The Way of Man by Henry T. Laurency
6. THE MENTAL BEING OF THE FIRST SELF
6. THE MENTAL BEING OF THE FIRST SELF
1During incarnation man is a mental being, since he has a mental envelope.
2The content of the mental envelope is made up of mental matter belonging to four mental molecular kinds. Each mental molecular kind has its own kind of mental consciousness, its own kind of apprehension, its own kind of ideas. The corresponding is true of all higher molecular kinds.
3The four kinds of mental consciousness are:
inference thinking from ground to consequence (47:7)
principle thinking (47:6)
perspective thinking (47:5)
system thinking (47:4)
4There are strong reasons for assuming a correspondence between 47:7, the seventh department, and physical consciousness; between 47:6, the sixth department, and emotional consciousness; between 47:5, the fifth department, and mental consciousness; between 47:4, the fourth department, and essential consciousness. A thorough investigation of this idea might prove profitable. (An idea from the author, for once.)
5The consciousness content of the mental envelope can be divided into four kinds according to origins:
conceptions from physical experience
conceptions from emotional experience
pure mental concepts
concretized causal ideas
6Physical conceptions include: physical facts, hypotheses, theories, sundry idiologies, everything that mental consciousness has managed to work up of the experiences of the physical envelope.
7However, much of this has entered into emotional consciousness: mental atoms involved into emotional molecules.
8Pure mentality does not comprise much in physical world man: philosophical, mathematical concepts, etc.
9Reactions of all kinds originate from either physical or emotional consciousness and from the participation of mentality in those two. Pure mentality is free from reaction. Matter-of-fact mental analysis, so rarely met with, entails no reaction; makes it possible to analyse without valuing or judging.
10You may say that at the present stage of mankind’s development, mental consciousness (except ascertained physical facts) contains on the whole nothing but fictions (conceptions without counterparts in reality; the false notions life ignorance has formed about everything it has not been able to ascertain objectively; subjective speculations, hypotheses, theories, assumptions, beliefs, dogmas, etc. of all kinds).
11We are able to think at all because there are mental energies in the mental world, which in every moment is pervaded by mental atoms (the cosmic motion). We are able to perceive things in the lower worlds because mental atoms exist in all lower (emotional and physical) molecular kinds: “intelligence in matter”. Without a knowledge of the composition of matter you cannot explain that phenomenon.
12Like everything else, ideas in the mental world have a subjective aspect (consciousness) and an objective aspect (matter). Ideas consist of mental atoms or mental molecules. The ideas belonging to a certain subject-matter constitute a mental material form in the mental world, a form that is kept alive due to the energy aspect of ideas and also through the constant supply from the thinkers who are occupied with the same problem. In that process there is a constant exchange of mental molecules between the thinker’s brain cells (containing mental molecules) and the mental form; this is of course said of those who think in accord with reality (have “right ideas”).
13The mental being (so-called mental elemental) which man’s thought engenders in the mental world is an exact replica of man’s conception. It has the same form. It is as intelligent. It is as dynamic.
14All problems have their counterparts in the mental world: thought forms, forms that are objectively accessible to those who have mental objective consciousness. This is a problem for those who must find the solution of problems pursuing the ordinary subjective path (using mental analysis and, possibly, synthesis).
15Objective consciousness ascertains that all mental consciousness expressions are geometrical forms in mental matter. They can be read as ordinary writing. Those geometrical forms are used as symbols in esoterics.
16Nobody is able to think anything that does not already exist in the mental world, since even the most erroneous constructions contain mental molecules. Errors arise when molecules do not occur in the right combinations. In that case there is no spontaneous mutual exchange but the material forms in the mental envelope of the person thinking wrong are more or less crystallized replicas of the corresponding mental form in the mental world. Most forms in the mental world are wrongly constructed.
17As regards the thought process, the esoterician distinguishes between the monad in the triad, the consciousness of the mental envelope, and the processes conveying energy to the brain. It is the monad that works in the mental atoms of the brain cells. Processes occurring from 47:3 to 47:5 are reflected in the higher regions of the brain; those occurring from 47:6 to 48:3, in the lower regions. The lower vibrations in the emotional world are assimilated by the solar plexus centre.
18There is a great difference between the brain’s capacity for mental thinking and the consciousness activity of the mental envelope. Because the mental envelope has its own consciousness, which the human brain does not even suspect. This independent consciousness can assimilate ideas that were formerly considered to belong to the subconscious, since the real fact of the matter could not be explained.
19It can take years before an idea assimilated by the mental envelope consciousness becomes conscious in the brain, the mental molecule has worked its way down into the brain cells. The consciousness content of the mental envelope can thus be much greater than that of the brain and, above all, more correct, since the mental molecule, on its way to the brain, passes through emotional consciousness and then is affected by it. Both kinds of mental consciousness necessarily use fictions (conceptions without correspondences in reality), unless the content is made up of facts of material reality in the worlds of man. Subjectivity without material correspondence is in itself deceptive in the emotional as well as in the mental world.
20The clearer and sharper a thinker the individual is, the greater is the mental power (effect) not just of vibrations and the chiselled-out mental forms in mental matter but also of the effects in the subconscious and in the brain cells in their tendency to automation. According to esoterics, the power of thought is the strongest factor in the matter of good or bad sowing and reaping. Ignorance thinks that “your thoughts are your own”, that it is without consequence what you think, that thoughts have no effect, that man is not responsible for what he thinks. That is one of the biggest mistakes of ignorance. Many people afterwards wonder how they could say or do a “thing like that”, and they find it absolutely incomprehensible. It is not. Anyone who in his so-called imagination “is playing with the thought” of doing something wrong incurs great risks, at least as great as children when playing with fire.
1The self (the monad in the triad in the triad envelope) incarnates in order to be roused to consciousness, since it cannot be conscious in its causal envelope and the old envelopes of incarnation have dissolved. The latent consciousness in the triad units is brought to life through opportunities of activity in the envelopes.
2At the stage of barbarism, the self cannot be conscious even in its mental envelope but only in its organism, etheric envelope, and emotional envelope. At this stage, the self’s mental consciousness is found in the mental molecules that have been involved into emotional molecules through the self’s effort to comprehend the things of physical life. At the stage of barbarism and on the lower civilizational levels, the ability of inference from ground to consequence is acquired.
3You should be clear about the fact that mental consciousness in the lowest molecular kind (47:7) displays ten successively higher powers of inference. It will be long before logicians have ascertained these different kinds. They are able to distinguish broadly between inference thinking (47:7) and principle thinking (scientific thinking, 47:6), but little more.
4On the higher levels of the stage of civilization, principle thinking is activated.
5Principle thinking includes the usual philosophical thinking in systems with analysis of concepts and definitions of concepts. A great importance is attached to the formal agreement of verbal expressions. This kind of thinking regards mutually contradictory propositions as logically impermissible and as refuting each other’s conceptual content.
6Perspective thinking rises above this principle-bound way of looking at things. It often unites contradictions based on principles into a higher synthesis. It readily expresses itself in paradoxes (which does not mean that the play with paradoxes, much in vogue, affords perspectives). It is only after acquiring this capacity that man can be called a mental self.
7System thinking means the ability to think with whole systems and no longer with separate concepts. This kind of thinking can be said to involve concretion of causal intuition. The causal intuition needs neither concepts nor systems, since it perceives parts as a unity and each part as put into its correct context.
8Man is a mental being until he has become a mental self, centred his monad in the first triad mental molecule. As a mental self he has reached the mental stage (the stage of humanity) and possesses mental “sovereignty”. In a new incarnation it may take many years before the man has reattained that stage. But it is latent in him.
9The more primitive the individual, the more difficulty has he in forming those general concepts which are the conditions of comprehension. Gradually, as he parrots what others have said and gets more satisfactory explanations, he starts to develop inference thinking. Most people in civilized countries have all that preparatory work done already in thousands of previous incarnations, so that the whole procedure goes on automatically during the first years of life. The higher level the individual has once attained, the more easily does he remember anew the things he knew once, and the more quickly is his understanding roused, provided his brain cells function normally and he has opportunities of remembrance. As a rule, the individual is reborn with brain cells that correspond to the capacity he once acquired (his ability to absorb similar emotional and mental molecules).
10General development (mankind’s increasing understanding) includes the mentalization of increasingly more emotional molecules in the emotional world, which greatly facilitates the acquisition of understanding.
11Human consciousness development essentially consists in the acquisition and elaboration of new ideas. The power of the collective (incompetence, repugnance, resistance) has to an incredible extent obstructed this necessary rethinking. The power of tradition in an order established upon a revolution has always made up a hindrance to the further evolution, like the notion that all essential ideas of culture already exist in religious writings and in Greek and Latin literature.
12Man’s need of something firm, at the emotional stage for his feeling, at the mental stage for his thought, has entailed that he must content himself with such things as evolution has proved untenable. Those who are already clinging to something that they cannot bear to lose have always proved unwilling to examine the tenability of the new ideas appearing. As easily (logically speaking) individuals acquire world views and life views, as unwillingly they later examine the reality content of new such views. New ideas are not appreciated by those who are happy with their system of ideas. Therefore new generations are needed who are able to examine the reality content of new ideas without prejudice. At the stage of development (the lower emotional and the lower mental) where the majority of mankind is, the activation of the higher emotionality is certainly by far the most important. However, mentality need not therefore be neglected. Men should be able to learn how to think, reflect on their own, not merely parroting others. In our time people have started to think in increasing numbers, even though the large majority still parrot whenever the inferences to be drawn are above the lowest level.
13By developing mental consciousness they make themselves independent of emotionality, which otherwise drives them to run like flocks of sheep hither and thither after every new prophet who knows how to play on their emotional strings, how to make them lose in psychoses the little reason they have got.
14After having been reserved for the esoteric mentalist, esoteric views become common property. This entails a considerable increase of mental capacity. The boundaries of the various stages of development shift. The relative distances between individuals at the various stages of development do not change therefore, however it may appear to those on lower levels.
15Before people have acquired esoteric knowledge, practically everybody becomes idiotized ever since childhood by the ruling idiologies (fictional systems), and old esotericians only at 35 years have acquired sufficient power of reflection to rethink and to eliminate all the madness there is in the views of public opinion, a work that takes them years to do. In that process they become “different” and are generally thought to be fools.
16At 40 years most people seem to have reached the highest level attainable in this incarnation. This is particularly the case with those who take no interest in problems of life in quite general terms.
1Those esoteric reality ideas, which through their more or less exact definition have been turned into concepts, are dependent on those general concepts, which are valid for some time in philosophical and scientific terminology. The absence of logical training has in all ages entailed a naive literalism, which believes it has a criterion of reality in the mere exactness of formulation. The views of reality change constantly as the knowledge of reality increases. To mental consciousness (the highest kind man has), superhuman and cosmic realities can be presented only as mental concepts that cannot explain a higher kind of reality. Consequently, those concepts cannot afford more than a “vision”. That vision nevertheless is necessary is quite another matter. “Where there is no vision, the people perish” is an esoteric axiom.
2The designation “soul”, as it occurs in esoteric literature, is a very vague term. It may signify: the monad in the first triad in the triad envelope; the monad at the emotional stage in momentary, spontaneous contact with mental, causal, or essential consciousness, with Augoeides; or even Augoeides himself. It may signify the monad as a mental self in communication with the higher kinds of consciousness mentioned or, in extremely rare cases, also with the second triad consciousness. This should be clear to you theoretically. However, as a disciple you are recommended to disregard all such distinctions, not to differentiate those various kinds of consciousness, but only see to the highest possible in the common superconsciousness, being unconcerned about which kind. The mental distinction may have an inhibitory effect on the very expansion of consciousness. In this connection it might be said that the phrase of mystics, “union with god”, is psychologically the most efficient, for everything superconscious is transcendent and therefore “god”.
3In the experience of consciousness you reach highest by bringing to life the highest, free from all concepts. Anyone who has achieved a contact with his Augoeides knows what it all is about and needs no further explanation.
1It is with emancipated mental consciousness that the individual shapes his mental system, the basis of his further orientation in reality. Mentality is an excellent instrument for research. But it is no source of knowledge. Without facts of reality mental consciousness produces nothing but fictions. Disregarding physical facts its so-called facts are only imaginative constructions.
2Mental consciousness is absolutely insufficient as a criterion of reality or to establish such a criterion. All reality ideas are causal ideas. Everything else is fictions. Those causal ideas cannot be discovered or deduced by mental consciousness. The ideas produced by speculation are erroneous. We are seldom able to produce new ideas from the hylozoic system (in its present skeleton form). It can be firmly asserted, however, that the “ideas” that conflict with that system are erroneous.
3The mental faculties are largely various abilities to combine and work up the reality ideas that can be received only from the casual world. Mental ideas are in most cases new combinations of original causal ideas.
4Just as mankind is seduced by its higher emotional faculties, so it is led astray by its neverending mania for speculation. Underlying the esoteric “art of being silent” was the insight that neither emotionality nor mentality affords us knowledge of reality. They are necessary faculties for us to develop, but once developed they serve only as instruments of various kinds. As for the rest, their duty is to “be silent”.
5True knowledge of reality cannot be self-acquired by the first self. Higher selves are needed for that. That is a thing which cannot be too strongly emphasized. We can receive knowledge only from the planetary hierarchy. The self-sufficiency of the mental self has always barred the way to the causal world, the world of ideas.
1Most people quite simply cannot decide whether so-called facts within the many areas of life are true facts. Most of them are misconceptions or brainwaves. You are wise in distinguishing between alleged facts and the few facts finally proved by research. Only the latter deserve the name of “facts”.
2Isolated data should not be regarded as facts. They gain probability only when put into a system. Also systems often prove to be misconstructions, however, and the history of science abounds in examples of that. Only anyone who has learnt not to accept anything without the necessary ground escapes the mistake people make daily and hourly as they believe at once that they are able to explain every fact they hear about.
3Facts ascertained methodically and systematically gain a rising degree of probability according as they are supported by experience gained by experiments.
4You cannot be too cautious about so-called esoteric facts. This caution will prove increasingly necessary as esoterics becomes “common property”. The field is already teeming with misleading data. The only reliable data are those we receive from the planetary hierarchy through causal and higher selves.
5About ninety nine per cent of all vagaries that are now thoughtlessly launched as facts would be eliminated if people learnt not to accept anything without the necessary grounds, if they learnt to ask themselves before every assumption: “What facts do I have for this?” That good habit would afford the individual a reliability and solidity that most people lack. A mantra to be repeated at least once a day is: “Let reality decide my every thought and truth rule in my life.” Life would then become different.
1The Westerner has a need for exact concepts, an exactly elaborated mental system. He cannot use symbols. Admitted that absolutely speaking also our concepts are symbols. But concepts are based on mankind’s exploration of reality up to now and on the facts that men have been able to ascertain and thus have been able to understand. Symbols are the language of the intuition and are not intended for the first self for whom the intuition is inaccessible. It is only when contacting the second self consciousness that intuition can be obtained and developed.
2You understand that philosophers and scientists, who require clear, exact concepts, cannot be content with the largely diffuse concepts of mystics and occultists. They demand a formulated world view as a basis of their life view in accord with reality so that they know that it concerns realities. The history of philosophy is the example of seekers who were never able to accept what other philosophers thought because they found their concepts unsatisfactory. They will seek further without cease until they have found the “absolute”, that is, the correctly formulated mental knowledge system, the one that proves tenable in all respects. Many people have become philosophers since they had an “instinctive feeling” that there was such a system and have become skeptics or given up their seeking when they have not been able to regain contact with that system.
1According as the amount of facts has increased (enlightenment has risen), literacy has been spread, the freedom of individual thought (tolerance) has been enlarged, also mental consciousness has developed. From this it does not follow, however, as people believe, that the ability to rightly judge things has increased. For this requires also experience from life, and that is seldom acquired before 50 years of age. Our time has proved that juvenile academic opinion (and this in all countries without exception) can be and generally is totally injudicious in most issues of life view.
2Many people confuse intelligence with the power of judgement. But they are two quite different faculties. Judgement requires a knowledge of facts and experience (a working-up of facts done previously). Speculation has seemed more convincing than humble uncertainty that has refused to assume anything without sufficient grounds, which have been lacking in 99 cases out of 100. The hyperintelligent man finds it all too easy to accept his vagaries with his sense of superiority and his self-confidence. When esoteric history will some time be publicized, we shall see how easily people have fallen victims to their illusions and fictions, assumptions without sufficient ground. They have not even been able to decide whether the ground was sufficient.
3Injudiciousness is the result when people make statements about things they have not studied thoroughly, typical of so-called public opinion, which is mistaken more than 95 per cent. What public opinion announces is what people believe they know. That belief is based on misunderstanding, rumours (often fabricated) of all descriptions, inclination to believe anything evil said, which is due to the vibrations of hatred in the three lower regions of the emotional world. It is only as a causal self you are able to ascertain the truth.
4Nobody is able to judge whatever is above the level of his power of judgement. That is a fact most people cannot understand. The proof of this is man’s innate self-reliance and the truth of the esoteric saying, “everybody is the master of his wisdom”. Everyone is wise in his own eyes until he has made the Sokratean realization. You may accept that fact in theory like everything else you accept in order not to make a fool of yourself, but in practice you act the opposite way. Then there are, of course, those who suffer from the complex of inferiority and who have lost their trust in self completely.
5Most people hold opinions on practically everything. A thinking man analyses the justification for these opinions, and he is always enriched with new views on the problems. Then he will find it easier to take his own stand when circumstances force him to do so. The gratuitous adoption of always unmatured opinions is part of infantile psychology. “Education” seems to mean that you have been crammed with all manner of guesswork so that you are able to make statements at once on everything you have not examined and practically know nothing about, that you are always ready to judge things and people. People have no idea of what a mental chaos they actually live in, however well-arranged they think their life is. Their world view and life view (if they have any) are composed of freaks and facts in a nice medley.
6Those who rely on authorities, who ask, “Who said that?”, may certainly do so. But it would do them no harm if they thought over from whom they heard it. For that is not the same thing. You seldom recognize your own statements when you hear others quoting them.
7It is a common feature of university graduates and intellectuals that they overrate their power of judgement, cannot see their own limitation. Those with a higher education do not seem to have realized yet that learning is not the same as wisdom, that learning does not imply a greater power of judgement but only a better orientation in one or several subject fields. The academic pride of learning and conceit would appear merely comical to esotericians if it did not occasion a great deal of harm. Experience shows that self-taught people generally have a better orientation as well as a greater power of judgement. An eminent academic is competent because he has reached higher levels and has acquired knowledge and understanding in thousands of incarnations, not because he is an academic. The academic injudiciousness is massive.
8As facts about the departments become exoteric, as the fact that each human envelope belongs to some department, we may expect that occultists will know the envelope departments of any individual. Therefore, it should be stated that only the planetary hierarchy can determine such things. The phenomenon that occultists believe they are in contact with the planetary hierarchy and learn from it everything they wish to know is an inevitable consequence of the publicizing of esoterics. Fools are all-knowing. You must be a Sokrates to see your own life ignorance and the fictitiousness of speculation. Esoterics often has a disorienting effect also on beginners in esoteric study, a fact that can be ascertained in the esoteric societies, among others. It is a good rule to take a skeptical attitude to all uncalled-for teachers of wisdom and all cocksure judges. Esoterics gives us the knowledge of the supermen but does not afford us the ability to handle it like ordinary human knowledge. The philosophical metaphysics shows us what will happen if we do not heed this warning.
9The esoterician is taught that every individual (monad) is a unique being, a unique entity in all respects. That is the basis of the law of freedom. What we have in common with everybody, our share in the three aspects of reality, is collective but is practically in all respects “individualized” through the monad’s unique individual character and experiences in the processes of manifestation, which include life in the physical world. The law of analogy is a cosmic law as is the law of self. The law of analogy applies to the matter aspect, the law of self to the consciousness aspect. When judging things you must take both into consideration. That is above the power of the first self, but the knowledge of these two basic factors is nevertheless necessary for a “fairly” possible analysis and synthesis.
10Conception goes from generals to particulars, though mechanical thinking stops at generals, lacking the ability to individualize and, moreover, the necessary facts.
1“Common sense” and “genius” are terms that are often used in everyday speech. The esoterician means by “common sense” the higher mental faculties (47:4,5) and by “genius”, subjective causal consciousness (47:2,3).
2As for the technical skills existing at lower stages, “talent” is anyone who has cultivated some particular faculty during at least three incarnations, and “genius” the corresponding during at least seven lives. There are also “allround geniuses”, who have acquired several such faculties. As a rule, genius requires an etheric envelope that enables the reception of the necessary vibrations. Otherwise there may be understanding but no ability to express the latent powers.
3There are many kinds of common sense, as many as there are kinds of material reality and the corresponding kinds of consciousness. Moreover, within each kind of reality, common sense is found in different degrees, which are due to the extent of knowledge and understanding acquired. Generally, “common sense” implies that you do not believe anything or believe you know anything but accepts only what is your own experience, such things as you comprehend and understand yourself.
4Buddha forbade his disciples to “believe anything” they did not comprehend. The same dissuasion also lies in the fundamental axiom of esoterics. That must be the only basis to build upon. If you do not comprehend, do not understand, you must wait until you have had the experiences that enable you to understand. It is better to be a skeptic than a believer and dogmatic. If that principle had been applied, the history of mankind would have looked different. We would have been spared credulity with its countless idiologies and all that sectarianism, which has poisoned human life.
5Hypotheses and theories are the attempts of life ignorance to explain phenomena originating from the unexplored. They remain subjective and most often also individual assumptions with attempts at fitting ascertained facts into some context.
6Most scientific disciplines largely consist of hypotheses and theories. The deplorable feature of this is that scientists and scholars constantly forget that their ephemeral dogmas are little but fictions (conceptions without correspondence in reality). Instead, they take their theories to be realities. They have “nothing else to go by”, they say. The concepts of esoterics are not just unknown to them but also inconceivable, since they have not received the basic training required for comprehension. Such a training is absolutely necessary for all who have not been initiates of esoteric knowledge orders and possess this knowledge latently in their subconscious.
7Where the esoterician is concerned, it is regrettable though inevitable that he must study the illusions and fictions of mankind in order to make himself understood at all, adapt to the level (level of education or level of understanding, two quite different things) of those he is talking to.
8In The Philosopher’s Stone, Laurency quite intentionally confined himself to the treatment of problems which occur to the first self and whose basic concepts must first be systematized.
9Although it is only as a causal self that man may be said to have acquired real common sense, yet there is at the lower stages of development a possibility to acquire some sense of proportions.
10The first proof that mankind has acquired common sense will be when it has realized that everything happens according to law. Arbitrariness would result in chaos. The matter and motion aspects are subject to laws of nature; the consciousness aspect is subject to laws of life.
1It is perhaps inevitable that mental selves (also those having esoteric knowledge) very often try to judge things and events (and even their teacher’s doings) by means of the knowledge material available to them and in so doing make mistakes. In such cases you must distinguish between criticism and mere mental analysis. The critic makes mistakes on account of his overestimation of his own capacity (presumption) as well as his inability to judge the insufficiency of the knowledge material. The analyst is fully aware of his own limitation as well as his “ignorance”, but analyses in order to reach clarity as far as that is possible at all.
2You cannot defend misleading idiologies by asserting that they are useful at a certain stage, which is quite another matter. For these idiologies harm those who could get a more correct view if they were not led astray. Those who cannot tell fiction from reality may certainly believe what they want. But you have a duty to point out the errors to those who, upon being thus informed, are able to perceive them. Seekers have a right to know the truth, know what is right and what is wrong. Repeating that old saw, “There is a core of truth in everything”, you can defend any lie whatsoever.
3There is a great difference between emotional querulousness and mental critical analysis. The latter is necessary to the liberation of mankind from the idiologies of the ruling life ignorance. Even though the criticism be “negative” in the eyes of most people and so is considered reprehensible, it still makes up an important part of mental activity and is indispensable to the development of mental consciousness. To get annoyed at a critic’s irony, satire, sarcasms, which by no means imply a desire to “hurt”, is evidence of emotionality and lack of a sense of humour (a sense of proportions). Often the writer needs to make his message more incisive in order to wake his readers up and show them he is serious. To gloss it over takes away such an effect. Then it is better to annoy those sleeping. In such cases, too, the motive is everything.
1“Knowledge is remembrance”, is reacquisition from the subconscious, which is never passive but automatically works up what it receives and collects all new material supplied to it.
2Comprehension is the result of logical working-up of a new material of thought. You can comprehend the radically new, but in order to understand it you need a much longer preparation. Understanding is the result of working up done already in a previous incarnation and is therefore direct.
3Comprehension goes from generals to particulars, from the more general to the less general in a series until the system is reached which contains all related concepts or facts in their correct contexts and is at the same time the criterion of mutual agreement. The fact that people do not realize this is evidence of a faulty training in logic.
4To really understand means that you have realized the agreement of thought and reality. Otherwise you deal with fictions.
5You can understand only what you have experienced yourself. Unfortunately even that is not enough, of which fact clairvoyants are instances, since they cannot judge the reality content of their experiences in the emotional world. But then the human stage is said to be the most difficult of all stages of development.
6What we meet in life and recognize through contact with the subconscious we always believe we understand. But our subconscious has many wrong complexes so that there is always a risk we misunderstand.
7To really understand is something quite different from people’s common belief that they understand. Those on lower levels misunderstand most about those on higher ones. It is the same case in the relation between educated and uneducated. This explains the countless misunderstandings.
8There are as many different kinds of consciousness as there are atomic kinds and molecular kinds. And nobody rightly understands a kind of consciousness that is beyond his own experience. That is a fact which many appear to have difficulty in realizing, as long as they believe they rightly comprehend what they cannot understand. It is due to this fact that individuals at different stages of development “speak different languages” and misunderstandings appear to be inevitable. An esoterician, in particular, must reckon with being misunderstood whatever he says and does.
1The common expression, “I have a strong feeling that ...”, is exact. It is a matter of feeling. Where most people are concerned that feeling is quite sufficient for them to be sure of their ground. We have no guarantee, however, that anything in the emotional world agrees with reality. It is indeed impossible. The lower cannot comprehend the higher. And only mental consciousness can comprehend; only mental consciousness can put facts right into correct systems that can agree with reality in the worlds of man (47–49). Thereupon we are to use analogy, which is a right principle, since it is a standard for the composition of matter from the highest cosmic world to the lowest planetary world. Analogy thus applies to the matter aspect. If you have once grasped the principles of the composition of matter in the worlds of man, then you have the key to higher worlds.
2Unfortunately, this principle of analogy cannot be applied to the consciousness aspect. The prerequisite of doing so is rather knowledge, which we can receive only from those in higher kingdoms, individuals who know what they are speaking about from their own experience, since they have succeeded in reaching higher kingdoms. When this has been said it seems to be self-evident. Before it has been said, however, it is a “mystery”. This self-evident is what nobody can find. And that is a thing which men have to learn: the most simple is the most difficult of all. The fundamental error of philosophers of all times has been that they have been searching for the “inscrutable” in the most complicated. Speculation spoils everything. The brilliant is the simple, the direct. That was the meaning intended with the parable of the child, a halting parable, besides. It did not mean ignorance but directness. The child is not complicated as grown-ups have become through faulty upbringing. People become disoriented whenever they are inoculated with illusions and fictions.
3As a rule, the simpler a hypothesis, the more correct it proves to be. Scientific thinking, when on the right track, strives for simplification, because reality is the simplest of all simple things (contrary to what is commonly assumed). We have got so entangled in our fictions that we cannot find the way out of the labyrinth.
4The organism is what man eats and drinks. At the emotional stage man is what his emotional consciousness expressions make him; and at the mental stage, man is what he thinks. But this is of course too simple for exoterists.
5On their present level, philosophers as well as scientists are unable to appreciate the esoteric world view. They are physicalists and have no idea of higher worlds. Until they have discovered the physical etheric world and the human etheric envelope, they will not be “converted” either.
6Almost all personal experience is in some respect unique, even though it appears to be general. It still remains for doctors to realize that all treatment must be individual and that they make mistakes when using their general methods of treatment. Every diet should be individual and the individual should have his own diet list. The big mistake that everybody makes every day is to make absolute statements from a general experience. Absolutification is objectionable in 99 cases out of 100.
1Man has not reached farther in his understanding of life than he thinks it is possible to live rationally without a knowledge of the laws of life. The initiates of the knowledge orders were taught something different. The knowledge has always existed although it might not be publicized on account of religious intolerance and fanaticism, which replaced the knowledge with their disorienting teachings.
2Most simply the meaning of life can be summed up thus: We are here to have experiences and to learn from them. So doing we acquire that fund of experience which must be the basis of the development of common sense. It is by making mistakes that we learn the most efficiently. What people call a “failure of a life” may in a subsequent incarnation prove to be a very instructive and so valuable life. In their life ignorance, moralists blame people for being on a certain level of development and do not realize that they do not know better or are able to do it better. Also in this case esoterics affords the true understanding.
3One-track idealism fades as you realize that life is more complicated than you thought. Generally, only at the end of the fifth period of life your experience and your own power of reflection are sufficient to enable you, if at the stage of culture, to take a critical stand on what is obsolete in the prevalent traditional thinking. So-called radicalism, belonging at the stage of civilization, refutes itself by its exaggerations, its unreasonableness, its lacking sense of proportion.
1There is knowledge (experience of reality and life) in all atoms in all kinds of matters except in primary matter (whose potential consciousness has not yet been actualized).
2There are different degrees of latent knowledge (experience of reality) in the involutionary atoms of the different worlds, in the triads, in the collective consciousness of the different worlds and in the evolutionary monads of the different natural kingdoms. The higher kingdom the individual has reached, the more he is able to profit by this knowledge.
3Inmost and ultimately, the monads (the primordial atoms) in the atoms possess this knowledge, and so only those who have reached the highest world of the highest kingdom (world 1) and become “ultimate selves”, liberated from all involvation, are able to experience the consciousness of all atoms in the primordial atoms. A 21-self can experience the collected knowledge of 21-atoms (evolutionary atoms!) in their atomic chain 22?49, if that self desires to make a special study of a certain individual’s unique way of looking at things. Otherwise (for the collected total knowledge) he has access to the collective consciousness of world 22. (This is said in order to clarify basic concepts.)
4Of course, our modern philosophers and scientists are unable to use these facts in a rational manner. But there are old initiates with latent knowledge who may delight in them. They also serve to facilitate understanding of the new facts which the planetary hierarchy allows for publication little by little. A fact of the future we should reckon with is that there will be exoteric as well as esoteric philosophers and researchers, and that the two groups will have totally different world views and life views. Probably so many esoteric ideas will soon be accepted by everybody equipped with common sense to some degree that esotericians can begin to speak their mind without being regarded as “nuts”. At all events, hylozoics will be generally accepted as a working hypothesis within 200 years.
5Latent knowledge from previous incarnations is actualized through activation; in men through a renewed contact with the corresponding reality.
6Unless an individual at a higher stage already in his youth gets into contact with his latent knowledge, but his brain is inoculated with the fictions of the ruling idiologies, it may happen that he will never in that life reattain his true level.
7There is in the latent consciousness of our triad mental molecule immensely much which we do not even suspect until we shall have the opportunity, some time as causal selves, to study the consciousness development of the monad through all its incarnations, the only matter of past lives that may interest causal selves and precisely because the knowledge gained from that study is part of the necessary experience of life, necessary to the understanding of life.
8In order to immediately see that esoterics is right you must have the knowledge latently, have been an initiate of an esoteric knowledge order in a previous incarnation. To enter such an order it was not necessary to have reached the humanist stage, but the cultural stage (higher emotional stage). It is not very probable that anyone lacking that latency takes an interest in esoterics so that he takes the trouble to master the system. That does not mean that you learn the system by heart but that you learn to explain the previously inexplicable by its aid.
9All who were initiated into some esoteric knowledge order had to be able to reach at least the second degree, corresponding to what was taught in the Greek “lesser and greater mysteries”. The third degree was so secret that not even initiates of the second degree knew of its existence, and the corresponding was true of the still higher degrees beyond every initiate. There were seven degrees in all. Those who had managed to attain the third degree as a rule also became disciples of the planetary hierarchy. Since anyone who has once been accepted as a disciple will always be a disciple, those to whom Pythagorean hylozoics is at once selfevident may regard themselves as disciples even though they know nothing about the fact. The planetary hierarchy considers that at all events they should regard themselves as disciples, as this facilitates their self-realization and, possibly, a new conscious contact if they fulfil the necessary conditions in the service of unity.
10Most esotericians, who have found the system to be simple and almost self-evident, experience to their surprise that it appears to be incomprehensible to the uninitiated. It is, to be sure, totally different from all other systems of thought. The explanation for this difference in individual understanding is that all “knowledge (understanding) is remembrance”. What we do not already know we have difficulty in understanding. Many are able to comprehend the system. Only “initiates” can understand it.
11Those who have the esoteric knowledge latently from previous incarnations always have an instinctive suspicion that “things cannot be such as theologians and philosophers say they are”. Usually they are either atheists or skeptics or feel more than others lost in existence until they renew their contact with esoterics. If they become theologians or philosophers, it is rather because they want to liberate mankind, as far as possible, from the ruling illusions and fictions.
12The power of latent knowledge is illustrated by those individuals who have been educated by Jesuits and entered into the Jesuit Order but have been able to free themselves after contacting esoterics.
1It is an everyday observation that people believe they understand what they cannot understand. The newcomer in the reality of esoterics easily thinks that intelligent people who are interested in the occult also really understand esoteric problems, and they often make mistakes in this respect. You may on the whole assume that those who have not been initiates of the third degree of an esoteric knowledge order only believe they understand. Knowing and understanding can be two quite different things.
2All this is of course part of psychology, and on that subject people are amazingly ignorant. That may sound as an exaggeration and a hard saying, but almost all human statements demonstrate that most people are psychologically primitive, to put it bluntly. They are at home in the matter aspect of the visible world, but their understanding of the individual’s consciousness aspect is almost non-existent. Psychological research has not yet realized that the consciousness aspect is a domain that is more than 99 per cent unexplored, that emotional as well as mental consciousness move in their own spheres of reality. They have not reached farther than the study of consciousness expressions in the organism, the lowest kind of consciousness. They believe that the cells of the cerebral cortex are the only condition of the ingenious creations of mankind, and that such achievements are accidental in equally accidental geniuses. In their scientific self-glory they refuse to study the sole world view that is able to afford a satisfactory explanation of the pertaining phenomena, provide the only firm basis of psychological understanding. If they knew what sovereignty in the matter of ideas esoterics grants those who have learnt to master that knowledge, they would eagerly grasp that opportunity, which formerly was accorded only to the initiates of the esoteric knowledge orders.
1As for the attitude that consciousness takes to reality, people can be divided into extraverts and introverts.
2Extraverts walk the 1–3–5–7 path, have a predominance of departments 1, 3, 5, and 7 in their envelopes. They have a stronger sense of the world view with its matter and energy aspects. They make up the Western objective consciousness type, having a bent for natural research.
3Introverts walk the 2–4–6 path, have a predominance of departments 2, 4, and 6 in their envelopes. They have a stronger sense of the life view with the consciousness aspect. They make up the Eastern type that prefers to live in its subjective consciousness.
4The Westerner has given us the world view and has thereby laid the necessary, objective basis of the life view. The Easterner has taken an especial interest in the life view, not sufficiently understanding the fact that the matter aspect must be the objective basis of any view, and so nearly 99 per cent of his “intellectual products” are figments of the imagination and unfit for life, not to say hostile to life. When, in the future, the two types will apply their methods on a right basis, they will achieve a fruitful collaboration.
5There are many people who do not care about any world view agreeing with reality as a basis of their life view. They have a bent for the consciousness aspect (departments 2, 4, and 6). Many psychologists are in this category. Because of that they must not deny their common sense, however, for this will mean a roundabout way. You must have acquired common sense in order to become a causal self.
6In contrast, most scientists and philosophers need a tenable basis. Regrettably, such a basis, meeting the requirements made by such people, has been lacking. Pythagorean hylozoics should supply this want for quite a long time ahead. Of course this does not refer to present-day scientists who are as yet happy with their fictional systems. But discoveries will be made that will eliminate the views commonly held up till now once and for all. Then hylozoics should be available as a working hypothesis.
7This can be called the basic error of all speculation and all speculative systems: they are not founded on a tenable basis, the knowledge of reality and life. All political, social, philosophical systems bear witness to that fact. They will prove untenable also in the future. Esoterics alone can make up an unshakable basis.
1The fact that men have mental envelopes does not mean that they are able to use mental consciousness except in the mental atoms of emotional molecules. Strictly speaking, mental thinking begins only as perspective consciousness (47:5) is acquired, and is possible only for mental selves. It should perhaps be mentioned that also the imagination is part of emotionality. Discernible emotions as well as imagination are combinations of emotional and mental consciousness, mixtures whose varying contents of mentality are due to the clarity of thought.
2The esoterician includes among “intellectuals” all who have acquired the faculty of principle thinking (47:6).
3The lower mental consciousness (47:6,7), functioning through the lower emotional consciousness (48:4-7), is all that is needed to intelligently master the problems of physical reality and, after a series of incarnations of orientation in a certain domain of reality or knowledge, to appear as a “genius”. Many mentally “sovereign” people perhaps think they are mental selves. But also the great “intellectual giants” have seldom reached beyond 47:6.
4All people at the stage of principle thinking have belonged to all races and nations, all kinds of religion, etc. This fact should give theologians, philosophers, and psychologists food for thought; those who are such true believers and so proud of their intelligence, their race, or their nation.
5Since each molecular kind embraces 49 material layers, corresponding subdivisions of mental consciousness are produced according as mankind and individuals work on the development of mental consciousness. By and large, only the two lowest kinds (47:6,7) have become generally activated so as to be comparatively easily acquired, depending, of course, on the individual’s level of development. This refinement of the two lowest kinds of consciousness takes place in the mental atoms of emotional molecules at the stage of culture. Poets and mystics work unconsciously on this, and so doing they serve consciousness development.
6Of course this does not mean that their “thinking” agrees with reality, although, if they had the knowledge of reality, the process would certainly be accelerated through their greater understanding of what they actually are engaged in. But mankind is still far from being able to perform that work purposefully.
7Not only levels separate people mentally, but also their domains of experience and study. It is interesting to study the vocabulary and thought associations of theologians, jurists, physicians, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists (and increasingly more groups within these categories). From the psychological point of view a definite guild system appears. Add to this the fact of different nations with different languages and other conditions, and you have an almost inexhaustible field of research. To an esoterician, who is solely an objective observer and analyst, such a study widens his perspectives and prevents him from committing himself as well as protects him from unconscious contamination with the illusory and fictitious associations of commonly used words and phrases.
8It is to be ascertained that human so-called thinking is largely made up of mechanical associations from false ideas of reality received from without. The monkey instinct – driving the individual to speak and act as he has in some way been hypnotized to do – still is the strongest instinct of all, whatever psychologists believe.
9A mature judgement is not acquired at home, at school, or at the university, but only in life and is seldom reached before the age of 40 years by those who have the prerequisites for it at all.
10There is a war constantly going on between the countless idiologies, and that is a proof of the rule of life ignorance and disorientation. It is a war of hatred, an emotional and a mental war that anytime may result in a physical war.
11Mankind has not got farther than that. It is unnecessary to point out that there is a minority possessed of common sense and emancipated from idiological emotional thinking. But is it able to assert itself in these times of equality when all are considered to understand equally much? The welfare of mankind depends on this.
1As long as there are different views and opinions, mankind has not found the truth (reality), because it is directly self-evident to all and logically inescapable. Fictionalism consists in the fact that everybody thinks that just his conception is obvious, and so it is because the concepts we use are mental constructions and not realities. Thus men do not know what is meant by freedom or equality or brotherhood, to give a few examples. In most cases, causal or essential consciousness is required to see reality. Philosophers try to define concepts. It is a useful exercise provided you realize the fictitiousness of it.
2Still philosophers and scientists have not seen their enormous ignorance of reality and life, not seen that man cannot solve the problems of existence. And since they are authorities to the rest of mankind, men will always be misled in all problems of life. They have one merit, however. Their temporary knowledge systems (idiologies) are not inflexible. Theologians, who have got irremediably stuck in an inflexible dogmatic system of life ignorance, are quite unable to orient themselves in reality and life.
3Mankind is the victim of its unchecked imagination with an uncontrollable mania for speculation. The esoterician has been taught that all human speculations on existence are nothing but fictions. Exoteric philosophy and science are still as widely separated from the esoteric knowledge that any attempt at combining them will only result in a miserable quasiscience. That is a thing which theosophists and other occultists have not yet realized. It is typical that occultists speculate on the esoteric facts and ideas they have received. The result is an occult quasi-science that has begun flooding mankind, increases disorientation even more, and discredits esoterics.
4The esoterician will accept no other ideas than facts from the planetary hierarchy. Either he knows or he does not know the esoteric facts. He never speculates, however, for he knows that he will never know whether his own “ideas” agree with reality. He has realized that speculation solves no superphysical problems, discovers no esoteric factors. He uses his reason to analyse the existing material and is content with the clarity that he may obtain thereby. He knows that it is as great a difference between reality and probability as between probability and possibility.
5He also knows that the mental systems elaborated with “right ideas” will remain temporary so that it will be impossible to enforce a new infallible paper pope (in the manner of the “pure, unadulterated word of god”). Everything will be just working hypotheses. There will never be any absolute authority, for that would hamper or even stop the consciousness development of mankind.
6Any conception of reality remains temporary, and this is true even of those in cosmic kingdoms, for the whole cosmos is in a process of constant transformation. We must be content that our conception of reality is the best possible at our stage of development and in our times. It cannot be considered expedient for a longer period than two thousand years. That is why the esoteric knowledge imparted in the secret knowledge orders was presented in a new way to each zodiacal epoch.
7“Creative” emotional imagination and mental analysis are often called philosophy. In the proper sense of the word, however, philosophy is the continuous attempt at solving the basic problems of world view and life view and is not the same as all manner of speculation.
8The history of philosophy, presenting countless thinkers everyone of whom used speculation to produce something different than all the others, should have taught the philosophers that none of them possessed the knowledge of reality and that you cannot reach reality by speculation. To reach reality you must research, experiment, and ascertain facts. Speculation is mental construction at random. You cannot produce facts about an unexplored reality by speculation.
9Analytical philosophy (epistemological semanticism) never reaches beyond the knowledge of reality acquired by mankind collectively. Whenever that limit is passed, creeds are produced (various kinds of religion, metaphysics, etc.) This remains inescapable until mankind has reached the causal stage, has acquired causal consciousness. Esoteric knowledge is not generally valid but the individual’s “private business” that it is no use fobbing off on other people.
10The only second selves in the history of European philosophy are Pythagoras and Francis Bacon. The other philosophers were without superphysical objective consciousness and so their speculations are more or less arbitrary fictions.
11Our modern geniuses have chucked all reality concepts out of the window, for only they know and comprehend. The old usual scientific method: denying everything they cannot understand or explain. They assume without proof things as must first be proved; in other words, they are believers. But it will fare with them as, in their times, with the sophists. Finally they will only dare to “move their finger”, the ultimate collapse of all their quasiknowledge.
12The best they can do in the future is to go on refuting their own speculations. To the esoterician it is all erroneous, and it is only a matter of time when this will be obvious to everybody.
13The individual is the irremediable victim of his emotional illusions until he has become a mental self, and of his fictions until he has become a causal self. He is the irremediable victim of any idiology until he has acquired esoteric knowledge. Idiologies also comprise skepticism. Note this: idiology - from ‘idios’ = your own, ‘logos’ = teaching - in contradistinction to ideology, having true, Platonic, or causal ideas. Esoterics is the only system that can rightly be called an ideology (a mental system that can be accepted by causal selves). Whether an idiology is embraced by millions of people means nothing in that respect.
14However, esoterics is no guarantee against illusions or fictions in matters of personal life. That is a fact which occultists have not yet realized. After esoterics has been made available to everybody, also those at the stage of civilization are able to assimilate it. Thereby they have not acquired the qualities and abilities belonging to higher stages of development. That sense of superiority you often encounter in occultists is perfectly unjustified. Instead, they should be humble before what they have undeservingly already received and consider the greater responsibility that goes with the knowledge.
1Any dogma eliminates common sense and thereby counteracts consciousness development. Men become idiotized by all manner of dogmas ? theological, philosophical, and scientific. Life is change, but men want to have everything fixed once and for all.
2Theologians as well as philosophers and scientists are dogmatic thinkers. They are able to think rationally outside their speciality. But as soon as they enter into their fictional system, their “free thought” ceases. The same phenomenon can be observed in all who are afflicted with dogmas, fictions, prejudice of all kinds. Within a certain domain they are quite unable to use their common sense, unamenable to arguments or facts. Then it only remains for the other of us to be silent and let them have their way or to talk about something else. A Bostromian (follower of Swedish subjectivist philosopher Bostrom) was able to think clearly, rationally, realistically on any kind of problem, until the question of the existence of the external world was broached. There reason suddenly ended, and dogma began.
3The whole dogmatism is an ongoing attempt at mentalizing, logicalizing a fictional system, and must take its practisers further and further away from reality. The more theologians intellectualize the fictions (originally misinterpreted symbols) turned into dogmas, the more difficulty they have in seeing through fictitiousness, the more fortified they are in their beliefs, the less amenable they are to common sense.
4Something similar is produced in philosophy. If you have once got stuck in some fiction (for instance, the subjectivist hypothesis that “everything is mind”, everything is subjective), then you are quite unable to understand reality, to liberate yourself from your fictional system.
5The advances in technology have entailed a superstitious belief in science. Science is still in its infancy, however, and that is why its dogmatism appears even more grotesque. When, in the future, the physical etheric molecular kinds are discovered (a start has been made with socalled nuclear fission), mankind will experience a revolution in its conception of reality and realize the enormous limitation of its present conception also of the matter aspect in the dense physical world.
6The esoterician never makes cocksure statements even if he is convinced personally. For cocksureness always and justly gives the impression of unreliability, since nobody is as cocksure as the one who knows, sees, understands nothing. That is a general feature ever since childhood. We are once and for all in the habit of expressing ourselves in terms as if everything were absolute. And what appears absolute perhaps goes down into the slop-pail tomorrow. At least it should in most cases.
1Superstitious beliefs are without number, and new ones are produced without limit, only the phrases formulating them become generally known. As a rule they are without any foundation in reality. One instance is the fear of being one of “thirteen at the table” (from Christos’ last supper with his disciples, the master and the twelve.) Certainly it may happen that one of the thirteen will die within the year, but the cause of it is hardly an accidental gathering at a meal. Superstitious beliefs can be eradicated only when people have learnt to see the necessity of causality. A “sign”, an “omen”, does not depend on any causal chain, is no cause of an effect.
2Scientific superstition is a harder case. It may take centuries before research has finally exploded a superstitious belief, which the history of medicine has demonstrated with many examples. A hypothesis is easily turned into an accepted dogma. In every discipline there is a risk that any fixed view will last a long time.
3The most deplorable scientific attitude is the refusal to condescend to examine many problems, an attitude that has been an incredible obstacle to progress.
1It is probably necessary, when discussing perspective consciousness (47:5), to sketch the origin of consciousness and the nature of mentality. An elucidation would require a comprehensive treatise.
2By contrast with emotionality and its typical illusoriness (seductive vagueness), the essence of mentality is the very clarity of its conception of all relations.
3Emotionality seems to contain a demand of the “will” to be right, independent of reality. All believe they are right not needing to consider grounds or causes. And if you try to invoke reason, that demand is rejected with equally illusory sophisms.
4The atom is composed of billions of primordial atoms, which in the process of involution have acquired passive consciousness, something that can be best compared to catching the event experienced, photo-and phonographic recording without the possibility of self-activity. In respect of consciousness, every atom is thus composed of billions of “reflections” of everything the primordial atom has experienced ever since its consciousness was brought to life. None of these reflections is quite similar to any other, since no two have been in the same position in relation to the event experienced. (No two cameras yield simultaneously the same picture.) Admitted that this analogy is very unsatisfactory, yet it can perhaps serve to provide material for “instinctive understanding” of what it actually is about.
5In the mental atom, the exact reproduction of reality experienced is its very nature. In the perspective, all details are elucidated. This is something quite different from the diffuse emotional vision with its expansive, dynamic intensity.
6Pure mental thinking actually begins only with perspective consciousness. The two lower kinds of mental activity are rather emotional-mental thinking, activated by emotional energies; “ideas” directed by emotional impulses, the powerful creations of imagination being the most typical example.
7Perspective thinking rises above views that are bound by principles. The discursive and analytical process is over and done with. Details recede into the background. Only essentials are considered. You could perhaps better call this “summarizing thinking” or “survey thinking”. Details are found in an overview of the essential, common characteristics of a group of things. The law of contradictory opposites, which is the absolute norm in principle thinking, has done its work, and contrary opposites merge in a synthesis; the various viewpoints are united and the content has been “raised onto a higher plane”. As teaching in schools is commonly done, the survey is lost in the mass of facts. Facts make up the groundwork and can be dropped when they have fulfilled their function as the basis of knowledge. When men have acquired perspective thinking, it will be possible for them to have a general orientation in the various knowledge areas of science.
8With perspective thinking you master a certain domain of knowledge, so that it all becomes a living whole with a sovereign survey without clinging to details. Most people probably have some degree of perspective thinking within a particular sphere of experience. This includes the ability to quickly perceive essentials in new fields while eliminating details as being unessential to the survey. The pertaining causal idea is exploded, as it were, in a vision of the totality.
9Perspective thinking is characterized by the ability to relativize as well as the sense of proportions in their finer nuances. The school training in logic does not seem to have taught people to refrain from making principles absolute. (Principles are abstractions, though they are not therefore applicable in all relations.) Generally, mutually qualifying and limiting principles are necessary for the result to be correct. Far from everyone is able to generalize and, even less, to absolutize. But everyone does it daily in all kinds of situations.
10As instances of perspective thinking Laurency’s books can be cited. All problems discussed in them have been raised onto a higher plane in a simplified survey. The esoteric knowledge system involves perspective thinking. If affords perspectives on existence to anyone who has mastered it.
11Concrete examples of perspective thinking are the outlines of philosophy, anthroposophy, and yoga in KR. They were written in order to show that human thought is fictitious and that human reason cannot solve the problems of reality. In that respect we must be content with the facts that time and again are received from the planetary hierarchy.
12Equally abortive is every attempt at speculation on esoteric facts, which is typical of the occult sects. It only results in new fictions. We have to confine ourselves to attempts at putting the facts received into their right contexts, which is possible only when sufficiently many connected facts are available. And in so doing it is important not to accept any such construction until it has been confirmed experimentally. Logical elaboration is not enough.
13It is with perspective thinking as with all higher kinds of consciousness. It cannot be fully understood without experience. Anyone who has acquired it knows what is meant by it. Others misunderstand the description of it.
14A still more widened perspective is obtained at system thinking. Its content is made up of systems, which in this thinking correspond to concepts in ordinary logical thinking. System thinking is the transition to intuition in which all systems disappear. As a rule system thinking is produced at the concretion of causal ideas, which contain all perceivable knowledge of reality within a certain area.
15Human thought abounds in fictions because facts and axioms have not been put into their right continuous contexts in their right system. The systems that thought has exceptionally been based on have been the dogmatic systems of ignorance without foundation in reality, those systems that seem unassailable just because they are systems.
16There is an essential difference between the vision conjured up by imaginative speculation and mental perspectives dealing with essentials and presupposing a detailed and comprehensive knowledge of the pertaining reality.
17Just as it seems impossible to pass from emotionality to mentality, it seems impossible to move from the lower mentality (47:6) to the higher mentality (47:5). Anyone who lives in the lower mental, in the sphere of concepts, has a tendency to lose himself in some kind of subjectivism beyond all reason and defying all logic. This was the case with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and that is the case with Zen Buddhism and semantics. The only rescue is to acquire perspective consciousness with the sovereign survey the ancients called intuition. The rescue from that kind of consciousness, in its turn, is to acquire a higher kind of objectivity; that is, causal consciousness. It is never easy to take the step over from a kind of consciousness already acquired to a new one. Subsequently it seems obvious, an experience that is familiar to everyone.
18Consciousness development perhaps consists in a series of passages from subjective to objective consciousness and then to a new subjectivism, etc. This fancy certainly is “unlawful speculation” (unlawful, because the risk of going astray is considerable) but seems plausible nevertheless. At all events, it seems to apply for consciousness in the lower worlds and could be the psychological explanation of many “abnormalities” in philosophy and theology.
19The mental sovereignty afforded by perspective consciousness has its great risks for anyone who has not seen the limitations of mental consciousness. It is made clear to the esoterician from the outset that mental consciousness can only work up the facts that are presented to it and, upon experiencing a causal intuition, concretize that vision into a mental system. When doing such work of concretion, or scaling down, the esoterician must make sure that all the building material (ideas and facts) fitted into his mental construction is in agreement with reality. Precisely in that respect the mentalist easily makes mistakes; how easily, is clear from the fact that everyone who has attempted such an enterprise has been guilty of that error. What entered into the vision and appeared evident was confused with the mental material subsequently produced and not always tenable.
20After he has been inspired by causal consciousness and when he is about to concretize universals into particulars, one of the errors the mentalist makes is the lack of exactness in verbal formulation, so that his readers or hearers misunderstand him. He may also too easily put another sense than the conventional into some of the words he uses, and that, too, makes for misunderstanding.
1At the lower mental stage, man thinks in systems, even though he be unaware of his usually subconscious, latent system, the synthesis of his collected experience of reality. At the highest mental stage (47:4), he thinks with systems. This system thinking consists in joining system to system just as conceptual thinking consists in joining concept to concept. The system is the summary, a survey of everything explored within a certain subject field. System thinking thus implies mental sovereignty.
2System thinking most often involves concretion of causal ideas, the content of a causal intuition of the lowest degree (47:3), and makes up the intermediate stage from mental to causal thinking. This is not given to the individual for nothing but is the result of his research and working up during the entire life-time of the causal envelope. It is available on inquiry and makes it possible to apprehend the ideas that causal selves have thought during the entire existence of mankind. Causal intuition knows because all relations in the present and past course of events with their causes and effects lie spread before the eyes of the individual. As always it is a matter of different degrees, of increasing ability, acquired through practice, to survey ever expanding spheres. Irrespective of degree, the ability is there all the same.
3System thinking could also be termed “symbol thinking”. A symbol is a summary of a whole view. Symbol thinking is the mental basic structure of our conception of reality. In that respect, the symbols of mathematics are exemplary.
1The planetary hierarchy says expressly that only those develop efficiently who have their attention centred in mentality. They learn to be mentally active, learn to stop habitual thinking and emotional thinking, learn to think clearly and precisely, and strive after perspectives on everything. It is not a matter of amassing facts but of putting facts into their right contexts, all that which via principle thinking (separation of chief issue and side issues, essentials and unessentials) and perspective thinking leads to system thinking, which is on the verge of intuition. Only the mental elite (not all are there who think they are there) start to acquire perspective thinking but have a long way to go to system thinking (the instantaneous conception of a standard work).
2Many people who possess the ability to reflect do not use it save under the influence of an emotional impulse. Self-initiated mental activity is still an uncommon phenomenon. Or as philosopher Spencer put it: “Most people seem to have decided to walk through life with as little reflection as possible”. They must be influenced by others to start their apparatus of thought, and even then it will mostly be parrotry. The power of the press largely derives from this fact.
3It is mental molecules that produce the “grey cells” in the brain and elsewhere in the organism (in the finger-tips of blind-born, for example). Lack of grey cells has the effect that people find it hard to think. Only the man who thinks his own thoughts is able to think. Anyone who wishes to develop his cerebral cortex thus should develop his power of reflection. It is a good rule to think one thought of your own for every thought you receive from another.
4To the extent that we think esoterically, we produce vibrations in the mental world and shape mental elementals. This makes it easier for seekers to grasp esoteric ideas and to be unconsciously influenced by them. Of course, everyone who has realized that esoterics is right should be on the look-out for the possibility of at least directing attention to such ancient esoteric ideas as reincarnation and the law of sowing and reaping to have people reflect on them. You never know when something you say may be the spark that sets it all off. Those who will not do anything to awaken people miss opportunities of good sowing and reaping in the future.
5Esoterics teaches that only by meditating daily for a while on the qualities we wish to acquire are we able to acquire them. Waking consciousness is a fleeting thing. By meditation you engrave the knowledge on your subconscious, which feeds the waking consciousness with its impulses. Meditation may be discontinued only when right action has become spontaneous.
6In concentration and meditation, energies pour from the emotional and mental worlds, energies which people do not even suspect and before which they are helpless. A meditation must not last longer than fifteen minutes. Else there will be serious consequences for the brain, nervous system, and organism at large.
7In the process of meditation, contemplation means the same as unceasing attention; meditation is intended to transfer mental ideas to brain cells; contemplation, to bring causal ideas via the mental envelope into the brain.
8There is no consciousness without matter. Collective consciousness is atomic consciousness in the kinds of matter making up this collective. Atomic consciousness forgets nothing. All manifestations of life it has observed are preserved latently in its subconscious. Knowledge is the actualization of these latent experiences. Knowledge is in matter! It is by methods of meditation that the esoterician learns how to assimilate the knowledge he is seeking. The method used by raja yogis is primitive. The new method, which is being elaborated in the planetary hierarchy, agni yoga (the genuine one, not the misinterpretation by Helena Roerich), is only for disciples of the planetary hierarchy, its instruments, who serve mankind, evolution, and unity.
1The big psychological error of the political ideal systems (socialism, communism, anarchism, etc.) lies in the fact that they can be rightly applied only by individuals at the stage of ideality and are turned into caricatures at lower stages of development. They are so wonderfully obvious and fascinating to simple intellects. These have no idea of the immense difference there is between the theoretical possibilities of unselfish individuals and the practical application by those incurable egoists who make up about 90 per cent of present-day mankind, most of whom are irremediably self-deceived in their imagined excellence.
2It is the same, besides, with other such theories. How many Christians (the clergy included) apply the Christian teaching? The history of the Church is eloquent on that account. Esotericians should test themselves. It is easy to grasp the esoteric system of thought but difficult to apply its life view. And yet it should be incomparably easier on the level they think they are on.
3To have the right knowledge is one thing, to be able to apply it rightly is quite another. That is a truth, which psychologists and educators have not yet seen.
4To understand a higher kind of consciousness you must have acquired it. Occultists, who believe they understand everything they are quite unable to grasp, believe, when in the higher regions of the emotional world, that they experience all kinds of higher consciousness, even cosmic consciousness, whereas they cannot acquire even objective mental consciousness. But then they are in the world of emotional illusions where imagination is omniscient and omnipotent. That is the risk of giving people knowledge. It is always idiotized by those who are unable to understand it, a truth demonstrated by all occult sects.
5It is a common phenomenon that anyone who has assimilated the esoteric system as a theory believes at once that he is competent to be a teacher. The majority of them are unsuccessful in that art. In any case many years of work on the system and many years of experience from its application are required before the disciple is fit to be a teacher. The apostle Paul had good reasons for his warning: “Be ye not many masters!”
6The esoteric mental system grants us a vision of existence and liberates us definitively from all human misconceptions of existence. Thereby we need no more fall victims to the views of life offered by theology, philosophy, and science. That is a priceless ground to stand on. But you may say that only now the real difficulties begin. It is one thing to have received a knowledge of the most important laws of life. It is quite another to be able to rationally apply them in our daily life and among people.
7We have been given to know the meaning and goal of existence and our mission to acquire ever higher kinds of consciousness in ever higher worlds. With that, however, we have not got to know our own level of development, the meaning of our present incarnation or of many other problems of life. Life is an endless series of problems, and by solving them in the best way with the knowledge we have got we develop in the most rapid way. We do not develop by letting other people solve our problems. As long as we are that helpless, we must keep to the authorities of the day. But we have no right to blame them for leading us astray. We are responsible for our choice of authorities, we must take the consequences.
8The more the individual develops, the more numerous and the more difficult are his problems. When he has got knowledge of his various envelopes and their kinds of consciousness, of the opposition between these envelope consciousnesses, new problems arise; the conflict between the objective problems of the physical external world and the subjective ones of emotional and mental consciousness causes new problems. As attention is directed to the consciousness aspect instead of the matter aspect of existence, the problem arises how the conflict between the various envelope consciousnesses is to be solved, and there is an increasing understanding of the fact that the solution exists in still higher kinds of consciousness, in causal consciousness. When man has acquired that highest kind of human consciousness, he will also be able to solve his own human problems.
1There are many ways of facilitating the control of consciousness, preventing thoughts from wandering, replacing unwelcome thought associations. You may have some construction at hand which you are working on, or an unsolved problem, or some sort of task, or direct your attention to your Augoeides or, if you are too tired to keep your attention fixed, you can use a mantra.
2“Meditation” consists in “thinking the matter over”, analysing it methodically and systematically until all its elements have been clarified so that you know what it all is about, which otherwise seldom is the case. What the outcome is, is “another story”, and depends on individual understanding, knowledge, and power of judgement.
3The esoterician is recommended not to look back. That is a good exercise in control of thought. Every retrospect involves associations belonging to stages that should be regarded as overcome. Such things strengthen the power of the past and can drag you down to a lower level of consciousness. Even if it need not have a debasing effect on the experienced man, it nevertheless brings about vibrations in his envelope, vibrations that need to be counteracted with new, unnecessary “corrections”. That is in any case an unnecessary expenditure of energy.
4A good exercise in liberating the self from its dependence on its envelopes of incarnation is to become an “observer”, to observe the thoughts of the mental envelope, the feelings of the emotional envelope, and all manner of physical reactions. That is an efficient method of becoming impersonal and achieve control of thought. It also increases your attention to the behaviour and modes of reaction of other people for your purpose of studying man.
1It is important for a mental self to reactivate the higher emotional qualities, for otherwise the individual becomes inactive. The esoterician cultivates the higher emotional as well as the higher mental. Reason leads the way to unity, and attraction supplies the energies.
2That mental self (47:5) who still has emotionality as a backlog from previous incarnations easily loses his understanding of the importance of emotionality for further consciousness development. It is only via the triad emotional atom that the self can reach essential consciousness. Emotionality still makes up the principal driving force of action as well as mental productivity in artistic-literary formation even at the mental stage, until emotionality has been superseded by causal energies. Mental will appears very late in the mental self and manifests itself, at the present stage of mankind’s general development, only when the individual is approaching the causal stage, thus on the highest mental level (47:4).
3It is, as always where esoteric realities are concerned, risky to speak of mental selves, those rare individuals, because then everybody believes that he is a mental self. Esoteric judgement is almost non-existent, for to have that faculty you must have mastered esoterics and made it come alive; you must live it in reality.
1In esoteric literature, the coalescence of emotional and mental (the mental in the emotional) is often termed “kama?manas” or the “psychic nature”.
2In the esoteric literature, the term “abstract” is used for the higher mental (47:4,5) as well as for the causal consciousness. It is a term that should be dropped, since already principle thinking (47:6) is abstract. The simplest alternative is to indicate the different kinds of mental and causal consciousness with their mathematical designations and, in any case, never use the term “abstract” for causal consciousness.
1System is the method of thought to orient itself in existence. System affords perspectives, survey, and clarity. System is the method of mental consciousness to assimilate the knowledge.
2Everyone of us has a system to start from, whether we know it or not. Most people know nothing of the fact that they have once acquired a system, which is the basis of their possibility to conceive of reality. Every elaborated idiology is in actual fact a system.
3The systems of most people are the products of life ignorance, and sooner or later they prove also logically untenable. They are fiction systems, since people have imbibed each other’s erroneous ideas of most things in existence, accepted vagaries as axioms and alleged facts as real facts. Axioms and facts are the logical reality basis of the true system.
4An exactly elaborated, harmonious mental knowledge system corresponds to the need of scientists and philosophers, and is desirable also because it counteracts the mania for speculation of many occultists. They have not yet learnt that you cannot reach knowledge by means of speculation. Anyone who does not have access to causal or essential intuition must be content with the facts we receive from the fifth natural kingdom.
5The individual’s attachment to a mental system becomes a hindrance to his consciousness development. Systems are mere means of orientation. They are desirable or temporarily necessary, intended to afford a vision of reality. The conception of reality is different in the different worlds, which constantly change through the processes of manifestation in the passing of the eons. Most systems are the results of research and are very short-lived. If they are turned into dogmas, they counteract the exploration of reality, which has hitherto been the case to an unimagined extent in theology as well as in philosophy and science.
6“Mental thinking” presupposes a system, if it is not to become a random thinking and hardly be able to claim rationality. All thinking deserving its name is indeed a thinking in system until it passes into a thinking with systems. For comprehension goes from the general to the particular, from the more general to the less general, etc., and, ultimately, from the system. The general has its validity from the fact that it enters into its right context in a system.
7The system is the logical (factual) criterion of mental consciousness and its ultimate guarantee that axioms and facts have been put into their correct contexts. A first self can never reach higher than that. Without systems, the statements he makes are in the air. Through the esoteric mental system it becomes possible to “rethink” and to put facts into their right contexts. Without a correct system this is impossible. Such a system has been lacking, and that is why mankind is disoriented in reality and life.
8The fact that people do not know about the system on which they base their conclusions is a clear indication of how imperfect is the education in logic and psychology. The teaching of philosophy has degenerated into giving information on the history of the philosophical fictions, which can only reinforce the tendency to speculation.
9You teach people to think by giving them problems to solve, not by feeding them all manner of fictions. A good preliminary exercise is to teach them to see the illogical features of people’s ordinary ways of thinking, to give them examples of such things.
10Illogical thinking arises from the very fact that concepts, principles have been isolated from the contexts to which they belong. The training in logic was intended to hinder such an isolation, which was part of the special art of the sophists, by means of which they could dupe their audience.
11People who lack esoteric knowledge cannot understand that their greater or lesser faculty of comprehension is determined by the quality of their unconscious mental system. If they could study objectively the material forms, which the expressions of mental consciousness produce in the mental world, they would be able to learn the difference between fictivity and reality, which philosophers and psychologists (and yogis) are unable to do. Modern logic and psychology (not to say psychoanalysis and psychiatry) lead them ever farther astray.
12It is the purpose of philosophy to construct systems in order to orient about the results of research and to supply the critique that prevents a system from becoming more than temporary. It is through this unceasing construction of systems on increasingly firm ground that our knowledge constantly expands.
13Systems are our temporary means of orientation in a world that would otherwise be chaotic. In our times all old systems have been shattered. The system that Pythagoras elaborated to afford a necessary working hypothesis when mankind ends up in skepticism and chaos has been allowed for publication in right time.
14The realization that true comprehension goes from generals to particulars as well as the understanding that systems are necessary seem to have been lost also to philosophers in this period of mental decline. It has been the task of Laurency to supply a mental system, following the example of Pythagoras, something that has been absent in the esoteric literature hitherto. For those who are interested in details there are other writers. Those who already have a system and are content with it and those who have no need of a system have no need of Laurency either.
15The Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky is to the majority of theosophists what the Bible is to the Christians. Those theosophists should consider the words of the Buddha that there are no “sacred” (faultless) writings. Those who look for faults are immature for esoterics. Not the “faults” are the essential, but the very system is. Two statements, which appear to contradict one another, may be correct, both of them. It depends on what the author meant by his formulation in each particular case. If you have once mastered the system, then you can correct apparent contradictions yourself. Those who are drowned in details lack the sense of a system. Such people obviously lack even the beginnings of perspective thinking. But that thinking is the characteristic of the esoterician.
16The saying a “kernel of truth”, used by the seducers and destroyers of nations to defend their lies of life, will soon enough be replaced with talk about facts. There are many kinds of facts, and they are all lies except the facts of reality. And also such facts are turned into lies when they are put into the wrong contexts. The philosophy of modern thoughtlessness rejects logic. But logic is the manner in which mental consciousness works. A system of thought must provide the basis of right work and is the logical ultimate guarantee that facts have been put into their right contexts. The risk of all logic is that it so easily diverts from objective reality in which all conclusions must be checked. The physical, objective reality soon ends, however. In order to ascertain facts of reality in the emotional and mental worlds you must have causal consciousness. Mystics, occultists, and clairvoyants have not realized that. And a full causal consciousness is possessed only by second selves.
1Hylozoics is a mental system that only a member of the planetary hierarchy, a second self, has been able to formulate. It is different from all other systems in the fact that it is a system that will be tenable for the next millennium, a system to which research will be able to connect and must strive to reach, and also a system that can absorb any knowledge of reality and knowledge of life contained in theology, philosophy, and science and enable them to unite. It makes up the infallible basis of human thinking. No first self is able to construct such a system.
2Hylozoics is a system that all thinking can start from, and it is a basis to build upon when formulating systems that, being scaled-down, may satisfy the various needs corresponding to different prospects of comprehension and understanding. Hylozoics is a system from which theology as well as philosophy and science must start if they will not be built on sand, which they have done hitherto. Hylozoics indicates the necessary reformation in the various ways of thinking. Hylozoics is for the mental elite and is unsuitable for those whose faculty of comprehension is not sufficient and who “need something for their emotions”. Those people need scaled-down systems. Hylozoics provides the basis for them all, however.
3Pythagoras’ mental system, hylozoics, indicates the first self’s possibility to have a right world view and life view. The causal self, living in the causal world, has no need of a system, since his intuition supersedes all concepts.
4Pythagorean hylozoics is a mental system for mental selves. The others are content with a more or less primitive idiology. Making propaganda for a mental system is as meaningless as trying to lift people up to the mental stage. It is equally meaningless to lecture on a mental system. The individual assimilates the system by study, which goes on until the system has become so alive that he is able to put new facts into their right contexts, is able to explain rationally previously inexplicable phenomena. Most occultists are unable to do this, although of course they believe they are able. Thereby they demonstrate that they use the lowest mental faculties and not perspective thinking. Their quasi-systems are caricatures of systems. Not all are chosen who believe they are called to be prophets. Their ambition testifies to that enormous presumption which is the direct opposite of the humility of the esoterician, a humility that increases by each higher kingdom and by the realization of how much remains to be acquired.
5It does not suffice to rightly conceive the hylozoic system. The system must be tested out in experience and must be made to demonstrate its superiority in the possibility it provides the individual to understand and explain more and more in accord with common sense.
6A civilizational individual, who has acquired the faculty of principle thinking (47:6) and is able to order the principles into a system, is certainly able to study and penetrate the hylozoic system conceptually. But it is highly improbable that it becomes more than a belief system to him. He will probably not understand how it agrees with reality. If he applies it in practical life, however, “as though it were correct”, he will soon find that it is indeed correct. He will find that more and more proves to be right.
7The difficulty of finding mentalists is due to the fact that many of them have their higher mental level only in their subconscious, whereas others, in spite of their perspective thinking, do not know that they are mental selves, or they have other interests than world view and life view, or they are wholly absorbed by their chosen task of life. Many of them are content with their esoteric instinct and manage quite well with it, feeling no need for a clearly fixed system, a thing they have accomplished forever in past incarnations. Anyone who has repeatedly entered into the system possesses it as innate understanding and a guiding instinct with the goal clearly indicated. When speaking of a man’s department we by that always mean the department of his causal envelope. Anyone who has one of the first three departments in that envelope and reaches the highest levels of the mental stage is already seeking contact with the intuition. That disposes of the need of an exactly formulated system. That “flair” is sufficient to afford trust in life and certainty of quite another kind than is found in many people at the stage of the mystic (mental certainty and not emotional, an essential difference to those who have experienced both).
8Just as hylozoics liberates man from further speculation on reality and life, so the knowledge of the laws of life liberates him from all the moral debates of life ignorance. The experienced man will see at once what falls under the laws indicated. It is no longer a matter of commandments with threats of punishment but of free choice with inevitable consequences.
9The mental system of hylozoics is the simplest of all esoteric systems. In comparison, the study of any other system is like passing the stream to fetch water. They are roundabout ways. How do you explain that man seems to prefer roundabout ways? Anyone who has made himself thoroughly familiar with occult literature will find that the hylozoic terminology (including the mathematical nomenclature) is the simplest possible (note this!), the most exact and unitary, and moreover forestalls confusion of concepts. A great number of misleading notions and sayings can thereby be discarded.
1The superiority of hylozoics is due to the fact that using it you can explain thousands of otherwise inexplicable phenomena in a sovereign manner. In order to do this, however, you must have mastered the system. It is not sufficient to have studied it. You must be able to give logically tenable explanations, be able to figure out by yourself how new phenomena appearing should be assessed. This is usually accompanied by the ability to see errors in untenable systems, the ability to refute these systems. If you cannot do this, then you have not comprehended but merely accepted it superficially.
2Most occultists have not comprehended. It is embarrassing to hear them quoting others or making claims for which they cannot state logical reasons, invoking “authorities” they have accepted. In so doing they testify to their own incompetence and harm their cause. They are not much better than the great mass of believers you run across in all occult sects.
3Strictly speaking, the expression “see that hylozoics agrees with reality” is not exact where first selves are concerned. Only causal selves (those who have acquired intuition) are able to do so. The furthest that mental selves can reach is the understanding that the system is overwhelmingly probable and is incomparably superior to all other systems of thought. Those who have once been initiates accept it because it appears “evident” to them. However, evidence is due to your immediate recognition of a system you have once mastered and is no logical proof. What you have once studied thoroughly and assimilated is always evident to you when you contact it anew.
4To the esoterician, Pythagorean hylozoics is no “working hypothesis” as it must be to philosophers and scientists. Hylozoics is an unshakably founded mental system, not just logically cogent but also daily confirmed through its universal explanations of otherwise inexplicable phenomena, since it is in agreement with reality. This is not the same as absolute certainty, however. Absolute certainty is reached only through causal objective consciousness (causal vision, causal sense), which is able to directly observe and ascertain facts.
5Before the seeker has reached that insight, he will remain either disoriented or the victim of a logically untenable fiction system, however strong his certainty of belief and personal conviction. Whatever does not agree with reality must sooner or later demonstrate its untenability. A fiction system fulfils a purpose as long as it corresponds to the seeker’s faculty of comprehension, orientation in life, and stage of development. Even such a system has its importance in that it represents a more or less necessary transitory stage.
6It is probably inevitable that hylozoics becomes a belief system for the injudicious after it has been accepted by the greatest capacities and the greatest authorities recognized. In such a believer hylozoics will be something beside his main interests and be combined with a comprehensible fiction system corresponding to his level of development. The false notions woven into the subconscious of mankind for millions of years will always make themselves felt until people have attained the mental stage, have acquired perspective thinking (47:5).
7Higher kinds of matter relate to lower kinds as energy to matter. This is due to the socalled cosmic motion, the current of primordial atoms (primary matter, unconscious rotatory matter) coming from the highest cosmic world down through all the 49 atomic kinds. There is no other original energy than dynamis in primordial atoms, and dynamis acts only in and through primordial atoms. This is the “force inherent in matter”. The higher the atomic kind (the higher the kind of matter), the stronger the effect of dynamis in the atom.
8Secondary matter, having actualized, inactive consciousness, can be actualized by active evolutionary consciousness (active, since it has acquired the ability to make dynamis act through its monad consciousness, ever more powerfully in ever higher natural kingdoms).
9In the above propositions lies the solution, for those who can understand, of the problem of motion in existence (the problem of energy), communicated in order to convince the intellectual elite (philosophers and researchers) more easily of the fact that hylozoics is superior as a working hypothesis. Vigorous efforts are needed to liberate them from their seeming ineradicable fictions.
10If mankind were not made up of such a multitude of potential bandits, it would receive the knowledge of how monad consciousness controls matter. Also its elite has always abused their power and will always do it until they have entered into unity.
11As the “intellectual” leaders to whom mankind looks up as authorities begin to take an interest in Pythagorean hylozoics, they will find how it explains more and more previously inexplicable things, and they will present their realizations to the public. Then there will be among the public such people as accept it, not because authorities have done so but because they are themselves able to ascertain that hylozoics agrees with reality.
12“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” A logical system of knowledge (KR 1.4–1.41) exists in order to afford philosophers and scientists the possibility of an acceptable vision (of the meaning of life, higher kingdoms, the consciousness development of the monads), a perspective on existence which mankind lacks and needs.
13Philosophy and science have convinced the esoterician that mankind with all its speculation will never be able to solve the problems of existence. Mankind has always deceived itself and will always continue to do so until it finds hylozoics and calls the planetary hierarchy back.
1People live in a consciousness chaos, since their physical, emotional, and mental consciousnesses largely lead their lives without connection with each other. Only when the envelopes and their consciousnesses have been integrated, is “harmonious” man produced, man in whom common sense rules. This kind of man is the mental self.
2When the mystics speak of “emancipation from self”, they mean the liberation of the self from its dependence on the envelopes of incarnation with their power, and that is precisely what is required in order to become a mental self.
3Man is a mental being until he has become a mental self. As a mental being the individual is conscious in the two lower mental molecular kinds (47:6,7). As a mental self he is conscious in the two higher kinds (47:4,5), he has acquired subjective self-consciousness in his mental envelope with perspective consciousness (47:5).
4All who have not acquired perspective consciousness are found at the emotional stage. The fact that also a mentalist may give proof of emotionality is another matter. This is particularly apparent in those who have the sixth department in their emotional envelopes. If the sixth department occurs in the triad envelope as well, this may produce a type whose thinking appears to express (as in Carlyle) in a series of explosions.
5The fact that a man is a mental self and has acquired perspective consciousness does not in itself imply that he can understand esoterics. Only he can do so who possesses this knowledge in his subconscious, who has been an initiate of some esoteric knowledge order.
6When the individual has become a mental self (47:5) and in addition understands esoterics, he works to reach the lowest causal (47:3) and, with the highest emotional (48:2), to contact, via the unity centre of the causal envelope (47:2), essential consciousness the energies of which, in their turn, affect the will centre (47:1).
7Man as a first self can be conscious only in his envelopes of incarnation, not in his triad envelope. It is only as a mental self on the higher mental levels that he begins to contact the causal consciousness in the lowest causal molecule (47:3) and a faint subjective causal consciousness. But there is no conscious existence in the causal envelope.
8Out of the total of 777 developmental levels, 70 have been assigned to the mental self. Such levels are always divisible into still smaller levels, and such subdivisions are particularly important in the matter of mentality. Nuances may appear very subtle but have nevertheless cost the individual the work of many incarnations. Consciousness development is no such simple process as it may seem to mechanical thinking. The more mankind develops, the more complicated it appears. Also recent causal selves may find it to be overwhelming in its seeming boundless manifoldness, and are taken aback by the objective confrontation with it. In this connection it should be pointed out that precisely causal consciousness is the fundamental objective perception in the worlds of man and is the objective basis of the subsequent life in the consciousness aspect.
9Those who are at the mental stage are supposed to acquire the world view in agreement with reality and, as disciples of the planetary hierarchy, to learn to master mentality by means of causal consciousness. You cannot master emotional consciousness by using the causal. You must use the mental for that. The causal intuition enables the causal self to ascertain, through his own research, that the mental knowledge system is correct; that it agrees with reality.
10The difference between a mental self and a causal self lies in the fact that the causal self possesses causal ideas and cannot be misled by the fictitiousness of mental ideas. The causal self is able to ascertain facts in the worlds of man without being misled by the fictions occurring in these worlds. That is quite impossible for the mental self. In addition, the causal self knows that causal consciousness is not sufficient to understand people or beings of all the other different kinds living in the lower worlds. In order to understand you must have access to the consciousness aspect. That is why the acquisition of the consciousness of unity is the most important object of the causal self.
11As first selves we receive the knowledge for nothing, we are taught by the planetary hierarchy how to become second selves. It is our task to learn to see, through realization, that the knowledge we have received is true knowledge. Anyone who is unable to understand the knowledge, is unable to apply the knowledge, is unable to realize, will have opportunities to do so in a new incarnation, provided he will try to prepare for it. If he takes no interest in it, he will do nothing for it, and so he has thrown away one more incarnation.
12The individual may very well have taken over any view whatever from another. He need not have reached the results which the individual achieves on higher levels by his own study. He is then a parrot, a true believer, believes he knows. His view need not be evidence of either real comprehension or understanding. The majority of members of occult sects and societies are too well-known instances of this.
13The mental self “believes”, nothing for either he knows or he does not know. He accepts nothing on the word of authority. He has seen the insufficiency of the theological, philosophical, and scientific dogmas and hypotheses. His stance in epistemological matters is then generally either agnostic or esoteric.
14Nobody has a right to pose as an authority, not even “god almighty”. What proof is there for the alleged utterances of Buddha or Christos? Literature is no proof. The judgement of common sense, however, when everything said squares with facts, is good enough as a working hypothesis.
15The mental self examines everything as far as possible. He examines what individuals can know in the physical world, in the emotional world, in the mental world, in the causal world, in the essential world. That is a good check of most things said and exposes the general illusoriness and fictitiousness.
16The most characteristic faculty in those at the mental stage is the sense of proportion. Those at the emotional stage lack it. Feeling is without measure. The ability to distinguish between what is possible and probable in various relations of life is a preparatory stage. Juvenile idealism wants to achieve paradise not understanding that the condition of this is that the will to unity is found in everybody and that man’s egoistic qualities, acquired and asserted during thousands of incarnations, have been overcome. To ignorance everything seems easy: “Just do it!”
17The most serious failing of the mental self is his critical attitude to everything. Mankind cannot “be saved” through reason, however. The first self’s understanding does not reach beyond the worlds of man. Anyone who wants to acquire knowledge of reality must enter into unity. The mental self thus fails in the quality of loving understanding, that very quality which the monad acquires as an emotional self and must reacquire as a mental self. All find and understand each other in unity, not in mentality.
18The mental self always runs a great risk of being sufficient unto himself, appearing as a megalomaniacal, Nietzschean superman-monkey when comparing himself with the rest of mankind on lower levels, especially so if he is a physicalist believing that the human kingdom is the supreme kingdom. The cult of genius originating from Schopenhauer and his disciple Nietzsche has twisted the heads of too many geniuses. There is nothing remarkable in the fact that you happen to be an older causal being than the majority of other people incarnated.
19The remedy for “spiritual pride” is the realization of how much remains to be acquired, of how greatly limited the first self is, of how impossible it is for the first self to solve the problems of existence. Even the individual having esoteric knowledge makes mistakes whenever he thinks himself able to ascertain facts in his worlds in any respect. He will only produce new fictions. All occultists are typical instances of that. Every occultist thinks he comprehends and understands best. And all are wrong. The esoterician accepts no other data than facts from the planetary hierarchy. And anyone who invokes discipleship is no disciple.
20Few mental selves incarnated in the zodiacal epoch of Pisces, the period of 2500 years prior to 1950. Their prospects of developing mental consciousness in largely barbarous conditions were not great. The few who made the attempt were of course misunderstood and badly treated. The incarnating part of mankind was at the stage of barbarism and on the lower levels of the stage of civilization, which fact history could clarify if historians had some knowledge of the past. The little culture that existed was the work of initiates (during the epoch of Christianity) of the very secret knowledge orders. We may hope that the mental selves of mankind will have better opportunities during the zodiacal epoch of Aquarius.
21As long as the individual is an emotional self, he will always be exposed to all the strains befalling whole mankind in the emotional world. Even on the highest levels the individual runs the risk of being dragged down to lower levels. Temporary grief may overwhelm him, dejection and despondency (not least on account of his own faults and failings) may have the effect that the individual is washed by waves of emotionality and has difficulty in keeping his head above the billows. The only guarantee against such disasters is to become a mental self.
1Far from all who are interested in esoterics are mental selves (47:5). But only mental selves are eligible for discipleship under the planetary hierarchy. The individual must have acquired as much common sense as is possible for mental consciousness; moreover a high percentage of self-reliance and self-determination (though no conceited self-glory). He must be a seeker and see the insufficiency of the ruling idiologies. He may be a skeptic as to the possibility for man to acquire true knowledge of reality. He must want to serve mankind, evolution, unity. With these qualifications he has good prospects as an (unconscious) aspirant to discipleship. For it is such ones as the planetary hierarchy needs for its work in mankind. In many cases he is already an unconscious disciple and “serves without any thought of reward” because he cannot do otherwise and thereby passes that strength test which all disciples must undergo.
2Esoterics is always misunderstood by those who have not acquired perspective thinking. The knowledge that was given by the secretary of the planetary hierarchy, 45-self D.K., in the years 1919–1949 and was anonymously publicized by Alice A. Bailey, is intended for disciples of the planetary hierarchy. Those books (about 18 volumes) were written in order to spare the teacher the trouble of repeating the same things to every disciple. Unfortunately, most occultists believe they understand this teaching at once, which has proved to be a great mistake that has inevitably given rise to deplorable misconceptions. In order to rightly understand these writings you must have a thorough knowledge of Pythagorean hylozoics. Moreover, through his largely symbolical treatment of the problems D.K. has masked the knowledge. The requisite interpretation is given individually by the teacher. The true esoteric knowledge is not made comprehensible merely by being publicized, even though it seems easy to grasp. Very few people have understood the esoterics of the New Testament, for instance. It is there but has been hopelessly misinterpreted by all theologians and also by occultists, Swedenborg and Steiner, for example.
3In problems concerning world view and life view the esoterician remains unconcerned by commonly held opinions. If he knows that his view of life cannot be rightly judged by outsiders but would just make him impossible in society if he were to divulge it, then it would be meaningless to talk to those who are unqualified to understand. He will cast no pearls.
4The esoterician can easily tell whether the claims made by various prophets, who boast of their spiritual capacity, are just or not. A disciple never reveals his status to outsiders. That was the mistake made by some “higher theosophists”, with the result that, in 1920, the planetary hierarchy stipulated absolute reticence in everything concerning the individual’s relations to the planetary hierarchy. Indiscretion in this respect automatically entails the loss of discipleship.
5The esoterician accepts no other data on superphysical reality than facts from the planetary hierarchy. That is a principle which neither theosophists nor other occultists have understood yet. Philosophy and science have taught him to distrust all human speculations. Even causal selves would be wise to submit the results of their research to scrutiny by a 45-self.
6The esoterician need never make any mistake in respect of knowledge for he has learnt to tell the difference between what he can know and what he cannot know. He does not permit himself to make personal assumptions, guesses, suppositions, hypotheses. He is skeptical, on principle, to everything that cannot be proved with facts that are mutually uncontradicted, agree in all respects.
7Also an esoterician experiences that everybody comprehends everything better than he does. He is taught about such things as other people do not comprehend, understand, or know anything about.
1It is not easy even for the mental self to find his bearings growing up in a mankind that is so totally disoriented, living in the midst of numerous different views of reality and life, all those religious dogmas about which theologians contend and all those world views and life views on which philosophers and scientists are divided. As a rule he is inoculated with the prejudice, emotional illusions, and mental fictions of his environment, being subject to a certain religion, the superiority of his nation, his social class, etc., and all other superstition. It takes time until his power of reflection has developed so far that he can think independently and liberate himself from most notions he has believed in hitherto. This process of elimination often becomes a painful conflict in his emotional and mental consciousness. The effects of the laws of destiny and reaping may facilitate or complicate his reorientation.
2Also mental selves must reckon on handicaps and inhibitions in some occasional incarnation: unserviceable organism and brain, an unsuitable horoscope, unfavourable departments in their envelopes, disadvantageous childhood circumstances, and a discordant cultural milieu. In certain cases such incarnations are lives of reaping; in many cases they are intended to force him to develop qualities and abilities. It should be clear from these conditions how impossible it is to judge an individual’s level of development.
3It is always difficult to be a human being, the most difficult of all evolutionary stages. We know too little about reality and life and how we should live in the right way. This is true also of those who have learnt how to master their emotional being and have become mental selves. Certainly, mental selves, having the esoteric knowledge as the basis of their world view and life view, are able to find the requisite norms of right action in a very general sense, but how such norms are to be applied in particular situations that call for action is always a problem whose solution depends on the individual’s level of development (his experience of life and power of judgement), unless he has reached a contact with his Augoeides and then only as to impersonal problems. If there were rules for all conceivable cases, the individual would remain a mindless robot and never develop. Development requires the possibility of free choice. Right choice in conflicts of duties can be of great importance in respect of destiny as well as of reaping. If people knew what true love (essentiality) is, their choice would seldom be difficult. The usual human love (attraction), mingled with egoism, sentimentality, and also misleading “religiosity”, often chooses wrong.
4At the present stage of mankind’s development and before the representatives of science (to whom also theologians will some time have to give up their dogmatic system) have accepted hylozoics as a working hypothesis, the mental self leads a mental double life (an esoteric and an exoteric life). Before he has managed to eliminate the ruling illusions and fictions, with which he has been afflicted ever since his earliest childhood, he lives in a mental chaos. “The external influences, the examples of the world, the inevitable drift with the current of circumstances, the cycle of temptations, disputes, annoyances, the continual relapse into grovelling and triviality” are tangible even to a mental self.
5It is not easy even for a mental self to “endure life, to accept that outer warfare against everything opposing self-realization, also when it is repugnant like a bad company and as the battlefield of various passions, to remain faithful to one’s ideal while not breaking with the followers of the false gods, not to run away from the human asylum”.
1In the following, some problems are taken up that have been deemed to be typical of the mental stage, since it is only there you may count on understanding of their right solution. Creeds belong to the emotional stage, as they are, at best, mentalized illusions or emotionalized fictions.
2Philosophy (like natural research) is confined to physical reality, and that is why all philosophy in physical respect remains physicalism and in superphysical respect, subjectivism: speculation without reality content. Without objective consciousness you cannot ascertain facts in objective material reality. And no man (first self) will in this eon acquire a higher kind of objective consciousness than the two lower etheric (49:3,4) and the emotional ones.
3Hylozoics is the knowledge of reality. It is a gift from the planetary hierarchy. Any other alleged knowledge will disorient you. Only the planetary hierarchy is in possession of the true knowledge.
4We need not turn back to the ancients (study Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) to get knowledge when we know that all knowledge man ever possessed he received through contacts with the planetary hierarchy. There is much esoteric knowledge of life interspersed with our learning without the “uninitiated” understanding where it came from. We can go straight to the same source of knowledge. Without the esoteric knowledge man will always remain disoriented and become the victim of the idiologies of life ignorance.
5The history of ideas is the essential history for it indicates the development of human consciousness and conception of reality. Not knowing about the world of ideas, historians of ideas will never discover the origin of ideas and will never be able to solve the problem of development. Do they not even realize that ideas build civilizations and cultures?
6The cosmic total consciousness in its 49-degree gamut may be called “god”. Everything is divine to all the 49 kinds of consciousness of the 49 atomic worlds, and these consciousnesses make up the cosmic total consciousness. Also physical life is divine. When the mystic “experiences god”, it may be a case of contact with causal or essential consciousness; the causal about the matter aspect; the essential about the consciousness aspect. Atomic consciousness in a certain world affords omniscience in that world.
7At the stage of the mystic, man learns more and more to tell the difference of right and wrong, essential and unessential, useful and harmful, selfish and unselfish. Only at the mental stage is man able to decide himself what is true and illusory or fictitious, true and false. Until then he remains a “believer”, accepts a world view or life view on emotional grounds. Only perspective thinking makes it possible for him to judge the problems. Then he is also an aspirant to discipleship under the planetary hierarchy, for then he has reached the Sokratean realization.
8Only when the individual has acquired self-consciousness (I am and I am I) can he ask questions about the meaning of existence and his own life. When he, at length, has acquired common sense and self-determination, he realizes that no man is able to answer that question. Theologians, philosophers, and scientists may go on making hypotheses as long as they like. They believe, or believe they know. When they have acquired common sense they quit doing such illogical things. The only acceptable thing is a logically tenable system that explains, in the simplest, most unitary manner, thousands of otherwise inexplicable phenomena. Most people do not seem to do that, however, until they have seen that all the other views are untenable.
9Being a mental self does not, as such, bring about understanding of esoterics. On the contrary, esoterics often has its greatest enemy in mere mentality, which is sovereign in its own domain and refuses to acknowledge a superior authority.
10Much in our physical lives is unessential. That is little, however, in relation to human emotional and mental life. Only esotericians are beginning to suspect how much of the things existing in it is unreal and useless balderdash.
11It appears as though only mental selves could understand that theoretical knowledge is useless if you do not apply it. It is true that knowledge is a prerequisite of practical ability. But in addition work is necessary if we are to rightly apply the knowledge. Mere knowledge is not sufficient. We must also acquire the art of rightly using our knowledge. Knowledge is part of the consciousness aspect. Application is part of the motion aspect (will aspect, energy aspect).
12To despise old age is to despise experience. All elder people have acquired experience in some domain. That should be examined and utilized. The higher the level, the richer the experience. Not to utilize the experience of elders is to miss opportunities of life. Anyone who does not see that we should take care of all opportunities to learn bears witness to his own ignorance of life. If I am to bear witness to myself, then I say that I am thankful to life for all opportunities I have got to learn and to learn from everybody without exception, not least from those who would never have dreamt of teaching me. Every individual is a universe in the making. It is exceedingly instructive to get to know something of such a one.
13There are risks involved in starting your higher consciousness development (acquisition of subjective causal consciousness) before you have rooted out your selfishness and tendency to hatred. Concentration on the superconscious draws down energies from it, and such energies strengthen all tendencies. Those who do not heed these risks develop Nietzschean superman follies, which may imperceptibly draw them onto the lefthand path leading to the black lodge. In politics, this produces such phenomena as the group of nazis around Hitler and the rulers of the Soviet Union, groups characterized by absolute contempt of all human values and lying elevated to norm.
14The esoterician is no blind instrument of the energies streaming through his envelopes. He can be and should become aware of the various kinds of energies, from where they come, through which envelopes they act, through which centres in his envelopes and through which of the active spokes in his envelope centres the energies act. He is aware of the purpose of the manifestations of energy. The more and the more clearly aware he is, the more purposively he is able to use the energies.
15The expression “resist not evil” can be understood only by an esoterician. There is a human tendency to put up an inner resistance to any trifle that “does not suit him”. This hinders the circulation of energies from higher envelopes from functioning properly, in the last analysis from acting on the centres of distribution in the organism: blood circulation, nervous fluid, and secretion, and so lessens the sense of freedom and unconcern that is part of general well-being.
16Life consists of a long series of opportunities offered to make decisions, which for the esoterician often have consequences also for things and individuals in his environment. This is connected with the sphere of influence of his aura with its radiation and magnetism. They attract to him whatever may hamper or benefit him and affect contacts he has made that are important for his future and so come to determine his destiny. Motives and responsibility are increasingly efficient the more he becomes aware of the pertaining factors.
1The more you know or are able to do, the greater insight and judgement you have, then the more competent co-worker with the planetary hierarchy you are. This is the true motive. The more I serve mankind, evolution, and unity, the more all qualities and abilities develop automatically. The more you forget yourself and your own development, the more able instrument of the planetary hierarchy you become.
2Only mental selves (47:5) can be accepted as disciples, according to a categorical statement by the planetary hierarchy. Most of what has been written on the conditions of discipleship is misconceptions, of deplorable consequences. How should those who have never had a right to take disciples be able to judge only from their own experience? Writers have jumped to conclusions also on other subjects.
3A big mistake, too, was the assertion that “the master desires” that or that to be done. It is unthinkable because it conflicts with the law of freedom and the law of self. Nobody in the planetary hierarchy issues commands or even expresses wishes. It is quite another thing, however, that a causal self, who has voluntarily assumed a certain task, may ask and receive advice, which outsiders confuse with orders. Orders or advice are not given within the hierarchy. When some work is being planned, all are summoned for a common discussion that goes on until everybody sees what he best can do and offers to do it.
4The planetary hierarchy does not look for people who want to be “saved”, who want to go to “heaven”, who want to keep “god” for themselves, who want to have knowledge in order to become superior, make a career, get power, who live for their own spiritual development, who want to reach the fifth natural kingdom as soon as possible. Such egoists are unsuitable for discipleship.
5The planetary hierarchy looks for people who possess common sense, people of great capacity who want to incarnate in order to serve mankind, evolution, and unity. It looks for co-workers, suitable instruments in the physical world who are able to benefit mankind in some domain of welfare, such as politics, science, etc.
6Mental selves having the first department in their causal envelopes often go into politics. Playing their parts as statesmen in the power game between the social classes, they want to protect the achievements of culture from the always serious risk of decay, which we have witnessed during the 20th century when new lows have been reached in literature, the arts, music, etc.
7What world view or life view the disciple has means nothing. He may be a skeptic, or an agnostic, or an atheist, if only he is animated by one single desire: to serve mankind. When the time is up for an atheist to become a disciple, he may have such experiences that he realizes, in one single day, that esoterics is the only sensible explanation of existence. Opinions are crutches that fall away when you have no further use of them to drag yourself along.
8If the disciple needs special knowledge in order to serve unselfishly, he will receive it. There are many such servers of life who are disciples without knowing it and without caring about it. Once a disciple, always a disciple. But you need not know anything about it in subsequent incarnations. It is in physical life you acquire all qualities and abilities necessary to physical life. By living to serve, the individual develops powers that may remain latent until that day arrives when, to his surprise, he finds that the requisite spade-work for the entry into the fifth natural kingdom is done already. Then he will realize what is meant by the symbolic saying, “What you have done unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me”. With no thought of reward, because service was its own reward. Anyone who has not been given such possibilities in some incarnation that he can make a sizeable contribution, should know that faithfulness in small things is among the fundamental qualities. There are (unconscious) disciples in the most insignificant positions in order to acquire qualities that are little valued by men because they do not see their necessity.
Endnotes by the translator into English
6.3.1 and 6.29.12 “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” The Bible, Proverbs, 29:18.
6.34.8 “What you have done unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me”. The Bible, Gospel according to Matthew, 25:40.
The above text constitutes the essay The Mental 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.