in the cult of prohibition. The moralist is a subjectivist without the ability to distinguish between appearance and reality, unessentials and essentials. Only he knows what is right and best for everybody. Anyone who refuses to adapt himself to him is dangerous to society. He is the patronizing man who, cancelling the law of development, commands that the individual change his nature and immediately be perfect. According to him, everything should actually be prohibited. As many prescriptions and prohibitions as possible is his motto.
7Morality is an expression of hatred. After religion has lost its power and thus its value for persecution, morality is hatred's best weapon. As long as morality is useful as a means of persecution, slander will be used as a means of poisoning. As such, it is convenient and infallible. Nobody must be above any suspicion. Not even superior beings find favour with the moralists. They said of Jeshu that he was a drunkard and glutton, sat at table with harlots, and loafed about with the rabble on the roads. It is a pity we have not got a more complete catalogue of pharisaic calumny. The moralists have of course denied their spiritual kinship to these gossip-mongers.
8Moralism is, first and last of everything, judging. Judging is the most common of all human phenomena. It is an innate, ineradicable habit, which has become a need and a pastime. Judging is an expression of hatred. Men will continue to judge until they have reached a higher stage and will hate not longer. Judging is presumption. Nobody, not even a god, has any right to judge. Anyone who judges, judges but himself and nobody else. In judging they make mistakes as to both the law of freedom and the law of unity. Nobody seems to realize that all suffer under this mutual judging, which poisons all social life and dissolves all community. Jeshu's parable about the mote (my neighbour's faults, vices, and crimes) and the beam (my judgement on them) does not seem to have been clearly understood as yet. The only thing that Jeshu condemned was hypocrisy, phariseism, moralism. The judgement of posterity is moralism, as is all other judgement. There must not be any ideals in human shape. Everybody must be dragged down into the mire, so that there will be full equality and nobody will be superior to anybody else. And so nothing is forgotten in the biography that can make it clear what a wretch the hero actually was. The grotesque searching out of faults and failings in the great ones of mankind is called the demand of truth and is regarded as a proof of scholarly acuity. They overlook the fact that the valet's inability of appreciation and admiration bears witness to the valet himself. The fictitious morality of monkish asceticism, that perversion of life, cannot be dispensed with, because it is part of the cult of appearances and provides the need for hatred with its necessary motives.
9There are many ways of masking judgement, men being specialists in concealing their motives of hatred also to themselves.
10Hatred has many degrees from assessment to criticism, rejection, and persecution. We have not right to assess and analyse our fellow men. Man has a right to be himself without any curious meddling in his psychological life. According to the law of freedom, he has a right to keep the world of his own consciousness to himself and be left in peace for others.
11Men have a need for criticizing others. Everything which does not appeal to them and their arrogance, which diverges from their fictitiousness or illusoriness, disposes them unsympathetically and must be censured. Hatred is intensified by being practised. originally being but a need for criticism, it grows into a need for rejection and persecution. And in order to bring others along with them, they will finally stick at nothing.
1Public opinion believes itself to be omniscient. How a certain opinion has arisen is perfectly unimportant to it. In any case it is sufficient to have a witness who has heard a thing from A, who has heard it from B, who has heard it from C, etc. ad infinitum. Public opinion need not bother about so ridiculous a thing as investigation. "A fact of public knowledge is as good as one witnessed", says indeed the proverb (which thereby obviously makes testimonies dubious). Then you know it for then everybody knows it. Especially proverbs are useful then for they are the voice of the people. And "the voice of the people is the voice of god", especially when the people of Pilate clamour for crucifixion.
2One of the chimaeras of public opinion is that in "our enlightened age" with its right of free speech and free press, its free propaganda for, and criticism of, all kinds of opinions, everybody is able to form an independent judgement. Here they overlook the fact that just a minority of the population have the intellectual prerequisites of acquiring a mediocre knowledge within a reasonable time-limit, that the capacities for knowledge and for judgement are two widely different abilities (the former relatively common, the latter rare), that opinions are not facts and are seldom even based on sufficient facts. Add to this the fact that the individual has but in the rarest exceptional cases any time, opportunity, possibility, or even a mind to familiarize himself with complex problems, to find out all the facts in the matter, and balance the different hypotheses and theories against each other. The layman becomes dependent on the expert. The experts often disagree. Many people pose as experts without being it. That leaves the possibility of choosing experts. The layman chooses the authority whom propaganda, ever biassed, appoints or who confirms the (irrelevant) fictional system and prejudices or egoistic interests he has already before. The expert himself, who realizes the immense difficulties, is in most cases able but to state that thus far has research advanced, that it is impossible to foresee future discoveries. Where "political experts" are concerned, it can without exaggeration be said that they are believers. They have been sworn to a political theory in which they believe blindly. All political theories, however, are no more than attempts at orientation, and prove to be untenable if put into practice without discrimination. Everything said here is best summed up in Kierkegaard's seeming paradox, saying that whenever the masses embrace a truth, it is thereby made a lie. For the masses make everything absolute so as to be eternally valid in all circumstances. However, only (real) facts are such absolute truths. All the others have a limited applicability, being valid in certain conditions, which, they too, as a rule change. Ignorance is ignorant of all this. The Nazi minister of propaganda, Goebbels, a real expert on the discrimination of public opinion, knew what he was talking about when he claimed that, with all the propaganda resources of the Reich at his disposal, he could within a week convince all Germans of the truth of any lie whatsoever. And not just all Germans.
3The intellectual standard of public opinion is the lowest mental level: the level of ignorance, lack of judgement, uncritical acceptance, rumour, the sum total of guesswork and supposition in all their innumerable expressions. Public opinion is a total picture of the prejudices, dogmas, superstitions, mistakes, and misunderstandings of the times. Public opinion knows nothing that is worth knowing. But it believes all the more.
4The emotional standard of public opinion is the lowest emotional level but one, with a great risk of rapidly sinking to the very lowest, if hatred with indignation or malicious joy can be aroused. To this level belongs mass fury, made blind and senseless by psychoses, and capable of any atrocities whatsoever.
5Public opinion is a typical example of the value of opinions and of the value of most people's opinions. Public opinion determines the opinions of the majority outside the domain of everybody's special knowledge. Within our speciality we laugh at "the view of the public" and recognize its absurdity. But we fail to draw from this experience the otherwise almost immediate conclusion that it must be the same matter with our opinions within the specialist domains of others. We fail to draw this conclusion since we participate ourselves in public opinion outside our speciality.
6An acute man was surprised at the old saw, de gustibus non est disputandum (there is no disputing about tastes), wondering what else one should dispute about. For there ought not to be any need for dispute about anything else. The learning of our times is immense. The actual knowledge, however, to be found in this learning is immensely small. Sokrates knew that he knew nothing (worth knowing). His utterance shows that he comprehended more than others. Public opinion is omniscient.
7Public opinion is often shaped quite accidentally, it is true. But nowadays it is more often shaped by newspapers, which often are the propaganda instruments of ignorance and unreliability, when not being those of deliberate, paid misrepresentation. If a power interest — and the papers are owned by power interests — has found an opinion to be valuable for its aims, then nothing is trusted to chance. Then the public is systematically fed with all the means that slander, propaganda, advertising have at their disposal, until all citizens are of the same "absolutely infallible", "unassailable" opinion. Therefore it is nowadays characteristic of public opinion that the papers have become its authorities. From the newspapers people learn what they should think and feel in order to know and speak absolutely rightly. People have been brought up into deferring their "own independent opinion" until they learn it from their paper. then they know. But what they do not know is that the small minority who really know also know how uncertain or even erroneous their information is. this is that public opinion which is handed down to posterity as - history.
8Often the newspapers do science a disservice by turning the hypotheses and theories of the day into dogmas. The assumptions of authorities are given out as being the last word of science. The comical in this lies in the fact that after such an affair, as a rule only the authority is uncertain, knowing how problematic the whole thing is. Public opinion is all the more certain. for the authority must know! Otherwise he would not be an authority!! And the authority — whose authority is at stake — does not give the show away. Downright discreditable to everything in the way of authority is certain experts' dashing testimony to their own fictional systems, dogmas, idiosyncrasies, and superstitions as to all kinds of subjects outside their own domains of research and insight. Thereby the authority shows that he has not learnt to distinguish between what he knows and knows not. That must lead to a general contempt for authority.
9Public opinion has two infallible methods of judging a man. The one is that of slander, which is always true. "No smoke without fire", which always proves the truth of rumour. The other is almost even more ingeniously simple, and consists in judging by success or failure. To this can be added the statement of an eminent esoterician, that the tribunal of public opinion is the "most flippantly cruel, prejudiced and unjust of all tribunals."
1The materialism of science, viewing the universe as ruled by eternal inflexible laws of nature, has in this very respect had the only correct conception of reality, and its superiority to all other views evolved in history has been brilliantly confirmed. Recognizing law as the supreme principle of existence, scientific explanations have liberated mankind from superstitions hostile to life, not least those accompanying the belief on the slavish dependence on the grace of divine arbitrariness. According to esoterics, the highest cosmic beings are subject to the Law.
2Chaos means absence of purpose. In chaos the unconscious, eternally blind will of dynamic primordial matter rules in accordance with the dynamic law, or mode of expression, of primordial matter. The more manifestational matter is composed, the more composed are the constant complexes of manifestation. development is to discover and apply faultlessly the laws of manifestational matter. Everything is conditioned by causes, everything is conditioned by law. Arbitrariness is a mistake as to law, and results in chaos and formlessness.
3Absolute freedom would be the freedom of arbitrariness and would abolish itself. Freedom is freedom by law, is limited by the Law. Supreme freedom is omniscience and omnipotence. Every atom has a possibility of, and a right to, supreme freedom. The temporary limitation to the freedom of any being depends on its ignorance of the laws of existence, its inability to apply these laws faultlessly, and the consequences of its mistakes about them. The higher a being has attained, the greater its freedom, its ability to solve the higher problems by itself. The freedom of the individual increases in a collective being in which, as a specialist in some function, he perfectly masters his function.
4The Law (the sum total of all laws of nature and life) is the fundamental, unavoidable factor of destiny, and is valid for all beings, from the lowest to the highest one. It appears different at different stages of development. The higher a being has attained, the more differentiated is the Law, the more laws can be discerned, the more faultlessly can the laws be applied, the more clearly is seen the inevitability of all the laws. It is by the relatively faultless application of the Law (intentionally or unintentionally) in its faceting on each particular level that the individual reaches the next higher level and increases his freedom.
5Destiny is the sum total of originally given conditions, and therefore limitations, with regard to the final goal. Every being develops under conditions that depend on the greater unit into which it enters as a part. Thus, for instance, the individual character and relative imperfection of the global being are a limitation for those who are dependent on its possibilities. All beings are moreover affected by the limitations resulting from everybody's freedom.
6The process of manifestation is a process of freedom within the framework of the inevitable conformity to law. The only thing that is determined in this process is the final goal. Every being, every primordial atom, is potentially god. All the freedom the Law can grant follows from this. The inevitable, universal conditions disregarded, the process of manifestation is determined in its course by the evolving beings themselves. The process is the result of everybody's work. Every being, from the highest to the lowest, makes its contribution by all its consciousness expressions, intentionally or unintentionally, voluntarily or involuntarily. The higher a being develops, the greater is its purposeful contribution to the process. At lower stages of development, the human individual counteracts development or brings about disorder, everything on his own responsibility. According as consciousness expands in more and more individual characters, the total consciousness is enriched and the symphony becomes more fully vibrant. Nothing is finished. Everything is in becoming. The process is an eternal improvising and experimenting with the constantly new possibilities, which increase according as the process goes on. The process of manifestation is an enormously slow process to begin with; it gains greater speed the more beings that co-operate in it purposefully; and the final process will be a gigantic expansion of the totality.
7The process of manifestation does not work according to any inflexible plan laid down in detail from the beginning, where each individual with his qualities predetermined were to have a function reserved for him. Such a plan is impossible. It is made impossible by the law of freedom alone, which grants to each being the right to choose its destiny in accordance with its individual character whose direction of development cannot be foreseen.
8The chaos that ignorance, inability, and the repellent tendency brings about within a limited domain requires counter-measures. The representatives of the law of destiny see to it that the balance upset is restored, that cacophony is made into harmony. In most cases it is sufficient to refer the case to the representatives of the law of reaping. Only a tiny part of our consciousness expressions is limited to the present now. The greater part goes into the future with its causality as beginnings of, or contributions to, causal chains. These chains are gradually woven together to form the web of events in the future. The course of events of the present is the last link of a chain that was begun thousands of years ago. The destiny that man can at best foresee belongs to the very nearest release of his activity in the past.
9The following additional remarks can perhaps contribute to make realistic thinking and foresight more comprehensible.
10Without experience learning is dead knowledge. The ability to think objectively does not extend further than the ability of objective consciousness. The normal individual is a subjectivist in everything that goes beyond the lowest three physical molecular kinds. He must employ mental constructions (concepts, fictions). Anyone who has understood this makes the principle of objectivity a regulator of his subjectivism. Otherwise the result will be arbitrariness. Knowledge of higher worlds presupposes objective consciousness of their kinds of matter, since they must be experienced. Essential and higher consciousness have no need for any concepts, because these kinds of consciousness are at need instantaneously united with the realities sought. Anyone who thinks realistically thinks in the forms, modes of motion and of consciousness of reality. What has not as yet taken a form is beyond the grasp of consciousness. The higher the consciousness, the more of the future exists in the present. To manifestal consciousness the entire solar system - its past, its meaning and goal, and all its causal chains already running into the future - exists in the present. To cosmic consciousness an ever greater part of the current processes of manifestation exists in the present, although to us they seem to belong to an ever more distant future. All higher beings live in the present. They do not worry about that future which is beyond their present. That is a matter for beings having a still vaster present.
1Individual character is the summation of the monad's total experience of life during involvation, involution, and evolution. Each monad has its individual character, which develops by experience. Every experience has always some importance. Every experience always leaves some trace. Experience includes all kinds of affection, perception, individual activity.
2The basis of individual character is laid in all the various kinds of affection during the first involvation into unconscious primary matter. The vibrations to which the monad is exposed differ from each monad. The combination of matter as well as their charges of energy, tensions, and series of vibrations are almost infinite in their variations. After some hundred aeons of such affection, every monad is in various respects different from every other.
3Individual character is further differentiated by the experiences of passive consciousness in the evolutionary monad. The reflected images of passive vision from the infinitely varied conditions of life during aeons leave impressions. Every involutionary monad has had its particular experiences.
4Individual character is strengthened by the experiences of the evolutionary monad in the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. During aeons of affection into adaptation, of dim groping and fumbling, of experiences rousing instincts, of instinctive reaction, of instinctive discerning and choosing, individual character crystallizes as an individual total synthesis of all unconscious and conscious experiences ever since the monad was introduced into the cosmos.
5Anybody who is interested in plant and animal life can ascertain a more and more clearly marked individual character in the individuals of the species. This is of course especially manifest in the animals approaching the stage of causalization.
6When the evolutionary monad has reached the human kingdom it brings with it an already fully developed individual character, which does not depend on any choice but is the product of the combinations of matter and the play of forces.
7In every individual character two basic tendencies can be discerned, which pervade all nature; the opposition of positive and negative, active and passive, attractive and repellent. One of the two tendencies preponderates in every individual. In some, either tendency is driven to extremes.
8The basic tendency appears more and more clearly with each higher evolutionary stage. Different individuals of the same animal species behave very differently. Some are kind, willing, teachable, strive to understand, etc. Others are proud, self-willed, domineering, cruel, etc.
9In the animal ready to causalize, the qualities of the most dominant tendency sooner or later on a certain occasion become so eruptive emotionally and mentally that the animal's first triad can achieve a contact with its second triad and thereby causalize. The qualities brought along in the newly formed causal body are those of the monad in the triad. They constituted the animal's individual character, or individuality.
10The influence of the environment at the animal's causalization is of course an important factor, as are all other influences. Thus it can weaken or strengthen the basic tendency. It is not, however, the sole decisive factor. Besides, according to the law of affinity the individual is mostly attracted to the environment that satisfies his basic tendency.
11Not all animals causalize as pet animals under the influence of human vibrations. Those which have causalized in periods of predominantly repellent vibrations are of course influenced by this in their individual characters.
12The individual character is the individual, the first self, the individual self, is the self's qualities and abilities, its insight and understanding, such as they find expression in the tendency and instincts of the personality. The personality is the self in the limitations of its incarnation. The wise man has respect for each individual character, however little he may sympathize with it. He knows that every individual is a potential godhead, which will some time in future aeons become an active divine being. This individual character will then be a particular power factor in the process of manifestation. Each being takes its own course of development through life and will reach the goal in the longer or shorter, more or less difficult, way assigned to it by its individual character. Every attempt at interference with the very individual character is presumption and blasphemy. The individual's failings appear in a wrong attitude to the laws of life, failings which the experiences of life gradually rectify.
13Qualities and abilities can be divided into four groups: basic, or universally human; those belonging to the departmental types; those belonging to the stage or level of development; and the individual ones. The basic and departmental ones develop slowly throughout all the levels. The importance on life of the others increase or decrease. Unnecessary ones, those no longer cultivated, remain latent. Qualities and abilities develop in different orders and degrees of intensity, according to individual character and department. All qualities and abilities can be developed to perfection, the highest possible efficiency. The higher the stage of development, the more important are the abilities and the more other abilities are the prerequisites of the acquisition of new ones. Naturally, the civilizational individual lacks most, and the most important, qualities and abilities.
14Qualities and abilities are acquired slowly, since they require a long experience of life. A fund of general experience of life is necessary before specialized experiences become possible. And even after the possibility exists, the specialization takes plenty of time and requires the work of several incarnations. Understanding has been acquired when one single experience of a certain kind on one life is sufficient to make it unnecessary to have a repeated experience of the same kind in the same life.
15A certain quality corresponds to a certain feeling. Feeling and quality strengthen each other. By cultivating the feeling the quality is developed, and by attending to the quality the feeling is vitalized. A certain feeling belongs to a certain series of emotional vibrations, and the quality or complex is the ability to apprehend these vibrations or to produce them spontaneously.
1The two basic tendencies express themselves in attractive or repellent feelings and qualities: in devotion (admiration), affection, and sympathy; or in fear, anger, and contempt; in readiness to adaptation or in self-assertion.
2When the self acts on the unconscious instincts of its basic tendency, it feels free. Ignorance with its illusions of life always feels free. When the illusions lose their power, freedom appears more and more clearly as conditioned by omniscience, and in the same extent the individual himself becomes the law, and thus free. Freedom is only won through law.
3Those who walk the path of adaptation follow without friction the law of least resistance. They avoid any antagonism as far as possible. They go forward in life on paths which are on the whole straight and well beaten. They apply instinctively the life laws of freedom and unity. They avoid bad sowing and acquire the necessary insight and understanding relatively easy. They are the artists of life who follow the path of light.
4Those whose individual character makes them resort to self-assertion, burst their way forward according to the law of greatest resistance. Of course all intermediary forms exist between the two opposite extremes.
5Self-assertion, which actually is the inability to perceive unity, regards its own opposition to others as both unavoidable and essential. Their experience has made them look on others as strange, hostile beings. They fear, for they scent dangers, snares, cunning, deceit, treachery everywhere. They are angry, because they think they can find proof of malice or stupidity in all who oppose them or do not think or feel as they do. they despise, for they see but the levels below them, especially they being unable to find anything above them, and so all comparison must be in their favour.
6Self-assertion refuses to learn in any other way than its own way. Those who act on that tendency, oppose as a matter of principle. They doubt, dislike, reject everything on which they have not put the stamp of their individual character, everything that does not dovetail with their fictions and illusions. They hate everything that affects them unpleasantly.
7Self-assertion leads to complete self-blindness. They do not learn through ordinary mistakes, because the causes of their failures are always located in others. They learn only through painful experiences of insurmountable obstacles, insuperable resistance, of definite impossibility. In life after life they wander roundabout ways and reach impasses leading to nowhere. They orientate themselves in the jungle of life by choosing the path of discarded mistakes.
8They do not understand that the happiness which consists in acting without obstacles is good reaping. Their satisfaction consists in breaking all obstacles down, carving their path without regard for the consequences to others. Unhesitatingly they transgress, when they can, the limits of the rights of others, violate the laws of freedom and unity, assert their will at the expense of all life. They go with waves of their own across the ocean. They fling their spears, with "the warrior's lawful intent to injure and kill", at even the most defenceless, who dare to stand just where they happen to make their way.
9When this tendency is cultivated in life upon life, there are finally obtained those types who make world history. They get wealth and power by the right of might, of violence, and cunning. Unhesitatingly they plunge individuals and entire nations down into the most profound misery. Power is for them a means of oppressing and persecuting all who do not serve their aims, their whims, their hatred. But even such oppressors of life reach unity, although only after eons.
10Those do not, however, who definitely refuse to give up self-assertion. Fortunately they are very few. They do not wish to enter into unity. They deny themselves the ever greater consciousness expansion of this unity. Of course his particular kind of self-assertion is not possible until objective knowledge of man's lower worlds had been acquired. And they know that, when the lower worlds will be dissolved, those who refuse to ascend higher will thereby lose their possibility of existence, or in any case their sphere of activity. Accordingly, they seek to arrest evolution in every conceivable way. They regard as their real enemies all who aspire higher, who serve evolution. According to circumstances they work for conservation of dogmas or for disorientating ideas, for revolutions or wars. Everywhere they attempt to create chaos. Only essential consciousness can identify them. They are "the wolves in sheep's clothing", charming persons who in external respect lead saintly lives, "truly honest men".
1Those who pursue the path of self-assertion do so because that path is for them the one path and the right path. It is also the hardest, the heaviest path. It is the path on which the individual is gradually hammered out by suffering.
2With the self-righteous presumption and arrogance that the moralists have chosen as their path of suffering, they condemn all who wander the path of self-assertion without hypocrisy. The wise man knows that admiration would be more becoming. For even though self-assertion develops man more slowly, yet his experiences are the more thorough and efficient. And according to the infallible justice of the causal law, those effects must manifest themselves.
3In the worlds of unity, every individual is done justice to, every individual character asserts itself in the very manner that only it is able to, becomes a new instrument in the universal orchestra, a new power factor in the universal process. Each new factor enriches unity and benefits all. The greater, the stronger the individual character, the mightier also that collective being into which the individual will enter as a member after his opposition has been removed. The strange thing happens, to the moralist's indignation, that what he named evil is transformed, not just into good, but into a greater good than the mediocre good.
4Those who develop in the easiest way, sow less bad sowing, meet with less resistance, reap more happiness, lead more pleasant lives. Those who pursue the path of self-assertion, sow bad sowing, meet with resistance everywhere, reap more suffering. However, those who wander the path of suffering are not the meaningless victims of their past. The greater the resistance they overcame, the greater was the intensity of their experience, the keener were the abilities gained, the firmer the will and the stronger the power developed.
5When in the worlds of unity the need arises for real capacities to fulfil particularly difficult tasks, it is not those who have wandered the happy path of light who are the possible choices at first hand. They play neither the first fiddle not the double bass in that orchestra. The law of compensation appears in that the last shall be first.
6Those collective beings who out of the atoms of primordial matter shape manifestations in which evil is transformed, not just into final good, but moreover is calculated to make the worlds of manifestation richer, more fully vibrant, and the generation of power for good mightier, make the best possible of the inevitable conditions. The phrase "the best of possible worlds" sounds a deadly scorn to the ignorance of life. It is an esoteric axiom. Not the gods but men are responsible for the physical and emotional world of our planet deserving their name of hell.
1The final destiny of the self is the next higher self. Before that, the destiny of the self is the destiny of its various personalities (incarnations), the path the self wanders from causalization to essentialization. The self determines its destiny by itself in accordance with its individual character, department, and self-acquisitions. With each new developmental level, the self lays out its path of development by its own work at self-realization, by the general and particular trend and direction of its individual character. The number of incarnations is determined by the self through its indolence or intensity of purpose. No effort is ever wholly wasted. The greatest qualities have been developed from hopeless first attempts.
2The personality (the envelopes of incarnation) is a product of the self. Every being shapes its future lives through its consciousness expressions. Every personality and its destiny are the work of the self in its previous personalities.
3Destiny is the common term for the innumerable concurrent factors in the course of events. Every consciousness expression goes into that dynamic present, which to us is also the future. Every consciousness expression, together with is effects in words and actions, becomes a causal factor, a potential force, which awaits the moment of its re-action when the circumstances concerned will once again be in such a position that the balance disturbed can be restored. It can take many lives before this is possible. But it must come. And the individual never knows how and when. Our faults and merits, everything painful and pleasant, all weariness, anxiety, agony, etc. ad infinitum, are our own doing, even though others are the agents of destiny. It is by "insignificant matters" that the individual prepares his destiny. By thoughts, feelings, words, and actions, link is unnoticedly joined to link, to firmer and firmer links. The finest thread is twined together with new threads into an indestructible cable. And the cables are woven together into that web of causal chains which makes up the course of events. The nearer the moment of the release of the dynamic into mechanical events, the less probable is the introduction of new force factors that can alter the course of events.
4By its previous incarnations the self has outlined its future personalities and their destinies in their basic features, not just those immediately following but a whole series of incarnations. In life upon life, the outline is filled more and more by the multitude of small details. Most consciousness expressions are not released into action. They go into the future and await their outlet in events through the impulses that release them. What does not find an outlet in some life will find it in a later one. Re-action is bound to come. All consciousness expressions are causes that have effects. The new personality goes forward in life on paths laid out and paved in previous lives. These paths are part of the self's bondage. But this does not mean that our destiny is inflexibly predetermined. The course of events is like the result of force relations in a parallelogram of forces, which constantly is being shifted by newly introduced force moments. It can never be known whether a new inlet of force may not result in another direction of the outcome. The lower the stage of development, the less is the freedom, the less is the ability to introduce force factors that can alter the course of events. The cultural individual, by the change of his attitude to life, introduces quite a number of totally new force factors, which can in many respects completely change the otherwise fixed course of events.
5The different personalities are the self's attempts at orientation in a world that is originally incomprehensible, more or less a random gathering of experiences, a seeking that more resembles a roving. Of course life in the personalities at lower stages often appears meaningless, personalities with a bad reaping and in which the self's latent possibilities have on the whole remained latent. The personality has never been given any opportunity to make a contribution of some kind, never been able to find a sphere of activity, never been able to find its bearings in an environment that is alien to its being. The higher the level, the more rational is the choice of experiences. The time and powers of the personality are limited. Most learning is fictitious and unessential to the self.
6In each new personality the self must through its own work develop abilities already acquired, in order to reach its true level. The activation begins from bottom up and is done more easily in every incarnation, until the final automatization will some time be possible. Freedom increases with each higher level, since the instinct of the Law increases, the contact with the superconscious is more easily effected, and the reaping is more purposeful. The most important incarnations are seldom remarkable in external respect. Obscurity is the best soil for all growth of consciousness.
7At lower stages, the destiny of the personality is principally determined by the factors of the law of reaping. The more primitive the individual, the less his ability of self-realization, the less important are the factors of development. At the stage of civilization, the individual, with his yet unformed individual character, his ignorance of life, his undeveloped qualities and abilities, needs most kinds of possible experiences. At the stage of culture, the factors of development have a greater influence and importance. Striving after development increases the self's freedom in increasingly more respects.
8There is a way of reducing to a minimum the importance of the law of reaping and the power of the factors of reaping. And that is that radically changed attitude which gives up all personal desires, all claims to a good reaping and personal happiness; which lives but to make others happy. The result of this good sowing is accelerated development, instead of the good reaping denied oneself. This explains the esoteric axiom saying that good reaping is a sign of ignorance of life: happiness is preferred to development. They do not realize that happiness intensifies egoism and they sow worse sowing thereby.
9The sufferings of the personality are always hard to bear. The inexperienced always think that nobody can understand how much they suffer. The suffering man often thinks that no future bliss can compensate these agonies. Later, in the mental world, there seems to be no possible justification for his inconceivable bliss. The hardest thing to endure in suffering is the prospects of imagination that suffering is endless. Increased suffering prolongs the sojourn in the mental world.
10Before the first self can finally become a perfected second self, it must have transformed its own past into relative "perfection". This is possible since the past is never something inflexibly determined for eternity, but lives on in the dynamic present as an active factor in it. All the mistakes of the first self ever since it causalized must be effaced. This means a Sisyphean labour for those of repellent individual character. For instance, those who have gone astray because of actions by the self must be sought out, and through a patience that makes everything good they must be loved forth, until they have regained what they have lost. All the evil that the self has done must be cancelled from the globe memories. All discords in that symphony, which the self has to compose in his human life, are turned into enriching harmonies.
1The collective destiny is the common final goal and the common path to the goal. Every collective is a community of destiny. The individual belongs to many kinds of collectives: mankind, his race, nation, social class, clan, family.
2In a nation organized according to the age of the causal classes, the various social classes represent different developmental levels. Whenever the conditions exist for such an arrangement, the individuals are born into the classes to which they belong. These classes form different strata of acquired experience heritage benefits those incarnating, so that they get opportunities of activating their latent knowledge and are able to continue immediately from where they previously stopped. the social class will then be made up of clans (groups of families), the individuals of which have causalized together and are presumed to essentialize together in the future. They are brought together in order to acquire understanding of each other's individual characters, to trust each other, to learn to co-operate, jointly to serve evolution and mankind, everything with a view to common tasks in the future as a unitary collective being.
3In Atlantis, millions of years ago, mankind was lead by its true elite. The eternally envious and discontented lowest classes started a revolution, as always, assumed power, and drove the elite away. Ever since, mankind has had its own way: "to look after its own affairs". Ignorance of life, arrogance, superstition, and barbarism have held sway. Awakening wiseacre reason which believes itself to possess knowledge when able to construct fictions, has been the guide of mankind. So-called universal history bears witness, at least in broad outline, to the result, and is the known part of the story of mankind's suffering.
4The classes mixed at random according to the law of reaping have in succession got power in society, and have, as always of course, abused their dominating position to the detriment stratum in power. If the social and economic conditions of class stability are removed, then social chaos arises. Social mobility (also it in accordance with the law of reaping) accelerates social disintegration. The well-meaning ignorance of life, which confuses brotherhood with democracy, grants power to those masses which unfailingly become the victims of demagogues.
5We are born into collectives on account of ancient relations with individuals in those collectives, to pay our debts, to help in our turn those who have helped us. We can always learn from common experiences. It is certain that we are in debt, debts that it is very wise of us to pay off, acting on the assumption that we are doing too little rather than too much. In tens of thousands of incarnations we have abused our power to the detriment of others, managed to violate the right of others in every respect, traded on others, participated in every respect through our idiocy and brutality in that war of all against all which has raged on our earth since millions of years.
6The fact that all these mistakes have to a great extent been due to our ignorance of life, does not alter the Law. Mistakes are mistakes no matter what they concern. All life is a unity. This is the basis of brotherhood, not just where men are concerned. And mistakes against unity are always serious. The relation with a collective entails a responsibility for all in the collective. "One for all and all for one as for a debt of their own" does not just apply to personal guarantees. There is but one away of avoiding increased responsibility; and that is to take on ourselves the responsibility for evil heroically, and to sacrifice ourselves, if that should be necessary. We have so many times demanded sacrifice of others. People would not so heedlessly assume the burden of responsibility if they had any idea of what responsibility means. They greet the offer of it as an opportunity of self-assertion, and do not see any further than to illusory safety.
7If we do not do what we can to fight evil (only with the weapons of good, of course), then we shall be born into evils similar to those we could have removed. It is on everyone's responsibility that wrong may be done, evils may remain, any kind of power may be abused, lies of life may be preached unchallengedly, absurdities may be engrafted into the trustful minds of children and idiotize their dawning understanding of life, any kind of suffering may exist without measures being taken to remedy it. It is for us to refuse loyalty when injustice holds sway. it is not for us to decide whether our sacrifice "is of any use".
8Only the total ignorance of life and lack of discernment can cast the blame on superior beings for the distress of the world, for the horrifying misery of life; can demand that superior beings put everything right that we have caused, that they break the Law so that mankind shall be allowed to continue with its atrocities. No evil can befall anyone who has not done evil, who has ultimately reaped the bad sowing he has sown during tens of thousands of incarnations. It is men who have made life into a hell. That debt of life will not be paid off until we have all made life into a heaven, unassisted restored everything to what it is in higher worlds.
9It is a dreadful blasphemy to cast the blame on those wondrous collectives of the unity of life, who live but to serve; to cast on them all the evil we have done, impute to them arbitrariness and hatred (wrath, threats of punishment, curses, etc.). Such accusations are boomerangs that return with the reinforced power that corresponds to the force field passed by them.
10Superior beings administer the Law. They have no right to help those who have forfeited any right to help, to protect the truth when all spread lies, to defend innocence when all outrage it, to prevent wrong-doings when all do wrong. It is for us to set things right and avoid all such stupidity in the future.
11In the happy epochs of mankind, the individual is born into his clan, where he can feel at home among none but friends, who facilitate everything for each other instead of, as now, seeking to hinder each other's self-realization. In his clan he understands the importance of the groupbeing. All strive after unity, work concertedly for evolution, serve mankind. Common ideals inspire all, who wholeheartedly sacrifice their self-importance, prejudice, demands on others, desire to decide, to lead, to rule. Full tolerance reigns in everything that does not concern the ideal. Envy, suspiciousness, criticism, disharmony are precluded. Everybody cherishes absolute trust for everybody. In such a group, which regards the group as a higher unit, the "group power" is generated. That power raises the level of all its members and also facilitates the solution of individual problems. It brings about results that exceed a hundredfold the results which the members can achieve working separately.
1The law of reaping, the law of sowing and reaping, the law of cause and effect in the domains of the causality of life, is a law consequential on the law of balance, or restoration. This law is absolutely valid in all world and for all beings. It applies to thoughts, feelings, various kinds of motives, as well as to words and actions.
2The law of reaping is a law that acts with absolute necessity. It is no law of arbitrariness, reward, retribution, or of punishing vengeance. It is continually active in the most surprising, unexpected ways in all circumstances of life and in everything we meet with. The infinitely varied relations of life in each new situation offer to every individual a flexible working out of the unlimited variations of the law of reaping.
3The law of reaping is the law of absolute justice. Injustice in any respect whatsoever is absolutely out of the question. Justice is done impersonally, objectively, incorruptibly. Debits and credits are balanced to the last penny. Injustice is a manner of speech of the ignorant and the envious.
4Where mankind is concerned, this law acts in all human worlds. Reaping as well as sowing can be of a gross physical, physical-etheric, emotional, mental, or causal kind.
5Reaping is of three principal kinds:
1) The not yet liquidated reaping remnant from all previous incarnations. Most people have already fixed their reaping in broad outline for many incarnations to come.
2) The reaping fixed for each particular incarnation. Everything of particular importance for the personality in a new life is part of what is already fixed. Whatever can appear as an immediate effect depends on similar circumstances in past lives.
3) Quick reaping according as an effect follows immediately on a cause in the lesser varied circumstances of life.
6The law of reaping is as terrible as the individual is or has been. The law of reaping is "merciful" to those who have been merciful, and merciless to those who have been merciless.
7"By the standards by which man measures also he shall be measured." People are unsuspecting of what standards they use. Those of most people are the standards of hatred (of envy, smallmindedness, vengefulness, vulgarity).
8The higher the level of development of a being, the greater is the effect of mistakes made by or against that being.
9The law of reaping can wait an unlimited time. But a sowing must be reaped.
10The law of reaping is the law of mechanical justice, the law of destiny is the law of development and of individual character.
1If there were only good reaping, nobody would care about the meaning of life, nor do research or find any laws. We take happiness to be our natural right of life and all misfortunes to be the iniquities of life. And this we do because life is happiness and was never meant to be a hell. It is we men who have made life into what it s. Misfortune and suffering cause life to appear meaningless. It actually is, but it is we who have made it meaningless and still persist in our madness.
2Every thinking man has pondered on the problem of evil. The most acute minds have declared that problem unsolvable. Others have exhausted all the possibilities of speculation to produce absurdities. The blame has been cast on god and the whole world, but never on ourselves. Their very self-importance has always hindered men to find the correct solution of their problems.
3Anyone who has not discovered the law of reaping is hopelessly disorientated in the worlds of man. He becomes the victim of his fictions. That is part of bad reaping and becomes new bad sowing. We are responsible for idiotizing our power of judgement. We must be able to learn something from life ourselves, not just blindly parrot the guesswork of others. The fact that milliards of people have believed something, or that it appeals to our feelings, does not prove anything. The intellectual heritage of mankind is 99 per cent made up of fictions. It is not to be wondered at that "we cannot learn anything from history".
4Anyone who has discovered the law of reaping, has no difficulty in subsequently finding the laws of freedom, unity, and self-realization. They follow from the law of reaping as the simplest corollaries. Through sowing and reaping the individual acquires necessary experiences of life. He develops in life upon life, acquiring qualities and abilities. At the stage of culture, his causal superconscious becomes an instinct of life. Then he makes rapid progress. When he is able to experience the mighty revelations of causal intuitions, he cannot doubt any longer. For then he knows.
1At the stage of civilization, the individual has developed so much power of judgement that he can be taught to comprehend that existence is an unsolvable enigma to his reason. But he often is unable to draw the conclusion from this that no human reason is able to solve that problem. Certainly, Buddha said that human reason could not solve the problems of the existence of god, the existence and immortality of the soul, and free will. But Buddha was a heathen, so you could not believe him. Many acute philosophers and famous scholars were needed to make people believe themselves able to understand that.
2We could not know. Therefore we were right to believe. And thus we accepted the fictions that had become ineradicable ideas by being engrafted into the childish mind. We were in good company if believing what our fathers believed. And then there was a rich literature through which to be fortified in the one true faith. That solved the problem. After that it was not worthwhile for anyone to put forward any new hypotheses, for they had to be wrong. There was something said about sowing and reaping, though. But every farmer knew what that was. That you really could sow and never come to see the reaping, or reap without knowing anything about the sowing, that surely was so patently absurd that it must be something in the way of what the learned call a paradox. Besides, we had been taught that if only we clung really tight to the promise of divine arbitrary grace, then we would not need to worry anymore about the desert of our evil deeds. Our good deeds we should be paid for, of course.
3Rather any absurd belief whatsoever than assuming something so painful and fatal as our responsibility for our future incarnations. Rather to blame the apple of knowledge, kids pinching apples, and god's punishing righteousness as the cause of all misery. The simplest judgement and sense of justice make it clear that in that story, it was the fancied monster, whom the theologians continue making into god, who made the mistake, and so he really should by angry with himself and not take his own stupidity put on countless milliards whom he goes on creating in order to gratify his insatiable vengefulness. Such a ghastly blasphemy entails responsibility. It is , however, wholly in character with a mankind that continues seeking reasons for casting suspicion on the noblest of beings, and finding out motives for he satisfaction of their mania for murder.
4That faith is ignorant is possibly an explanation but no defence. Mistakes are mistakes no matter what they concern. You do not cancel any laws of nature or laws of life simply by denying their validity.
1To the ignorant of life who has a bad reaping, life appears either meaningless or unjust. It is meaningless when you cannot find satisfaction in any occupation, or find any aim to work for. It is unjust when you look at how well off others are.
2They are radiant with health. You are feeble and ill. They have plenty of everything they can reasonably desire. You are poorly off. They are given opportunities of education and of learning everything they wish to, find it easy to profit by everything they learn, You have to remain ignorant, and fail in your studies. They get friends everywhere. You look for friends in vain. They have benefactors everywhere who help them in all ways. You meet with indifference, coldness, or opposition. They succeed in everything they set about. You fail in everything. They are happy. You are unhappy. With such experiences in one respect or other, life must certainly appear as simply one great injustice.
3In comparison with others, was it not? But appearances are deceptive. Nobody perceives the torments behind the smiling mask. "The heart alone knows its own bitterness." A few examples chosen at random. Benjamin Constant, who in all respects appeared exceptionally enviable to his contemporaries, wrote at the end that all his life he had continually gone through greater sufferings than the condemned man at the place of execution. Behold Man! Goethe - a sovereign genius, handsome, healthy, whose life was just one long triumph - at the age of eighty estimated the happy moments of his life at four weeks in all. It was he who wrote: "When man in agony falls silent, a god grants me to utter how I suffer."
4The deceptive illusions of life hold out the prospect to the ignorant that happiness is to be found where he is not. He avoids the present and drags along his miserable self everywhere. The wise man knows that he who does not find happiness within will never find it without. It is so easy to envy others, about whom you actually know nothing worth knowing. To envy those who, loaded with the bounties of life, miss extraordinary opportunities of serving life, and who waste the chances of their future lives in order to gratify their insatiable egoism, is to envy very bad sowing.
5People have demands on life, not suspecting the fact that by their doings in thousands of incarnations they have forfeited every right to any demands whatsoever, even though those serious mistakes which belong to a certain level have been reaped at that level.
6The only way of being spared the "injustice of life" in lives to come is to be just yourself. The just man makes no fatal mistakes about unknown laws of nature, because justness is an unerring instinct of life. The egoist makes mistakes as infallibly, at least about the law of unity.
1All evil which the individual meets with is bad reaping. No evil can befall anyone who has not a bad sowing to reap. Not even his worst enemies can harm him the least of the law of reaping does not permit it. All people (or other beings or circumstances) who directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, benefit or harm us are the unwitting agents of reaping. If they do us great services or inflict real suffering on us, then there are usually personal relations since lives past. Clan individuals are given opportunities of helping each other by turns in life upon life. Spiteful individuals have possibilities of persecuting each other by turns in life upon life. Nobody can against his will be forced to be the voluntary agent of bad reaping. It is up to the individual whether he wishes to be the agent of good or of bad reaping. If adversities are predetermined, then misfortunes must come. But it is always fatal to the one who in this is the voluntary agent of reaping. Nobody can suspend the effects of the law of reaping. If an individual is to remain unhelped, then people will be incapable of helping him, no matter how they try. The will to help always becomes a good sowing. Neglect makes you lose an opportunity of good sowing, or it becomes a bad sowing. The proverbial phrase, "as you make your bed, so on it you must lie", implies that you may lie when it is your turn to have made your bed.
2The man who is wise in life avoids becoming the agent of bad reaping. He will help as a matter of principle whenever and wherever he can, without reservations or expectations. It is not for the individual to "administer justice" or "take justice into his own hands". Revenge is always a bad sowing. Such things are part of the acts of folly brought about by ignorance and hatred.
3Other people's hatred is not always due to bad reaping. The phrase, "he had no enemies", is not unambiguous praise. Even avatars have enemies. Spiteful individuals who cultivate hatred, end up in being compelled to hate everybody. The hatred complex can stifle all other feelings. Such spiteful individuals avail themselves of every opportunity to bring others with them in their hatred. All they meet and all they hear about become their victims. Inevitably they spread the pestilence of hatred in ever wider circles, and infect all they can reach. If that tendency is cultivated in life upon life, then we have in the end those monsters in human shape, who as the agents of collective reaping have been called "the scourge of god".
4When, some time in the future, mankind has developed so far that many researchers can make use of the "esoteric archive", then we shall have the authentic descriptions that make it possible to study the effects in history of the laws of destiny and of reaping. After that it is to be hoped that mankind will be able to avoid making the same mistakes that recur again and again. The fact is, however, that according to the law of self-realization, individuals of a repellent tendency follow the path of discarded mistakes, finding the "truths" only when they have already realized them. Those who choose to follow that path have chosen the hardest path.
1Happiness as well as suffering is our own doing. All suffering is consequences of mistakes about the life laws of freedom and unity. Nobody has to suffer who has not himself inflicted suffering on other beings. All suffering we cause others will in due time become our own suffering. If an individual's suffering is incurable, then he has inflicted incurable suffering on others.
2Nobody can suffer for the sake of another. Nobody can exempt anybody from a bad reaping by taking his sufferings on him. We can take the sufferings of others on us, voluntarily suffer more than is intended for a particular incarnation, only in case we still have a bad reaping remnant. But by this we do not exempt others from their reaping, just put it off till a later occasion.
3Suffering is of three kinds: physical, emotional, and mental. The physical suffering, which is the most difficult to cure, science tries to relieve. The emotional can be related to the elemental of reaping, hatred, or ignorance. The suffering of hatred is essentially fear. That of ignorance is connected with imagination and the will. Imagination can strengthen or weaken suffering almost to any extent whatsoever. Suffering can be dispelled by an act of will, by refusing to suffer, refusing to attend to anything which causes suffering, by noble indifference, stoicism, heroism. The mental suffering can depend on mental defects. But usually it is caused by brooding or concern as consequences of uncontrolled thinking, and it is removed by "thinking of something else".
4Despite the fact that all suffering is self-inflicted, it always carries with it some sort of compensation. It results in a prolonged sojourn in the mental world. Often it is also compensated for in the physical world, by success in some respect, deeper understanding, etc. Vagueness or inability in their younger days are part of the suffering of many geniuses.
5The inevitable suffering according to the law of reaping is usually just a fraction of the actual suffering. Nine-tenths of the sufferings of the civilizational individual depend on his wrong manner of meeting suffering, and on his aversion to controlling his attention, imagination, and will. Anyone who has attained the stage of culture, has most of his suffering behind him. Anyone who has definitely placed himself under the law of unity, can never more be put in insuperable difficulties in future incarnations.
6Suffering is seldom incurable. Most kinds of suffering are limited in time as well as in extent and intensity. Even an incarnation of suffering can present oases in the desert of life.
7We should always seek remedies for suffering wherever help can be obtained; always, everywhere, in all respects fight all kinds of suffering, and never tire. Such efforts result in good sowing according to the law of unity, and counteract evil in the world.
1People believe they are not responsible for what they think or feel. They have not done anything, have they? All self-initiated consciousness expressions in all worlds produce vibrations that affect, for better or for worse, all who are reached by them. Every consciousness expression has an effect. It is true that its action is minimal in most cases. But repetition strengthens the tendency as well as the effect. The accumulation of unnoticeable causes finally becomes measurable effects.
2Thought is the greatest factor of reaping. It produces feelings, which result in words and actions. All mental vibrations can be apprehended by all mental bodies. The "universal language" of thought is understood immediately by all. The mental body is a sender and receiver working tirelessly, restlessly, and efficiently. Every subject-matter has its own wave-length. The greater the familiarity with a certain subject-matter, the greater the possibility of telepathy in it. Those whose mental "receivers" are momentarily tuned in to the wave-length of the same thought, are influenced by it.
3At the emotional stage (the stages of barbarism, civilization, and culture), the emotional consciousness expressions (desire, feeling, and imagination) are the most activated and, consequently, the most dynamic ones (qualified by will). The emotional vibrations do not reach as far as the mental ones, due partly to the greater primordial atomic density of emotional matter, partly to the masses of vibrations crossing, disturbing, checking each other. The pressure of public opinion is enormous because of its standardized mass thinking and mass feeling. The emotional and mental worlds are the worlds of disorientation, because of the fictitiousness and illusoriness of the thought-forms existing in them.
4At the stages of barbarism and civilization, the consciousness expressions of most people belong under bad sowing and bad reaping. You strengthen whatever you attend to. The moralists, who concentrate on the faults and failings of others, automatically strengthen the worst sides in all, transfer their evil thoughts to their victim, thereby strengthening the tendency to hatred that may be there and reducing his power of resistance. We sow much bad sowing and cause much suffering by our mere thoughts and feelings.
5Most thoughts and feelings are egocentric. Everything is considered and judged with regard to how it concerns the fictions and illusions of one's personality, egoistic advantages and disadvantages. The result is of course more or less unreal, perverted, idiotic.
6Hatred arouses hatred, is strengthened by each repetition, blinds, makes it impossible to understand life, prevents the contact with and reception of attractive vibrations, makes life harder for all, counteracts self-realization, increases the number of incarnations of suffering.
7By giving way to feelings of depression we tune in the receiver of our subconscious to the wave-lengths belonging to the lowest regions of the emotional world, and thereby we easily become the victims of those horrible vibrations of the agony of life which the ancients symbolized by the "chasing Furies".
8The feelings of admiration, devotion, sympathy, etc., belonging to love, attraction; are the most powerful factor of development. Sympathy is necessary to understanding, attracts us to what we sooner or later must learn. Antipathy repels and separates us from unity. With love life can be made a paradise. With hatred it will always remain a hell. All this has been preached to mankind during millions of years. But it is only at the stage of culture that we "understand" and draw the consequences.
9We communicate with other people by our words. Speech is an enormously efficient means of influencing others. Ignorance has not the faintest idea of its unconscious effect in the subconscious. Speech strengthens the vibrations of our thoughts and facilitates telepathy. By our speech we influence others for better or for worse, help them or hinder them in their striving, free or bind, unify or divide, heal or wound, spread the pestilence of hatred and seduce others to join us in hatred.
10By thinking or speaking ill of others we make mistakes both as to the law of freedom and the law of unity, the most important laws in respect of reaping. According to the law of freedom, everybody has a right to have his personality and private life left alone, away from other people's curiosity, obtrusiveness, desire to psychologize and judge.
11You are not good because you perform good deeds. But if you are good, then good actions spring up automatically and spontaneously from your disposition of mind. We all make up a unity and exist in order to help each other. By hindering others we have set three different kinds of forces going: those acting according to the law of reaping, the law of freedom (which restrict freedom), and the law of unity (which separate).
1Good sowing is to apply the laws of life without friction. "Nature is dominated by applying the laws of nature." By applying the laws of life the individual becomes a master of life.
2Good sowing is to cultivate the tendency to unity; to work for acquiring noble feelings and qualities, insight and understanding; to strive after self-realization.
3By taking advantage of the possibilities of remedying existing social evils we get valuable experiences, reduce suffering in the world, get the right to greater possibilities of sowing a good sowing in the future.
4Good sowing is to bring children up in love, is to bear suffering heroically, is indifference to other people's expressions of hatred, is to counteract the cult of appearances, lie, and hatred.
5Very good sowing and the quickest liberation from egoism is to do what is right simply because it is right, without any thought of your own advantage or disadvantage, of gratitude or reaping; and also to assist those on higher levels instead of, as hitherto, counteracting them.
6By systematically cultivating the feelings of joy, happiness, by being like sunbeams for other people, we increase happiness in the world and especially for those around us. "Nothing can brighten a grey and irritating life as much as just kindness."
7By thinking good of all people, on principle and without exceptions, we strengthen the best tendencies in everybody, and make life easier to live for all. This also has the result that we become invulnerable and find refuge with all.
8Only the speech that is true, benevolent, and helpful is good sowing.
1Good reaping includes the benefit of belonging to a civilized nation. There is a veritable competition for the places in the cultural families, for a purposeful milieu to grow up in, for ennobling company (teachers, superiors, friends), for chances of acquiring knowledge and abilities, insight and understanding.
2Good reaping is health and all the good things that life grants to us without our doing, or makes it possible for us to gain from life.
3The best reaping can be said to include opportunities offered of rapid development through experiences promoting unity, and of being together with geniuses of life, artists in living, and self-realizers.
4Without a good reaping we shall never find happiness, however much we pursue it. We are happy in so far as we have made others happy.
5Power, glory, wealth are good reaping only at higher stages. Until then, the ignorance of life will not be able to avoid abusing those seeming favours of life.
1What good sowing is we comprehend easily enough. Bad sowing, however, belongs to our rooted habits, the erroneous notions and false life view of moral illusionism, our own blindness in life. Without suspecting it, we heave out our sowings of hatred by our consciousness expressions, thinking we are most excellent. This idiocy seems incurable, which it is at the stage of civilization. The examples of our mistakes in life cited below can, of course, be but a few of the most frequent ones. The moralist sets up a great number of taboos, observes them, and by that he has fulfilled all righteousness. But as easily as that will no one avoid his responsibility in life. At the present stage of development, we make on the whole nothing but mistakes. The best way of avoiding them is to try to reach higher levels with the greater understanding of life that they afford.
2All mistakes as to the laws of life are both bad sowing and bad reaping. Interpreting the realities of life is a difficult matter, because of the very scant knowledge of life at present. The greater the ignorance of life, the greater the cocksureness. The mistakes cannot be classified according to the laws of life, since usually they fall under several of them simultaneously.
3A common mistake under the law of self-realization is to quit working for your own development, to fancy you understand everything and are approaching the goal. "Nobody has ever anything done" is perhaps a paradox, but it shows an understanding of life. And you do not develop through just being "nice". We all have, none excepted, infinitely much undone, an immense series of levels above us. Those who think they are "ready" have not reached far, though evidently as far a possible for them in that particular incarnation. With that idiotic attitude, however, there will never be any rapid career in life.
4Bad sowing includes the entire cult of appearances, of lie, and of hatred, all manifestations of the tendency to separateness. All speech that is not true, kind, helpful belongs to it. This esoteric axiom of life alone would silence the moralists if they could control their hatred. The common contempt, especially in periods of democratic equality, for all on higher levels, belongs to it. To hate those who have placed themselves under the law of unity and are earnestly trying to serve mankind, is one of the many serious mistakes in life of the moralists.
5All demands are hostile to life, kill the sense of unity, make the ideals repulsive, and arouses defiance. What is not brought forth in love is unfit for life. Judgement is everything by which we seek to exclude somebody from his right to unity, to the community of all, and to our hearts. By judging man loses that unity to which he would otherwise have a right. Anyone who does not desire unity, leaves it of his own accord. It is not for us to see that justice is done in the matter of the laws of life. There can be no peace on earth until people have understood that.
6Suspiciousness is a great provocative factor. Many people form by it that illusory reality which confirms their distrust or produces the "foreseen". Distrust poisons all community, grows and is directed to more and more people, destroys what trust has built up.
7Abuse of knowledge leads to the loss of knowledge through such circumstances in future incarnations that no chances will be given to activate the latent capacity. The Atlanteans possessed knowledge. Atlantis went down. Mankind lost its intellectual heritage and was forced to begin anew gathering experiences.
8All kinds of abuse of power are fatal mistakes as to the laws of freedom and unity. It will be a very long time before new opportunities of abusing power will be to hand again. And the intervening period of impotence or "injustice" is very bitter.
9Suicide is a serious mistake in life. It extends its effects over several incarnations, does not solve any problems (which must be solved), only complicates and aggravates them still more.
10The worst sowing possible is to inflict suffering on other beings, to take revenge, to act the part of "punishing providence". Those who do wrong that right may come thereof, expect good reaping from bad sowing. The suffering we have inflicted on others is returned to us regardless of our motive.
11Finally, bad sowing includes the ordinary, wrong, perverted manner of meeting the bad reaping.
12Bad sowing (individual and collective) is the greatest obstacle to development.
1Bad reaping includes most things in life, everything that cannot be called happiness, everything that torments and displeases us, not just obvious "bad luck in life", The law of reaping is the law of individual adjustment, which considers the individual character, idiosyncrasies, complexes, and emotional states of the individual, with a well-balanced effect. In most circumstances of life the understanding of life is made easier if you take into account the significance of the levels in various respects, and, to avoid absolutifying, calculate with a gradation, for example on a percentage basis. The more your view of life is determined by a more profound conception of existence as being absolutely conditioned by law and absolutely devoid of divine arbitrariness, the less is the risk of erroneous views.
2Not everything that the individual meets with in life is unavoidable, not everything is fixed and predetermined in detail. Not all bad reaping needs to be manifested in these ways, not always is misjudgement unavoidable for us. But the law of reaping acts in everything, and utilizes all possibilities and chances that arise. The higher the level the individual has reached, the greater are his possibilities of modifying the effects of the law of reaping in the particular cases. However, all sowing must be reaped sooner or later. The blow we deal to another will some time hit us with exactly the same effect.
3Bad reaping includes a race, nation, class, family, teachers, superiors, friends, company, etc. that lower the individual's level. It includes all kinds of sufferings, defects, sorrows, disappointments, adversities, obstacles, losses, etc. ad infinitum. It includes missing possibilities of acquiring knowledge, insight, understanding, qualities, abilities, skills, etc.
4Bad reaping at the stage of civilization often includes power, wealth, glory, etc. Brilliant success in life as a rule corrupts the "favourite of luck". The ignorance of life, presumption, or self-importance imagines a lot of idiotic things about the infallible insight and understanding of its own capacity, and abuses opportunities offered by sowing a fatally bad sowing.
5Misfortunes and sufferings at the stage of culture are always calculated so as to be borne and not to break the individual down. They can be tests, which, if passed, mean an extra good sowing, or a giant stride upwards. They are often intended to develop desirable qualities. Evident blindness in life in some respect is a bad reaping at the stage of culture, as are all faults. Failings, however, depend on missing qualities.
6Consciousness development in the human kingdom could go on in an ever increased tempo. The fact that for most people it takes many times longer time than necessary, is due to their bad sowing, not so much through definite malice as by moralism, omission, and indifference. It takes a long time before all the bad sowing is reaped.
1"Life is misery." And so it is because we have ourselves made the physical and emotional worlds into hells and still continue sowing hatred and the lies of life. Physical life is the hardest. Illness, disablement, hunger and thirst, cold and heat, exist in the physical world only. The emotional world is the world of desires, feelings, and imagination, intensified a thousandfold. In it, hatred and the terrible fictions of imagination rage without restraint. But anyone who relies on the sovereignty of his own will, remains inaccessible and invulnerable, and does not need to suffer. The unavoidable suffering belongs to the physical world. Both worlds will remain hells, however, until mankind has restored everything to what it was intended to be, and made them into the abodes of happiness for all. We shall remain unhappy on this planet of sorrow until we have accomplished that work, made the worlds of hatred into worlds of love, the worlds of division into worlds of unity, the worlds of lie into worlds of truth. Suffering will not be diminished until men's attitude to life will be radically changed. Men have done and still do whatever they can to let the frightful need of mankind continue. They circumscribe the freedom, ruin the joy, wreck the happiness, of other people. They spread daily their pestilence of hatred, infecting everything. They hinder, hamper, counteract, oppress, cast suspicions, slander, injure, revenge, etc. ad infinitum. An incredible blindness. And then they accuse life of the outcome of all the stupidity, iniquities, and outrages of human ignorance and egoism. The simplest power of judgement should, despite the prevalent idiocy, at last be awakened to see and understand.
2The collective "original sin" is great. We inherit, as Goethe intimated, "like a disease eternal", not only national debt and inhuman social systems, but also the fictions and illusions of ignorance in most domains of human life. We inherit ideologies of the one and only saving democracy, dictatorship, war, and revolution. We inherit ignorance and barbarism in power. The fact that the responsibility is shared by many does not mean that the individual share is less. Collective responsibility means unequivocally: one for all and all for one as for a debt of their own. We have all had temporary benefits at the expense of others. We have all contributed to the idiotization of mankind.
3We are jointly responsible for allowing power to be abused, ignorance and incompetence to rule, men to be trodden underfoot, living beings to suffer unnecessarily, lies to be preached unchallengedly, wrong judgements to be passed, any kind of injustice to prevail without being criticized and corrected. Those who neglect to fight for truth and justice, contribute by their passivity to the resignation of power to the enemies of truth, justice, evolution, and unity.
4We are responsible for the inhuman laws of society. Society has no right to "administer justice". Only the law of reaping can do that. The right to punish is a self-assumed right. Society must of course protect itself against madmen. But it has no right to revenge, no right to do evil that good may come thereof. The inevitable arbitrariness of the legal system is defining criminal actions and fixing the terms of punishment, with its inability to judge (ascertain true facts and motives), exists because the hatred, indignation, and desire for revenge of public opinion demand victims. If society does violence to an individual, then society is in debt to that individual, and the law of reaping sees to it that the debt is paid off. Many social phenomena are explained by this. As long as society does not realize its own debt, it will be impossible for it to fight crime efficiently.
5Every race, nation, class, clan, family has its own reaping. Anyone is implicated in it who has accepted and approved of the existing injustice, has derived any advantage of conditions existing and measures taken. Bad reaping has the result that the social classes do not correspond to the levels. Also social mobility is bad reaping, because individuals at higher levels are born into lower castes, and those at lower levels into higher castes. The ruling castes have always abused their position of power with their downfall as the result. Finally the lowest stratum of society come into power. Their incompetence and barbarism holds sway until the bad sowing of the other castes has been reaped.
1Man is the self in the personality striving to become a first self, thereupon a second self, etc. The self is not more advanced than its self-consciousness in its personality. When the self in the personality sows, and the self in the personality reaps. The fact that the self knows nothing about its previous personalities, is due to the fact that its own memory has become latent. When the self's activity ceases, its continuity of consciousness becomes lost and its memory, latent. Therefore it must start all over again and call its dormant abilities to a new life through new experiences. When the self has acquired causal consciousness and can study its previous existences, it will remember everything. The disadvantage of the veil thrown over the past is outbalanced a thousand times by its advantages. That vision is more than the normal individual would stand. The knowledge of what remains to be reaped would paralyse without affording the least benefit, and would just complicate things. Everything will appear different to the self when a causal being. The self's freedom is determined by the insight, understanding, and ability of the personality with the general limitations according to the law of destiny and the temporary ones according to the law of reaping.
2The most important factors of reaping are the bodies of the personality, the affecting vibrations, the reaping elemental, and the surrounding world.
3All the bodies of the personality are factors of reaping. Their acquired capacity of vibration (ability of reception and emission) can by the law of reaping be limited to any degree, and in any respect, whatsoever.
4The organism (brain, nervous system) with its health or illhealth is a physiological inheritance from physical ancestors. You have the constitution, predispositions, etc. of the parents whom you are to have according to the law of reaping.
5The etheric body is the physical vibrational body. As a rule it is the most important body in respect of reaping. It depends on its quality which emotional and mental (possibly causal) vibrations will reach the brain (nerves), as well as whether the self's predispositions and abilities will be able to find expression. Understanding may be present but the possibility of using the talent may be absent.
6The capacity of the emotional and mental bodies can be limited by the attachment to their centres of prepared molecules (skandhas), which cut off any vibrational area and reinforce others. They act in connection with the reaping elemental in such a manner that the foreseen destiny of life is fulfilled.
7Defects can exist in all the bodies. "Absence of mind" can depend on a defect in any of the bodies of the personality. If the defect is mental, then also the life in the mental world is devoid of reason, and the entire incarnation is wholly wasted, thus solely an incarnation of reaping.
8Vibrations are of fundamental importance for the individual. Vibrations are of cosmic (interstellar), solar systemic (interplanetary and telluric) kinds, and those emitted from other beings. The law of reaping determines the kinds of vibrations which shall, strengthened or weakened or not at all, affect the individual, as well as how they shall affect him. In the emotional aeon, the emotional vibrations are the strongest ones. Anyone who has refined his bodies so that they cannot be reached by the vibrations in lower kinds of matter, thereby has limited the possibilities of the law of reaping.
9The reaping elemental is an emotional-mental being, which is formed according to the law of reaping. Attached to the aura it follows the man throughout his life, seeing to it that the part of his sowing intended to be reaped, is reaped. It discharges itself with unfailing precision and, if required, with an irresistible force, when occasions exist. It can make the individual say and do things that he does not mean. It affects him with faults which otherwise would be impossible. It can strengthen his complexes to reach any affective intensity whatsoever. Its vibrations can influence other beings to the advantage or disadvantage of the individual. It can also be regarded as a vibrational centre of the kinds of vibrations determined. Of course it can, when necessary, serve as a guardian spirit in such circumstances of life as do not belong to bad reaping, or call for assistance from the central of aid. Such vain efforts can the individual thus spare himself. Everything is so well arranged that he cannot suggest any improvement.
10The surrounding world includes all beings with whom the individual comes into contact or on whom he can become dependent, also indirectly; his milieu with its beneficent or restrictive influences, all circumstances and relations in life, everything that the individual meets with.
11The law of reaping considers missing desirable experiences, qualities, abilities, opportunities utilized in previous lives, interests, striving after unity and development, etc.
12The law of reaping also considers the surrounding world and takes into account the individual's previous relations with races, nations, classes, clans, individuals of all kinds belonging to all the natural kingdoms. Regard is paid to the possibilities of a beneficent or restrictive influence on the universal development, etc. In this connection it should be pointed out that the boasting about the geniuses of the nations is without any ground. The development of genius takes many incarnations, as a rule in different races and nations. Besides, the geniuses are badly treated in contrast to the perfectly harmless talents.
13"There is no escaping one's fate." By taking precautionary measures of all kinds you can manage to escape your reaping in one life. But it will come back. Foolhardiness is not defended here. The law of reaping considers the individual's level of development and ability of judgement, and presupposes his use of common sense. Common sense, balance, sobriety and moderation, a realizable ideal, are reliable lodestars in all circumstances of life. Unrealizable ideals are superstitions.
1The ground of the fiction of "original sin" is the individual and collective bad sowing we have not yet reaped. The collective reaping is everyone's part in all the mistakes in all respects for which we have been jointly responsible. Original sin is every individual's evil thoughts, feelings, words, and actions in past lives. There is not other debt in life than bad sowing, and that we must reap. Anguish of sin, of life, etc. is a bad reaping, and as a rule is the result of having engrafted a complex of sin into others.
2The ground of the fiction of the "commandments of god" is the laws of life.
3The ground of the fiction of the "promises of god" is the good reaping from good sowing.
4The ground of the fiction of "wrath of god" and the "punishing righteousness of god" is the bad reaping from bad sowing.
5The ground of the fiction of "sin" is mistakes as to the laws of life.
6The ground of the fiction of the "granting of prayers" is man's right, according to the law of freedom, to have all his wishes granted that are not neutralized by bad sowing in the past.
7The reality underlying the fiction of "satan" is that collective of incarnating men who, having acquired esoteric knowledge and objective consciousness of at least the physical-etheric and emotional worlds, refuse to enter into unity, and abstain from developing any further. They are the actual rulers in the physical and emotional worlds. This implies that individuals at the stage of hatred easily become their unwitting and willing tools. Both the symbols (god and satan) thus stand for realities.
8The ground of the fiction of the "power of prayer" is the effect of methodical and systematic meditation, especially emotional collective will closely welded.
9The fiction of missionizing is without any ground. Giving knowledge to serious "seekers after truth" is a good sowing. It is, however, unwise to make that mistake described, illustratively and incisively, as "casting pearls". It is not wisdom of life to give knowledge to those who lack the prerequisites of insight and understanding. That will strengthen their contempt for everything that passes their comprehension, for everything superior.
10That god protects the truth on earth and preserves the innocent, are fictions without any ground. There is no other protection than the good reaping from god sowing.
11The ground of the fiction of the "guidance of god" is the possibility of achieving contact with our superconscious.
12"To receive the holy ghost" meant the transfer of the self from its lowest triad to its causal body or its second triad.
13"The kingdom of god" was the term of the collective of second selves.
14Most of the religious terms of Christianity are gnostic symbols, which the church, lacking the gnosis, has misinterpreted hopelessly.
1Life is activity, motion. Absolute passivity results in disintegration of form. Every consciousness expression entails activity in some kind of matter. Active consciousness reinforces itself by consciousness expressions. Activity develops the ability of activation and strengthens the content of consciousness.
2The law of activation says that: every expression of consciousness becomes a cause that has an inevitable effect; everything consciousness observes is affected; everything contained in consciousness takes shape in some way; without your own activity consciousness does not develop, nor are any qualities or abilities acquired; everything you strive for or wish to accomplish in order to obtain or realize it, must first be contained in your consciousness; everything you get you have desired at some time; everything you desire you will get some time (though seldom as you had imagined).
3Consequential on the law of activation are the law of repetition, or reinforcement, and the law of habit.
4The law of repetition says that: by each repetition the content of consciousness is reinforced and is continually easier to resuscitate; by each repetition the tendency to recur is strengthened; by repetition thought and feeling are reinforced more and more, until they are automatically expressed in action; by each repetition thought becomes ever more active, ever more firmly engraved in memory, an ever stronger factor in its complex, ever intenser in feeling and imagination; by each repetition the fictitiousness of thought and illusoriness of emotion become ever stronger, and seem ever more probable, legitimate, and necessary.
5The law of habit says that a thought, feeling, phrase, action repeated is automatized, which usually results in immutability, imperviousness to new impressions, and inability of adaptation.
6By attention we decide the content of our consciousness. By means of thought we acquire feelings and qualities. The more purposive and intensive the activity, the greater is the effect achieved.
7In every (conscious) choice the result is determined by the strongest motive. This is determinism, still misunderstood. Thanks to this law, the individual can win freedom of choice by methodically strengthening his motive (any whatsoever), until it becomes the strongest. It is by our self-activity alone that we can liberate ourselves from the automatized dependence on those fictions and illusions of the ignorance of life which we have unsuspectingly incorporated with complexes ever since childhood. Ignorance believes it is free and does not suspect its dependence. The activity of most people is determined by arbitrary complexes or by influences from without. The latter can be unsuspectedly assimilated by the subconscious: emotional-mental vibrations from mass opinions and psychoses.
8Our fictions and illusions in our complexes and fixed ideas are ineradicable because they have been automatized by being constantly repeated. Their power over us can only be limited by setting up counter-complexes. The fact that homilies and enforced habits produce effects contrary to those intended, is also due to their rousing a spontaneous defiance complex.
1Man is a unity of five beings, his five bodies. Man's consciousness is of five kinds: dense physical, etheric physical, emotional, mental, and causal. What the ignorance call a "split personality" can be a lack of contact between these five beings. The self lives in someone of these five, and moves at will between those activated. Attention indicates the presence of the self.
2Consciousness (everything pertaining to "mind" and "soul") can be divided into the waking consciousness and the unconscious. The unconscious is divided into the subconscious and the superconscious.
3It is hardly an exaggeration to call the unconscious the real man. The different kinds of consciousness of the personality belong to the unconscious, with the exception of the small camera opening of the waking consciousness, there the visual point of attention is in the field of vision. The waking consciousness is an exceedingly tiny fraction of the normal individual's total consciousness.
4In vibrational respect everything can be said to consist of vibrations. Man is as though immersed into an ocean of physical, emotional, mental, and causal vibrations from the five worlds of man, which vibrations pour through his five bodies at every moment. Not even one quadrillionth of these are apprehended by the waking consciousness. The individual's bodies can be compared to receiving and transmitting stations. Their capacity depends on their ability of activity and selectivity.
5The subconscious includes all impressions that have passed through the waking consciousness, the merging of these impressions into complexes, and the working up by the complexes themselves of new impressions from the waking consciousness and of direct vibrations from without.
6The superconscious includes all experiences the individual has acquired (has had and worked up) in previous existences, as well as the apprehension and working up by causal consciousness itself, when activated.
7There is a mutual reception between the waking consciousness and the unconscious. From the subconscious, waking consciousness receives emotional and mental impulses from without, from the complexes, and from memory centres. From the superconscious, the waking consciousness receives latent ideas that have been activated by remembrance anew, inspiration via higher emotional or mental domains of consciousness, and intuition from the individual's own causal consciousness.
8At the stages of barbarism and civilization, the individual is dominated by his subconscious; at the stage of ideality, by that which to the normal individual is his superconscious. At the stage of culture, man learns to differentiate between self-determined vibrations, vibrations coming from without, and such coming from the sub-or superconscious. Without that ability the individual identifies himself with all impulses entering into his waking consciousness, regarding them as expressions of his own being. Self-determination means independence of the intensely activated emotional-mental vibrations of public opinion, which as a rule strengthen the tendency to hatred and all the individual's fictions and illusions. For ideas coming from without to be assimilated, the individual must have an insight and understanding corresponding to them. The more closely the idea is related to one's own domains of knowledge, the easier it is to apprehend it, especially if the thinker formed it with clarity and distinctness.
1The subconscious consists of a vast number of domains of impression, association, and conception. In the following they are called complexes. Complexes can be divided into emotional, mental, and emotional-mental ones. The emotional complexes are on the whole formed by and decisive of physical and emotional needs and habits. The emotional-mental complexes are the most numerous in the normal individual. They consist of various domains of feeling and imagination, which the individual has paid attention to or been interested in.
2The subconscious forgets nothing. In the subconscious exists everything that has ever existed in the waking consciousness. By far the most of it man has forgotten to remember no more; often he did not even apprehend it clearly. All impressions he has received, all fictions and illusions (beliefs, conjectures, dogmas, superstitions) he has been fed with since early childhood, everything he believes he has discarded and neutralized long ago; it all leads its own life under the cover of the unconscious and with an unsuspected power. Whether this power will be of grater advantage than disadvantage depends on the character of the impressions — benefiting or restricting life —, on the intensity of the impressions and the plasticity of the subconscious, and on the nature of the counter-powers that are at the individual's disposal.
3Impressions stream in through the waking consciousness, are absorbed by the complexes, which work constantly. Complexes work mechanically, not critically. They work over what they get. The results of their work will be faultless only if they are supplied with nothing but facts and axioms. Complexes grow, are strengthened and vitalized through new impressions, through the attention of the waking consciousness to impulses from the complexes. The conception of ideas can occur rapidly or slowly. If impressions are clear, connected, purposeful, then the work of the complexes will be correspondingly efficient. Impressions are worked up in continually formed and dissolved combinations, until a new idea is crystallized, which by the power of its concentrated content releases impulses in the waking consciousness. If the material necessary to the solution of the problem has been supplied to the complex, then the problem will be solved.
4At the stage of civilization, the content of most complexes is made up of unrealistic fictions and of illusions that are hostile to life and have a repellent tendency. Belonging to the same domains of vibrations as those of public opinion, they serve as good receivers of the pertaining mass vibrations, and make the self's incipient self-determination more difficult or impossible altogether. Strongly developed self-activity is necessary in order to make yourself independent of these engrafted fictions and illusions. It is not enough to realize the falsity of the fictions and worthlessness of the illusions by acquiring a knowledge of reality and life. For the new ideas to be decisive in the waking consciousness they must be woven into the new complexes by being constantly attended to, until these complexes in strength surpass the old ones.
5The complexes rule unconsciously and instinctively. The impulses coming from the subconscious into the waking conscious are automatic and irresistible. The power of the subconscious can be temporarily neutralized by some kind of psychosis. When the calm has returned, however, the complexes resume their authority. All faults and failings, as well as prejudices, aversions, fixed ideas, fear, a guilty conscience, anxiety, etc. are found in unsuitable complexes.
6Only the most fatal of the moral complexes will be discussed below. If they are not being fought by efficient counter-complexes they will sure enough become "the other man in us", a source of anxiety, agony, neurosis, despair. The connected complexes of moral superstition which poison life, are the illusions of sin, guilt, and shame. They are the traitors of our happiness. Conscience is called "god's voice in man". But conscience is a complex, is the mechanical, automatic, logical reaction of the subconscious to everything that comes into opposition to engrafted prohibitions or accepted rules of conduct. The same mode of reaction can be seen in the higher animals, for example dogs and cats, etc. Conscience strengthens everything which man pays attention to but should not, and it can become a permanently guilty conscience, which makes the individual more or less unfit for life.
7Fear is another fatal complex. The only evil that can befall us in life is our own doing, a bad sowing in a former existence. And that sowing must be reaped, the sooner the better. To learn to bear the inevitable heroically is part of the art of living. Thus there is never any reason for fear. But fear as a complex destroys self-reliance, weakens vitality, paralyses will-power, blinds judgement. The impulses of fear are the worst, the most harmful and irrational of them all. Fear makes the individual defenceless and powerless. Fear strengthens its own complex into agony before life. Fear is fought by noble indifference, by never paying attention to the counter-complex of self-reliance.
8The complex of shame, which senseless upbringing engrafts into the child's mind in order to enforce obedience in the most convenient way, often becomes a serious handicap in life. In sensitive minds this complex can result in timidity, anxiety, shyness, fear of people. It enhances the dependence on others, lays the basis of the fear of other people's opinions, and can degenerate into a cult of appearances, of insincerity, and into hypocrisy, with cringing and fawning on all who are in dominant positions. It can take years of methodical work to counteract this complex effectively. In this situation, you should make it clear to yourself that no matter what you do, the keen eye of hatred will always find faults and failings and thus motives for condemnation. Many "worldly wise" people buy the benevolence of egoists, which will cease, however, when their means run out.
1The self has followed the genesis of the third and second triads with faintly developed subjective consciousness without self-consciousness. These two triads remain on the whole inactive until the self has acquired objective self-consciousness and can definitely take possession of them.
2The self's objective self-consciousness does not reach higher than its ability of activity in the respective molecular kinds. The normal individual thus lacks both physical and emotional atomic consciousness in his first triad.
3At the stage of civilization, both emotional and mental molecular layers are part of the self's superconscious. As they become activated also causal consciousness is influenced. During thousands of incarnations at the stages of barbarism and civilization, causal consciousness has remained inactive except for its momentary activation at the reception of the harvest of incarnation upon the disintegration of the personality.
4At the stage of culture, the higher emotionality, the "spirituality" of the normal individual, begins to be activated. It is true that at the stage of civilization he has been able, in moments of ecstasy or of rare experiences, to raise his consciousness temporarily to these heights, and such moments certainly produce effects in activation; they are, however, insufficient to influence causal consciousness appreciably. It is only when noble feelings are cultivated and noble qualities are developed that such experiences of "everlasting value" are had which causal consciousness can apprehend and profit by.
5When, at the stage of humanity, the apprehension of reality is acquired and the liberation from the fictitiousness prevailing up to then is achieved, the activation of causal consciousness becomes effective. Causal consciousness begins to be able, objectively, to experience reality and, subjectively, to work up the experiences had in the past into causal ideas. Such ideas are units of enormously concentrated reality content with experiences synthesized from thousands of incarnations.
6At the stage of ideality, the self becomes a causal being with the ability to assimilate previously superconscious causal knowledge of reality and causal understanding of life. By that the self has accomplished its stages of ignorance. The self has acquired the ability to make the personality into a perfect instrument for the causal being. The man has become Man and prepares to enter the kingdom of supermen.
7Self-realization is the gradual conquest of instinct of life, instinct of reality, insight, and understanding. It coincides with the acquisition of vibrational ability in the ever higher molecular kinds and the raising of the corresponding kinds of consciousness. The subjective condition of this is he liberation from the fictions and illusions of ignorance by means of knowledge of reality. According as the superconscious is activated, the personality receives emotional inspirations and mental ideas from domains previously inactive, experiences which ignorance has in vain tried to explain by its imaginative constructions.
1People think they are "free" when they let emotions and thoughts come and go at random, inadvertently let themselves be influenced by these vibrations from without or incidental emotional impulses from those more or less purposeless complexes which they have unsuspectingly allowed to be formed and grow strong in their subconscious. At the stage of civilization, scarcely five per cent of the content of consciousness is self-initiated, selfdetermined. Whenever your attention is not occupied with your necessary everyday cares and duties, your own activity grows weaker. Instead consciousness becomes receptive and, therefore, mostly the victim of negative influences.
2Any content of consciousness that is attended to becomes vitalized and strengthened. By letting attention concern itself with this content, the intensity of its vibrations increases. Thereby the content becomes powerful both in the conscious and in the subconscious. Thereby you become implicated in the responsibility that is the consequence of having increased the power of vibrations to influence still more people. In this way most people involuntarily and unwittingly strengthen worthless, undesirable emotions and thoughts in themselves and others.
3Attention not controlled has the result that accidental occurrences gain a decisive influence on mentality, emotionality, and actions. If the self has its attention centred in emotionality, then desire, feeling, and imagination are aroused. The power of emotionality decreases when attention is centred in mentality. If the self lives in emotionality, mentality loses its possibility of influencing. And as long as the lower emotionality dominates, so long any contact with causal consciousness is precluded.
4There are two methods of counteracting this state of split consciousness, lack of will power. The one is to occupy consciousness by letting attention be absorbed by some interest. The other method is to pay constant attention to the content of consciousness.
5This unceasing watchfulness would be tiring or unbearable if it would imply any sort of supervision, effort, or strain. It can preferably be accompanied by some simple relaxation exercise now and then. You observe as though unintentionally how your thinking picks up and drops the one line of thought after the other in an endless succession. The unconstrained attention with which you follow the restless flight of thought is not perceived as any fetter, which else would cause a reaction. Soon you have imperceptibly slipped into an unintentional control, as it were. You learn to distinguish between thoughts from the unconscious and thoughts from without. The entire procedure should be regarded as an amusing play of thought. Of course you relax attention at the first feeling of strain, fatigue or discomfort. You soon find that the very attentiveness alone automatically results in a rejection of undesirable thoughts. Being observed, attention is prevented from strengthening unserviceable impressions, thoughts, emotions, etc. The control of consciousness results in calm, quiets anxiety, makes the content of consciousness clearer.
1All consciousness expressions in the waking consciousness are activated consciousness, and entail activation of the content of consciousness. The consciousness expressions of the normal individual are for the most part reception from without or impulses from his subconscious. His self-initiated thoughts (emotions) are dependent on these, on the daily work or interests of various kinds. Attention, concentration, the ability to clearly retain a given content of consciousness, slackens as this activity becomes habit and routine.
2The ability of activation is above all the ability of prolonged attention. Any other activation of consciousness is faint. Activation is made strongest by the emotional or mental initiative, your own reflection, mental working up of what is received by the waking consciousness. The power of impressions received is directly proportional to the attention paid to them. By keeping consciousness at the thing observed, impressions are vitalized and are given enough time to sink into the subconscious. Most people are content with fleeting impressions, and chatter away the rest of the already faint power of these impressions. It is typical of the genius that he will often be unable to give a prompt opinion, often be speechless before the overwhelming power or beauty or convincing objectivity of impressions. The genius needs time to allow the thing experienced to act in his unconscious, and his criticism is the ability to forget what should be forgotten, not to impress it into his memory.
3A consciousness expression sinks into the subconscious, enters into and vitalizes complexes, which sooner or later feed the waking consciousness with whatever they have been made to receive. It is the complexes that rule us: unconsciously, instinctually, automatically. The individual at the stage of civilization is a set of habits: thinking according to ingrained views and conventions, feeling according to the need for hatred, talking according to inherited patterns of gossip, acting according to egoistic motives and interests.
4Most of what we supply the subconscious with is useless in life, not to say hostile to life. All manner of fictions and illusions daily wash over us from everywhere, often becoming bad suggestions. Without suspecting it, we have ourselves made our subconscious our real enemy, a harmful power of great proportions, "the other man in us", a source of irrational emotional and mental impulses of all sorts.
5All this changes, however, according as mankind works its way up to the stages of culture and humanity. Anyone who does not do anything about the matter, will move along with the slow passing of millions of years. But anyone who wills to develop can begin the change at once. Our subconscious can become our benefactor. The method of activation teaches us how to do this.
6We can improve ourselves in two different ways. Both are equally important. The one consists in starving out unserviceable complexes, the other in forming new complexes.
7There are some difficulties to the method of activation. By proceeding ignorantly, you will strengthen the wrong complexes. The result can be the opposite of what is intended. Mistakes can have serious consequences. The really efficacious method is part of the science of the will, which will remain esoteric at the stage of civilization, no matter what religions intent on salvation and "secret orders" promise.
8It cannot be too strongly emphasized that in the endeavour to reform the personality, activation must be effected via the unconscious. The intentional, deliberate resolution "to become a mew man", "to break with the past", to follow new directions; will lead to a hopeless struggle against existing ingrained automatized habit and reaction complexes, which dominate the individual, and will just enhance their vitality. By fighting complexes ("faults and failings") directly you strengthen them. It is true that in individual cases results can be obtained in that way. Reflective action, however, is "morally" scamped work, and the infatuating self-righteousness that is the outcome of it makes confusion worse confounded. Reflective action is uncertain and fumbling, since it does not spring spontaneously from the right attitude to life.
9The only way of weakening the complexes is not to supply them with fresh nourishment. If they are never attended to, they will finally grow so weak as to be unable to dominate. The traditional method is of course as perverted as possible, the usual psychological mistake of ignorance. By repenting, revelling in remorse, grieving for, and trying to rid yourself of faults, cultivating a bad conscience, waging a war against yourself; you strengthen the very things that you desire to free yourself from. They are strengthened because they are attended to and vitalized to a high degree by the intensity of remorse. The only way of reducing the power of complexes is to refuse to pay any attention at all to the emotions and thoughts belonging to the complexes.
10Old complexes are counteracted by the formation of new complexes, partly such as are directly opposite to the old ones, partly such as you find the most desirable. When the mew counter-complexes have grown strong enough, they fulfil their function automatically. Upon a detrimental impulse its opposite follows automatically, which through its greater vitality repels the weaker impulse out of the waking consciousness. Gradually the detrimental complexes become less powerful, until they finally will not even be able to penetrate above the threshold of consciousness. By systematically and methodically attending to the thoughts and feelings that you want to cherish, new complexes are formed, which can be strengthened to any degree whatsoever. The more frequently, the more clearly, the more distinctly you fix your attention on them, the stronger the corresponding complexes grow. However, you will get efficient results only if you impress them daily in an uninterrupted contemplation during a few minutes or so. They must be vitalized until they feed the waking consciousness with noble impulses every now and then.
11Next to the control of thought and systematic attention to desirable thoughts, feelings, and qualities, a positive attitude is the most important thing. Usually people distrust each other, criticize, belittle, brush aside everything that does not agree with their wrong emotionality and mentality. They discredit new things as though everything did not actually remain to be discovered. Instead of availing themselves of the wondrous criticism that life uses, forgetfulness, they impress anew the useless into their memory. This negativity is counteracted by the systematic exercise of attending to the good, disregarding as a matter of principle everything that is useless for yourself or others, disregarding faults and just paying regard to merits.
12There are many general, harmless methods (several more will be discovered by psychological research) and there is certainly something to be learnt from each; from the noble, invulnerable indifference of the Stoics; from the Coue nethod, according to which autosuggestion has the greatest effect when not being deliberate; from the mystic's unceasing contemplation of unity (the ideal) whenever thought must not be occupied with the necessary cares of life. What is needed is perseverance and a calm reliance on the law of undisturbed growth. The rest will come of itself. One day the result will show in unreflecting, direct spontaneity.
13It is the qualities lacking that are essential and should be attended to by the indirect method of admiration, devotion, worship. By analyzing themselves and by being occupied with ridiculous imperfections, the moralists enhance self-centredness and fritter away their time and energy on unessential "faults and failings", which disappear of themselves after they have fulfilled their purpose and have been finally reaped.
14A good method of keeping attention away from useless impressions is to cultivate interests, hobbies of various kinds. Anyone chooses according to his tastes and attitudes. A hobby that particularly trains the powers of observation and concentration as well as imagination, is visualization. It consists in observing attentively all details in some object, a picture, etc., thereupon endeavouring to bring back to mind the object observed as graphically as possible.
15It is we, not other people, who make ourselves happy or unhappy. It is true that circumstances can make happiness enormously easier or more difficult to attain. But in the end it all depends on ourselves. The purposeful illusions of imagination are important to our development.
16The most powerful factor of activation is imagination. By means of it you can strengthen or weaken whatever feelings, thoughts, qualities you like. Imagination is our best friend and worst foe. Imagination makes life into heaven by embellishing it, and the same situation into hell by blackening life. If imagination is allowed to be occupied with everything that causes suffering, we shall soon perish. If you look on the difficulties as things soon passing off, they will be incomparably easier to bear.
17Imagination can vividly represent desirable qualities. By idealizing you are attracted to the ideals more quickly. Every ideal is an evolutionary power. Thoughtlessly crushing the ideals of another is to deprive him of something that is perhaps irreplaceable. It is irrelevant whether the model corresponds to the ideal. It is the very work of imagination that ennobles (but also possibly destroys and brutalizes). If you have a dramatic turn you can work out an ideal type, to whom you attribute the qualities you wish to acquire. This ideal character is put into all conceivable situations, so that the hero is given opportunities of displaying his abilities, in which you allow yourself to be filled with admiration, devotion, worship. There will be authors to give mankind masterpieces of these kinds, which will be counted among the true devotional books. The creditable, although on the whole unsuccessful, attempts made by Carlyle and Emerson to rehabilitate their heroes, show the disadvantage of using historical personages, which have already been besmirched by the biographies of moralists.
18The superconscious is activated through noble feelings and the countless little acts of kindness and services of everyday life. It is also activated by being constantly attended to.
19It is by no means easy for the unaccustomed to learn to distinguish between the three different main kinds of life expressions from the unconscious. Only by training and a keen understanding can you identify the impulses from the subconscious, the external telepathic suggestions of public opinion, and the inspirations from the superconscious. In this, the most important thing is to avoid becoming helplessly dependent on "inspiration". Waiting for it easily degenerates into the passivity of quietism, a general lack of enterprise, and undiscerning acceptance of all fancies as though coming from above. Your own initiative and activity must always remain the primary thing, and the self-determining discrimination of your own experience must be decisive. Mistakes are unavoidable if they are part of bad reaping. Besides, they are often intended to develop the power of discrimination. Passivity does not activate the unconscious but makes the individual inactive or a slave to the vibrations from without.
1Through his causal body man is a unit which is isolated from other beings, an individual being with the purpose, not only of crystallizing individual character, but also of developing individuality into universality in perfect harmony with the laws of life, which he will himself discover. Life in the causal world is not an isolated life. The causal being is part of a group of individuals with common future tasks. In the epochs of unity, these individuals incarnate together into the same clans and families in order to cultivate their solidarity also in physical existence. In the epochs of discord, with their mixed races and social mobility, this would be meaningless. The sense of solidarity is then lacking even within the family. The individual's need for a group remains, however, and at the stage of culture it finds expression in idealist associations in the service of freedom, unity, and evolution (including research). Associations with egoistic interests further the tendency to division.
2In such an idealist group everybody leaves off the fool's hood of his self-importance, and all unite in complete harmony and mutual confidence, respecting each other's full sovereignty in everything beside the one essential thing.
3Under these conditions, the group activity becomes the collective, fully vibrant harmony, the incomparably mightiest power of which the individual is capable. That power, wisely directed with knowledge and purpose, is capable of much that ignorance does not suspect. It also benefits the group members themselves, strengthening their good complexes and activating their superconscious.
The above text constitutes the essay Esoteric Life View by Henry T. Laurency. The essay is part of the book The Philosopher's Stone by Henry T. Laurency. Copyright © 1979 by the Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation.