The Way of Man by Henry T. Laurency
5. THE EMOTIONAL BEING OF THE FIRST SELF EMOTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
5. THE EMOTIONAL BEING OF THE FIRST SELF EMOTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
1Emotional consciousness is of six kinds (the atomic consciousness excluded), corresponding to the six emotional molecular kinds. Detailed information about these six kinds is lacking. It will be the task of future research to specify these six different degrees of illusoriness, made possible by the involvation of mental atoms to form emotional matter.
2Nor do we know anything exact about the impulses that trigger off attractive and repulsive energies, which in themselves are mentally blind.
3It is true of emotional consciousness as of all other kinds of consciousness: it is the monad’s possibility of consciousness in a certain kind of matter, its mode of perception and expression in that matter.
4Man’s emotional life is partly his subjective life when in physical existence, partly his objective life in the emotional world after he has put off his physical envelopes. As a physical being he apprehends the consciousness of his emotional envelope largely as just desires, feelings, and imaginative expansions.
5Man has two physical envelopes (49:2-4; 49:5-7) and two mental ones (47:1-3; 47:4-7). This division into two as well as the construction of the triads is not so much due to the nature of matter (the composition of which is continuous) as to the necessity of making barriers to consciousness. Without barriers, individuals would prefer to live in the highest molecular kinds and consciousness development would be immensely more difficult. It is necessary that consciousness activation starts from the bottom. It is true that this is done systematically in the three lowest natural kingdoms. But it is necessary in the human kingdom as well, until the individual has activated his mental consciousness from the bottom and has built a mental system that is in the esoteric sense “concrete” and in agreement with reality, making up the firm basis for intuition, the causal as well as the essential one.
6Emotional consciousness has no significance for the understanding of reality, like physical and mental consciousness has, since it just provides the driving force needed for the activation of mental consciousness. A division of emotional consciousness into lower and higher would counteract this purpose. In contrast, it is of the utmost importance that emotional attractive energies become dominant if development is not to be endangered by hatred’s tendency to division, which paralyses the will to unity.
7Emotionality is in the man positive (active), in the woman negative (receptive). This is the reason why women more easily than men fall victims to all manner of emotional impulses from the subconscious and the surrounding world.
8In emotional consciousness development three stages can be discerned: the stages of barbarism, civilization, and culture. The stage of civilization is characterized by an ongoing activation of the mental atoms in the emotional molecules, which entails a coalescence of the emotional and mental envelopes and an activation of the two lowest mental molecular kinds (47:6,7).
9The consciousness of the first triad never reaches beyond mentality (47:4). The self is able, however, by means of higher atomic kinds involved into lower kinds of matter, in the highest emotional consciousness (48:2) and mental perspective consciousness (47:5) to reach the second triad causal and essential consciousness via centres in the causal envelope; emotionality can reach essential consciousness, and mentality can reach causal consciousness. Many who have been informed about this believe at once they are able to do it and experience in the emotional world everything they have heard about superhuman worlds. The power of imagination is sovereign as always.
1Emotional consciousness is the particular consciousness of the animal kingdom. The highest animals (those ready to causalize) have acquired the ability to spontaneously express the highest emotional attraction.
2The particular consciousness of the fourth natural kingdom is mental consciousness (47:4-7). Much is lacking in that respect, which mankind’s evolutionary retardation demonstrates. We have been thrown back because of our attitude to those who had the knowledge and were willing to give it to us. We have even neglected to cultivate the higher emotionality. A large portion of mankind is still at or close to the stage of barbarism (proved by continual relapses into barbarism), a stage we should have left behind several million years ago.
3Emotional consciousness is by nature blind energy, blind urge, or what man can perceive as “dynamic will”. It is valuable as driving force. But it is unfit for knowledge, even hostile to knowledge. Everything in the emotional world is lie. The sooner occultists see this truth, the sooner they will be able to acquire knowledge of reality.
4It might be said that the consciousness aspect is wholly absent in the original emotionality. Emotionality is in that respect no independent stage in the development of consciousness. What there is in emotionality of something consciously strived for is due to the synthesizing triad consciousness or the effect of the mental molecule on the emotional atom. The original function of emotionality was to activate (“dynamize”) the rudiment of mentality. This activation is begun in the vegetable kingdom, and is continuously increased in the animal kingdom. The importance of emotionality is seen in the fact that it is an activating mediation between physical and mental consciousness. And that importance is great. For it is in emotional matter that the activation of mentality can be begun. The mentalization of emotional consciousness can be divided into three principal stages: “desire”, feeling, and imagination. The life of feelings is the activity of the lowest mental consciousness (47:7) in emotionality, and the life of imagination is the result of the lowest mentality but one (47:6).
5It is in emotional consciousness that the struggle begins between egoism (repulsion) and altruism (attraction), between self-assertion (repulsion) and service (attraction). The progressive ennoblement of emotionality is due to the effect of attraction. Vibrations in emotional matter have either an attractive or a repulsive effect. In the higher molecular kinds, attractive vibrations preponderate; in the lower ones, repulsive.
6Those who have activated consciousness just in the lower molecular kinds are more subject to and more easily affected by the repulsive vibrations. Whichever kind preponderates depends on the self-acquired tendency of individual character to attraction or repulsion and on the degree of difficulty in reaching the higher emotional stage with its will to unity.
7All emotionality is selfish, even though in a coarser or finer degree (“spiritual egoism”). Everything unselfish originates from essentiality (unity), even though it be just a waft of it. Being more marked it shows the awakening of the centre of unity in the causal envelope.
8As emotionality is the only kind of consciousness which has nothing to do with the conception of reality, it is suited to fantasizing. Such things come particularly into manifestation at each transition from a world epoch to another, such as our present transition from the zodiacal epoch of Pisces into that of Aquarius. Then imagination becomes sovereign, the individual can imagine anything whatever and receive all brainwaves as expressions of art, culture, proofs of higher development, etc., and even as knowledge of life. Esoteric history is full of examples of similar chaos in all spheres of life at the transition from the epoch of Aries into that of Pisces. In such a chaos Christianity began, a religion that totally distorted all gnostic symbols. We experience analogous follies in all domains of life (politics, philosophy, culture, art, occultism, etc.).
9The very intensity of emotional consciousness causes its illusions to be perceived as true reality and captivates men in its illusions, which are nothing but imaginative constructions. The intensity is due to the possibility of directly perceiving the energy aspect in emotional matter.
10Falling in love is a typical emotional phenomenon: mentally blind attraction, as mentally blind as its opposite, unreasoning hatred. Pure emotionality is attraction-repulsion; in its two extreme opposites of altruism-egoism. The opposite recurs in the concepts of good and evil (right and wrong are as pure concepts mental). At lower stages, “good” appears to be everything that satisfies egotism, evil everything opposite to this. At higher stages, good is everything that accords with the Law, irrespective of “self”.
11The various kinds of molecular emotional consciousness can rapidly succeed each other. Then most people can be thrown from the highest level reached to the lowest or vice versa in however short a while. The division is just intended as an orientation and thus must not be conceived as though a level reached were in any way constant. It is the task of daily meditation to help the individual to keep himself in a higher state of consciousness more easily.
1At mankind’s present stage of development, emotionality is still the incomparably most important kind of consciousness.
2At this stage, the monad in the triad is more or less permanently centred in the triad emotional atom and directs from there the physical envelopes.
3Even for people at higher stages, however, emotionality is of very great importance for their development; for the mystic as well as for the mental self. It is, therefore, a serious mistake, as many highly intellectual people do, to neglect to cultivate emotionality. Without emotional consciousness and its efficient participation, the first self cannot become a second self.
4With mentality alone the mental self can come in contact with the lowest causal consciousness (47:3), it is true, but he cannot reach essential consciousness (46:7). Mentality is necessary for the individual to become a second self. But only the cooperation of the highest emotionality and the highest mentality makes this possible.
5The higher emotional consciousness (48:3) makes it possible to acquire the qualities of attraction, is necessary to contact essential consciousness, and provides the dynamic energy that man must learn to master. It is via the higher emotionality that the mystic can receive inspirations from the world of wisdom and love (46), inspirations necessary to the understanding of life, energies necessary to self-realization. It is by the energies of attractive (48;2,3) imagination that the mental self can construct the bridge between the first self’s mental molecule and the second self’s mental atom.
6It is only when man sees that the first self cannot solve the problems of existence that he makes himself receptive to the inspirations from the second self. It is also only then he seeks to contact the consciousness of unity (essential consciousness) of existence.
7The mystic (emotionalist) despises reason, seeing that reason (at the present stage of mankind’s development; 47:6,7) cannot solve the problems of life. The occultist despises emotionality, since emotion (at the present stage of mankind’s development; 48:4-7) with its physical tendency and its repulsive vibrations is a hindrance to the understanding of life and to self-realization.
8Highly intellectual man despises emotionality, since “normal” emotional states with their depressions, their abortive sentimentality, their function to effect mental disorientation, etc., become hindrances to his mental sovereignty.
9History shows us that mankind is at the emotional stage and that (as Schopenhauer has rightly pointed out) mankind generally does nothing but foolish things. The time elapsed since Rousseau and Schopenhauer has just furthermore confirmed the verdicts of these men. The question is whether mankind, in its immense folly, will annihilate itself and all life on our planet. So it is understandable that the “mentally sovereign” (who have assimilated most of mankind’s collected ideas) disdain such emotional life controlling reason.
10Emotionality (including the lower mentality, 47:6,7) is incapable of formulating a view of life that accords with reality, since not even the emotional genius (the so-called saint) has access to the higher mentality (47:4,5) and even less to the world of ideas (47:1-3). For the ideas of the world of ideas are necessary to a correct world view, and this must be the basis of a correct conception of reality.
1The esoterician is on his guard against the intensive illusionism of emotionality, which controls mankind, also spiritualists and occultists. He also sees that emotionality is necessary, however. Emotionality is, in its original essence, dynamic, blind energy. At the present stage of mankind’s development and in the current emotional eon, emotionality is of the greatest importance as an energy factor and the emotional world is the world in which man can utilize dynamis. Without that force man is passive, inactive.
2Emotional will is the strongest kind of will, also in those who have in several incarnations neglected their emotional development. Such people therefore think they are unaffected by emotionality and believe they have overcome those stages. Faced with catastrophes, however, and exposed to strains and trials that are part of the final test of the saint, man is awakened from his emotional apathy. Only when having acquired perspective consciousness is he able to become a mental self.
3The difficulty is in using emotionality right. It must not control the individual but must be his obedient servant. Mankind misses much as long as it misuses its knowledge and its power. Both knowledge and power are gifts that are not given in order to counteract the meaning of life.
4Man needs emotionality also for his creative activity. This creative power is best furthered by the power of visualization, which the disciple is encouraged to develop particularly. This power is also needed for the building of the “bridge” between the mental and the causal.
5According to Hamann, “spontaneous feeling, observation, and imagination” are the eternal main fountains of artistic creation, thus chiefly emotional. This remark is correct as such. Then the result is due to the poet’s level of development. Emotional creativity is inexhaustible, especially under the influence of mental ideas.
6The disciple is taught to rightly use his emotional consciousness as a source of energy, a driving force in his striving from the highest emotional via the centre of unity in the causal envelope to get into contact with the world of unity, of intuition, of wisdom and love, nowadays (after 1925) the lowest world of the planetary hierarchy where all can meet. Thus it is abortive to neglect the higher emotional consciousness, which has nothing to do with sentimentality and moods or the farces of creative illusion, but is will to unity, aspiration to unity, and purposiveness.
7The esoterician needs emotionality in three respects in particular: for contacting the essential world, for building the “bridge” between the mental molecule and the mental atom, for the final passing into the second self.
1Imagination, which is a coalescence of emotional and mental consciousness, should rightly be assigned an especial intermediary position. It constitutes the power of artistic creation in poets, artists, and musicians. It reaches its highest ability of artistic performance beyond the products of principle thinking, driven by the dynamic energy of emotional will. When imagination is in accord with reality, it can contact the consciousness of unity. This presupposes esoteric knowledge.
2The risk is, however, that is loses itself in expanses where it believes itself omniscient and omnipotent. This happens easily before the common sense and mental control of perspective thinking has reached the requisite strength. The deplorable consequence of this are all the idiologies disorienting mankind. Most philosophical systems with all their logic belonging to principle thinking are basically figments of the imagination.
3Imagination is a powerful tool in meditation and in expansion of consciousness. In the matter of mental systems, however, it is facts and logic that count.
4In the higher regions of the emotional world and in the mental world, imagination is omnipotent, since it can reshape the matter of those worlds at pleasure and without the individual knowing how this is done. This is the reason why all clairvoyants go astray. They believe that they possess cosmic omniscience and that everything they imagine also is permanent reality. All the esoteric facts about higher worlds, etc., which mediums and clairvoyants hear about, they find in their “spiritual world”. Everything is copied by imagination in emotional matter and is thus turned into “objective reality”, which they are able to ascertain and so is the definitive proof of their having seen it right.
5Emotional imagination (48:2,3) has its mental correspondence in what could be called “mental imagination” (47:4,5), which is able to catch a “vision” from the world of ideas (47:3), a vision which leaves an impression transformed into a mental idea (a conception the energy of which compels imagination to perceptible concretization) that can be caught at the emotional stage and by emotional imagination is given beauty and colour. This is a mightly thing, which easily becomes fatal if the catcher of it lacks mental balance, a marked sense of proportion, and perspective. In that case he will see, believe in, work for this “idea” alone, which holds him captive. He fights for it violently wherever he finds himself, in political, social, philosophical, scientific, etc. circles. The idee fixe may turn him into a sadist, willing to eliminate all who hinder him and whom he looks upon as enemies of truth.
6In a less extreme form such persons are found in organizations, churches, etc., of all kinds. Regrettably, this energy of imagination is infectious, and having once settled in a man, it all too easily carries many other people with it.
7Fanaticism of any kind is an unhealthy phenomenon, which an esoterician positively deprecates. The reality ideas are their own advocates. They speak for themselves without advertisement and agitation. Those who do not immediately see that they agree with reality quite simply are unripe for that knowledge.
8What exoterists call escapism is often escape from one world of imagination (world of illusions and fictions that the uninitiated live in) to another. Escape may be justified if the new world is better than the old one, better accords with the basic principles of truth, goodness, beauty and thus is in closer contact with the laws of life. It is an emergency measure in our chaotic world where all old views are in a state of dissolution.
1Before the individual has become a causal self, he must even as a mental self activate his higher emotional consciousness to contact the world of unity and be able to receive energies of unity. If he omits to do this, there is a risk that he “isolates himself in his ivory tower” and does not reach other people, however much he agitates. Just as theologians he will then preach to deaf ears or to churchy ears that want to hear only what calms their gnawing instinct of life.
2To cultivate feelings of the higher emotionality (48:2,3) develops us more than to cultivate the lower reason (47:6,7). These feelings affect the causal superconsciousness and, being attractive, also the consciousness of unity (essentiality, 46). These emotional vibrations also pass through our superconscious causal consciousness (47:2,3) and always leave their traces, however faint the effect of activation be.
3Anyone who from 48:2 is able to receive a direct, spontaneous, occasional contact with the essential world experiences an essential intuition and, with it, essential knowledge. It is always a risk to say such things, for all too many people all too easily imagine anything about themselves. They may believe themselves to be disciples, causal selves and even higher selves, for in the emotional world everything is possible. We shall be swamped with all manner of prophets, and we see it beginning already.
4When unity energies (46) pour down into our envelopes and are rightly perceived by the emotional consciousness, the result is that the mind is filled with that “love for all living beings, for the individual (however he be) which is limitless enough to allow total, unconditional self-sacrifice. This does not mean self-surrender or self-effacement, but is the active, spontaneous love that forgets the importuning demands of the natural instincts: the instinct of self-preservation, the instinct of power”.
5Having activated (constantly attending to) higher emotional consciousness (48:3, attraction), the individual possessing esoteric knowledge is via the unity centre in the causal envelope able to reach the essential world (46:7). If this connection is cultivated, the will to unity develops with efficiency in service as a result. Then you do not ask what you have to give but what the other person needs. You forget yourself and “identify” yourself with the person you want to help.
1Mankind can acquire objective consciousness in the physical etheric world and in the emotional world, and therefore they are the only two worlds that mankind can know anything about. They are the two worlds of man. For mental objective consciousness also causal objective consciousness is required. Thus man cannot explore the mental world, and thus there are no higher worlds for him.
2Of old, metaphysicians call the physical world the “material world” and the emotional world the “spiritual world” like spiritists and all manner of occultists. All beings in the spiritual world are all-knowing, are authorities for those who in seances listen to the messages of the spirits. They are also authorities for those clairvoyants who are able to observe the pertaining emotional beings.
3If theologians believe in the “hereafter” (which many of them, in company with Bishop Anders Nygren, do not), then they speak like spiritists of two worlds, the material world and the spiritual world.
4Those who talk about more worlds have taken that information from esoterics.
5Neither clairvoyants of countless kinds, yogis of many kinds, nor occultists, the number of whom is constantly rising in our time, have (whatever they believe and say) reached beyond emotional reality, which for them is “spiritual reality”. They are unable to acquire objective consciousness of higher worlds.
6Rudolf Steiner had emotional objective consciousness (clairvoyance). He could ascertain the existence of the two worlds, the physical and the emotional. In common with the spiritists he assumed that there were no more worlds than “the material world and the spiritual world”. And on that experience he constructed his entire occult world view.
7The yogis go one step further: they have constructed a superconscious world that they call “nirvana” in which the self is to be annihilated. Of the mental world and the causal world the yogis know nothing unless they have accepted esoterics.
8Martinus has probably got the term “cosmic consciousness” from the Rosicrucian sect, AMORC, which distinguishes between two kinds of consciousness: physical and cosmic consciousness. Using that term he has apparently managed to dupe people who are ignorant of esoterics and do not see that his “cosmic consciousness” is emotional consciousness and that his objective consciousness is emotional clairvoyance, thus of the same order as Steiner’s. Still nobody has succeeded in acquiring even mental objective consciousness except as a disciple of the planetary hierarchy.
1Like all worlds, the emotional consists of three basically different kinds of matter: involvatory matter (primary matter), involutionary matter (secondary matter), and evolutionary matter (tertiary and quaternary matter). Involvatory matter lacks consciousness, involutionary matter possesses actualized passive consciousness, and evolutionary matter has active consciousness.
2The primary matter of the emotional world acts as a blind force. The secondary matter of the emotional world makes conception, emotion, imagination possible, with a rational content that varies according to the percentage of mental atoms in emotional molecules and the percentages of the molecular kinds in the emotional envelope.
3All involutionary matter (atoms and molecules) has passive consciousness. When man “thinks”, his imagination shapes elementals in emotional matter, emotional material forms, live emotional beings with activated emotional consciousness, corresponding to consciousness in that thought which formed them. The lifetime of these beings depends on the degree of the emotional energy that produced them. As a rule this lasts for a minute or so, whereupon the form dissolves and the emotional molecules return to their original states.
4It is involutionary matter, with its delusive life-forms, that men take for permanent reality and that is the ground and cause of the illusions of mankind.
5As a term of world 48 the “emotional world” is to be preferred to the usual, the “astral world”, since the emotional forms largely composing that world are shaped by human emotional consciousness.
6A man with a sufficiently strong imagination studies a legend of a saint and enters into the life of that saint. So he unconsciously constructs such a saint in the emotional world and will meet him when he has “passed on”.
7When mankind has attained the mental stage, the emotional world will be emptied of its content except the emotional envelopes of the natural kingdoms and formless primary involvatory matter, which is invisible to human consciousness.
8Emotional matter is formed at a critical stage in the involvation of matter at transition from the mental to the physical and in the evolvation of matter at transition from the physical to the mental. Something corresponding to this occurs also in the process of evolution.
9As yet there are not sufficient facts to explain the pertaining phenomena. We have only been informed that the planetary hierarchy does not regard the emotional world as real to conception in the same sense as the six other worlds of the solar system but as the world of irremediable illusoriness, where objective consciousness (clairvoyance) can never contact permanent reality.
10In the old esoteric symbolic language, emotional matter was called “water” and mental matter “fire”. At the meeting of water and fire “mist” is produced. This explains why the emotional world was called the “misty world”: everything in that world is illusory and delusive. There is no possibility in that world to explore reality. To do so, causal consciousness is necessary, for it is able to “divide water and fire”, dissolve the “mist”.
11An exhaustive treatise on the emotional world with all its phenomena and all misconceptions about it has not appeared as yet. Certainly Leadbeater did a magnificent preparatory work, but the most of what should be done still remains. The difficulty probably is in finding an essential self who would assume the task. There are so many other and more important things to do at present.
1That man is greatly mistaken who thinks that life in the emotional world is what it was intended to be, a period of rest between incarnations. In the emotional world one has no annoyances from the organism, it is true, but the more annoyances from emotional consciousness, feelings intensified thousandfold. In the physical world men are by and large devils to each other, and one should not expect something better in the lower regions of the emotional world (48:5-7). Also, chaos is worse in the emotional world than in the physical world. There people gather up all gossip from physical life, and virulence is spewed out worse there than here. All inhibitions are dropped, and only now people appear such as they really are. Falsity, persecution, and poisoning cease only in the higher regions (48:2-4).
2Especially out of favour are all esotericians who dare to proclaim the truth: that the knowledge of reality cannot be acquired in the emotional world, that all idiologies are represented and all abortive, that men are as ignorant and as misled in that world as in the physical, as much victims of their speculation, that any kind of research is precluded, since none but causal selves are able to ascertain facts in that matter. The correct data that the “spirits” can supply they have received from esotericians in the physical world, not from higher worlds. The superstitious belief that the emotional world is the “spiritual world”, that all beings in that world are omniscient, seems ineradicable. Man does not change, does not improve, becomes no wiser merely by putting off his physical envelopes. Thereupon he only lacks physical sense perceptions. Instead, emotional “perceptions” are the more intense, since the pertaining vibrations are no longer damped by physical matter.
3In the emotional world there exist emotional envelopes of animals, emotional naturebeings, emotional devas, and men. Moreover, there are elementals of all kinds, formed by emotional consciousness.
4In contrast, there are no mental selves, causal selves, second selves or other kinds of selves having knowledge of reality.
5The old esoteric saying, “Nobody in the emotional world can possess knowledge of reality”, does not apply any longer, since increasing numbers of people who have acquired this knowledge in the physical world after 1875 teach it after their passing. The saying was hardly correctly worded, since initiates of esoteric knowledge orders possessed such knowledge. But their vow of silence applied also to their continued existence in the “other world”; otherwise their learning would have been snatched up by clairvoyants and clairaudients and passed on to other non-initiates.
6Emotional envelopes dissolve but slowly, according as emotional consciousness moves to ever higher molecular kinds. Something of lower molecular kinds always remains, however, so that the envelope in many cases remains also after man has left it and passed to the mental world. This is particularly the case with those who were great historical personages and as such have won admirers and followers. Their emotional envelopes are unceasingly supplied with new emotional matter and thereby also the power to mechanically repeat what posterity has read about them and legend has attributed to them. Sometimes such an envelope is taken possession of by a “magician” (an individual knowing how to do this) who desires to play the role of the person admired. In that way the envelopes of many famous people in history remain as long as their remembrance is preserved and is the object of admiration. Those who, after their passing to the emotional world, still worship those idols can always count on seeing them again. There is plenty of room for everybody in the emotional world with its six interpenetrating regions. It is true that each region has its own particular sphere, but all kinds of matter exist everywhere due to the fact that atomic matter, common to the whole emotional world, exists everywhere.
7The three lower regions of the emotional world coexist with (penetrate) the physical world. The three higher regions are the worlds of pure imagination, where the thoughts of men shape reality at will. In the three lower regions, life is largely mental chaos. There people are, if possible, even more disoriented than in the physical world. Like is drawn to like, individuals are drawn to their idiological sects, and the content of discussion, when it is not mere gossip (mostly poisonous, reminiscences from physical existence) is endless, meaningless debates on religion, philosophy, politics, etc.
8Three pictures.
9Sinnett constantly lectured on theosophy to those who wanted to listen. Bismarck explained to his faithful followers how insane was the politics of Kaiser Wilhelm II. (They constantly receive news from the physical world, partly from newcomers, partly through clairvoyants.) A general who had fallen in World War I asked where he was: “If this is heaven, I don’t give much for it; if this is hell, then it’s better than I thought.”
10Concerning the information given about individuals in the emotional world the truth that there are always exceptions to the rule applies here as everywhere else. Those who cling to such an existence or have special interests in physical people or regard it as their task to help and teach, etc. can prolong their sojourn in the emotional world considerably.
11Thus Queen Elizabeth I of England has only recently passed to the mental world. She was detained by her interest in England and its politics. There are plenty of old Indians who serve as so-called controllers at spiritist seances. It is always risky to dogmatize. Nothing is “firm”. You must tell generals from particulars.
12The religious notion that life in the emotional world is a purgatory in which souls are purified is part of religious fictionalism. It is true that such emotional desires as are gratified only through the organism cannot be satisfied in the emotional world and that such desires may cause suffering (quite unnecessarily for those who use their will). However, that world is no purgatory in the proper sense. Physical life, not life in the emotional world, could be called both hell and purgatory.
1We are in the planetary emotional eon, which according to the normal plan for consciousness development is devoted to emotional consciousness. In the emotional eon, emotionality is the dynamics proper. In the mental eon, mental consciousness will supply the dynamics. The mental selves, who have attained the developmental stage that will become general in the mental eon, are also able to use the mental energy. They constitute a scarce minority, being disciples of the planetary hierarchy. However, it has not been possible to follow out the normal plan with the monads that have been transferred to our planet.
2The emotional world is the particular world of the animal kingdom, and emotional consciousness is the particular animal consciousness. The emotional eon is that developmental cycle during which animals should normally causalize, acquire their own causal envelopes and in so doing transmigrate to the human kingdom.
3Our mankind can largely be divided into two categories: about 40 per cent of the total number (60 billion) causalized on our planet 22-18 million years ago, and 60 per cent have been transferred here from other planets. Normally, those 60 per cent should have reached the mental stage (have their monad centred in the triad mental molecule) already at their transition to Earth.
4Instead, the majority are still at the lower emotional stage (the stage of repulsion) and only a small portion at the higher emotional stage (the stage of attraction, of the mystic) and fewer still at the mental stage.
5Knowing this one is amazed to see men act in their sense of self-importance. They think they are very clever if they can do something more than others, know something more than others, grasp something more than others, understand something more than others. One has a vision of the cock on top of the dunghill that thinks he is important because he can crow.
1It is high time that people began to know themselves, at least as to their emotionality.
2Mankind is at the emotional stage, and its two basic needs are the physical need of maintenance and the emotional need, these two needs being taken in the widest sense. On the lower levels of the emotional stage (the levels of repulsion), the insatiable desires to possess and to hate control the individual. In contrast, cultural man strives to reduce his physical desires in order to devote himself the more to other interests determined largely by his level of development.
3When a man has reached beyond the stage of barbarism, he is an emotional self. He remains an emotional self as long as emotional consciousness is his most intense kind of consciousness. In most people, all expressions of active consciousness are still of an emotional nature. When a man has acquired mental will and using it can control emotional will, he is a mental self. He achieves this by acquiring perspective (47:5) and system thinking (47:4).
4Higher consciousness dominates a lower kind when the higher kind has become as activated as the lower one. In this there is a relation of correspondence. Principle thinking (47:6) cannot control the two highest emotional consciousnesses (48:2,3). In order to control emotional imagination in those molecular kinds, as a rule perspective thinking (47:5) is required.
5Since the emotional envelope contains six kinds of emotional molecules, there are also six kinds of emotional consciousness. The study of these largely falls within the animal kingdom beginning with the highest stages of the vegetable kingdom. This will be the business of research, of so-called animal psychology. Researchers who have studied the pertaining problems will incarnate when there is a prospect of understanding the nature of that consciousness and mankind realizes its task of supervising the consciousness development of animal monads.
6Mankind should have put this particular emotional kingdom behind it. For emotional consciousness actually is the particular consciousness of animals, and mental consciousness that of men. Regrettably, it has not been possible to keep the timetable for normal development. When we banished the planetary hierarchy in Atlantis, the consequence was that mankind was thrown back in its development (the feat of the black lodge) and now still lives in emotional consciousness. However, the planetary hierarchy has declared that it is prepared to reappear. It depends on mankind whether this will be possible. If we do not call the hierarchy back in the new zodiacal epoch with its unique prospects of mental consciousness activation, then there is a risk that it will take thousands of years more.
7More than 95 per cent of the present mankind are at the emotional stage. About 85 per cent of this mankind are at the lower emotional stage (the stages of barbarism and civilization). About 15 per cent have managed to reach beyond the lower emotional. The planetary hierarchy expects that, in the Aquarian zodiacal epoch which has recently begun, ever more people at the higher emotional and the mental stages will be able to incarnate to continue their consciousness development. It is the business of already incarnate men to make the intellectual climate suitable for them.
8Men do not know that those who live in the physical world are embraced and penetrated by the emotional world, the mental world, the world of ideas (to limit the description to these worlds). They can lead a physical life, an emotional life, a mental life, and a life of ideas. Since most people are not interested in problems of thought or in “ideas that rule the world” (that are part of the evolutionary process of consciousness), self-consciousness has to choose between physical experiences, emotions, and figments of the imagination; consciousness limited to the two lowest worlds.
9Most people live their physical lives pure and simple, largely on their habits with daily experiences. In addition they live emotional lives, which subjectively are much more intense than their physical lives, but this they do not seem to realize. In our time, with its revolutions in politics, society, technology, and culture, most people live in an emotional chaos with fear of the future (so-called dread of life) as key-note. When this fear becomes acute, many seek comfort in the belief in a divine helper.
10People’s emotional life moves in the emotional vibrational layers of public opinion, is affected and strengthened by them.
11As long as mankind is found at the stage of civilization (and more are than everybody thinks), the individual may give proof of qualities that belong at the lowest barbarian stage. Man is a conglomeration of almost all bad and many good qualities. At higher stages of development man acquires ever more good qualities. He has once had the bad ones, and everything he has had remains in the subconscious of the triad. Like everything subconscious the bad ones can be roused in a new incarnation, if an opportunity arises. It is true that the higher the individual’s level, the less probable such relapses are, but the risk exists. Generally, the individual is protected from such dangers by the environment he grows up in. In children, however, it is easy to recognize even the worst qualities (cruelty, for instance) before they have passed this transitory stage.
12Of men in general it may be said that the majority appear to be without a “soul”. Certainly everybody has a causal envelope, but its consciousness is part of the superconscious, which is inaccessible to all who have not reached the stage of culture (the higher emotionality, the stage of attraction with its striving for unity).
13Men are controlled by their emotions, and these are the impelling forces in their thinking, saying, and doing. They must find expression, and that is the reason why the desire of gossip, among other desires, is irresistible and the inability to be silent so manifest. If the individual is found in the lower emotionality with its repulsion and aggressiveness, then speech and action are expressive of hatred (with its countless nuances of ever more sophisticated modes of expression).
14Individuals who have managed to solve their own complexes of inhibition and had success in life by exploiting circumstances skilfully typically often become aggressive, reckless “boors” with Nietzschean superman manners, which are irresistibly comical to all who have acquired the humorist’s sense of proportions. What a ridiculous figure he is in the eyes of those who have a knowledge of the levels of development!
15“Relatively few people think. The rest are busy with emotions, mainly emotional observations, and the many kinds of emotionalism, such as irritation, sorrows, grief, anxiety, depression, and sometimes aspiration. Few live in the world of thought and fewer still in that of reality.” (D.K.) Few people are content and glad. Most people take everything tragically and live a repulsive life. Then they accuse life of their own perverseness.
16At the present stage of mankind’s development, we cannot (according to the planetary hierarchy) help others by the intellect but only by “loving understanding”. By mentality (“cold facts”) you do not achieve understanding in other individuals than those at the higher mental stage.
17To feel that he is not loved is a harsh destiny for man. He then turns cold, hard, bitter. It is amazing when this has not been realized even by the two partners of a marriage. Never does a man fall more easily a victim as when a woman pretends love. And when will people learn to tell the difference between mere falling in love and the devotion of true love? Flirtation is a play that is dangerous for the disappointed and injudicious. They so easily imagine that it is serious business. This bears witness to an irresponsible attitude in both parties with tragic consequences. What is said here will of course, as everything sensible, be contested by all wiseacres. It is in any case an unworthy pastime. They could show their admiration, affection, compassion in a better way.
18All idiologies belong at the emotional stage. That part of mankind who have reached the mental stage have acquired so much critical reason that they see that all those fictional systems of ignorance are untenable, especially apparent when compared with Pythagorean hylozoics. It is to be noted here that the two lowest mental consciousnesses are said to belong to the emotional stage because those who have acquired them are still emotional selves. Only when he has come into possession of perspective thinking is man a mental self, is he independent of emotionality.
19Even so-called intellectual geniuses deal exclusively with the two lowest mental faculties (47:6,7), and their “creative activity” is the work of imagination. Even imagination is part of emotionality, which fact apparently needs to be pointed out. All creative activity in the arts as well is emotional. Inventors in the physical can once in a while receive an idea from the world of ideas. They are wise in regarding it as a gift from some interested deva who wants to help mankind. It is not an instance of personal “favour” even though it benefit some certain individual. Men could receive enormous help from the devas if they did not abuse everything for their own good and to the detriment of others.
20Almost the entire fiction literature belongs to emotionality, a fact that could be informative to those who have wondered about this literature. The world of fiction is a world of seductive enchantment from which many people have been unable to free themselves. But there are higher worlds.
21Mankind will largely remain at the emotional stage during the next few million years, even if emotional consciousness will be increasingly intellectualized. Transition to the mental stage (47:5) will be done under ever stronger, unconscious influence from Augoeides.
22The majority of mankind is found at a stage of transition from the lower to the higher emotionality. The individuals of the pronounced hatred type are probably a minority. The question is, however, whether hatred is not more easily roused than compassion. Much depends on the levels of incarnated clans in various epochs. Racial hatred, national hatred, hatred of dissidents in political, social, and religious matters has still a terrifying spread. Still spiteful words are more readily listened to than kind ones.
23Mankind at the emotional stage will always remain disoriented in life view, for emotional consciousness can only produce illusions. All religions and all occult sects are proofs of this truth. Wherever emotionality enters in reality will be falsified. The “salvation” of mankind lies in the fact that the evolutionary monads in their first triads definitively move from the emotional atom to the mental molecule. But what should be done with a mankind for which “feeling is everything” and which in emotional expansion “finds everything”? No two individuals find the same things in it. When mankind has reached the highest mystic stage (48:2), then every individual will have his own “religion” and every individual will be as absolutely certain as all the others that his conception is the only true one. When asked whether he has seen god, everybody will say, just as Ramakrishna answered that question by Vivekananda, “Yes, as distinctly as I see you”. For everybody will have shaped a live elemental in his highest emotional sphere and supplied it with the highest kind of emotional molecules (48:2), the highest kind of emotional consciousness, and the highest kind of emotional energy.
1The tendencies (taken over from the emotional envelopes of previous incarnations) most powerfully strengthening illusoriness are self-pity, criticism of others, and suspicion.
2These tendencies contain much more than what appears from their designations. At all events, they arise from the fact that you are busy with your own self (instead of forgetting it) and that your sense of unity is deficient. All first selves are imperfect in various respects and actually to a higher degree than self-estimation will ever recognize. To concentrate on the faults and failings of other people is to draw out and strengthen the corresponding slumbering tendencies in your own emotional envelope (instant cause and effect).
3Emotional illusions include the feeling of having missed your task, made mistakes, failed in a general sense. All such things are part of the necessary experiences in life. We make mistakes until we have gained wisdom. By grieving for them, consider them, we just increase our inability to overcome them. Memories of them must be swept away from consciousness and never be heeded, which precisely was the meaning of the ancient exhortation: Do not look back! Let the subconscious take care of them and work them up into useful lessons, which it does if we do not reinforce them in our waking consciousness. Whenever we realize that we have made a mistake, our waking consciousness is sufficiently activated for the subconscious to work the experience up, incorporate it into existing complexes and thereby into that fund which expresses itself as instinct in subsequent incarnations. By being constantly recalled they become living factors in the waking consciousness and illusive powers that make us unfit for life. If we look upon our mistake as a useful lesson, it is turned into a positive gain instead of a destructive factor.
4With regard to people’s incredible capacity for self-deception in the matter of everything occult we must expect that they, upon being informed about the planetary hierarchy, “masters”, causal selves, etc., at once believe they are in contact with high beings or are themselves causal selves, even superessential selves. There is no limit to the excesses of imagination. Just as theologians believe they know about the will of god, philosophers know how reality is made up, so these fantasts believe in their vagaries, freaks, revelations, etc. Therefore, it must be clearly stated that man cannot acquire knowledge of reality.
5Since this self-deception cannot be seen through, certainly many people, when the fact of discipleship has become common knowledge, will believe and try to convince others that they are accepted disciples. But that cat won’t jump. For no disciple bears witness to his discipleship. And an initiate or a causal self does not reveal his status or allege to know anything. Still less do they accept payment for their services.
6“The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” Those who imagine they have been assigned with that task can only muddle things up. Regrettably their number is Legion. The Messiah complex is one that everybody will be afflicted with in some incarnation before he reaches up to the Sokratean realization. Self-importance is a very common affliction at lower stages.
7One of the strongest fictions is the theological fiction of “sin”, according to theological fictionalism a “crime against an infinite being who requires an infinite punishment”. The fact that such a fiction was accepted is evidence that the Church was totally ignorant of reality and life. The power of that illusion is strengthened by the mental fiction. There is no other “sin”, however, than mistakes about the laws of life, and those mistakes we have to suffer for or make good and do so only in the physical life periods of our future incarnations, thus not during our sojourns in the emotional and mental worlds between incarnations. Certainly men can hate also in the emotional world (though not in the mental world, where everything is just “bliss”). Such expressions of hatred have to be reaped in subsequent incarnations. They also make it more difficult for the individual to acquire the qualities of attraction. The individual himself puts stones in his way and counteracts his own consciousness development. Sowing shall be reaped. But when and how this is done in a new life we cannot say, neither as for ourselves nor as for others. The attempts of occultists to explain why we suffer are erroneous. The law of reaping is unfathomable.
8The individual always falls a victim to illusoriness as long as the self is the centre, everything revolves around the self, everything is conceived in relation to his own self, as long as there are thoughts of his own self. It is only in the first triad that the self is the centre of the universe, the self is something important. Liberation from this self (“forget yourself”) is the prerequisite to contact (identification) with Augoeides and to passing to the second triad. “I live; yet not I, but Christos lives in me” means that the self has entered into unity, has ceased to be a separate self. The second self has no thought of himself but lives in unity.
9The self as an emotional being, as an emotional self (the monad centred in the emotional atom), the mystic as victim of his illusions, in his longing for “union with god”, in his intense eagerness to “realize the ideal”, mistakes his emotional attraction, his aspiration, his will to unity, for essentiality, and the result is deplorable. The self does not see its “spiritual egoism”, lives for the realization of its self (its first self!!) instead of forgetting itself in the service of life. Anyone who wants to reach the second self must forget his first self, liberate himself from his visions, from his dear ideals, from the truth he worships, stop thinking of his work, his sacrifice, everything that is “his”, cease to be a self, since it is only a first self.
10Perhaps you see how impossible this is without knowledge of reality; that you need a true world view as a firm basis for your life view. The self as a first self can never solve the problems of life but must become the victim of illusions and fictions.
11By forgetting itself in the service of life, in the fulfilment of its tasks and duties as a man, the self acquires unconsciously and automatically everything necessary to “self-realization”, to the acquisition of a “higher self”.
12Man can entrust himself to life, for it is Life (whatever name you use for it; names that men in their grotesque ignorance dispute about and consider essential) that made him a human being and will bring him into the “unknown” Life, unknown because the speculations of the first self do not solve the problem of life.
13Life sees to it that man will have all the experiences that he must have to develop, to acquire all the qualities and abilities he needs to become a second self.
1It is at the emotional stage that the problem of good and evil must be solved by the individual. Good is everything that agrees with the Law (the laws of nature of the world view, the laws of life of the life view). Good is everything that promotes consciousness development (the law of development and the law of self-realization). Evil is everything that wars against the Law.
2The development of the concepts of right is a long process. The path was called by the Buddha (600 B.C.) the “noble middle path”. The more the sense of right is refined, the narrower is the path until it has become the razor-edged path that only wisdom can discover.
3To the extent that the laws of the land are necessary for our life together without friction, they are at the stage of civilization regarded as sufficient guidelines. At the stage of culture, with its attraction to all living creatures and striving for unity, the conception is increasingly refined.
4The emotional envelope is the battle-ground where the monad in the first triad fights for liberation; and the weapon with which the monad overcomes is intelligent, loving service. The idea of struggle is the most apt of all similes just as service is compared to a weapon. He who has overcome knows that. What remains after that is work but no struggle, which is always emotional. Also the brooding of ignorance is emotional, and unnecessary since the knowledge exists for everybody. We become fully free from emotionality only as causal selves. Also the mental self needs emotional will for action, as impelling force.
5The “psyche” of the normal individual is his emotional consciousness. With this he controls automatically his physical envelopes. In his emotional life he is thrown between two opposites: love and hatred in their countless degrees and various forms, between joy and grief, happiness and suffering, doubt and certainty, contentment and discontentment, worry and calm, fear and courage, etc. He is the victim of his emotional envelope vibrations, which are often activated from without.
6Urge and desire create illusions that are taken to be realities. If imagination (always coloured by desire) with its intellectual fictitiousness is added, the individual is a defenceless victim.
7There is quite another result when he decides not to let himself be controlled by such emotions, refuses to pay attention to them and takes recourse to his imagination (his “ability to think”), which will be easier the higher the level.
8Fear and anxiety, sorrow, etc., are part of emotionality, and if the pertaining vibrations are heeded by the self’s consciousness, they may be strengthened to the limit of the supportable. The wisest method is to direct attention (which is the self) to either physical or mental things, away from emotional states.
9Unavoidable suffering exists only in the three lowest regions of the physical and emotional worlds. The fact that Christos, for instance, if he momentarily identifies his consciousness with the collective consciousness of mankind, will experience agony is quite another matter. Such conditions are unavoidable as long as all monads have not entered into unity.
10The condition to reach happiness is to forget yourself and live for others, live for life, live for something else than yourself. There is no harm in trying.
11In moments of depression, failure, when weariness, despondency, and discouragement gain the upper hand, the disciple should remind himself that he nevertheless is on the way, that his Augoeides is watching him, wants to help him and also does so, if it is permitted. Man’s soul is an angel of light, always compassionate. Why grieve then?
12Will to development, will to self-determination (the opposite of self-assertion), will to unity, are tendencies that in those who will for development at all require a highly awakened intellect to be able to discern at the emotional stage.
13During incarnation in the physical envelopes, mankind lives in respect of consciousness in three worlds (gross physical, etheric physical, and emotional), one objective life and two subjective lives. It is in the emotional consciousness that all the vagaries arise of which man by and large is a helpless victim, which fact appears in our time more than ever before with constantly new occult sects, constantly new theories, countless prophets. All are victims of their emotional consciousness, which makes things in the emotional world intensely alive, results of the formative imagination of mankind (also collectively). This will go on, until individuals are able to centre their first triad in the mental envelope instead of in the emotional.
14Goethe is the best example of the power beauty wields to fascinate also far advanced mental geniuses. Time and again he fell victim to beauties who appreciated his genius. Strange enough, he never understood the fact that what bewitched him was not the real woman in question but the form he shaped in the emotional world and supplied with attractive energies. The only way for Goethe to release himself from the suffering that subsequent separation and self-denial caused was to transpose the attractive energies to a work of literary creation. The state of being in love abates as imagination ceases to supply the emotional form with fresh energies, and later on the elemental dissolves. Only an esoterician knows anything about the pertaining automatic processes. This is true of the common condition of falling in love, not of the friendships based on the affinity of souls, which are due to the departments of the envelopes or community of past lives with stable destiny relationships (within esoteric clans, for instance).
15It is not easy to keep yourself on the highest level you have managed to attain. We can easily, suddenly, by the force of an impulse or when being in contact with other people, plunge down some hundred levels, say and do things which in other circumstances would be impossible. After such experiences many people are very unhappy and blame themselves, consider themselves failures, etc. They do not know that in so doing they harm themselves. The right method is to fix your attention on higher things and strengthen them by renewing your effort to sense them. We must learn to show forbearance with ourselves (as well as with others), being certain that our striving must yield results. The accumulated effect of thousands of lives in the lower states is not overcome in one single incarnation.
16The emotional stage is the most difficult of all stages of development. To free yourself completely from the influence of emotional energies so that you can determine yourself when to use them is regarded as a feat of true strength.
17Mankind is at the emotional stage because individual man in his life ignorance unfailingly falls a victim to his own and the collective illusoriness, being firmly convinced that he experiences reality, and this is precisely his serious mistake. The emotional world is the world of illusions and never the world of knowledge. All beings in the emotional world are, more or less, the victims of an erroneous conception of reality and of life, unless they have acquired knowledge in the physical world.
1Esoterics maintains that man needs religion at his present stage of development, and as long as he needs his emotional consciousness to activate essential consciousness. Here “religion” means norms of right and wrong for emotional life.
2At the stages of barbarism and civilization, men need elaborated systems of religious dogmas. At the stage of culture, man needs “mysticism” (individually formed “concept of god”: the father of all, unity, all-embracing life, etc.).
3When the individual has reached beyond the emotional stage, he no longer needs religion. Belief is then superseded by knowledge of reality.
4The term “religion” can refer to any kind of life view that is based on emotionality. All belief systems are included here, also those of science, and the majority of political idiologies.
5“No religion is higher than truth.” That fact reduces all religions to mere belief systems belonging to the emotional world, their theological literature may then fill however many libraries. Unbelievable amounts of time and energy have been wasted on writing nonsensical books on absurdities of all kinds, both theology and philosophy. And more libraries wait to be filled as long as mankind remains at the emotional stage.
6Perhaps you understand why the esoterician considers that emotional religion (life view) as well as mental science (world view) must cooperate for man’s consciousness development. But to be sure: it must be quite another religion, philosophy, and science than those now ruling, and they must be founded on true knowledge of reality, not on illusions, fictions, and historical pseudo-facts. Hypotheses are no firm foundations.
7The greatest mistake of the fathers of the church (pseudo-gnosticians) was that they eliminated the knowledge of reincarnation from the creed and made one largely unimportant incarnation man’s only life on earth that determined the “life eternal”. When then the teaching of sin as a crime against an infinite being who “because of his righteousness cannot forgive” but demands eternal punishment in everlasting hell, the power of the church was firmly established as it is to this very day.
8During the zodiacal epoch of Pisces (the last 2500 years) the planetary hierarchy attached importance to rousing the higher emotionality. This was the mission of the world-teacher, Christos-Maitreya. Religion was the only resource available during this epoch, before natural research could become a general activity and thereby the intellect could develop to a greater extent at the stage of civilization. As mankind acquires the necessary preconditions to develop mental consciousness, religion has not the same unique importance as before. Those who strive to develop their mentality and pass to the mental stage need another life view than religion, which is chiefly emotional. Such a mental life view includes the knowledge of the laws of life, and so of course also the law of sowing and reaping.
9The proof that common sense begins to assert itself is the fact that there is now a fairly general realization that the theological dogmas are absurd. Theology turns out to be less and less capable of meeting the demands of people.
1Any intellectual content to be found in the emotional world originates from the mental atoms involved into emotional molecules. The emotional atom (48) contains atoms of all the higher kinds (1—47).
2Consciousness development in the emotional and mental envelopes is by no means a parallel activity. In most people at the stage of civilization, the activated consciousness in emotional molecular kinds 48:4-7 corresponds to the activated consciousness in mental kinds 47:6,7.
3In the course of evolution, all kinds of passive consciousness in some higher envelope are activated by the individual’s active consciousness in his next lower envelope. An instance of this principle is the activation of mental consciousness by emotional consciousness. In that process, the mental envelope is attracted to the emotional and their coalescence grows ever stronger the further the activity continues. This has the effect that the two kinds of consciousness unite to produce a combination of emotional and mental consciousness, which in the lower emotional molecular kinds manifests itself mentally as “feeling” (diffuse mentality) and in higher kinds as “imagination” (a clearer expansive mentality). Of old the yoga philosophers have used the term “kama-manas” for this combined consciousness.
4Feeling as well as imagination – which are combinations of emotional urge (desire) and reason – can be considerably mentalized in those who cultivate mental interests. Mental molecules involve into emotional molecular kinds and enhance the capacity for reason. Of course this facilitates the individual’s transition to the mental stage.
5What in everyday speech is called “intellect” is mentalized emotional consciousness, mental atoms in emotional molecules or “associated” mental and emotional molecules (obtained in the coalescence of emotional and mental envelopes). So-called imagination is emotional consciousness of the highest kind. “Pure thought”, thought free from emotionality, is a rare phenomenon.
6Goethe’s statement, “Gefuhl ist alles” (feeling is all), shows that he had esoteric knowledge and thus knew the fact that the “psyche” of mankind is emotional. Man “lives” his “inner life” entirely in the emotional world, and that is why “feeling is all”.
7At the emotional stage there is no difference perceived between analysis and criticism. Emotion is either attractive or repulsive, making impersonal analysis impossible. Such an analysis is possible only at the mental stage on. It is easy to ascertain that emotionalists always conceive mental analysis emotionally and that their conception therefore sinks down into general injudiciousness.
8It is useless to appeal to reason when dealing with those at the lower emotional stage, those who still use the simplest inference thinking (47:7). They need to be informed about what is truly desirable, not what is truly rational. That is a thing which should be inculcated on all social workers. An appeal to reason may have some effect on those who have acquired the faculty of principle thinking (47:6).
9They read but reflections they must be fed with. It seems difficult to think out what the text implies beyond its literal sense, and precisely this shows how much still remains before mental activity is self-initiated. They read to know what people have thought so that they can think the same thoughts, and having got that learning they deem themselves wise. That is what the esoterician calls robot thinking. However, a wise man thinks his own thoughts.
10More than 90 per cent of what the normal individual “thinks” are emotional vibrations from human mass thinking and the subconscious. If they were the individual’s own thoughts, then he would possess control of consciousness, a faculty that very few men have acquired. “Thoughts” come and go as they like, however, independently of man’s will. At the present stage of mankind’s development, they come from unsuitable directions. Anyone who takes those fancies and impulses for his own rational thoughts falls victim to the imaginings of the ignorance of reality and life. This, too, is very easy to ascertain. All history bears witness to it. Psychologists, however, do not understand; psychologically, they are still at the stage of infancy.
11A striking proof that our “thoughts” need not be our own is the fact that we often say what we do not mean and afterwards are amazed how we could say such a stupid or even nasty thing. Of course we are judged by such blunders.
12Some theosophists consider that in order to facilitate thought-control we should keep our thought of the master in the background so that, whenever our attention is not occupied with necessary tasks, we always think of the master. Only a disciple knows of his own master, however, and he is told by the master that he should instead think of his work for mankind, which is always there to be considered. On the other hand, everybody who wishes to contact his Augoeides should think of him, for it is he who has taken upon himself to supervise our development.
13Emotional mankind can be divided into three mental categories: those in whom the mental atoms in emotional molecules enable them to perceive physical reality; those possessing the faculty of simple logical inference thinking (47:7); and abstract thinkers (47:6). Also thinkers of the third category belong at the emotional stage, which fact appears in the emotional elements that accompany their thoughts and almost always make themselves felt in some respect - also when they remain hidden to the individual himself -, which fact outsiders can ascertain in their personal thinking, family thinking, class thinking, national thinking, racial thinking and the other kinds of subjective emotionality. “Pure” mental thinking is impersonal and objective in all relations.
14As long as emotional life is powerful enough to influence us, pure mental thinking is precluded except in the matter of purely mental problems (those of mathematics, for instance). In order to acquire mental consciousness, man must first have acquired the faculty of concentration (fixed attention) and meditation (continuous attention directed for some length of time to problems to be solved).
15There are two extreme positions among “thinkers”. Those of the one standpoint consider, “This can be understood only by experts, and they must know”. Those of the other say, “Only I understand this,” when they have not understood a thing - or, as a “great philosopher” is alleged to have said: “Only god and I understand this.” The categories in between are not much smarter. Without knowledge everything is guesswork. What is the use of being a “universal” or a “centenary genius”, if the “genius” lacks the knowledge of reality?
16Belief is in most cases little better than superstition. Anyone who has not comprehended and understood does not know whether he knows. Also the true knowledge is superstition until you have by your own work mastered it so that you can explain in a rational way why you realize it to be correct. At mankind’s present stage of development (the stage of life ignorance), a tendency to cocksureness is a proof of emotionalism.
1At the emotional stage man can know nothing about higher worlds. At the higher emotional stage, he can certainly, by unconscious or conscious application of the laws of life, reach a subjective contact with causal consciousness. He can reach 47:3 via 48:3 and 47:2 via 48:2. But he cannot use more of it than he is able to express through his higher emotionality. It is a long step from there to the purposeful use of causal consciousness, to the causal self. And it is only as a conscious disciple of the planetary hierarchy that he can become a causal self.
2At the present stage of mankind’s development, the emotional envelope is man’s most important envelope and emotional consciousness is largely man’s highest kind of consciousness. Therefore, it is important to understand that emotionalized thought has but small prospects of knowledge. That is the understanding lacking, which entails that people fall victims to the speculations of ignorance, victims to all manner of fantasts with their pretended knowledge. When it has once become clear to you what emotional consciousness can know and cannot know, you are also in a position to assess how well-founded, or rather ill-founded, are the claims to knowledge of reality made by countless self-deceived prophets in the physical as well as the emotional world. Everything communicated in or from the emotional world is either sheer illusion or knowledge from people who have studied esoterics in the physical world.
3How difficult it is to acquire true knowledge of reality, and in so doing not to make mistakes, is clear from the fact that even those in the fifth natural kingdom always check their ideas with those in the sixth kingdom. The first self cannot acquire knowledge of reality, which is a fact that cannot be too strongly emphasized. No fourth kingdom individual can rightly judge the reality content of his learning. Those who assert the opposite have in so doing exposed their incompetence.
4The knowledge of the superphysical we possess we have received from the planetary hierarchy. Any other information about the “superphysical” (actually a misnomer, for what is implied here is everything beyond 49:5) is fictitious. Without esoterics, emotional learning in the emotional world is not knowledge. Emotional consciousness will never get beyond the stage of belief where emotion decides. At the mental stage rules logical conviction based on ascertained facts, experience common to all mankind, and logically inescapable systems of thought. The fact that scientists, who have no logical right to make statements about anything beyond physical knowledge, deny realities they cannot themselves ascertain, testifies to a dogmatic attitude and in actual fact evidences their inability to solve problems of epistemology, or theoretical problems of knowledge. They have the logical right to be agnostics but not skeptics (deniers). It is all a matter of developmental stages. Those who have achieved a contact with the causal world, have experienced a causal intuition, can never more doubt.
5There are those who have personally met with members of the planetary hierarchy. There are incarnated causal selves, essential selves, 45-selves, 44-selves, and 43-selves. Still higher selves (42-selves, etc.) cannot incarnate, for no organism could stand their vibrations. However, they are able to make themselves forms of physical atomic matter, forms that they can easily make visible to all, clothed in the lowest kind of gross physical matter (49:7). They cannot appear in public on account of the prevalent skepticism, the prevalent sensationalism, the prevalent curiosity and forwardness, the prevalent general life ignorance which in any case cannot understand a thing of what they could communicate. People understand only what they have experienced and worked up, largely only what physical science has taught them to comprehend. When mankind has acquired esoteric knowledge and feels the need of those who can show it how to solve its insoluble problems of the right way of thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting, then they will be able to appear.
1Being a member of a so-called cultured society, man has been fed with many idiologies. He is familiar with several views each of which is typical of some stage of development. If he is an “educated” and “cultured” individual he tries, according to his dispositions, interests, and abilities, to apply the pertaining instructions of how to lead a “life worthy of the human being”, not least from his need of appearing “upright”. If he wants to know his own stage of development, he tests his attitude to the various phenomena of life and his own norms of action.
2With all this heterogeneous learning, he is most often composed of all contradictory things he has assimilated, mottos and guidelines for higher as well as lower stages. Sometimes he seems to be at the stage of civilization, sometimes at the stage of culture or even at the stage of humanity.
3If he is in doubt about his status, he might get some guidance from his answer to the question what he could possibly do under trying conditions. If he strives after self-realization, he seeks to discard the bad qualities he discovers in that process. Besides, the extent of his understanding of things human bears witness to the experiences of life he has assimilated.
4In our time mankind is living in a perfect chaos of all manner of vagaries. A journal committed to “experiments with truth” (every such experiment turns out to be a lie) publishes any occult nonsense and presents a medley of what they do not know but for some reason believe. Superstition is rife and every view presented is as true as anyone else. Each new, isolated statement is expounded and explained by fantasts and is accepted by the mass of undiscerning readers.
5If the foundation, the knowledge of reality and life, is absent, then all assumptions, vagaries, freaks, brainwaves, hypotheses and theories amount to nothing but an intellectual play, of which fact our fiction literature is just one great example. That literature deals predominantly with the lower emotionality and the lower mentality (apart from pornography on the lowest bottom level). If you do not have the knowledge, then what you write has no foundation, but everything you say is in the air. And every writer has his own opinion about life, which precisely is the sign of the absence of knowledge. It is all guesswork, more or less acute and profound, witty and “literary”.
6Theologians, philosophers (including semanticists), mystics, spiritualists, occultists, clairvoyants, yogis all have different views of reality. However, there is only one reality and therefore only one knowledge of reality. Whenever there are several views, religions, philosophies, etc., disorientation and not knowledge is prevalent. All idiologies are the speculative products of ignorance. Man cannot acquire knowledge of reality. We receive the knowledge from the planetary hierarchy, from individuals who have reached the fifth and sixth natural kingdoms. The knowledge is not given out to individual disciples but only to groups of disciples who have acquired telepathic common consciousness. That has proved to be the only way of forestalling misunderstanding. Those who give themselves out as being disciples are no disciples, nor are those who say they are members of such a group as described above.
7The occultists do not seem to have understood yet the fact that by their imaginings they form in the emotional world material phenomena, which clairvoyants take to be the real things. Everything perceptible in that world is a product of human speculation. As soon as they get hold of some new esoteric facts they start speculating. They imagine, for instance, the planetary hierarchy and its members, and the result is (if their power of imagination is strong enough) that a replica of the hierarchy with the individuals they have heard of is formed in the emotional world and is there found by clairvoyants who can bear witness to the existence of such a reality. The material forms mentioned are grasped with desire by “researchers” in the emotional world who with their imagination (believing they make additional discoveries) reinforce the forms, often nearly making them permanent. There are always those who desirously seize the opportunity to lead people astray and also are able to “impersonate” those forms, appearing as true representatives of the planetary hierarchy.
1Philosophers and scientists can know nothing about the consciousness aspect of existence. Psychologists believe that consciousness is a phenomenon that is possible only in the “nervous substance” of organisms. At any event they are able to study only the so-called psyche of the organism.
2Only at the end of the 18th century they began to wonder whether “emotion might be an independent function of the soul” and not, as had been assumed till then, a concomitant of sense perceptions. Long they assumed that emotion consisted in perceptions of pleasure and displeasure. Wundt discovered the pairs of opposites, “Erregung und Beruhigung” (“irritation and calming down”) and “Spannung und Losung” (“excitement and release”), and he was hailed a pioneer.
3They do not know what feeling is, or what will is. They regard emotionality as a mediatory phenomenon between physical reality and the intellect and not as having a function of its own.
4Still they have not discovered the two most basic emotional energies: attraction and repulsion. Perhaps they will do it when they have been informed about it through esoterics. And then it will be science.
5In order to explore emotionality you must be able to objectively study phenomena in the emotional world, be able to distinguish primary involvatory matter and secondary involutionary matter, be able to study the expressions of consciousness in the six different emotional molecular matters. Only causal selves are able to do so.
6Moreover, you must be able to study man’s emotional envelope with its different kinds of matter, especially be able to ascertain the various organs of perception and activity of the envelope, what kinds of consciousness and energy express themselves in these centres.
7Psychologists have no idea of anything of this, and if they read about it, they reject it all as “superstition”, for to that category they relegate everything they do not or cannot know anything about. And no scientist will condescend to acquaint himself with such things. That is wise of them. For they quite lack the prerequisites of such study.
1During the 2500 years that philosophy has existed (the zodiacal epoch of Pisces), the problem of the possibilities and boundaries of knowledge (the so-called theory of knowledge) has been the chief problem of philosophy. Now it begins to dawn on the philosophers that this problem is insoluble. The problem is insoluble also psychologically, since only a higher kind of consciousness can see the limits of a lower kind. The first self cannot decide where the boundary to its faculty of knowledge goes. And since there must not be anything that philosophers cannot explain, they have resorted to the assertion that the basic problems of philosophy and so all reality concepts are nothing but traditional figments of the brain.
2To assert that problems do not exist is a convenient way of getting rid of them. It is annoying, however, that they indeed exist and come up again in each new generation. In less than a hundred years hence it will be possible to film phenomena of the etheric world as well as of the emotional world. This will also bring about the definitive elimination of philosophy. Philosophers will have no more opportunity to disorient mankind, and that goes for theologians as well.
3Then it will be the turn of the clairvoyants to dominate public opinion until also clairvoyance has proved its insufficience. Clairvoyants see what normal individuals cannot see. There have been many clairvoyants. The most famous include Swedenborg, Ramakrishna, Steiner, and, recently in Scandinavia, Martinus.
4There are seven different main kinds of emotional objective consciousness, so-called clairvoyance, divided according to molecular kinds, 48:1-7. Add to this the fact that perception is individual, due to individual character and previous development. There are innumerable kinds of clairvoyance concerning space as well as time phenomena. Everyone who occupies himself with such faculties is a clairvoyant in some limited sense.
5According to esoterics (which means the knowledge received from the planetary hierarchy, the individuals of the fifth and sixth natural kingdoms), man can acquire objective consciousness beyond the emotional one only as a disciple of some teacher in the planetary hierarchy. Mental objective consciousness is acquired together with the causal one and only by causal selves.
6The objective consciousness beyond organic sense perceptions possible for non-disciples is physical etheric and emotional. The physical etheric one is exact. The emotional one, which is also called clairvoyance, cannot be exact.
7The correspondence between the emotional world and the mental world appears in the fact that the two lowest kinds of mental consciousness (47:6,7) can make themselves felt in the four lower emotional kinds (48:4-7). The two highest emotional kinds (48:2,3) are beyond the control of the lower mentality (47:6,7). In those two emotional regions you see everything you want to see and imagination reigns supreme, unaffected by mental reason. There, too, clairvoyants and yogis make their inevitable mistakes. There everything which an unbridled imagination may fantasize at once takes objective, material shape so that the clairvoyant is convinced that it is indisputable reality. It should be added that those are the regions of the mystics as well.
8Those who have attained the two regions mentioned and acquired objective consciousness in molecular kinds 48:2,3 fall helpless victims to the constructions of their imagination, not being able to see through the illusoriness of their creations. Nothing could be done about that. They are quite sincerely convinced that they see right. It is regrettable that they always succeed in disorienting other people.
9The mental control mentioned requires, in order to be used properly, a detailed knowledge of the constitution of emotional reality, and such a knowledge is not available to men. Only causal selves possess it and are able to apply it. And causal selves, too, easily make mistakes unless they are very careful in every detail, and this fact alone shows that it is a hopeless attempt for man.
10It is typical of clairvoyants that they firmly believe that they experience absolute reality. If in addition they have got some esoteric knowledge, they perceive as graphic reality what they have studied in theory and may believe they are however far advanced. But no two clairvoyants see the same things. Everyone has his own view of reality, a view that is unlike those of all the others (quite like philosophers in so far as they are independent thinkers), since whatever they see is not permanent reality but individual creations.
11However, all causal selves have the same conception of material reality. That reality can be perceived in only one way, whereas verbal descriptions of it may differ on account of differences in terminology, which fact has always caused confusion of ideas. That is why it is important to agree on a common international terminology.
12In all ages there have been clairvoyants. The ancients, who lived in that state, often were more intense in their observations and imaginings than are the more divided people of our time. Thus for instance the stories of the Old Testament have not merely found “confirmation” by clairvoyants but have also been supplanted with individual additions, so that those who research the old historical phenomena of the emotional world find several versions of the same historical tale, all of them shaped according to the researchers’ imagination. Historical research in the emotional world thus is as unreliable as that in the physical world.
13Many who think they are able to foresee the future of other people see the plans that their “patient” fantasized about, thus a kind of telepathy.
14Only those who in the past were so-called vestals can, in certain heaven-endowed moments, contact the consciousness of the emotional atomic kind and there catch a vision of a possible future, a vision that will be fulfilled if no new influencing factors enter, changing the course of events. Warnings by such a “vestal” against misfortunes of the near future should always be taken seriously. They could be justified in fact. You should not regard such predictions as infallible, however, for if the vestal’s personality has contributed, the result will be wrong.
15Probably, we shall never reach any true clarity in these respects, since the planetary hierarchy is not interested in the phenomena of the emotional world and an essential self (the lowest kind of self that could investigate the matter objectively) probably considers that he has more important work to do. Also The Astral Plane by C. W. Leadbeater, which is in many respects a book of great merit, is just a preliminary attempt, like his book Clairvoyance little more than a sketch. In any case, these two works of his are the only reliable ones as far as they go.
1Man lives in emotional involutionary matter with its passive consciousness. Every active consciousness expression affects the passive consciousness of matter to instantly mould that matter into a certain form. That kind of consciousness is man’s central one and constitutes his “reason”. Pure mentality, free of any coalescence with emotionality, is practically non-existent except in mental selves emancipated from any emotionality.
2With his scanty knowledge of reality beyond the gross physical, the first self fails in his attempts at orienting himself in the emotional and mental worlds. Every assumption, every kind of imagination finds confirmation in those worlds. It is impossible for a first self to decide what in the emotional world is a figment of imagination and what is permanent reality. That is why the emotional world is the world of illusions and that is why esotericians assert with vigour that everything in the emotional world is lie.
3That is the world in which clairvoyants of all kinds (yogis included) make their observations. That is the world from which come all false ideas (mentalized emotional molecules), about 99 per cent of the ideas that mankind accepts as truth. That is the world in which all mistaken views are taken to be true and find confirmation, all philosophies and religions with their subjectivism have their basis, all occult sects have their origin and abode. That is the world which mankind takes to be the “spiritual world” with “cosmic consciousness”.
4All clairvoyants believe that what they see is permanent reality, whereas nothing in that world is more than a product of emotional and mental consciousness energy. They cannot know that the faintest expressions of emotional consciousness “create” material forms in the emotional world. Every consciousness expression is also an output of energy. We people the emotional world with our thoughts coloured with emotionality. We create replicas of everything we fantasize about, especially of all people we admire or worship. Then we bow down to those material forms of the emotional world as though they were the “genuine” things or persons.
5The clairvoyant is quite unable to study, in the proper sense, the matter aspect of the emotional world. The same is true of the normal individual after he has discarded his two physical envelopes. They see only what they already know, using the learning they have got in the physical world. That is a fact which occultists have not duly considered. There is no possibility without esoteric knowledge to orient oneself in the emotional world.
6The higher kind of emotional consciousness, the greater the intensity of experiences had. The illusoriness of the highest emotional spheres is so intense that also very advanced disciples of the planetary hierarchy (causal selves) have been deceived. In those regions you can find emotional replicas of everything that really exists in higher worlds. Ramakrishna made a truthful testimony by his: “I have seen god as distinctly as I see you.” He meant the live divine form he had unconsciously created in the highest kind of emotional molecular matter.
7Also higher kinds of emotional energy are sufficient to influence and transform physical matter, making magical phenomena (so-called materializations) possible.
8Regrettably, neither Besant nor Leadbeater warned emotionalists and clairvoyants with sufficient vigour against the inevitable delusiveness of the emotional world. Some of their books were written before they had become causal selves and before they had understood the true nature of the ongoing experiments.
9It cannot be too forcefully inculcated that the individual must be skeptical to all phenomena in the emotional world. In that world there is nothing corresponding to permanent reality. The emotional world is and will remain the world of illusions, however intensely its reality manifests itself. This fact is constantly forgotten by clairvoyants and by other people who have passed over to that world.
10The emotional world is the least “spiritual” of all worlds, and beings in that world are, on account of its irremediable illusoriness, quite unable to come into contact with the planetary hierarchy. That is why people are asked to try, as soon as possible after so-called death, to liberate themselves from their emotional envelopes and to pass to the mental world. They do so by refusing to take any interest in the pertaining phenomena and by directing their attention to mental ideas. Thereby the emotional envelope will not be supplied with new energies but will dissolve out of powerlessness.
1Clairvoyants see and, if they are clairaudient as well, they hear. But that does not equip them with the ability to judge the reality content of what they see and hear. If they believe what they hear, they are believers, believe what others say while having no guarantee that these possess the knowledge.
2It is difficult to decide who are the most unreasonable in their refusal to accept knowledge: blind believers or emotional clairvoyants. The individuals of the latter category can say in their defence that they are witnesses to the truth: they see and experience reality and they are being taught by teachers in that world about the things they see. They just report what they have seen, heard, and been taught by their “guides”. Precisely this is their error, however. They are unable to understand that the reality they see is a figment of the imagination, that the entire emotional world is an objective, material product of the imaginative life of all mankind, and that their teachers are as much victims to the illusoriness of the emotional world as they are themselves.
3Those in the emotional world do not know more about reality than those in the physical world. Rather, they are even more misled. No two individuals have the same view and opinion. But knowledge is one. All knowers share the same view. Whenever there are two different views, it is a matter of guesswork, assumption, belief, not knowledge.
4Moreover, the teachers as a rule have a religious background from their physical lives and so are doubly disoriented. They are not in contact with higher worlds and with their Augoeides. Augoeides takes no interest in those who can accept anything in the emotional world.
5Only causal and essential selves can decide, by investigating each individual case, from where clairvoyants in the higher emotional regions receive the impulses that trigger off the unconscious formation of phenomena that are taken to be permanent realities. Clairvoyants themselves have no ideas of the causes involved, unless their experiences depend on theories and conscious expectations. Yet clairvoyants often think they are omniscient, which is part of emotional illusoriness.
6If a clairvoyant in the higher regions of the emotional world gives himself up to speculation, he will be misled by his latent experiences and conceptions of things from past lives, and these become such live realities that they must appear as absolute. It would be totally meaningless to try to convince such a clairvoyant that he is the victim of his own creative imagination. He sees and knows and is certain that he experiences reality and is perfectly impervious to the remark that every clairvoyant sees something different from all the others but is as certain as all the others that he sees right.
7The clairvoyant has no use of a critical reason, since reason cannot deny that man sees what he sees. Only the esoteric knowledge of the deceptive nature of emotional matter can restrain the clairvoyant from using his faculty.
8Clairvoyants are all life-ignorant or self-deceived, be they Swedenborg, Steiner, or Ramakrishna. Unquestionably they are highly intelligent people. But that is not sufficient. Unquestionably they are great persons, emotional “saints”. But that is not sufficient. Neither intelligence nor sainthood affords any knowledge of reality, esoteric facts about higher worlds.
1Whenever the clairvoyant in higher emotional regions hears about higher worlds, higher kingdoms, higher beings, etc., his imagination takes charge of these “objects” and shapes in emotional matter live figures that he himself as well as other people see and take to be the originals. There is nothing that he cannot see. So great is the formative power of imagination.
2Clairvoyants speak of “streets of gold” in the emotional world. In the fifth region of the emotional world (48:3), composed of its particular kind of emotional matter, a sufficiently strong emotional consciousness expression shapes a material form of the appearance determined by imagination. If imagination conceives of gold, then matter will have that appearance. Many people read in legends of saints about diverse states of matter in the spiritual world and in so doing shape such forms in emotional matter, forms that those newly arrived in the emotional world take for permanent realities. Disciples are witnesses of experiments with the different emotional molecular kinds and are taught how to shape as well as to dissolve these matters.
3In order to develop his power of visualization, a disciple of the planetary hierarchy amused himself for several years by creating in his imagination a garden with its appurtenances. That garden still remains, and disciples who have been informed about its existence visit it and continually improve on it. It has a prospect of enduring for many centuries to come. A clairvoyant would without fail take it for indestructible reality, though it all could be swept away with thought.
4In the emotional world there are live replicas of all beings that men “worship”. All historical personages are found there in live emotional replicas, which the ignorant take for genuine. Being robots, they say what you know they said in the physical world. The majority of true believers have, under the influence of religious, spiritualist, yogic, etc. fictitious systems, unwittingly shaped a “divine form” or a “master” or a “guide” in the emotional world; generally a new form in each incarnation. In many cases, these emotional forms have been taken over by people in the emotional world who think they are able to help in this way. Only causal selves are able to decide how matters stand in individual cases; the man himself (whether clairvoyant or not) cannot possibly decide such things.
5The whole planetary hierarchy and planetary government in all their glory, and all great beings they have already heard about already have their replicas in the emotional world. Skilled “actors” in the emotional world who possess esoteric knowledge can use those replicas and act “masters”. How tricky this is appears best from the fact that also disciples of the planetary hierarchy may mistake the live replicas of their teachers, which they have unwittingly formed in emotional matter, for the real teachers. D.K. warns his disciples not to take his emotional form for himself. He does not use that replica.
6All these things are permanent material creations by those who have fantasized on esoteric facts they have picked up, and also by those who have been in contact with that “reality” and can bear witness to what they have seen and heard. This is the explanation why clairvoyants meet higher beings of all kinds, are received in audience in the “city of Shamballa” by the planetary ruler, pass “initiations” of all sorts, are received into the planetary hierarchy and government, become the highest self they have heard of, acquire “cosmic consciousness” and visit other starry worlds, etc., and all of it with an intense feeling of reality. Everybody contributes with some detail, and the embellishment goes on unceasingly.
7It may be expected that the information we have received about Augoeides is misconceived as is everything else and that the “shape” in the emotional world is taken for Augoeides; even that the emotional being believes and claims to be Augoeides. The illusoriness of self-deception is sovereign.
8There are risks to giving esoteric knowledge to life-ignorant and untrained people, since by and large they just misunderstand and misuse (even though unconsciously) the pertaining ideas with their material energies.
1The right designation of the emotional world is the “world of lie”. All knowledge to be found in that world is brought there from either the physical or the causal world, is knowledge that individuals in that world have gained elsewhere. There you meet with representatives of all religions and other idiologies, all occult sects, as much true believers as in the physical world, if not more so.
2It is to be noted that man, either as a clairvoyant in the physical world or after discarding his physical envelopes, is automatically attracted to the regions where his latent or actualized misconceptions of existence are confirmed, and so his faith in them is strengthened even more.
3During sleep, when the emotional envelope with higher envelopes has left the organism with its etheric envelope and usually remains at a distance of about one metre, many people have visions in the so-called akashic records (the molecular memories of the emotional world), visions they take for real past or present experiences. But there are no truths in the emotional world. The esoterician has once and for all made it his guiding idea that he either knows or knows not. Human learning is interspersed with facts, scientific and historical facts. Generally, they have ended up in the wrong contexts. Therefore, it is better to be skeptical than credulous.
4All clairvoyants, occult prophets, etc., are convinced that it is possible for man to acquire knowledge of reality and life by himself. Against that conviction it must be emphatically maintained that such a knowledge can be acquired only by causal selves and not by first selves (individuals of the fourth natural kingdom).
5As we know how easy it is for fantasts to imagine all sorts of things, it should be added that causal selves are conscious disciples of the planetary hierarchy and have access to members of the hierarchy. The latter do not appear in the emotional world.
6The causal world (the world of Platonic ideas) is the world of knowledge, not the emotional world, which is the world of feeling. There is no knowledge to be had in the emotional world, there are no causal selves teaching the knowledge of reality. The only ones in the emotional world who possess knowledge are those esotericians who have gained their knowledge during physical incarnation. It seems as though these self-evident facts were impossible to grasp for most people. They stubbornly go on seeking knowledge in the world of illusions. In that world there are so many consoling, lovely messages, and there you always have confirmation that you are right, that all your brainwaves and imaginings agree with reality. And all “spirits” in that spirit-world are as certain that they are right, so nothing can be done about that. Only, everybody has his own conception of the only right thing and thinks that all others are wrong. They could perhaps ask themselves: Where is the common subjective as well as objective criterion of truth, valid for everybody?
7There are as many misconceptions of reality in the emotional world as in the physical world. Departed philosophers, scientists, theologians, spiritists, and occultists keep the views they acquired in physical existence. The esotericians are probably the only ones who have a common conception of reality. They are not many but grow in numbers the more people acquire the esoteric knowledge in physical life.
8The more esoterics (received directly from the planetary hierarchy) becomes generally known to people in the physical world, the more people in the emotional world will eventually have the same knowledge. In consequence, spiritualist mediums will “confirm” that this knowledge is correct. Spiritualists will be convinced only then. They still believe that the “spirits in the spiritual world” know everything better. The knowledge must be confirmed by “the spirits”. Only then it is truly certain knowledge. But if the spirits have always known it, why have they not told us before? They are able to parrot, however. And that shows that they just believe; they have not understood that “that is the way it has to be”.
9The spiritualists’ belief in “the spirits of the spiritual world” as omniscient is of course incurable as is any conviction of ignorance. In actual fact, people in the emotional world are even more disoriented than people in the physical world. They live in a perfect chaos of subjective imaginings. If there is knowledge in the emotional world, then it has been received from other worlds, lower or higher, from other kinds of consciousness, has not been acquired in the emotional world. And aggressiveness against dissidents is even fiercer than in the physical world. So that world is no paradise, as they believe.
10The fact that disciples of the planetary hierarchy also have emotional envelopes and spread their knowledge also in the emotional world does not contradict the fact that emotional beings do not know more than physical beings. They do not even know the true nature of their own world.
1Emotional matter obeys the least hint from consciousness, and that is why it is impossible for a human researcher (the normal individual) to study that matter. It is in a state of perpetual transformation according to the emotional consciousness expressions of individuals. Only causal selves are in a position to decide what in that matter is permanent reality and what is a more or less temporary product of the energies of emotional consciousness.
2Normally, causal selves are not able to study consciousness in the emotional atomic kind, but it is only as an essential self that the individual can acquire emotional atomic consciousness. No rule without exceptions, however. Obviously causal selves may succeed in doing this with esoteric training. In such cases especial vigilance against the danger of falling prey to a most treacherous illusion: imagine you are a perfected essential self and able to touch also the superessential world; even being able to behold the solar systemic ruler in all his glory.
1Most spiritualists and clairvoyants have in the emotional world a guide who usually thinks he is omniscient, a guide in whom they trust and on whom they become dependent. However, there are no reliable guides in the emotional world. Everybody who trusts in such an authority will be led astray, no matter how ideal, noble, and magnificent it appears.
2In the physical world, there are countless teachers proclaiming what they believe they know, and self-made prophets with the Messiah complex. In the emotional world, there are even more such individuals who disorient people in all good faith. They are more because they have to their surprise found that this world is something quite different from what they previously thought and are now eager to correct the false teachings prevalent in the physical world, not realizing that also their new conception is insufficient.
3Esotericians do not pose as authorities. They may account for their view on things and then leave it to their audience to accept or reject it. Disciples of the planetary hierarchy, in particular, are careful not to have an influence on anyone, just help seekers who ask for help. Those in the emotional world who pretend to be authorities are without real knowledge, and those who believe they have found an authority in that world are mistaken. Of course this fact will be disputed by all believers, as usual. Let them have their belief. They are happy with it. In new incarnations they will have opportunities to relearn. We shall all become causal selves sooner or later.
1It is an increasingly common phenomenon that people seek information about their past incarnations either from emotional selves (human beings in the emotional world) or from clairvoyants, who in the various molecular memories of the emotional world see what they wish and believe they are able to study their own and other people’s previous incarnations.
2Such activity is a mistake, for only causal selves can ascertain facts in past events. No man who is not a disciple of the planetary hierarchy, thus no clairvoyant, raja yogi, etc., can acquire objective consciousness beyond the emotional. Those who assert the opposite are victims of the illusoriness of their emotional objective consciousness which makes them see things that do not agree with permanent reality. The planetary hierarchy warns vigorously: “Do not trust the statements of emotional clairvoyants.”
3Clairvoyants do not see the exact reality, what really is or is happening, but only that distortion of reality which is a result of the self-conception of human emotional consciousness, a picture that is constantly changing with all the mistaken ideas the individual has of his own situation and of other people’s behaviour in unsurveyable variety. What men may observe in the emotional world is the final synthesis of all that illusory life, their own construction on the basis of all the influences to which they unconsciously fall victim.
4As an evidence that they have been a certain historical personage they often refer to their experience of recognizing everything when reading what that person has written. To have that experience you only need to use your imagination when reading.
5Of course a human being can receive information about one or several of his previous incarnations. But in that case it is done directly or indirectly through causal selves. Thus the possibility exists, though the probability is very slight. The disciple is requested “not to look back”, and this has reference to previous incarnations as well as the past of this incarnation. Nobody learns anything from such things. In order to fully grasp the effect of the law of reaping you must have access to the consciousness aspect, and only essential selves have that. Esoterics must not be used to satisfy curiosity, for that is an abuse of the knowledge, which has inevitable consequences.
6Leadbeater was given permission to study the previous incarnations of some individuals and to publicize his findings. At the first appearance of esoterics much was permitted for propaganda reasons and for purposes of experimentation which otherwise was prohibited and is not permitted now either. After the year 1920 all such things are tabooed again. Unwarranted curiosity as well as gossip at once bars the disciple from the prospect of further contact with the planetary hierarchy in that incarnation.
1The planetary hierarchy firmly declares that it has nothing to do with anything or anybody in the emotional world. To the hierarchy, it is as though that world did not exist. The teachers in the planetary hierarchy all inculcate in their pupils not to concern themselves with the phenomena of the emotional world, with its illusions (everything found there is lie and deception). The teachers exhort those disciples in the physical world who have emotional objective consciousness to work at dissolving the material forms of that world as far as that is possible, since those forms are obstacles to the perception of reality.
2The planetary hierarchy warns its disciples not to strive after any kind of objective consciousness before they have acquired causal objective consciousness and so have become causal selves. When they become causal selves, they acquire emotional and mental objective consciousness as well and then they also know how to use those faculties correctly. Before that stage, they prove to be obstacles to mental consciousness development. And every misuse amounts to a very bad sowing. But such great intensity has the higher emotional clairvoyance that even causal selves must be very attentive lest they confuse these two different kinds of objective vision. Only 45-selves can never be mistaken, never run the risk of being deceived.
3How treacherous is this illusoriness appears from the fact that also causal selves have been deceived when not sufficiently attentive. This happened to Besant as well as to Leadbeater. The secretary of the planetary hierarchy even considers that a good share of healthy agnosticism may be of great value for the disciple before he has been allowed to accompany his teacher through the emotional world to observe him performing all the essential experiments with matter — from the shaping of gods to the demonstration of the genesis of the universe.
4The planetary hierarchy makes it clear that nobody in the emotional world can have the knowledge of reality. Therefore, it sends out this warning to the ignorant of life: “Do not accept anything as true from anybody in the emotional world.” That was the meaning of the esoteric axiom: “Angels whisper but lies.”
5The warning demonstrates how anxious the teacher is to fight credulity, the veritable curse of mankind.
6No disciples of the planetary hierarchy may use spiritualist mediums to communicate with people in the physical world. It is not permitted for disciples to use instruments who are unconscious when lending their physical envelopes. Spiritualism allows unconscious mediums to use emotional selves in the emotional world. And that settles the matter.
7Nobody in the emotional world can have any direct or indirect contact with the planetary hierarchy. This is said with especial reference to all manner of clairvoyants and occultists. Everything these have said in the matter is sheer illusoriness.
8It was a necessary measure the planetary government took with the solar plexus centre of the emotional envelope when, after the Atlantis experiment, it made human beings be born without emotional objective consciousness.
9In a famous poem, Schiller makes a clairvoyant beseech the godhead to liberate him from this “terrible gift” and let him get his blindness back.
10The best advice you can give everybody who has been “gifted” with emotional clairvoyance is not to use it, for he cannot see through the illusoriness of the emotional world and rightly judge its phenomena. Probably, every such advice is waste of time. In giving it, however, the esoterician has fulfilled an urgent duty to these misled people. They have got on to a side-track with deplorable consequences for their next incarnation, or even incarnations.
1The “spirits in the spiritual world” that spiritualists talk about are men in the emotional world, men who have put off their physical envelopes. Only first selves are found in the emotional world, no causal selves or second selves. Those who give themselves out as such higher selves are self-deceived. The lowest manifestation of Augoeides is found in the highest region of the mental world (47:4).
2The only ones possessing real knowledge in the emotional world are old hylozoicians, former initiates of esoteric knowledge orders who in their last physical life had the opportunity to remember their knowledge anew in the physical world. Those who teach in the emotional world are generally representatives of all the old idiologies or, at best, such people as are also able to orient themselves in the emotional world. All experiences had in the emotional world, however wonderful they appear, are illusory. It must be particularly pointed out that knowledge of reality cannot be acquired in lower worlds than the causal, not in the worlds of man, not in the consciousness of the envelopes of incarnation. If certain first selves assert something else, it still does not change anything. First selves cannot on their own acquire knowledge of reality.
1It is a very common notion among occultists that clairvoyance is an indication of a “high spiritual level”. This is a great mistake. Clairvoyance and clairaudience belong at the emotional stage. They are innate or acquired emotional faculties and are not in any way connected with “higher development” of any kind whatsoever.
2Many people remain unnecessarily long in emotionality, particularly those who have acquired clairvoyance in some way or other and believe they find the knowledge of reality and life in the emotional world. Regrettably, there are many people at the mental stage who through their emotional clairvoyance relapse to this lower stage. Those mental selves who are born with that faculty thus are wise to refuse to notice it. The importance of this advice they are as yet unable to understand, for they are ignorant of reality, fascinated by the seemingly unlimited opportunities of imaginative experiences there are in the emotional world, and do not understand the fact that all that phantasmagoria is illusory.
3We are in the physical world in order to live in this world and not in any “higher spheres”. We are in the physical world in order to acquire the necessary qualities and abilities. You cannot do that by clairvoyance.
4Then the esoterician regards clairvoyance rather as a burden. It is frequently seen that clairvoyants are injudicious as well as irresponsible. The planetary hierarchy asserts that clairvoyance without true esoteric knowledge inevitably leads those astray who attach any importance to it, confusing it with knowledge. Clairvoyance is often an indication of bad reaping, a consequence of the individual’s dabbling at black magic in some previous incarnation.
5To clairvoyants the emotional world is the highest world, since they cannot experience the mental world. They should, however, learn something from the fact that the emotional envelope of a causal self is empty of all content, so empty that phenomena of the emotional world do not exist for such a self otherwise than if he has some reason to concern himself with something particular in that world. Do not listen to anyone in the emotional world, for nobody in that world has any knowledge!
6It is asserted in esoterics that the faculties of etheric energy (“magic”) as well as clairvoyance are hindrances to further consciousness development. The individual is blinded by his capacity. He lives in what he should refuse to notice.
7You should be alive to the fact that in each envelope you acquire just the qualities that are possible to acquire in that envelope, and no higher qualities. The emotional abilities afford no knowledge of the physical world. Only mental consciousness can afford a correct perception in the worlds of man provided that it receives correct facts from physical sense or from causal consciousness. You cannot know anything on your own about worlds where you do not have consciousness. That is a fact which also very simple intellects should be able to grasp. And those who live in the physical world do not have the consciousness of second selves unless they are avatars. One fact can be laid down as absolute: There are no second selves in the emotional world. They can do nothing in that world of irremediably idiotizing illusions.
8Emotional consciousness is immune to common sense. It lives in its own world of illusion with its “absolute knowledge”.
1Many mystics, in India yogis, believe they possess “cosmic consciousness”. In Scandinavia, Martinus is the best known case of a man who has asserted the same. It is grotesque but eminently typical of clairvoyants at the higher emotional stage, the highest potency of illusionism. Just as so many others Martinus was the helpless victim of his own imagination. It is the same - you could as well say - inevitable mistake made by all emotional clairvoyants who cannot possibly decide where the limits go to their apparent “expansion of consciousness into infinitude”.
2Martinus did not know that there are two superhuman kingdoms of nature on our planet, that there is a planetary hierarchy, that the individual in order to reach cosmic consciousness must first acquire consciousness in the causal world (47:1-3) and in the worlds (46-42), that an individual who has acquired 42-consciousness enters into the planetary government and is omnipotent within the solar system. If a man could acquire cosmic consciousness, then there would be no higher kingdoms and no planetary hierarchy would be needed. Even this much said here is enough to unmask that piece of self-deception.
3“No self-tutored seer ever saw correctly.” Until mankind realizes this there will be no end of the clairvoyants’ belief in the correctness of their imaginative experiences. And until the occultists have learnt “not to assume anything without sufficient grounds” there will be no end of their belief in all manner of brainwaves and vagaries.
1Just as Christianity contains an esoteric teaching (not yet publicized gnostics), also Islam contains an esoteric teaching that has become known. They have apparently not yet seen that the same teaching was at the bottom of Indian yoga philosophy as well as of all historical forms of religions. There is only one true world view and life view, the one which the planetary hierarchy has taught in the esoteric (secret) knowledge orders during fifty thousand years.
2Our modern-time occultists have come across portions of this teaching and used these when speculating up their own teachings. This has resulted in occult sects in ever swelling numbers. Instead of theology and philosophy we now have occultism. But otherwise it is the same madness and incorrigibility that have always characterized religion and philosophy. Every fantast with a messiah complex knows everything about the “only true teaching”.
3In the following, criticism, and in part very severe criticism, is levelled against the occultists and their misconception of reality. Everybody has the right to his own view of reality. However, when this is given out as the only true one, so misleading a gullible public, then its advocates must put up with correction. We are all on the way, and it is probably inevitable that some people enter upon by-ways coming to a dead-end. In new incarnations they will have to relearn. If possible, they could be spared having their lessons so turned.
4Those who have assimilated the esoteric knowledge made exoteric soon understand how little of the knowledge has yet been publicized. Actually, we have received only the most basic facts about reality and life, sufficient for us to liberate ourselves from the idiologies of ruling ignorance and then acquire the qualifications for discipleship.
5Anyone who needs to know more in order to serve better is given to know it as a disciple. That is the only way. Disciples are given to know much which may not be publicized for several hundred years yet, knowledge that would be misused or distorted (as always), not least by the occultists.
1It is increasingly necessary to distinguish between occultism and esoterics. The essential difference between them is that occultism is dependent on subjective conception (experiences in the emotional world), whereas esoterics consists of facts received in the physical world directly from the planetary hierarchy. It is the difference between subjective and objective, between speculation and real facts. As a rule, the occultists have not been able to grasp even that difference. To them, esoterics is of the same category as occultism. Occultists draw their learning from all conceivable quarters, not being able to determine the origin of the data they accept. Their “facts” and ideas are drawn from the symbolical literature of the esoteric knowledge orders where they are not their own imaginative constructions, experiences in the emotional world. The esoterician accepts data only from the planetary hierarchy, conveyed by its disciples or, in rare cases, by letters from 45-selves. The only disciples who have hitherto proved to be able to convey such knowledge are Blavatsky, Besant, Leadbeater, and Bailey.
2We may expect in the next few decades the appearance of innumerable occult sects and an ever broadening stream of occult literature of the most variegated description. The result will be something similar to the seventy-odd gnostic sects that appeared at the transition from the zodiacal epoch of Aries to that of Pisces, only that opportunities of spreading any message are enormously greater now than then. Countless they are who bring their opinions before the public, adding to confusion.
3And not only mystics and clairvoyants are misled but also the thousands of people who believe in their teachings. In their book, Le matin des magiciens (The Dawn of Magic in abridged translation), Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier describe in some detail how Hitler, Himmler, Hess, Rosenberg, and other Nazi leaders helplessly fell victims to occult fantasts, so called Rosicrucians, etc. (Machen, Horbiger, Haushofer, Guenon, etc.)
4Non-esotericians must find it confusing that in all that flowing balderdash there is almost always a “core of truth”, some fact, some idea that has been totally distorted. If data about genuine Rosicrucians, such as Bulwer-Lytton and Blavatsky, are given, one is amazed at the baroque contexts these facts have been put into.
5The multitude of occult idiologies has the result that people are confused and intellectuals are skeptical. A critical examination and comparison would reveal the enormous difference between esoterics and occultism. Most people are unable to do it, however, and from the others it would require a work they deem useless.
6Old esoteric knowledge orders certainly had their defects, for such ones are always unavoidable. But they at least prevented the initiates of the lowest degrees from imagining (which nowadays always is the case) they had reached the same understanding as those of the highest degrees.
7It is useless collecting old occult literature. On account of the occultists’ speculations it is full of mistakes and highly unreliable. This is particularly true of such literature published before 1920, literature which should be filed away.
8Originally, genuine esotericians called themselves “occultists”. But after lots of individuals at the stage of the mystic started to call themselves occultists, that designation became unsuitable. Of course, those occultists will soon enough describe themselves as “esotericians”, being ignorant of the fact that they are unable to liberate themselves from the emotional world with its exhaustless possibilities of imaginative constructions. There is an ongoing falsification of all esoteric concepts.
9The esoterician was designated as “mentalist” in contrast to the mystics as “emotionalists”. But of course emotionalists have now started calling themselves “mentalists”. The uninitiated is defenceless against all this mischief. They are quite unable to understand that it is a matter of self-deception.
1Beginning in the year 1875, when the knowledge of reality was made accessible to everybody, there have arisen numerous occult sects each of which has succeeded in mystifying its followers by the notion that the founder of the sect was especially called to communicate the knowledge in the only true way. That is deception, to use plain language. Nobody has received such a right. The knowledge that has been given out must not be made the privilege of some certain sect. None of these sect-founders is a member of the planetary hierarchy or has been given any personal commission by it.
2The result of all this mystery-making with knowledge already publicized is that, according to the planetary hierarchy, “occult sects and esoteric groups are among the most disoriented of all kinds of groups”.
3What has been made public is no longer esoteric in the proper sense of the word. The fact that this knowledge has not yet been examined and accepted by the authorities of public opinion and therefore has remained unknown, unnoted by the great mass of intellectuals, is quite another matter. The knowledge is always available to seekers.
4All occult sects belong at the emotional stage, the stage of feeling and imagination. All sects, also occult sects, with initiations and other such childish procedures, have a disorienting effect. That is a word of warning to all seekers: Avoid contact with such societies, for the consequence can only be deplorable, to come under the influence of forces the power of which the uninitiated do not suspect. Avoid all sect-founders! They are misled. No knowledge orders will be founded before the year 2200, and then only by essential selves. The Theosophical Society was no knowledge order.
5Sinnett required people to wear formal dress at his meetings. Colonel Olcott, however, appeared in his one suit, a threadbare coat and baggy trousers. And so he appeared also at the Royal Palace in Stockholm, called to an audience with King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway. It is the same in esoterics: Before the master you may come however tattered you are.
6The many occult sects in some measure meet the needs on various levels, and in that respect there is a justification for them. The risk of making propaganda for these sects is that they so easily attract individuals who are ripe for the esoteric knowledge and through it could have a more correct conception of reality. Just as the existing forms of religion are hindrances to the one true religion, the religion of love and wisdom, so all the mushrooming occult sects are hindrances to the true knowledge.
7Disputes between the various occult sects about such problems as only second selves can solve just counteract the striving after unity. Soon enough, errors will be corrected when the individual has reached such a development that the problems must be solved in the right way. Then he is already a disciple. The esoteric mental system exists to afford a vision of existence and liberate us from the speculations of life ignorance. That system must not be turned into a dogmatic system giving rise to meaningless disputes about things which in any case only higher selves are able to judge.
8No occult societies except the original Theosophical Society (founded by Blavatsky in 1875), Arcane School (founded by Alice A. Bailey in 1923), and the Temple of the People (founded in 1898 on the initiative of 45-self H.) have issued from the planetary hierarchy or have had any connection whatsoever with its members, whatever founders of other societies believe and assert. There are disciples of several of the hierarchy’s 45-selves, but they cannot be identified as disciples and do not give themselves out as such. There are reasons to assume that nowadays no society is in direct contact with the hierarchy but that those who once were go on by the impulse they originally received.
9Those who have once attained the third degree in some esoteric knowledge order also have once been accepted as disciples and are entered as such on the hierarchy’s list of disciples. They need no society but are able to connect with their Augoeides and “their god”.
1To the esoterician, esoterics is remembrance anew of a knowledge he once acquired. It is a knowledge which mankind at large cannot apply in a rational manner and therefore does not need. Therefore, the esoterician does not regard it as his task to make propaganda for this knowledge. Instead, he does his best to help everybody on his level, help him to reattain his latent level. Thereupon it is everybody’s own business to reach a higher level by himself, by his own experience and his working up of it. The esoterician’s own view of reality is his own secret and nothing that he tries to foist off on those who do not need it.
2That is the mistake made by the occult sects, fobbing off on people ideas that make them more or less unfit for life, seducing them into a world that for them can only be an illusory world of imagination, since they have no self-acquired basis to stand on. If you lack that basis, your learning will only be a new kind of religion and little better than superstition. Then it is better to be a physicalist and help people to solve their problems so that life in the physical world is reduced in friction, can be lived more purposefully, happily. In the course of development through the incarnations, everybody acquires through his own experiences his own view of reality and life.
3It must be clearly asserted that nobody has a right to force his view on anybody, be that view however correct. Any such attempt conflicts with the law of freedom and the law of selfrealization. “Power over others” may be necessary in the upbringing of children, until they have acquired an elementary understanding of life. But the use of power to curtail the freedom of thought and expression is unlawful, an encroachment that has serious consequences for the dictator. Anyone who enters some society (political, religious, scientific, occult, etc.) and is later expelled for his individual view should be grateful for the freedom he has won. Suppression of opinion of any kind should be utterly reprehensible. The individual should never accept anything that goes against his own self-acquired view. Only so can he develop in the right way.
1There are occultists who do not see that the physical world is a hell. This indicates that they lack sufficient experience of life and understanding of the horrendous situation of mankind. It is also distinctive of many of them that they are unable to realize that we should never “look back”. So little have they understood that esoteric warning that, on the contrary, they are eager to know about their previous incarnations. Besides, they have no use for them for their consciousness development. It is ordinary curiosity. They talk about studying the “workings of karma”, but that is equally wrong, for they cannot ascertain what they are unable to understand. The occultists have to learn to realize the fact that they are unable to judge the real things of life and the actual course of events. They enormously overrate their prospects of expedient use of the scanty esoteric information they have received.
2It is very often seen that “superintellectual” occultists, after they have acquired knowledge from the esoteric literature existing, become utterly important, comprehend everything better and look down upon those from whom they have received the knowledge as being too primitive. If they did not challenge ridicule, they would prefer to give themselves out as “masters”. At any event, they do not mind being called so by their echoes, as was the case with Steiner. It is not easy to draw the line between self-estimation (factually correct assessment of one’s capacity) and self-overestimation.
3Formerly, the esoterician learnt that he must be silent before theologians, philosophers, and mystics. Nowadays he must also be silent before occultists. It is useless talking to those who know everything better and have been taught by their masters in the emotional world (the astral world, the “spiritual world”), those who “visit Shamballa”, etc.
4There is no limit to madness, imagination, and credulity. Thank goodness only 45-selves are able to visit other planets, in their superessential envelopes. But the “masters” of the black lodge are able to shape forms in emotional and physical matters, forms that mislead all who are not esotericians. They do everything they can to mislead and sidetrack people. Occultists are proofs that they score heavily.
5Just as in religion we have had countless prophets who have all said different things, so in occultism we have countless “masters” whom believers accept and whose statements they believe. But the esoterician accepts no masters who give themselves out to be masters, for he knows that the master’s home is the world of Platonic ideas, the causal world, and that is where you will see him but never in the emotional world. The clairvoyants’ wish to see “their master” in the emotional world is quite sufficient for it to take place. Only he is no master from the planetary hierarchy. And nobody will meet his own master in the planetary hierarchy until he has become an instrument of his Augoeides.
6People have heard of the planetary hierarchy and at once start fantasizing. One fantast, for instance, imagines he has “received permission from the hierarchy...” It must be emphatically stated that such assertions cannot be true. Only disciples in groups of five, seven, or nine can contact the hierarchy, never individuals. Regrettably, this does not remove the risk of fantastry, because it has repeatedly turned out that a whole group can fall prey to any emotional illusion whatsoever.
7In the emotional world they have believed they were initiated by the planetary ruler and became both causal and essential selves. Those who nowadays (after they year 1925) bear witness to such things are all misled. That disciple who testifies to himself (his status, his experiences as a disciple) is no longer a disciple, if he ever was one. By that rule the planetary hierarchy has put an end to curiosity about the disciple’s personalities. Anyone who wants to become an esoterician must content himself with the esoteric knowledge. Everything personal is taboo. Biographies written in the attempt to “clear” such historical personages as Paracelsus, Cagliostro, Blavatsky, Francis Bacon, Saint Germain, etc., do not interest the planetary hierarchy. Everybody may believe what he wants in this matter as in everything else. Anyone who has not acquired understanding will fall prey to lies in any case.
8When you see how easily people fall prey to lies even in the physical world and how easily mass suggestion affects whole congregations you will easily be skeptical to all testimonies. It only remains to try to use your critical reason.
1The many sects that mystics and occultists form in our times have at least the merit that they counteract physicalism and point to superphysical existence. The gratifying side of the phenomenon is that it evidences that there are seekers, that many people have realized that the old idiologies are untenable, that there is some understanding of the existence of higher worlds and higher kinds of consciousness. We may hope that these merits to some extent make good the harm occultists do with their disorienting speculations.
2We live in times when occultists speculate more and more with unchecked so-called historical facts, with isolated esoteric facts and, as for the rest, with all manner of spurious facts. Their constant mistake and the ground of their failure is the fact that they mix their own speculations into the knowledge we have received from the planetary hierarchy. There are plenty of occultists a la Rudolf Steiner, highly intelligent people who believe they can speculate with esoteric facts.
3Speculation with esoterics only becomes misleading nonsense that is not of the least importance for our self-realization, rather hinders us from becoming serviceable tools of the planetary hierarchy. We have not received the knowledge in order to speculate and fantasize but in order to live right and show others how to do so, in order to become disciples. The occultists have never understood that. They obviously think that speculation is the meaning of life.
4We have been given to know enough in order to live, to be able to realize. That is why we have received the knowledge. It is typical of the occultists that they want to know unreasonably much for which they have not the least use, a theoretical learning (you could call it misleading rubbish), which unnecessarily burdens their consciousness content and makes it more difficult for them to daily apply the essentials. Those who only want to increase their theoretical knowledge will have to wait until the planetary hierarchy allows more facts for publication.
5The esoterician knows that the human intellect cannot solve the problems of reality, that to do so requires a higher kind of objective consciousness, at least causal and essential, that knowledge of reality cannot be acquired in the human worlds (the physical, emotional, and mental worlds) but only in the world of Platonic ideas (the causal world) and that nobody can enter into that world except as a disciple of the planetary hierarchy. Man can acquire knowledge of the physical world but cannot judge the content of reality of what he experiences in the emotional and mental worlds.
6It is understandable that at the stage of ignorance people sought for explanations of events and speculated on causes. But mankind should learn something from the result of millennia of speculation: the fictitiousness of the theological belief in legends of history and the more or less logical imaginings of theologians as well as philosophers.
7Apparently, occultists have realized that neither theology, nor philosophy or science is able to solve the problems of existence. But they do not realize that they make exactly the same mistake as theologians, philosophers, and scientists, that they make statements about superphysical reality without having the requisite capacity, that only causal selves are in a position to ascertain facts, acquire the necessary “intuition”.
8Among the many kinds of occultists, you may come across such ones as consider themselves independent thinkers. They study all kinds of occult literature and select whatever agrees with their views, not understanding that most occult writers have done the same and that everyone of them has a different view of the one reality. If in addition they are clairvoyants, they consult individuals in the emotional world whom they regard as definitive authorities on knowledge and accept their opinions, and they do not see the inconsistency of their imagined independence.
9If every philosopher thinks himself able to acquire a correct conception of reality, then this is true to an even higher degree of occultists. And like philosophers they all have dissimilar views on what is reality and truth.
10Truth is one, however, and that truth we receive from the planetary hierarchy. All causal selves, disciples of the planetary hierarchy, share the same conception of reality, a fact that may perhaps cause some reflection. Whatever does not agree with their knowledge, universal to all esotericians, is not truth. All “experiments with truth” lead astray unconditionally.
11Whatever esotericians have done to counteract the inexhaustible speculations of the ever more numerous occultists, these have persisted in their misleading abuse of all the facts and ideas that are made exoteric to an increasing extent.
12It is well that brighter times are approaching. Within a century, so many genuine (not the many false) disciples of the planetary hierarchy will have refuted the collected production by thousands of occult imaginative speculants. Meanwhile, we may hope that increasingly many people develop that esoteric instinct which makes them see that “it cannot be like occultists say”.
13That principle of reason, which should be normative for all who are able to think for themselves and not just parrot what others have thought (a principle that also philosophers have too easily forgotten), is: Do not assume anything without sufficient grounds. That is a principle most people forget whenever they want to explain “why”. In daily intercourse they always think they know why an individual says or does so. Possibly, they may present a superficial explanation in some particular cases. But where people at higher developmental stages are concerned that possibility is as good as non-existent.
14It is especially important for occultists to apply that principle, since man cannot make statements about reality beyond the emotional; and precisely emotional reality, which clairvoyants believe they understand, is the “world of illusions”. There they take appearance to be reality and are helpless preys to their experiences, of which fact the all but innumerable occult sects are proof.
15Most people obviously are unable to decide what are sufficient grounds. They do not realize that knowledge must be based on ascertained facts and a sufficient amount of exhaustive, concordant facts.
16You hardly make any mistakes if you refuse to accept information on the superphysical except from disciples of the planetary hierarchy. Regrettably, you are by no means on “secure ground” merely because of that. For in the future more and more people, who cannot possibly be disciples, will give themselves out as such ones. Clairvoyants without number and other misguided people will claim that they receive all their imagined facts from a “master in the hierarchy”. Regrettably, the problem we shall face is not only one of self-deception. We must expect quite intentional deception by those who try methodically to thwart consciousness development.
17The only protection is never to accept anything from that quarter, never to accept single, isolated information, to regard also what appears to be put into its correct context as a “working hypothesis” and never as established truth. It is everybody’s duty to examine for himself, for whatever you accept you accept on your own responsibility. You must not throw the blame on any people misleading you; it is their business that they sow a very bad sowing. Keep this in mind: everything coming from the emotional world is a lie. Everyone who strives for loving understanding is on the right track. In comparison, everything else is of little import.
18When studying the content of the ever greater variety of occult works, you realize the importance of having mastered the esoteric world view. You undeniably have the impression that occultist writers think esoteric facts may be put at random everywhere and into numerous contexts except the only right one. We experience something similar to what happened at the transition of the vernal equinox from the constellation of Aries to that of Pisces. Everyone who then got hold of a philosophical idea had to make something remarkable out of it. At once they knew all about it and all about its relations and delivered balderdash, although hardly as devoid of reason as in our days.
19The planetary hierarchy awaits the day when it will be able to give mankind the true knowledge of reality. The fundamental facts we have received as a basis of a tenable world view and life view are fully sufficient to demonstrate that the fifth natural kingdom is absolutely sovereign in respect of knowledge.
1Occultists commonly misjudge their stage of development. Merely because they have acquired a theoretical learning about various stages of development and managed to put on a pattern of behaviour matching a higher stage, they believe they are somebody they have no prospects of being within the next few incarnations. When in a new incarnation (prior to remembrance anew) they are put to the test, they fail as they do not have the support of a theoretical learning. Most of them either overrate or underrate their prospects (the latter more seldom).
2The individual’s misjudgement of his level sometimes depends on the fact that in previous incarnations he has onesidedly acquired certain abilities belonging to a higher level but failed to develop others, equally necessary ones. Frequently there is also a great distance between learning and ability of self-realization.
3If occultists did not let themselves be blinded by the consciousness aspect and (as many of them) imagined they possessed cosmic consciousness but on the contrary understood that in evolution the will aspect keeps pace with the consciousness aspect, they would perhaps sober up. Those who possess cosmic consciousness are not merely omniscient within the solar system but also omnipotent. Occultists may well think they are omniscient. It is certainly somewhat harder to imagine you are omnipotent in the same worlds if you have a wee bit of reason left.
1There are lots of abnormal or so-called occult abilities that are innate or manifest themselves spontaneously. Of course, they are all inexplicable without esoteric knowledge. The explanations that uninitiated people always have at hand are fictions.
2All who, without any fault of their own, happen to possess occult powers and abilities you may earnestly advise not to use them. In the best event they have only a disorienting effect, since their right use requires special esoteric training (which only disciples of the planetary hierarchy receive). There are always risks involved in experiments with unknown energies. But warnings are generally a waste of time. The would-be magician always thinks that he is chosen and that his ability entails the understanding of its right use. “Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.”
3“No self-tutored seer ever saw correctly” is an esoteric axiom to which no exception has yet occurred. Clairvoyance (emotional objective consciousness) affords no criterion of correct perception (which emotionalists and clairvoyants think), no more than objective physical consciousness can explain reality. In reference to the “light in the head” it should be pointed out that experiments with that phenomenon have resulted in blindness.
4If the individual is really able to benefit mankind with his ability, then he will also be taken care of by a disciple of the planetary hierarchy. Nobody can be disregarded in any respect whatsoever. Each and everyone who has reached the stage of the mystic has in the esoteric archive his own file comprising a whole series of incarnations. And everybody has his Augoeides.
1A medium is a human being who lends his organism with its etheric envelope to an unknown emotional being and is unconscious during the time the loan lasts, being quite unaware of what is being said and done during that time.
2Not only human emotional beings take possession of the medium’s body but also emotional beings formed by men, for the emotional world teems with them. The latter can also reproduce the thoughts they receive from the people who are sitting around the medium.
3Spiritualists think that their controllers in the emotional world are dependable guides who take care lest the visiting emotional beings harm the mediums. That is correct in a general sense. However, they are not in the position to determine the developmental stage of any occupant being. Only second selves are able to do that. And they are not found in the emotional world.
4Spiritist mediums, who lend their organism with its etheric envelope to strange emotional beings, actually present the spectacle of a kind of obsession. The only difference is that the medium has voluntarily lent himself to it, whereas in other people the phenomenon occurs against their desire. With many mediums the end of it has been that the temporary possessor refused to part with his prey: an easy way of avoiding the process of reincarnation. Is it any use warning? Probably not.
5No disciple of the planetary hierarchy, no member of the planetary hierarchy, communicates through any medium. In extremely rare exceptional cases they can use some disciple’s organism with its etheric envelope. Thus a third self can use a causal self. However, then it is a matter of a causal self, and he is all the time fully aware of what is said and done. That is a considerable difference.
1Our time abounds in self-styled Pythagoreans, Platonists, Rosicrucians, etc., and their numbers swell day by day. But those who bear witness of themselves have never been initiated into any esoteric knowledge order. Theosophist Leadbeater was allowed to account for the three lowest degrees of the Pythagorean Order (the three ones known to him), but that was only after permission by Pythagoras, whom he could contact personally.
2When people hear about discipleship, they think they are ready for it. Not an earthly. If the fact of discipleship is new to them, they have many incarnations left before that matter comes into question. People usually imagine they are much more advanced in development than they actually are. Besides, there are many initiates of esoteric knowledge orders, since thousands of years, who have many incarnations left before they can become disciples. Membership of an occult society is no merit in this. It rather seems as if such societies had a degrading effect on the individual’s level.
3Those who do not possess the esoteric knowledge latently have small prospects in our chaotic period, within the next 200 years, to acquire the conditions to judge its content of reality (“value, importance in life”).
1The planetary hierarchy warns against the attempts to mislead seekers that will increasingly be made. It is quite obvious that you must nowadays reckon with “black” occultists whose task it is to do precisely this with their expositions. Ever more fantasts give themselves out to be disciples and to have acquired their learning from the “highest level” or even to be “masters”, who are surrounded by disciples, make propaganda for their misleading idiology, etc. Since those “masters” have a particular talent for attracting attention and confuse the judgement of people at the emotional stage, it is necessary to warn emphatically of this ever increasing risk.
2Those occultists avert the attention from the true esoterics, taught by Blavatsky, Besant and Leadbeater, and during 1920-1950 by the secretary of the planetary hierarchy, D.K. Only authors starting from these teachers are standing on that basis of knowledge which, where the West is concerned, was laid by Greek philosopher (46-self) Pythagoras, our future world teacher after Christos-Maitreya.
3It is the same phenomenon over again, as it was more than two thousand years ago when the quasi-gnostic sects distorted the teaching of Christos.
4History teaches us that lie is more easily believed than truth. The proof of this is all the different sects, societies, the great number of idiologies.
1It seems to be an inevitable consequence of the publication of new facts and ideas that they are taken care of by all manner of speculants who ruin the essential and in so doing make it more difficult to assimilate the new knowledge. They are so eager to show their understanding that they cannot wait until they have grasped what it all is about and that the condition of understanding is a radical rethinking with elimination of everything they consider indispensable, a view of life acquired with much toil. They work the new ideas into their old systems and with their old methods and so produce a quasi-knowledge that is unfit for life. The deplorable feature of this is that they block the way for competent seekers (having latent knowledge) who disappointed turn away from this quasi-knowledge and give up.
2The strange thing is that these disorienting occult sects always seem to have greater success and following than the esotericians, who teach the true knowledge of reality and life. It seems as though truth must always be mixed up with lie to be generally accepted. People are happy if there is just a “kernel of truth” in all the lie.
3The view of the planetary hierarchy from the year 1775 that mankind was not ripe for esoterics has been fully verified. Esoterics has been misunderstood and misinterpreted by most students. Many have become megalomaniacs. Others have developed a messiah complex. Many have started speculating on esoteric facts and so have misled many other occultists. They must fantasize in order not to live and realize. Most of the work done by true esotericians consists in counteracting this madness.
1Attraction and repulsion always make themselves felt in all relations of energy and in the individual’s attitude to everything, both inner and outer things. Negative repulsive vibrations preponderate in the lower emotional molecular kinds, but that does not at all mean that attractive energies are lacking. Attraction and repulsion exist in all emotional molecular kinds, positive and negative energies are found in everything; opposites presuppose each other. It would be more correct psychologically to say that individuals at lower stages, and those of repulsive basic tendency in particular, are more easily affected by negative than by positive energies.
2What is said here has reference to the two vibratory tendencies of matter. Where consciousness is concerned, there are in addition other factors, determined by the individual’s desires or feelings (and thus his level of development). “Love” for a certain object may engender hatred for everything not associated with that particular object. Typical examples of this are all kinds of dogmatism and sectarianism, excluding everything that does not agree with them.
3Men are controlled by their lower emotionality, since in past incarnations they have cultivated the very interests belonging to that lower. People are vitalized by the repulsive vibrations of the lower molecular kinds, hatred in all its countless modes of expression among which is egoism. Those who have reached the stage of culture or of the mystic learn how to develop attraction to everything (the striving towards unity). In the emotional envelope there rages a conflict between the lower and the higher energies until the higher ones have won. This conflict is the cause of emotional suffering of many kinds.
4The conflict between the energies of attraction and repulsion in the emotional envelope is long and difficult and goes on through many incarnations. Even after the individual has reached the highest emotionality (48:2), the conflict is not at all finished but goes on also at the humanist stage, since the individual in each incarnation runs through all the stages of his development until he has reattained his true level. Often the mentalist devotes himself to the development of his mental consciousness and in so doing neglects to reacquire the higher emotional faculties that are latent in his emotional subconsciousness. Since mankind is at the lower emotional stage, the vibrations that pour through man’s emotional envelope are predominantly repulsive. As those vibrations penetrate also the humanist’s emotional envelope activating his emotionality, he must develop his higher emotional faculties not to fall victim to the vibrations of repulsion. This, our dependence on the environment and the civilization we live in, was what the gnosticians called our share in original sin.
1What is not love (attraction) is hatred (repulsion). Generally speaking, the life expressions of most people are instances of hatred. The worst ones include envy and malicious joy, slander, and persecution.
2As long as the repulsive tendency seeks outlets for its hatred, life remains a struggle. Hatred violates the law of freedom and the law of unity. At lower stages men encroach each other’s freedom and hinder each other’s self-realization.
3Voltaire called man the meanest of all animals (l’animal mechant par preferance), and regrettably a significant portion of mankind (at lower stages) comes up to that designation. There are no bounds to evil whenever hatred is inflamed. And the religious hatred is the worst of all.
4At the lower emotional stage (the stage of hatred) there is reason for the view sometimes voiced that your so-called friends often harm you more than your enemies. The habitual, thoughtless, and irresponsible chatter is mixed with seemingly reliable remarks about every negative trait the person thinks he has noticed in his friend, and so outsiders are given a perverted picture of that individual. It is also very common that wives in similar ways speak ill of their husbands. Many a man has got his career ruined in that way. Those people are unaware of how they unmask themselves and their level with their gossip and their judgements. Anyone who takes notice of faults and failings in his friend is no true friend. Such a person has a debasing effect and so you should avoid dealings with him as far as possible. Besides, this is true of all who speak ill of people. They spread and increase hatred in the world.
5People never forgive. They cannot even if they try. Constantly and on the slightest provocation, whatever roused hatred must appear and be heeded. Those who have not reached the stage of attraction live in repulsion whether they see it or not. Hatred exists in subconscious complexes and is actualized at the least reminder.
6The only things spiteful individuals remember of a man are his failings and mistakes, being unaware of their own share in them, unaware of the fact that the hatred of the environment in all its expressions has a misleading effect.
7You understand that Schopenhauer, being the expert on mankind he was, could sum up the wisdom of life in two parts. One half was “to say nothing and to believe nothing”. The other, “neither to love nor to hate”. He added that anyone who has seen this also willingly abstains from such a life. Without the esoteric knowledge such a conclusion is near at hand.
8Typical of the lower emotionality is mass thinking, parrotry with its mental negativity and emotional receptivity.
9At the stages of barbarism and civilization egoistic feelings dominate. By kindness and favours (gifts, etc.) you can in those individuals rouse some of the feelings that Christians think are instances of love but are only a kind of sentimentality. Those people are largely characterized by the old saw: “I love those who me love and hate those who me hate. So have I done, so do I still and let other people prate.” And hatred always lies in lurk. At the least provocation it is inflamed and often to a terrifying degree. And then it will not give even measure for measure but a manifold return.
10If you want to achieve results with such people you must therefore appeal to egoism and try to “refine” egoism. Altruism and the other noble feelings are beyond their understanding unless individual character has an “innate” tendency to unity.
11Individual character is that basic nature which the individual has acquired during eons, and it cannot change suddenly. Through enlightenment and good influence you may polish the surface and teach a pattern of social behaviour, though you do not change “nature”. By influencing them you may rouse psychoses and make the individuals experience attraction, which often puts people into ecstasy. By making them have such experiences you may kindle their longing after such states. But then they must work to reach higher levels by selfrealization. Many people are unable to do so, as they lack the prerequisites, the necessary experience. Longing finds energy, opportunities, and means. It is all a question of mere time. And people have difficulty in understanding this. In their impatience they want at once to have results that may take many incarnations to achieve.
12Truly it has been said: “Politeness is often the only kind of love we have an opportunity to show our fellow human beings.” No doubt that is the lowest kind, that polished surface, the result of good upbringing and the “mark of education”.
13In the expressions “feeling pity” or “having compassion” for other people there is a connotation of “suffering with” them, and this is even more apparent in the corresponding words of many other languages. If we suffered with other people, it would make us unable to help them. If we suffered with all who suffer, we would soon be complete nervous wrecks and end up in an asylum. This connotation of “suffering with others” shows that the pertaining notion is misleading and self-deceptive, as usual. Nietzsche was violently opposed to this notion. He had tried to suffer with others and saw clearly the absurdity of it, that people would end up in nursing institutions without having made the least useful contribution. Moreover, he had the intense feeling as to himself that proud characters decline with thanks other people’s pity. They prefer to endure their torments in silence.
14It will be long yet before all the tendencies we have acquired at lower stages are definitively eradicated. That lies in the expression: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” That little have Christians learnt in 2000 years that, at the first opportunity, they are eager to “cast the first stone”. They do not even notice it, so automatic is the daily stone-casting, and then they think they are cultured and have insight into human nature. There is all too much left from the stage of barbarism also in those who think they possess self-knowledge and consider themselves advanced. Self-blindness is enormous, and most of the common notions stupidize. “You aren’t more than human, are you?” Not more than?
15If you divided people into those of love and those of hatred (a very sensible division), then how many would you find whom you would number among the first category, since everything is hatred that is not love? Are you there yourself? A daily self-examination in this respect would be a wholesome exercise that would soon change us for the better.
16When mankind, some time in the future, will have learnt that in our physical and lower emotional nature we have all the negative qualities existing in the animal kingdom, to a higher or lower degree in the different incarnations, then perhaps we shall finally begin to look rationally on human so-called weaknesses. It is a certain thing that those who in spiteful moralism condemn others for their faults and failings will be afflicted with those very things in a new incarnation. The knowledge of this fact may perhaps stop the senseless condemnation. “You are such as the one you are condemning” or will be such a one and will be condemned yourself. We all have faults, more or less in various incarnations. If we go on concentrating on them, as we have done hitherto, then we shall never be free from them.
17Mankind is a collective of individuals on various levels, and these levels rise or sink collectively as epochs pass. They will not rise until mankind works collectively to raise them. But only then can it be a true rise of all levels.
1All life (all monads) make up a unity in respect of consciousness. “Salvation” lies in the understanding of this unity, an understanding that is possible for man but does not become reality until it is experienced in the essential consciousness. The attainment of that consciousness requires the energies of emotional attraction and the acquisition of the qualities of emotional attraction. Service has in esoterics been symbolized as “sacrifice”, since it can be very trying to overcome hatred (repulsion) by love (attraction). But since the energies of attraction, being of a higher emotional kind, are stronger than the energies of hatred in the lower emotional molecular kinds, they must overcome if they are used purposefully. If you use the energies of attraction, they will dominate more and more also in your own emotional consciousness, and they will moreover automatically receive additional contribution from the essential world (from the second triad essential atom via the unity centre of the causal envelope). This also vitalizes the essential atom, so that it automatically by its vibrations forms an essential envelope, which is embryonic to begin with but subsequently expands continually. Thereby it will be increasingly easy to contact the intuition of unity and its energies.
2It is only as a disciple of the planetary hierarchy that the monad as a mental self is able to rightly use the energies of emotional attraction in order to reach, via the causal envelope, the consciousness of the essential world and understand what unity means.
3The qualities of attraction are acquired in the higher emotionality (48:2,3). The stage of culture can be said to begin on the higher levels of 48:4 and is crowned by an incarnation as a saint (a true one, with but small resemblance to the qualifications for “canonization” by the Catholics), the highest level of 48:2.
4The so-called stage of the mystic begins on the higher levels of 48:3, when attraction has grown so strong that “reason” (47:6,7) is no more able to wield any control.
5It is characteristic of the stage of culture that the individual ceases to live for himself (the life of the egoist) and lives for others, for other aims than self-satisfaction, for mankind or for an ideal, for the service of evolution, for unity. It is at the stage of culture that man can contact the essential consciousness via the unity centre of his causal envelope.
6The higher emotionality, in contact with essentiality, affords a greater understanding of other people than any mental analysis. That is a thing which also people who are ignorant of esoterics are able to ascertain; an age-old experience at the stage of the mystic, although of course without esoteric knowledge they have not been able to explain the technical connection.
7We develop the qualities of attraction by meeting people with loving understanding, even those we find disagreeable. In so doing we influence their possibilities of attraction, counteract their attitude of hatred. It is part of the art of living that we learn to love people while not being attached to them, which we easily are if there is anything of egoism in our affection.
8By loving people we come into contact with their soul, with their Augoeides, who is love. We help him in his striving to make the emotional consciousness receptive to the energies of attraction. By contacting our Augoeides we contact unity and the souls of other people. There is no other way.
9Emotional attraction overcomes emotional repulsion (hatred) but cannot therefore be regarded as “love” in the higher sense (essential love, 46). Attraction does not afford us the ability of judgement, for it is beyond mental control. True love is always united with wisdom. “Human love” in its unwisdom all too often makes big mistakes. As a rule it is unable to say no, when that would be the only right thing to do, and thereby often bolsters up vice, satisfies irresponsibility, facilitates parasitism. It regards the verdicts of wisdom as “hard sayings”.
10Attraction may turn into a vice just as well as repulsion. There is attraction that attaches you and attraction that liberates you, depending on your motive, what you intend and what you want to achieve. If the inspiration comes from Augoeides, then all is well. Then you are protected from self-deception.
11Anyone who has at the stage of culture acquired the qualities of attraction loves people however they are, with their faults, failings, and vices. Those bad qualities are part of man as much as good qualities and virtues; the two kinds of qualities cannot be separated. You love the whole man, not a part of him. That is a thing people have not learnt to see. If you have the right of love (for understanding better and for being able to help better) to analyse man, then you admire his good qualities and feel sympathy for him on account of the others. Hatred, which criticizes, violates the law of unity as well as the law of freedom.
12In our sex-fixated times, when people live in a sexually overheated state, there is a risk in all too many people to take all expressions of attraction (admiration, affection, sympathy) as instances of sexual desire. This could mislead also psychoanalysts such as Freud.
13All need loving understanding; there is a crying need for it in the world of repulsive emotions, in the world of hatred. They need it far more than the most perfect system of knowledge. All have their individual needs. It is these that we should try to satisfy, instead of what we desire to give. When you have once found the key to their hearts, they open up and you can see their need of which they perhaps are not conscious themselves.
14“Conversion” is not, as theologians have misunderstood it, the acceptance of absurd dogmas, but a total change of the individual’s attitude to people, his acquisition of the good qualities of attraction and overcoming of repulsion (hatred) of everything in life. Along with this also comes the realization that “only love can save the world”, that the service of life is the path of development, that we incarnate in order to acquire the qualities and abilities that make it possible for us to enter into the kingdom of the unity of life. There is no “mysticism” in this, that mysticism which loses itself in all manner of imaginative speculation on the religious illusions and philosophical fictions of the life ignorance handed down through history, that mysticism which counteracts the acquisition of common sense.
15Everywhere and in all connections the individual goes through tests unbeknownst to himself in order that his Augoeides may be able to decide what more he can do for the consciousness development of that individual. The prerequisite of such care is of course that the individual has reached such a stage of development that there are prospects of success for such an experiment; when the individual approaches the higher emotional stage. The mystic who with all his energy is striving to reach the “Mount of Transfiguration” has great prospects of going through that test.
16It is infinitely valuable for the esoterician to know where the limits are to the knowledge, understanding, and ability possible for the individual at his various stages of development. Then there is the risk, always great, that the barbarian believes he has reached the stage of culture, the emotionalist the stage of ideality, the mentalist that he is a causal self. Those are mistakes the painful experience of which very few people are spared throughout their incarnations. Then man is, once and for all, a peculiar sort. The prayer “save us from evil” could be replaced with “save us from ourselves”.
1How perverse our entire culture is we see perhaps best when we have learnt that the “law of harmony” is the basic law of the motion aspect. Disharmony implies that purposeful energies neutralize each other resulting in dissolution of matter. The foremost attribute of culture is harmony. Modern philosophy, literature, art, and music have destructive effects and also stifle attempts at true culture. Modern culture is part of the lower emotionality, and true culture is at home in the higher emotionality, is impossible without the qualities that develop through the energies of attraction with harmony, joy, happiness as external characteristics.
2Some of the qualities that can be acquired at the higher emotional stage are enumerated below. Everyone may complete the list himself: admiration, affection, sympathy, simplicity, spontaneity, tolerance, kindness, gratitude, uprightness, sincerity, trustworthiness, courage, purposiveness, decision, staying power, trust in life, obedience to law, invulnerability, magnanimity. These enter into the twelve essential qualities, which the causal self must have acquired one hundred per cent before he can become an essential self. Some of the qualities enumerated are described in classical literature and have been considered to characterize the humanist.
3This brings out the importance of emotionality for culture and humanism and for the right use of reason and freedom.
4What esotericians call “culture” serves to develop emotional and mental subjective consciousness, conditions of the acquisition of higher subjective consciousness. Without emotional consciousness we cannot contact the essential world and without mental consciousness we cannot contact the causal world. Emotional attraction reaches the world of unity and the world of mental knowledge. It is attractive love and knowledge combined that make the acquisition of essential wisdom and love possible. It is these qualities that religion should make possible but that theology in fact has made it more difficult to attain by its dogmas counteracting the unification of mankind. Nothing that separates, that wars against unity, that excludes anyone can be in agreement with the knowledge of reality.
5It should be pointed out that barbarism is compatible with technology, that civilization has largely been technological barbarism, at home at the lower emotional stage, the stage of hatred. Technology improves the conditions of human physical life but has nothing to do with culture (ennoblement). Regrettably, technology, which should have kept pace with culture, has developed ahead of it. That is why we in the 20th century have seen barbarian regimes equipped with means of mass destruction that could spell catastrophe for all mankind.
6True culture, cultivation of the higher emotionality, is the highest attainable stage for the great majority of mankind in the current zodiacal epoch of 2500 years. That implies, in comparison with present conditions, a big stride forward towards the stage of ideality, the stage at which everybody is conscious of his responsibility, at which nobody needs to think of himself because all live for all, all are responsible for all. It is at the stage of ideality that mankind realizes what Christos meant by the “kingdom of god on earth”. In our new epoch (in about one thousand years), men will get a foretaste of what is meant by this, acquire at least an understanding of the laws of freedom and unity.
7Lacking a true knowledge of the inescapable stages of development, life-ignorant idealists have thought themselves able to transform human nature through inspiring individual examples of how those are able to live who have attained a higher stage. Nature makes no leaps, however. The individual can indeed be “transformed”, which in that case is due to the fact that he reacquires a level that he had already attained in a previous life. In a society such as ours, millions of people live below their true level, being inhibited in their consciousness development by an unsympathetic environment and unserviceable circumstances of life. We have a long way to go before we reach understanding of the right upbringing of children and are able to judge the individual case.
1Christianity has given people an erroneous idea of the stage of the mystic as well as the incarnation as a saint.
2For those at the stage of the mystic, the higher emotional stage, the two chief aims are to acquire the attractive qualities and to learn to control emotionality by mentality. The mystic tries to solve the problems of existence with his mentalized emotional consciousness, which unfailingly leads him astray.
3In all mystics, emotional imagination becomes sovereign and goes beyond the reach of common sense. As mystics can be termed Boehme, Guion, Swedenborg, Saint Martin, Emerson, Whitman, Mulford, Steiner, and all Indian raja yogis, also those possessing objective emotional consciousness.
4It is characteristic of those at the higher emotional stage, the stage of the mystic, that they strive for “union with god”. Many of them believe they have reached that union, and the writings of mystics and yogis witness to that belief. The union they are certain of is with the god of their own creation in the emotional world.
5The self is potentially a supreme cosmic self, for you cannot become what you are not potentially. That is the potentiality to be actualized in the process of manifestation. When you realize this you have solved the basic problem of life. We are all divine in our true essence, and our objective is to realize that essence according to the law of self-realization.
6That is the understanding which the individual acquires at the stage of the mystic. Through his contact, via the unity centre in his causal envelope, with the essential world, the mystic becomes convinced that he is divine in essence, understands what is meant by that old saying, “Only he knows himself (his true self) who is conscious of his divinity.” Through esoterics you learn about the fact that you have an unlosable share in the cosmic total consciousness and that this share guarantees that you will some time become a highest cosmic self, however many eons it may take. To keep this goal alive before yourself is the best way to develop, to become a second self, to spare yourself many unnecessary incarnations and much unnecessary suffering. It is part of the paradox of life that the only way to become a second self is to forget yourself, to become absorbed in the service of life in all the ways that automatically entail consciousness development. It is part of the paradox that you acquire knowledge and understanding, qualities and abilities in order to serve better, to forget yourself for the goal, to forget yourself when working at your own development.
7Laurency’s works are not intended for those at the stage of the mystic. The mystics must have their experiences in the higher emotionality and do not need the hylozoic mental system’s description of material reality. They are content with practically any world view whatever. They consort with their “elevated spirits”, their masters in the emotional world, and do not need the common sense of mental consciousness.
8KR is intended for those who want to be oriented in reality. For those who seek for norms of action, the knowledge of the laws of life (the third section of PS) affords the necessary basic view.
9The difference between the mystic and the esoterician (the emotionalist and the mentalist) is that the mystic does not need, does not even desire, clear concepts. For the mystic “feeling is all”. He loves the vague, diffuse, undefined. He defends himself instinctively against mental clarity, since it hinders him from losing himself in the “ineffable”, makes it more difficult for his imagination to expand into infinitude. In mystics you often find an aversion to everything that “is said in books”. Often they do not notice their obvious contradictions, for example when proclaiming that “truth is one” and also stating that no two individuals share the same view. The mystic finds it easier to lead a saintly life with the energies of attraction as his driving force and finds it easier to become “intuitive” in a superficial sense, since “loving understanding is the path to the hearts of other people”.
10The esoterician demands a clearly elaborated mental system of facts and ideas to start from. It is to be regretted that most people have hitherto been content with speculative systems. Those who have the fifth department in their mental envelopes strive to acquire exact concepts and are tormented by all vagueness in the cover of which all manner of fantastry thrives.
11It is of great help to the individual at the stage of the mystic if he already at lower stages, through a training in philosophy, has learnt to love clear concepts. Then he will not as easily fall a prey to that vague sentimentality which makes the individual, rapt in ineffable devotion, lose himself in god or the “absolute” and therefore makes him believe he has reached the goal of life, makes him regard mental clarity as sacrilege, “loss of grace”, presumption, apostasy from god, rejection, and more such expressions, which show how seemingly unfeasible it is to deny oneself that delightful piece of self-deception.
12The writings of the mystics can be of great avail to those at the higher emotional stage but are often obstacles to those who have become mental selves, because they counteract the clarity that the mentalist strives after. It can so easily be a relapse into the much longed-for emotional expansion into infinitude and “union with god”. You will retrieve that only as an essential self when entering into unity.
13Man as a mystic in the highest emotional regions always believes he is sovereign and omniscient, being quite unable to see his own limitation. As unfailingly he will become the helpless victim of his own delusions. The deplorable aspect of it is that with the pertaining emotional consciousness and emotional energies he will almost always idiotize a considerable portion of the people he succeeds in reaching.
14In theosophical literature there is information to the effect that the three highest kinds of emotional matter (48:1-3) correspond to the three highest causal ones (47:1-3). That is misleading. You may very well have activated the three highest emotional kinds while not being causally conscious. That explains why the mystic is independent of mental control and in ecstasy expands his imagination into seeming infinitude with a feeling of omniscience, etc. This is not to say that vibrations from 48:3 cannot reach 47:3 and that man cannot receive inspiration from his Augoeides. With energies from 48:2 you can affect the unity centre (47:2) of the causal envelope.
15The error of many people at the stage of emotional attraction is that they want to be saints in a hurry and think they have failed in their incarnation if they do not reach that stage. They torment and tyrannize themselves and often feel deeply unhappy. But with such desperate selftorture they counteract their own development.
16Many people at the higher emotional stage would quickly reach higher stages if they were not idiotized by the theological dogmas prevalent or by the imaginative constructions of occultists. The need to rid himself from all that nonsense engages the individual in a Sisyphean labour that continues in life after life. The worst of it all is that we shall not be relieved of that burden until the planetary hierarchy has been called back and is able to clean up that Augean stable. No one Herakles is enough for that task. A legion is needed.
17The mystic has a tendency to withdraw within himself in order to find peace and rest. He is content to live with his god (which he has shaped himself in the emotional world). That is the one true reality for him. In this appears the limitation of the mystic temperament. Isolation is the life of the first self; for the second self there is nothing but community, unity.
1At the emotional stage, the individual develops by activating emotional consciousness in his emotional envelope. By cultivating (directing your attention to) the qualities of attraction (admiration, affection, sympathy) you activate consciousness in the higher molecular kinds; by living in feelings of hatred (fear, anger, contempt) you strengthen these more and more.
2It is in the emotional envelope that the qualities are acquired which enable the activation of the consciousness of the higher molecular kinds. As viewed from the matter aspect, development means that lower molecular kinds in the envelope are exchanged for higher ones.
3At the present stage of mankind’s development – the emotional, and chiefly lower emotional, stage – emotional invulnerability, unconcern for everything, emotional stability, divine indifference to whatever happens to your incarnation, forgetfulness of your own self (the first self) enter into the most valuable quality: the prerequisite of the will to unity. Anyone who wishes to become a mental self must learn to be completely independent of everything emotional. This does not in the least mean absence of love but power over emotional life. That life can and must be controlled by mental will.
4The esoterician must acquire an absolute indifference to what people say to him or of him, what they do against him. He knows that such things belong to their level of development, and that they understand no better. (He was such himself on that level.) It is so much easier to acquire that quality when you know that your trials in life are opportunities of redress, of offset, of testing and hardening. Moreover, he knows that at the present stage of mankind’s development “everything is said” about him, there is nothing more to make up.
5By leading lives of service, self-sacrifice we most easily acquire all good qualities, and at the same time lower molecular kinds are exchanged for higher ones. It is of course important that we meditate daily on all good qualities (taken one by one) without egoistically striving to “become good”, which counteracts the purpose. To forget yourself and your insignificance becomes a matter of course. It is important that goodness is not turned into a source of weakness and yieldingness to the claims of others. Sentimentality blinds judgement. You have to be your own master and decide for yourself what is most rational and purposeful for you. A sterling character is determined by his own will, unaffected by other people’s appreciation, conceptions, and views. The mere will to serve is not enough. You must also be able to serve in such a manner that the help you give is efficient. Otherwise you may do more harm than good. Mere will is not enough. You must also know of “how to do it”: with insight, judgement, and intelligent understanding. By using your reason it develops eventually into “common sense”.
6The risky thing about all such instructions is that they are not intended for all but only for those who have attained a certain level of development where the instruction belongs psychologically. You do not preach “love” to the barbarian. You do so to those who have a prospect of reaching the higher emotionality. Just as in all schools you must adapt your teaching to the capacity of perception there is in the audience. Only the most simple teaching, that which is common to all, is intended for all. All other teaching is individual, and is adapted to the individual level. The teacher exists in order to help the individual.
7The three most important abilities at the emotional stage are the will to unity, creative imagination, and the power of visualization. They facilitate contact with the centres of the causal envelope.
8The best, simplest, surest way to reach higher levels is to acquire good qualities. When these qualities each and every one have been acquired fifty per cent, there is a rapid progress towards the stage of the saint.
9We are able to help people by giving them knowledge, courage to live, strength to endure, by our thoughts. The higher kind of consciousness that ideas are part of, the greater is their effect, since a higher kind of matter entails a greater energy; the greater is also their power to transform.
1Men are ruled by their emotional being, until they have become the masters of their emotional states of consciousness. It is a powerful being they have created for themselves in previous incarnations. This being is activated by the subconscious and by external vibrations coming from the emotional world (unconscious telepathy), particularly noticeable in psychoses of all kinds. Only when man realizes that he is not his emotions can he begin to liberate himself from the power of his emotional being. As long as he identifies himself with his emotions, he is their slave. Man has created for himself those physical, emotional, and mental tyrants. They are his own work in the past.
2Something quite different is obtained when the second self forms his envelopes. They, too, are products of the self, but absolutely perfect tools of the self and contain nothing else than what the self has determined. Nothing can penetrate into them from without. Everything is regulated in accordance with the laws of life.
3Spinoza’s thesis, that an affect can be overcome only through another affect, is valid at the emotional stage, before the individual has acquired the mental will of mental consciousness. After that it depends on the individual whether he will allow the affect to rule or will refuse to consider it or even sweep it out of the emotional envelope, so that afterwards it is as though it never existed.
4In order to make himself independent of his conditions and circumstances in physical life, man must liberate himself from the blinding and fascinating power of emotional illusoriness as well as from his fear of the unknown and of the future. This is possible only through mentality, which at the emotional stage is ineffective.
5To be aware of one’s imperfections, one’s faults and failings, is the condition of liberating oneself from them. The fact that the self may feel offended by the lovelessness of others shows that the individual is dependent on his emotions.
6You are not liberated from emotional consciousness and its energies at once but only during a long series of incarnations, what is popularly called “ennoblement”, with regrettably frequent relapses into the lower. Even those who have reached a relatively high emotional consciousness may be sentenced by bad reaping to inability to control the lower energies. Generally, the bad reaping is the result of loveless verdicts on straying brothers. Those who judge will in their turn be judged, if not in the same life then in a subsequent one. Crimes against unity always entail downfall.
7Fortunately, about half of mankind should have put most of this primitivity behind it and be on the verge of the higher emotionality. There still remains much, however, even though the process has been speeded up through the mental activation by science in the last one hundred years. The process is concluded only when the emotional envelope consists of nothing but emotional atoms, the individual has become a 45-self, and the envelope is wholly directed by the essential energies via the centre of unity in the causal envelope. Only then the individual will know what is meant by true love.
8This exchange of the first self’s emotional attraction for the second self’s essential unity was what the gnosticians called the “vicarious atonement”, which the theologians have misunderstood so thoroughly and thereby caused so much unnecessary suffering.
9The liberation from the emotional consciousness entails, in its initial phase, often for the “sensitive” a need to avoid contact, as far as possible, with everything belonging to the night side of existence, things of which modern literature indulges in veritable orgies depicting whatever is worst in people. Strindberg was a forerunner with such descriptions of “pariahs” and the aspect of human hatred. As they attain the stage of the mystic most people will develop an ability to feel sympathy also for individuals showing such expressions of life at the stage of barbarism.
10Glad and happy man shall be. Otherwise there is something wrong with him, a wrong that has to be removed. We have no reason to be otherwise when we know our destination, that gladness and happiness carry us most quickly forward, that they are of enormous importance for our environment and give us the best possible reaping. It is all a matter of emotion and, for those who have acquired will, a matter of will. Emotionality shall not control us. We can be glad and happy if we want to. Else we are slaves under our emotional being. Our mental being is happy (the mental world is our heavenly kingdom), so that anyone who is not happy thereby demonstrates his dependence on emotionality.
11Mankind lives in the physical and emotional worlds. Its thoughts are mentalized emotional forms. It is high time we learnt to live in the mental world as well. Anyone who lives in the mental world is glad and happy. Depression, dejection, etc., are the results when the self sinks down into emotionality.
12The planetary hierarchy considers that (if development goes on as the hierarchy hopes) the significance of the emotional envelope will gradually decrease. Mankind’s attention will instead be directed towards physical and mental life. Physical life involves so many unsolved problems, and they will increasingly attract attention after mankind has decided to make the physical world a “paradise” for its future incarnations. The contribution of mentality to this will increase in importance. The knowledge of the meaning of life will also entail a general striving among people to become mental selves. Upon realizing that consciousness development is a complicated and time-consuming process and that you cannot skip mental consciousness in order to reach the causal and essential consciousness all of a sudden, theosophical and other occult sects will sober up and direct their energies towards nearer and more realistic goals. People will no more wish to live in an illusory world of imagination. And thereby also the emotional world will be “depopulated” and liberated from the imaginative constructions that charm and deceive. The emotional envelope will become devoid of its content, and people will move from the physical world to the mental and back without interludes in the emotional world.
1The individuals of the third as well as the fourth natural kingdom have their monad consciousness centred in the emotional atom of the triad. Both groups are at the emotional stage. Moreover, man has an animal body. These two facts clarify man’s proximity to the animal kingdom in physical and emotional respect. There are also important differences, however. Man has been able to activate consciousness in the mental atoms of emotional matter, to activate consciousness in the lowest molecular kind of his mental envelope, to weave together the emotional and mental envelopes, so that henceforth he will be able to activate higher kinds of consciousness.
2So much about mankind at the stages of barbarism and civilization. The individuals who have been transferred to our planet and who thus causalized earlier, generally have managed to reach the stages of culture and humanity. This explains the existence of that elite the individuals of which have been able to centre their monads in the mental molecule of the triad and to acquire perspective consciousness.
3That elite can be divided into two categories: those who have been initiated into esoteric knowledge orders and have been informed of the true knowledge and those who without that knowledge have constructed fictionalism in theology and philosophy. The scientific fiction systems are of later date. On account of the intolerance and persecution of dissenters by those in power, the initiates have been forced to keep their knowledge to themselves. The contribution they have been able to make has consisted in cautiously proclaiming humanizing ideals.
4It is to be hoped that the esoteric elite, who regrettably have largely ended up in disorienting occult sects, will be able to retrieve the correct system and become that band of guides of mankind they were intended to be.
5During the fully 20 million years mankind’s consciousness development has lasted, energies from the planetary hierarchy have eventually been able to vitalize the mental atoms in the emotional molecular kinds of the emotional world and thereby also the mental atoms there are in man’s emotional envelope. Emotionality has been gradually mentalized, and the clans that have been transferred to our planet in several turns (laggards on other planets, although ahead of mankind in their consciousness development) have contributed to this mentalization.
1The incarnation of the saint bears small resemblance to the notions that theologians have taught their followers. The saint has learnt to see that the meaning of life is consciousness development, that emotional and, quite particularly, mental consciousness are of greater importance than physical things, that physical life has its great significance for the acquisition of qualities and abilities by serving life, mankind, development, and unity, but as to the rest just has a disorienting and alluring effect.
2Anyone who has passed through the incarnation of the saint thereby has put the emotional stage behind him. This does not mean that, in a new incarnation, he is unable to relapse into emotionality. On the contrary, he must in life after life pass through the same stages, and then it will depend on many factors how and when he attains his true level. After he has reattained his level, however, he can at need and whenever he so chooses control his emotional consciousness, is aware of his unity with all people without exception and has definitively overcome any tendency to contempt.
3The saint has mastered the energies of the emotional world. This implies a complete mastery of all phenomena of the emotional consciousness, a complete unconcern for other people’s behaviour, criticism, and rejection. The saint is able to impersonally analyse his own past mistakes and stupidities as being typical of a certain stage of development, the reaction of individual character under given circumstances.
4The saint is independent of his emotional states, is free from any dependence on people, does not let himself be exploited, is self-determined. His attitude is one of sympathy and service, without any emotional motive. Such a person is simple, direct, invulnerable, and purposive.
5The content of noble qualities is due to the efficiency of the will to unity, the ability to resist evil even if it “causes some trouble”, not to compromise with what you know to be right. You help nobody by yielding to unwarranted claims, by bolstering up vice. Outsiders often regard the saint as a “hard individual” because he is free from any kind of sentimentality, something that most people do not know what it is. (As always they think they understand merely because they have learnt to use the word.) It is a matter of “enlarging the concept” of qualities. Thus for example gratitude is gratitude for everything, for everything that life grants you, for the affection and understanding of others, etc.
6There are many kinds of saints. The lowest kind of saints is made up of those who have reached the highest level of emotional attraction. Also causal selves are saints, however, since they cannot acquire a higher kind of consciousness without the aid of emotional imagination and the dynamics of emotional energies. In new incarnations they must resuscitate their latent emotional consciousness in order to have access to the resources of activation there are in emotional attraction. When they have become second selves, essential selves, they are one with all, and so the concept of saint has no longer any meaning in their case.
7To have attained the level of the saint does not necessarily imply that you have acquired all the noble emotional qualities one hundred per cent. The most important one is sufficient: attraction to living beings (human beings first of all), which in itself entails a high-grade acquisition of everything noble. There are several levels of sainthood to go through before you have become a 46-self.
8We can never decide when a man has reached the level of the saint. The only criterion we can go by is that the individual is not in any respect affected by emotional energies but can certainly use them when there is a need for them.
1Consciousness development goes side by side with the acquisition of good qualities and during thousands of incarnations right from the stage of barbarism. When man “takes his destiny into his own hands”, starts working methodically and systematically to increase the percentage of his qualities, his incarnation gains importance, with a “full life” as a result. In so doing he automatically acquires consciousness in ever higher emotional molecular kinds, until he has reached his next goal, improperly called the stage of the saint. It is not easy to work for ennoblement, least of all in the cyclically recurrent periods of decline, such as the present one, when everything appears to counteract such strivings. Precisely in such times, however, where opposition is the strongest, we can learn the most and make the greatest progress.
2He develops most rapidly who forgets his own development, forgets himself in service, leaves his development to his unconscious in the assurance that anyone who has taken his stand under the law of unity will automatically enter into unity. By our mental analyses we disturb the process of consciousness in our causal and essential superconscious.
3By our concentrating our consciousness on the tasks connected with service, we perform them as well as we can and we learn to serve ever better. The central task is to bring everybody into unity, everybody as far as he is able to perceive unity on his level; at any event to counteract repulsion, hatred. We can do so little, we can learn so little from our historical past (which has mostly been of the lowest emotionality), psychology can help us so little (it still is in its infancy). Everybody who lives in order to serve is a pioneer, a discoverer of unexplored regions in the consciousness of our envelopes and in the consciousness aspect of the corresponding worlds. The regions of hatred we know from the novels and plays of literature. There the “brilliant” writers are in their element, analysing primitive consciousness on the 400 barbarian levels and so hindering us from directing our attention to “something different”.
4However, anyone who wants to be a helper in the enormous spiritual agony of mankind lives in the regions of attraction and seeks to show men the path to a life without friction through right human relations, the path to the worlds of mental and causal ideas (causal because they show us the causes of the effects we witness.)
5He will develop in the most rapid way who in relation to his fellow human beings cultivates loving understanding systematically and this for everyone whom he in any way contacts or hears about. Everything that is not love is hatred, and hatred is an absolute hindrance to the attainment of the fifth natural kingdom. During our development at lower stages we have acquired countless qualities of repulsion. They must be replaced with those of attraction. This does not mean that you are blind to the shortcomings of other people but that you understand them and help, at least with good thoughts.
6The most simple way of working for your development is to meditate on a certain good quality for a short while every day and to go on doing that regularly until you notice that your work yields results: the quality becomes easier to realize. In that manner you may take the one quality after the other of those that seem most necessary to you. The important thing is that this is done every day. Otherwise the impressions easily volatilize that need to be strengthened day by day if you want to arrive at results. Sporadic efforts lead you nowhere and will soon appear meaningless.
7You may also proceed so as to formulate the quality everyday in a short motto, which you repeat to yourself whenever an opportunity presents itself or you want to dispel unwelcome thoughts. This facilitates consciousness control and counteracts distraction, that state in which meaningless thoughts succeed one another by automatic association in an endless series. The lesser the content of the quality, the longer it takes before the quality manifests itself spontaneously.
8If you do not want to work for your development, then you must follow along at the general jog-trot during thousands of otherwise unnecessary incarnations.
9When a man has reached the higher emotional stage (the stage of the mystic) and knows, through esoteric knowledge nowadays available, that it is up to him when he will reach “perfection” as a man (become a causal self with all the imperfections of a causal self), then he will also learn how to rightly use time (after fulfilling all his social duties of various kinds) and what he should direct his attention to. This eventually leads to his elimination of everything that is unessential to his development.
10It should be pointed out that the esoterician makes no difference between profane and sacred professions. All are necessary and because of that equally “sacred” (if that term should be used at all); all are parts of the necessary experience of life and service of the community. The fulfilment of duty (the acquisition of a necessary quality), wherever you stand, is the essential work. By acquiring good qualities you automatically acquire a higher kind of consciousness.
11All activity can be called “spiritual” in so far as it is based on high idealism, the aim to provide the highest good for the greatest number, and self-denying constant effort. Such a first self is an image, even though a faint one, of the causal self, whose “being” is knowledge, unity, will to sacrifice. The opposite type is the one controlled by desire for power, desire for glory, craze for possessions, pride, and who lacks the will to unity.
Endnotes by the translator into English
5.6.4 I have not been able to establish who is the author of this quotation.
5.12.6 “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” Shakespeare, Hamlet, i.v.188
5.44.14 “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” The Bible, Gospel according to John, 8:7.
The above text constitutes the essay The Emotional Being of the First Self by Henry T. Laurency. The essay is part of the book The Way of Man by Henry T. Laurency. Copyright © 1999 by the Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation.