The Way of Man by Henry T. Laurency
9. THE SECOND SELF (Part 1)
9. THE SECOND SELF (Part 1)
1This section on the second self does not treat only of the second self’s nature, his conception of life and reality, activity, relationships, etc. It also deals with the conditions of the monad’s transition from the first self to the second self.
2When the individual has become a seeker, he strives to reach higher. Only then is it meaningful to inform him as to the conditions. He should be told that it is the second self he is striving to reach, even though unconsciously.
3The first self lacks esoteric knowledge and does not usually take an interest in esoterics. The pertaining insights are seldom gained before man is nearly ready to pass to the second self. Then it is possible for him to understand the immemorial wisdom. At the present general stage of mankind’s development, the first self seems to have difficulty in grasping even simple and familiar truths.
4“Esoterician” does not mean mystics or imaginative speculants but mental selves possessing common sense, people who understand what they accept and know what they know, not just believe.
5New ideas and facts are, taken separately, “aphorisms”. If they are not to be misinterpreted you must put them into their right contexts. So you produce a continuous text. Some writers expatiate in verbiage so that their readers must have detective skills in order to see the point, the essential message. In particular this is the case in our times when the art of reading (of comprehending the content of the text) has been replaced with fast reading with the result that the reader afterwards does not know what he has read.
1The three units of the second triad correspond in departmental respect to the first three departments: The energies of the first department (the energy aspect) come from world 45; those of the second department (the consciousness aspect) from world 46, and those of the third department (the matter aspect) from the causal world. In respect of the three aspects within the worlds of the second triad, there is since old a usage of the terms the “will aspect”, the “wisdom and unity aspect”, the “intelligence aspect”. One sees that these auxiliary terms are “all too human”. Only the second self, experiencing the three aspects of these worlds, grasps what they mean.
2To intimate where the three kinds of ideas of the second triad best assert themselves, you may say that the will aspect concerns the different natural kingdoms and, where mankind is concerned, races and nations; the wisdom aspect, upbringing, education, pedagogic, psychological, and religious problems; the intelligence aspect, the problems of civilization and culture. To this is added the problem of finding in mankind the individuals possessing the best qualifications of grasping and realizing the pertaining ideas within the limits of the possible at mankind’s general stage of development. These individuals, who have been the pioneers, guides of mankind, are also able to conceive the ideas when “inspired” with them or experience them in the form of vision. The majority of them are also disciples of the planetary hierarchy.
1The energies from the second triad superessential molecule (45:4) affect, via the crown centres of the aggregate envelopes (mental, emotional, and etheric envelopes), the organism’s nervous system and brain.
2The energies from the essential atom (46:1) affect the heart centre and the blood.
3The energies from the triad mental atom (47:1) affect the throat centre and the cells of the organism. In individuals at lower stages, these energies go directly to the sacral centre and stimulate sexuality.
4The energies of the first triad can counteract the energies of the second triad. If this is seen, a great number of psychological, theological, etc., (pseudo)problems are solved. Only the energies from the second triad (via the causal envelope) make evolution possible and, particularly, the higher consciousness development. It is the “causal energies” that enable man to acquire causal consciousness. Even more. They enable us to help each other “spiritually” (in everything that has to do with consciousness). The energies of the first self are no good for that.
5There has always been a connection between the first and the second triad: the life-thread (sutratma) and the consciousness thread (antahkarana). This connection is not sufficient, however, for the monad in the first triad to be able to pass to the second triad, from the mental molecule to the mental atom. The monad must itself build a bridge of causal matter between the two triads. This bridge does not go through the centres of the causal envelope but is a special, direct connection. Also this bridge has been called “antahkarana” in Sanskrit. It is otherwise called the “rainbow bridge” but can also be named the “triad bridge”. Building it is hard work, which is of old divided into six phases in a consciousness process the technique of which is taught to the disciple of the planetary hierarchy. Through this process, the self becomes a causal self, the monad is able to definitively move to the second triad, which then takes its seat in the causal envelope.
6Another process follows later, when the monad in the second triad is to be transferred from the causal envelope to the essential envelope. In that process, the old causal envelope is dissolved and the causal self becomes an essential self.
1In summing up it may be said that there are three main kinds of consciousness in the first triad, three in the centres of the causal envelope, and three in the second triad. Consciousness development consists in gradually activating these ever higher kinds of consciousness.
2The three main kinds of second triad consciousness are bound up with the three units of this triad. When centred in the second triad mental atom, the self can study objective phenomena in lower worlds; in the essential atom, the consciousness content of all the lower worlds; in the superessential molecule (45:4), which besides its special function enables the self to synthesize the mental and essential subjective and objective consciousnesses, the self is sovereign in worlds 46–49. With each higher molecular kind (45:3, 45:2, 45:1 etc.), the will aspect grows ever more powerful.
3The three consciousnesses of the second triad actually make up a unitary consciousness, since the higher includes the lower. The lower receives energies from the higher, and in so far as causal consciousness with the energies it receives activates the essential atom, essential ideas can be apprehended and the essential intuition be developed.
4The three main kinds of second triad consciousness have been called “intelligence” (47:1-3), “love” (46:1-7), and “will” (45:4-7). These terms are analogies with human faculties and are misleading if taken literally. Comprehensible terms are still lacking, since the pertaining kinds of consciousness and energy are beyond possible human experience. In its highest potency, “intelligence” (47:1) implies sovereign understanding of all objective material phenomena in the worlds of man. “Love” (46:1) is consciousness of unity, of community, with understanding of all kinds of consciousness within worlds 46–49. “Will” (45:4) is a synthesis of all energies and consciousnesses within worlds 46–49 and omnipotence in these worlds. The mathematical denotations have the advantage that they exactly state the mutual relations between various worlds, atomic kinds, molecular kinds, etc. Indirectly they also intimate how abortive it is to name the three aspects in higher worlds by such terms as cannot even classify the realities referred to.
5The fact that it is possible to apprehend reason, wisdom (= unity), and will in the lowest worlds is due to the presence of mental, essential, and superessential atoms even in the lowest matter (the physical atom).
6There is a certain analogy between the physical and the causal (the matter aspect), the emotional and the essential (the consciousness aspect), the mental and the superessential (the will aspect), there being at the same time direct relations between the superessential and the physical, and between the causal and the mental. It is in the physical that energy must find its outlet.
7The three main kinds of second triad consciousness enable in the first self illumination through energy, imagination through unity, and inspiration through the intellect; enable control of the physical envelopes through the mental, of the emotional envelope through the consciousness of unity, and of the mental through the will.
8A host of possibilities of which our present day psychologists (not to say theologians) suspect nothing and of which they will even remain ignorant for quite some time yet. However much they would want to do so, they cannot understand the matter. It is typical that all causal and higher selves have been dubbed the greatest impostors of their time: Paracelsus, Francis Bacon, Saint Germain, Cagliostro, Blavatsky, etc. Typical, too, of the worth of our historical truths. There is just one universal witness of truth, impossible to falsify: the causal globe memory of our planet (symbolically called the “mind of god”).
1The monad cannot as a first self acquire the consciousness of the second self. The monad can become a second self, however, and then it is no longer in the human kingdom. It needs no “saviour” to do this, but mankind must “save itself” by activating its consciousness and acquire higher kinds of consciousness (before the stage of culture, or of the mystic, this is done largely automatically).
2Therefore, it is the task of those who are elder brothers than mankind at large and thus have got ahead of the others in their consciousness development to help those at lower stages to reduce the lead. If they fail in this task they cannot reckon on being assisted at their transition from the fourth to the fifth natural kingdom. Those on higher levels are to help those on lower instead of exploiting them as they have done hitherto. Of course this is a matter of voluntary work and nothing that those on lower levels may consider as their right to claim of those on higher levels. Professional obligations or self-assumed duties are of quite other categories. (An addition that should be unnecessary but which in the prevalent barbarism of ideas may be justified.)
3The gnosticians called the third self the “father”, the second self the “son”, and the first self the “mother”. It is the task of the mother to “give birth to the son”. It is the first self who as far as he can must acquire the qualities and abilities that are required to become a causal self. And that is done in the physical world. When the “son”, the causal self, is born, the mother has fulfilled her task. But not before. The first self must do all he possibly can to become a second self. When he has done what he can he receives the necessary help to become such a one, help to knowledge and help by his Augoeides. Whatever more help he needs he receives from a teacher in the planetary hierarchy.
4This truth has been so incredibly bungled by all the preachers of life ignorance. We understand very well the warning of the gnostician Paul: “Do ye not become many teachers,” meaning all those who lack the knowledge of reality. Until now the church has been the false guide. Nowadays various occult societies appear. There is no need for such societies. There are other ways for esotericians to find each other, if they wish. All societies degenerate because proselytes are immature, leaders are dictators, omnipresent wiseacres are intolerant, and tendencies to division prevail. Sects spawn ever more sects.
1The second self is the monad in the second triad. Being centred in the second triad mental atom, the monad is a causal self; being centred in the essential atom, an essential self (46); in the superessential molecule, a superessential self (45).
2Second selves (46- and 45-selves, or essential and superessential selves) in their collectivity make up the fifth natural kingdom, the essential kingdom. The worlds of the fifth natural kingdom, worlds 46 and 45, are the same as the worlds of the second self. The lower part of the planetary hierarchy belongs to the fifth natural kingdom.
3The fifth natural kingdom is at the same time that kingdom in which the consciousness aspect acquires that basic capacity which makes cosmic consciousness expansion possible, acquires insight of its function in the process of manifestation and the qualifications for conscious utilization of the dynamic universal energy.
4The second self has three envelopes: a causal being, an essential being, and a superessential being. The causal being is the envelope formed by the second triad mental atom after the old envelope has been dissolved.
5A perfect second self (45-self) has three different main kinds of consciousness at his disposal: causal, essential, and superessential consciousness. Causal consciousness bears mostly on the matter aspect, essential on the consciousness aspect, and superessential consciousness on the effect of dynamis in the motion aspect.
6In the human kingdom, four different main kinds of energy are distinguished: atomic energy (primary energy in all atomic kinds), etheric energy, emotional energy, and mental energy. In the causal self causal energy is added, and in the essential self, essential energy. When the individual masters these, he is a second self.
7Man’s stage of development indicates which of these he controls, which of them control him.
8Perfect second selves have worlds 45—46 at their free disposal. Since world 45 is common to all in the solar system, also other planets are within their range of action. These second selves are independent of space and time, and so there is no past time for them but everything exists in the “present”.
9Second selves are collective selves. Thanks to universal collective consciousness all lower kinds of consciousness enter into higher kinds. This means that second selves share in the collective consciousness of their lower worlds.
10We understand why the consciousness aspect is the dominant one for them. The matter aspect has lost all importance for them. Matter in worlds 45–49 appears to be automatized; so little does it resist the pertaining kinds of consciousness.
11As a second self (essential self) the individual becomes conscious of his godhood, of the godhood of all life, of god immanent, of his share in the cosmic total consciousness. Only the intuition affords us true knowledge. This was what Platon wanted to intimate with his teaching on the world of ideas, and this was impossible to understand without esoterics. It is not sufficient to merely translate the writings of Platon. They must be interpreted by an esoterician.
12The first self is individualistic and must be so to be able to develop into an individual with self-determined consciousness activity. This development is concluded when the monad has become a causal self (isolated in its causal envelope) and so has acquired unlosable self-identity in the collective consciousness. The next step is to appropriate this common consciousness with its pertaining energies and with their help to acquire an increasing share in the cosmic total consciousness by degrees in ever higher kingdoms. It is with the ever mightier energies of ever higher worlds that the monad is able to acquire ever widening consciousness. The first self becomes a second self by methodically and systematically appropriating the energies of the second self. When man as a mental self has acquired the preconditions of the pertaining methods, he automatically becomes a disciple of the planetary hierarchy.
13All divisions are deficient, since the capacity of consciousness is individual and due to the acquisition of faculties by individual character. Therefore, the boundaries between the different selves given here should not be understood as distinct.
14Thus the causal self has an intermediate position between the first self and the second self. It is true that his monad is centred in the second triad mental atom. But his causal envelope is still the old envelope the monad has had through its evolution in the human kingdom. When this envelope has been dissolved at the monad’s transition to the second triad essential atom, only then has the monad entered into the fifth natural kingdom.
15Likewise, the 45-self is at the borderline between the second and third selves through his share in the collective consciousness of world 45.
16When you have learnt how to distinguish between the different kinds of consciousness of the second and third selves, you will see the essential difference between the two selves and then you will need only those two terms, which facilitate conception and presentation enormously.
1In the first self, the matter aspect dominates; in the second self, the consciousness aspect; in the third self, the will aspect.
2Correspondingly, we have to distinguish between the energies of the worlds of man (47:4–49:7), dominated by the matter aspect; the energies of the second self (45:4–47:3), dominated by the consciousness aspect; and the energies of the third self (43:4–45:3), in which the will aspect prevails.
3The same scheme recurs in the three units of the second triad, in such a manner that the causal self is sovereign in the matter aspect of three lowest worlds (47–49); the essential self, in the consciousness aspect of the same worlds; and the 45-self, equally sovereign in all three aspects.
4This is particularly manifest if the causal self is of the third department, the essential self of the second, and the 45-self of the first department. This must not be taken so as to mean that the causal self is without will. The causal self must use dynamis as much as it can be expressed in causal matter. The corresponding is true of all three aspects. All three must be developed to that full capacity possible in the different molecular kinds and departments of the different worlds. And that is no easy work. Nothing is given for nothing in any kingdom, even if continuous evolution makes the work considerably easier for the successors. Everything must be self-acquired. It is a consolation that no quality or ability acquired can be lost, even if it goes into latency when continuity of consciousness is lost.
5Only the second self provides scope for the three aspects of reality: the causal self’s objective consciousness in the three lowest atomic worlds (47–49); the essential self’s collective consciousness (his ability to identify with the consciousness of all beings in the lower worlds); the superessential self’s full sovereignty in the worlds of the first self as well as the second self. From this it appears that the second self, not the first self, has a knowledge of reality. Apart from his physical objective consciousness, the first self is reduced to life in the illusoriness of the emotional world and in the fictitiousness of the mental world. Mankind cannot solve the problems of reality and life. Mankind is even unable to understand this fact. It is unable to define its problems, see its enormous limitation. The first self cannot solve the reality problems of his worlds, cannot acquire an exact perception of reality even in his own worlds.
1The three main kinds of the second self are causal consciousness, essential consciousness (46-consciousness), and superessential consciousness (45-consciousness). Causal consciousness is of three kinds (47:1-3), 46-consciousness is of seven kinds (46:1-7), and 45-consciousness is of four kinds (45:4-7).
2To the third self belong the three highest kinds of 45-consciousness (45:1-3), which the monad comparatively easily appropriates during its development into a perfect 45-self.
3Apart from the lowest kind of causal consciousness (47:3), the consciousness of the second self is simultaneous individual and collective consciousness. Also higher causal consciousness is collective consciousness due to the fact that the connection between the unity (47:2) and will (47:1) consciousnesses of the causal envelope is actualized by energies from the second triad.
4Causal consciousness is the ability of objective consciousness to ascertain facts in the planetary worlds of man (47–49) in space as well as time (independently of space and time). Thus the matter aspect with its space and time is intended.
5Essential consciousness is consciousness of unity. It brings about the liberation from all apprehension of separateness, isolation, without any loss of self-identity but with a liberation from individual consciousness.
6Essential consciousness lives in the very consciousness aspect. By using the consciousness of the atoms and material envelopes as well as the collective consciousness of the worlds it ascertains events in matter as well as consciousness (also independently of space and time, of course) such as they are perceived or were perceived in the different natural kingdoms all the way from the mineral kingdom.
7The much used and, because of the speculation of ignorance, useless term “intuition” actually has reference to some kind of second self consciousness: causal, essential, or superessential.
8The faculty of “intuition” is nothing that is easily acquired. It takes several incarnations to develop it from a tender beginning. It is fully developed only in the 45-self.
9What ignorance takes to be intuition is a variety of phenomena: remembrance anew, impulses from the subconscious, manifestations of the instinct of life acquired, telepathic pickup of ideas in the emotional and mental worlds, inspirations from Augoeides, thus the experience of any kind of manifestation from the unconscious.
10Theosophists, in particular, have used the term “intuition” of causal as well as essential consciousness. The two kinds of intuition can be distinguished by adding “causal”, “essential”. To forestall confusion of ideas, however, it is probably best to avoid that vague term and to use exact terms instead.
1The fact that the second self is a collective self also implies that the second self can enter into any group whatever that has a common consciousness within the world of consciousness he has reached and all the lower worlds. All the worlds of the planetary chain, 46–49, are at the disposal of the essential self. But since the work at the various processes of manifestation is done by groups with functions allotted to them, the essential self always belongs to a group forming a collective being within the common world consciousness. In addition, the essential self always belongs to one department of seven. Thus there are many collective beings within the essential world, although all essential selves are one and moreover one with all monad consciousnesses in all lower worlds. There is no lower limit to collective consciousness. What makes up a collective being is determined by a certainly distinguishable though not separating limit against other departments and other functions (expressed paradoxically: a unit for itself in unity). All monads of a collective being are self-identities having their individual characters. Their particular abilities are shared in common and can be utilized by others if the work at the specialized function so requires. The collective being guarantees a common, allround capacity of everybody and a freedom from the limitations of individual characters.
1The second self lives entirely in his respective kinds of consciousness: causal, essential, or superessential consciousness. Since lower kinds of consciousness enter into higher ones, this kind of monad does not need its first triad. But as a rule the monad keeps the first triad in order to more easily form envelopes in the worlds of man, if the monad has located its work to these worlds with their four natural kingdoms. There are many functions to choose from.
2Anyone who lives in the matter aspect, the one for which the material form is the only essential, never feels secure. For the form always runs the risk of attack by countless foes. But anyone who lives in the consciousness aspect is unassailable.
1The second self is a collective self. This fact is crucially important for the second self’s view of life and reality. It means, among other things, that the second self has seen the unity of all life, has entered into unity, lives to help all who strive after unity to reach unity, at all stages of development to promote consciousness development whose goal is unity. In addition, like all collective selves in ever higher worlds he seeks to develop himself ever more in order to better serve, to serve higher as well as lower selves. The motive is the service of evolution, since evolution is the meaning of life: all shall reach the highest cosmic kingdom. It is by service that all the qualities and abilities necessary to evolution are best and most quickly developed.
2All beings in higher kingdoms have the basic things in common. The fact that the perceptions of the three aspects of reality, such as they manifest themselves in higher dimensions, must be different, is quite another matter. Everybody’s individual character makes itself felt in individual treatment of given problems. Opinions about what measures should or should not be taken in regard to general facts valid for all (concerning mankind, for instance) may diverge and so be discussed until unanimity has been reached.
3The second self’s view of the self is thoroughly different from the first self’s view. Because the second self looks upon the monad (primordial atom) as the ultimate self it is, as a potentially highest cosmic self, seeing everything “from above”, whereas the first self sees everything “from below”, from the mineral kingdom and the process of evolution. The second self and higher selves consider the process of expansion: the self as returning to its “original home” (the highest cosmic world), as a being sharing in the cosmic total consciousness. They consider the potentiality, not the actuality. The monad as a first self thus is a potential second self, a potential third self, etc. The very perception of time is quite different, widens with every higher world, until in the highest cosmic kingdom everything becomes an eternal present, all processes of manifestation fall in the present, since in the great cosmic plan made at the making of the cosmos, all the processes, everything to be actualized, is seen from the beginning to the end.
4For the second self, there is no authority in whom to “believe”. He uses the greater knowledge of reality received from higher selves as “working hypotheses” but accepts nothing which he does not understand himself by his own experience and working up of his own experience.
1In treating the problems of philosophical subjectivism, exoteric and esoteric subjectivism should be clearly distinguished and not be confounded.
2Exoteric subjectivism denies the existence of matter, denies that there is a world outside us. Eastern and western philosophers, ignorant of reality, have eagerly proclaimed that the external world is mere “illusion”. This is sheer madness, as it conflicts with the law of identity and with common sense, however many philosophers or occultists or Christian scientists in present time or in the future will proclaim this subjectivism and illusionism. Esotericians, in any case hylozoicians, do not count modern occultists among real esotericians.
3Illusionist philosophy has come about under the influence of esoteric subjectivist philosophy, formulated by second selves. The two kinds of subjectivism are totally dissimilar, however. Esoteric subjectivism presupposes a knowledge of the three aspects of reality: the aspects of matter, motion, and consciousness. This fact is self-evident and need never be discussed. The three aspects are directly given and can be ascertained by everybody, even by the simplest “physical sense”.
4Esoteric subjectivism is explainable as an expression of the second selves’ conception of reality. To second selves (46-selves and 45-selves) consciousness is the dominant aspect. Second selves start from the consciousness aspect, should and must do so and can do so without risk, since they master all three aspects of reality. Thus they can never deny the existence of matter although they must regard matter as unessential. To second selves, the forms of matter are interesting only as vehicles of consciousness, and they pay regard to the consciousnesses of the different worlds and envelopes, whereas they disregard the matter aspect.
5In contrast, to first selves matter is the dominant aspect. Therefore, they should start from the matter aspect as the basis of their world view. Else human beings risk losing their logical balance, the wee bit of common sense they have. Common sense exists in different degrees and is the result of self-acquired experience of life during the total number of incarnations.
6Without a correct world view the requisite ground for the life view is lacking as well. Yoga philosophers are sufficient proof of this, for it is precisely their ignorance of the matter aspect that invalidates their life view. That view is a subjective speculation on the basis of originally esoteric facts they have totally distorted, which they did not need to do if they had taken hylozoics as their basis. When in the future yogis start from hylozoics, their subjective experience of the consciousness aspect will be especially valuable for western psychologists.
7Subjectivism, starting from the consciousness aspect, thus belongs to the domains of second selves. Therefore, it comes natural to second selves to start from subjectivist ways of looking at things also in their teaching. Disciples of the planetary hierarchy are encouraged to disregard the matter aspect as far as possible, since they are supposed to have already accepted hylozoics as their world view and thus do not need to consider it any further. Worlds and envelopes are taken for granted.
8However, before hylozoics has been generally accepted as the only rational and tenable working hypothesis, there is a risk that teachers onesidedly emphasizing the consciousness aspect will confuse their pupils and cause them to revert to philosophical subjectivism, which has dominated philosophy since the days of the sophists.
9It is deplorable that the reader’s time must be taken up with this discussion. Regrettably, however, it has proved necessary to scotch a basic misconception prevalent also among socalled esotericians.
1All envelopes of incarnation except the causal triad envelope are robots affected by energies coming from within, from higher envelopes, and, in the majority, above all coming from without. The mental envelope is affected by mental vibrations, the emotional envelope by vibrations from the emotional world (which means vibrations from other people), the etheric envelope and the organism by so-called cosmic energies (all kinds of atomic energies). Only when the individual has become a second self (an essential self) will he be able to make himself independent of other kinds of energies than the ones he selects himself. Most people are slaves to their robots, which means that “man lacks free will”, an esoteric expression that ignorance has picked up and of course idiotized as usual. The self is not free as long as it is dominated by its envelopes. It is the privilege of the esoterician to see the enormous limitation of the first self and the limit to his possible understanding (by contact with the causal and essential worlds through centres of the causal envelope).
2Second selves of the first department work with “dynamic will”; those of the second department, with “inclusive radiatory will”; those of the third department, with “magnetic will”; these being the three kinds of will that most easily manifest themselves in the consciousness aspect of the second triad.
3“Disease” may occur in anyone of the envelopes of incarnation (save the triad envelope), in anybody, even in causal selves. Only essential selves are unassailable by disease. In them, used-up cells are automatically excreted from the organism and all organs function perfectly.
1Second selves do not make themselves known. They do not make their true status known even indirectly. If you can tell by a person’s appearance that he is a saint, then he is no saint. A saint is quite different from what people think they can spot in behaviour and manners. The most distinctive trait of a saint is the freedom of his being, his simplicity, directness, and radiating joy, the opposite of solemn and sombre miens before all the sins of the world. We are all on our way, and even if our way be long or short we shall all reach the goal. That is trust in life and the source of joy.
2Even if second selves sometimes incarnate in order to work more easily with their disciples, they remain inaccessible to curiosity and never appear in public. Those who appear in public are no second selves but impostors. Only in connection with the reappearance of the planetary hierarchy will it be possible for second selves to appear in public individually. Not even disciples bear witness of their discipleship. That would indeed be meaningless until mankind, by an overwhelming majority, has accepted esoterics as the only rational working hypothesis and so will have a chance of understanding those in higher kingdoms.
3It will prove increasingly necessary to state this emphatically, since by every day there appear ever people who pass themselves off as spiritual celebrities, always misleading great numbers of gullible and injudicious people. Those are impostors, too, who boast of their familiarity with members of the planetary hierarchy, their visits to Shamballa, etc.
1All in higher kingdoms are experts on some certain area of knowledge, and of course they make their knowledge available to those of the same kingdom, whether in the planetary hierarchy or in the deva hierarchy. Thus it is possible for a 45-self immediately to obtain knowledge of everything he wants to concerning realities of lower worlds, and so he is spared unnecessary work.
2As knowledge of reality is acquired, the task of life appears as an “infinite” development of consciousness in 44 ever higher worlds. With every higher atomic world goes a new dimension, a new perception of time, new kinds of consciousness, and new kinds of energies. Acquiring all this appears as difficult to higher selves as becoming a mental self appears difficult to an emotional self or becoming a causal self, to a mental self. The requirements for the increase of capacity in all respects rise in an enormous scale.
3The second self is a conveyor of energies from higher kingdoms to the four lowest natural kingdoms. This work presupposes a knowledge of the Law and the processes of development, so that the distribution is done in the right way.
4Second selves choose their spheres of activity themselves, choices that are much due to their most essential interests as first selves, for instance in the mineral, vegetable, animal, or human kingdom. All monads in all kingdoms need help with their consciousness development. The more familiar you are with a certain kingdom, the better equipped you are to assist monads of this kingdom to reach a higher form of existence.
5Mankind has unbeknownst to itself done much for this development by working up minerals and metals, by breeding plants and animals. The essential help is given these monads by those who have learnt the technical procedure of transferring the monads to a higher kingdom by “breaking up” their lowest group-soul envelope or by helping individuals of the highest animal species to causalize. This will be a task for human beings in the future when they have learnt how to cooperate with the planetary hierarchy.
6Second selves have certainly enough work to do. The assumption that second selves are there exclusively to serve the fourth natural kingdom is part of the incurable conceit about the incomparable and unique position of the human individual (that largely misshapen cog in the cosmic machinery). Second selves take an interest in the problems of first selves only in order to help mankind.
1It is only as a second self that the individual can acquire knowledge of reality. Then he can ascertain facts himself in the five lowest atomic worlds (45–49) and moreover obtain knowledge of higher kingdoms, conveyed by the planetary government, which has its own experience of the three lowest cosmic kingdoms (29–35, 36–42, 43–49) and is able to directly or indirectly contact the four still higher kingdoms (1–7, 8–14, 15–21, 22–28). The highest cosmic selves (1–7) satisfy themselves that no mistakes are made within the cosmic organization, that all know what they need to know and can perform their functions. Besides, there is a recurring check made by special controllers (Sanskrit: nirmanakayas), operating between the kingdoms; controllers who also supervise the distribution of energies from higher to lower kingdoms.
2Every event is simultaneously triune: matter, consciousness, motion. The matter aspect can be ascertained by causal selves who can objectively study material energies, their causes and effects in the worlds of man. The ascertainments of lower selves are unreliable on principle, then they may appear however convincing. Real knowledge can exist only in second selves.
3Knowledge is the sum of presented facts. The causal self masters the facts and in a sovereign way. His very sovereignty has the effect that the causal self does not always distinguish between the causal knowledge and the intuition, which conveys the new knowledge, the new ideas from the essential consciousness. This has caused some misunderstandings about causal and essential “intuition”, two quite different faculties. The more knowledge we receive from the planetary hierarchy, the more it appears that the old esoteric views are too primitive in a manner that is often misleading. This in particular is the reason why the seemingly unremediable tendency to dogmatism is totally abortive. The mode of presentation (the mental formulation of the system of knowledge) is changed unceasingly, which indeed is inevitable as mental consciousness works with concepts in a consecutive manner. When, some time in the future, mankind can work with ideas instead of concepts, it will need no systems.
4When judging people (analysis is not criticism) there is much to consider which only second selves can ascertain: the stage of development, the horoscope, the departments in the envelopes, extraversion (1–3–5–7 types) or introversion (2–4–6 types). To this should be added physical influences whose full impact on the individual in promotive or inhibitive respect have not been assessable: race, nation, class, family, with idiosyncrasies, prejudice, traditions. The general spirit of the times is important, too.
5All first selves have different conceptions of reality, and all second selves have a single one which is common to them all.
6It should be asserted once and for all that human reason cannot solve any problems of reality. In so far as solutions of such problems are available in exoteric learning, they have been received either from anyone in contact with the world of ideas or directly from the planetary hierarchy. All speculation is abortive.
7To put it drastically it can be said that we human beings are helplessly disoriented idiots in life until we have acquired causal knowledge and liberated ourselves from our dependence on emotional illusions and mental fictions.
1If you realize that the faintest expression of consciousness also implies a manifestation of energy, then you also understand that the study of the energy effect in all material contexts is one of the many fundamental disciplines of second selves.
2By the knowledge of the laws of nature and laws of life and of the requisite methods of their application, consciousness can control matter and use energies purposefully. Magic is this knowledge of energies and their application. The old division of magic into white and black was well-founded. White magic uses energies from the worlds of unity. Those are energies that promote evolution. Black magic uses those involutionary energies that are stored in the material composition. Those energies counteract evolution.
3The work of composing primordial atoms to form increasingly coarser involutionary matter takes an enormous amount of energy. That energy lies subsequently latent in the composition and is set free at the dissolution of matter. This fact is demonstrated in such phenomena as radioactivity and so-called nuclear fission. The consciousness energies stored in involutionary matter are of analogous potency.
4Knowing somewhat mankind’s inability to rightly use these energies, we understand how necessary it was to keep this knowledge secret, to entrust it only to those who had definitively pledged themselves to use only energies that promote evolution, never to use the knowledge for their own good and never to use it without permission in each particular case.
5Reflecting on the above we perhaps understand that magic is a discipline for second selves and not for first selves.
6The highest we can reach in summarizing are mathematical symbols, words of power, and aphorisms. In higher worlds there is obtained something that may be likened to symbols: flashes of thought-directed atoms or molecules having an energy and consciousness effect; the higher the world this occurs in, the shorter, more concentrated, and mightier it is. The shorter, the more potent dynamis.
7The matters of higher worlds manifest as light and colour. Only higher selves can observe and analyse those matters. (The motion aspect of different matters manifests itself as different kinds of sound.) With each higher atomic kind, light is ever more intensive and colours are ever more exquisite. The esoterician distinguishes between involutionary (those of the black ones) and evolutionary colours. Involutionary colours include black, brown, grey, some shades of purple and of green. Fortunately, some pertaining problems have begun to be studied by psychologists and physicians. The colours surrounding the individual are of great importance for his physical and emotional well-being.
8Light is a quality of matter that manifests itself differently in different matters. It is one of the tasks of esoteric science to unite the different kinds of light.
9According to D.K., there are “technically two bodies of light”, the causal envelope and the etheric envelope, and they are man’s two most important envelopes.
10According to D.K., the science of the antahkarana is especially concerned with the manifestations of light, the continuity of consciousness, and the pertaining problem of life and death.
11According to D.K., the study of the antahkarana made by disciples will entail a complete revolution of present-day upbringing and education, which have proved their inefficacy.
12Only second selves understand the nature of religion, the purpose of science, and the goal of education. These are not what people think today.
13The esoteric history, told by individuals in the fifth natural kingdom having access to the planetary memory (the collective memories of the causal, mental, emotional, and physical worlds), is the only reliable world history. It is accessible to the causal self as regards the matter aspect and to the essential self as regards the consciousness aspect.
14The world history of our modern historians is largely a construction. Historians will not admit that, however, until the esoteric history is presented some time. Then they will be in a position to ascertain what forces have been at work in the past.
1In esoterics there is mention of “integration”, which has reference to several different kinds of processes. Common to them all is that the individual by means of a higher envelope learns how to control all the lower ones. We may speak of the integration of the first self, the causal self, the essential self, etc.
2The integration of the first self is that process in which the individual learns how to control consciousness and energy in the emotional and physical envelopes. To do this you must be a mental self. It is especially important to control the emotional envelope. In so doing it is not a matter of killing out emotions or refusing them attention. It is required to be able to control these energies and to use them in the right way. In the integrated first self, there is a direct connection between mental consciousness and the brain. The individual cannot acquire second self consciousness until he has become an integrated first self.
3The integration of the causal self is that process in which the causal envelope penetrates the envelopes of incarnation more and more until the individual has become a causal self. In the causal self, there is a direct connection between causal-mental consciousness and the brain.
4The integration of the essential self is done partially in the corresponding manner. In the essential self, there is an unbroken connection between the second triad and the brain.
5Since the self-activation of ever higher consciousness also entails a successive realization of unity, “integration” also can be used to term the individual’s entry into a family, a nation, and finally mankind; as well as his entry into the fifth natural kingdom, into the world of unity (46), which enables him to identify himself with all monads in the five lowest natural kingdoms. The individual has then entered into unity, the unity of all. Unity has always been an inevitable reality. Only now, however, when he has experienced it, he can ascertain this fact for himself.
1Physical etheric consciousness is controlled by emotional consciousness, emotional by mental, mental by causal, etc. In contrast, causal consciousness cannot be used to control emotionality. The perfect second self, who himself shapes his envelopes of incarnation by means of his first triad, of course controls also consciousness in these envelopes automatically.
2The first self has reached his highest capacity when he has become a mental self and controls consciousness in his envelopes of incarnation through consciousness in the two highest mental molecular kinds (47:4,5). This can be called sovereignty in a restricted sense. The individual then is ripe for discipleship the purpose of which is to enable the monad to acquire consciousness in the second triad.
3In the human kingdom there is a risk of regarding every higher kind of consciousness conquered as ultimate and final, in the manner of the neophyte’s often heard exclamation at a new, overwhelming insight, “This is all I need to know”. We find it so easy to take the part to be the whole, content ourselves with the resources of the first self, “all we need”. But this does not afford us cosmic knowledge and power, not even atomic consciousness. There are 49 kinds of atomic consciousness and many higher kingdoms.
4True sovereignty in each world is attained by the monad in the highest consciousness of that world, in the atomic consciousness. Only the essential self can do that.
1At the present stage of mankind’s development, esoterics is the knowledge of the second selves. Many evident facts should, by the way, belong to the levels of first selves. If mankind were not so ignorant of life, second selves would not need to devote themselves to things for which they are overqualified but would be able to use their powers in quite another manner. Esoteric teachers still have to occupy themselves with such things as ordinary school-teachers could impart to people.
2All thinking first selves make themselves their own life view with the materials of knowledge they have at their disposal. Not until they realize that the right knowledge can only be one, do they begin to seriously search for that knowledge which is common to all members of the fifth natural kingdom and higher kingdoms.
3Whatever of that knowledge is communicated in the writings of Laurency concerns exclusively the possibilities of the first self to formulate a comprehensible world view and life view as a basis to build upon. Whatever knowledge disciples of the planetary hierarchy receive in order to acquire the second self’s view of life is a quite different thing, which they cannot understand until they have mastered the first self’s correct view of life.
4Man’s conception of what he is taught in theoretical esoterics (for instance, how the monad in its atomic chain reaches higher kingdoms and in the process identifies itself with the consciousness of ever greater collectives) is perhaps best described as a vision. We can understand it only to the extent that we, as ever higher selves, acquire the ability to experience those realities and participate in the pertaining processes of manifestation.
5Esoterics wants to afford people a correct conception of reality, show man the path to higher achievement and show him what is required to become a disciple of the planetary hierarchy, for only as a disciple can man become a causal self, a second self.
6The problems of esoterics are problems of the second self (at least causal consciousness, the world of Platonic ideas). Therefore, only those who have achieved a contact with the world of ideas, former initiates, can understand those problems. The first self cannot understand those problems. What is said here implies, among other things, that every attempt at speculation with nowadays publicized esoteric facts and ideas is utterly abortive and that the hypotheses and theories of occultists are erroneous, misleading, and idiotizing. Therefore, only facts and ideas coming directly from the planetary hierarchy should be accepted by those who cannot decide the matter themselves. The data supplied by occultists are just abortive guesswork, if they are not indeed deliberate disinformation and disorientation (regrettably an increasingly frequent phenomenon). The black ones make the most of every opportunity, and the nowadays publicized part of esoterics has opened a new and rewarding field for their activity.
1If you were a genius at school and got the highest marks in all subjects, this might indicate that you can become a perfect first self. For a future esoterician that may be an asset, a basis to build upon. Unfortunately, it does not entail any particular understanding of the second self’s view of reality and life. If you have no latent esoteric knowledge, your prospects are very small. In most cases, the genius of the first self is even a hindrance. Old initiates often prove to be typical second-raters at school. They show no interest in first self learning the fictitiousness of which (apart from the facts of the physical world) they have seen through in past incarnations and so fend off instinctively.
2It is not sufficient that the first self has integrated his envelopes so that mental consciousness controls emotionality and emotionality controls his physical nature. As such, the first self has no sense of the objectivity of his higher self, has no intuition, and is incapable of “spiritual” activity. And that monad, which has reached contact with a higher kind of consciousness, is in its first triad a “house divided against itself”. It takes many incarnations of seeking and working up of experience before the intellect is able to formulate a mental system that satisfies both physical and “spiritual” needs. At its stage of dependence, the self has been fed with many belief systems during thousands of incarnations. It takes many incarnations before the self has reached the point where it asks questions about the meaning of life and dares to seek the solution of that problem on its own, and before the self can see that this is an impossible achievement. It is only then that the intellect is so developed that it can test the reliability of the system supplied by the individuals of the fifth natural kingdom who are far ahead of mankind in their consciousness development.
3“It is not safe for human beings, poor foolish things, to tamper with unknown forces.” (D.K.) That is a 45-self’s assessment of human capacity.
1The first triad with its envelopes of incarnation is the very main problem of the self. When the self has solved that problem it is ready for higher tasks. Anyone who has seen this thereby also has got a firm basis for his world view and life view. He has solved the riddle of life and is free from the dependence on other people’s opinions and imaginative speculations, free from the need of sharing in the general appreciation of one’s own remarkable, dear “self”. What immense amount of time and energy has been wasted on that problem and will be wasted for millions of years yet?
2As a first self the monad is counteracted in its development by untold hindrances in all its envelopes; physical inheritance from parents, its own inheritance from the sowing of previous incarnations, from all manner of bad or insufficient qualities and abilities, from a life-ignorant environment, from false notions and prejudice inoculated, from defects of the collectives the individual enters into, etc. It is important to never give up, to endure, to look upon failures as necessary lessons.
3As long as the monad identifies with its first triad or with any consciousness content of its envelopes, so long the monad is a first self.
4As long as man allows himself to be influenced by the idiologies of ruling ignorance for his view of reality and life, so long he is unable to assimilate the esoteric knowledge, the inspiration from Augoeides, to reach contact with his own subjective causal consciousness. He must liberate himself from traditional views, theological, philosophical, and scientific dogmas.
5There is a great difference in our ability both to give and to receive whether we are interested in the content of another individual’s temporary being of incarnation or in his causal being. But if it is not possible to contact even the lowest kind of subjective causal consciousness (when the individual has not reached the higher emotional stage), then we are reduced to contact his first self.
6The experience of many incarnations is required before the monad as a first self has acquired self-reliance and self-determination as necessary conditions of that purposive will to sacrifice contained in the striving to become a causal self. It is one of the paradoxes of life that we have to acquire self-determination to realize the insufficience of the first self. Until then, the first self stands in the way of his own further development, and so he usually does during a long series of incarnations, until he has learnt to rely on his Augoeides. The knowledge of his existence should facilitate his emancipation from the limitation of the first self.
7We all lead a “double life”, whether we know it or not, and so we do because human beings consist of “body and soul”, the first and the second triad. The more concentratedly first selves we are, the more split we are. The more we sense that we are one with all, unity and community, the freer we are. It is unity that sets us free.
8However great, however important, however influential a “spiritual leader” is, he is not a second self as long as he is a first self. A truism, but how many see its truth in real life? A leader all too easily becomes all too great, great also in his own eyes.
1It is of course impossible for a first self, with only objective physical and subjective emotional and mental consciousness at his disposal, to know of his second self, know that there is something beyond mentality. The normal individual, lacking physical etheric vision and emotional clairvoyance (objective consciousness) cannot even know that there is something beyond “visible” reality (the three lowest molecular kinds of physical matter). The clairvoyant cannot know that there is a mental world, since he cannot acquire mental objective consciousness. Subjective consciousness is not sufficient, but unshakable knowledge is had only through objective consciousness.
2As a disciple of the planetary hierarchy the individual learns how to acquire mental as well as causal objective consciousness. Thereby he becomes sovereign in the worlds of man and sees that it is impossible for a first self to comprehend, even to rightly judge, realities in these worlds. The subjective essential consciousness he has at the same time acquired is of such a kind that he is assured of the existence of still higher worlds. As a causal self in his old causal envelope, which he received as a gift from his Augoeides, he cannot acquire essential objective consciousness. In order to become an essential self, he must sacrifice his causal envelope. Subsequently, he is for the first time subjectively conscious in the collective consciousness of existence and thereby also conscious of his potential godhood.
3Not only does he now, as a causal self, possess a true knowledge of reality, but he can henceforth think in agreement with reality and never more falls the victim of the imaginative speculations and constructions of ignorance. He knows that he knows what he knows, and can always tell what he knows from what he does not know. Men cannot do that, only causal selves. Men cannot decide whether their superphysical learning is in agreement with reality. If they could, there would not be such a great number of different views. Reality is one and the knowledge of reality can only be one and valid for everybody.
1At the lower stages of development, the content of the lower mental (47:6,7) and the lower emotional (48:4-7) is the only conceivable, the only evident consciousness, be it real or unreal. At the stage of the mystic, the self gropes for “true reality” (unity) via the causal unity centre. At the higher mental (47:4,5) stage, the self seeks a contact with its “soul”, causal consciousness, and thereby consciously or unconsciously with Augoeides. This contact can be reached in the highest mental (47:4).
2The esoterician soon learns how to differentiate the first self’s physical, emotional, and mental consciousness from the second self’s causal, essential, and superessential consciousness, such as they express subjectively to self-consciousness long before they can be ascertained objectively as energy expressions in the different material envelopes of the two triads.
3According as man acquires incipient subjective causal and essential consciousness via the conveying centres of the causal envelope, he also begins to be aware of himself as a “double self”: a “human self” and a “spiritual self” which appear to “struggle for supremacy” in his monad consciousness. It is an antagonism that starts at the stage of emotional attraction, goes on at the higher mental stage until the individual has become a causal self.
4Having no knowledge of the different envelope consciousnesses of the two triads, theologians have of course totally misjudged these subjective phenomena in the monad consciousness. Only esoterics can explain them and their genesis. What an enormous amount of profound and acute balderdash has been produced by theologians during the centuries ever since the so called Epistles of Paul were written! How many millions of human lives have been lost in the wars of religious fanaticism, brought about by quarrels over theological views! All the time the explanations were known to the initiates of the esoteric knowledge orders, and they had to keep silent if they would not be tortured and burned at the stake. The knowledge exists but never where people think and never in those who are in power. In this connection it should be added: never in churches and never in occult sects. Where there are two conflicting views, two warring societies or churches, there the knowledge is absent.
1If you have once seen the meaning of life – to acquire ever higher material envelopes with their ever higher kinds of consciousness, then you understand why the “ancients” talked about the illusions of life: the attachment to the lower as if it were the only reality when in fact the higher is a higher kind of reality and the highest cosmic kingdom is the goal of life. The very process of evolution consists in a series of liberations from the lower as conditions of transition to the higher. Life-ignorant man feels “renunciation” as a sacrifice, whereas the man who has a knowledge of reality senses it as a heartening token of the fact that he is done with this lower and may trade it in for something immensely more valuable. Evolution appears from below as a series of sacrifices and from above as a series of gains. Sacrifice, renunciation, liberation, elimination is the same process and the condition of further acquisition of consciousness.
2No forms of life endure. Material forms of all kind are perishable and can always be assailed, from without and from within. The monad alone is unassailable and invulnerable. People talk of “taking lives”. But that is impossible, for the monad is eternal, immortal, indestructible, and nothing is more certain than the fact that everybody will some time become a highest cosmic self. The law of destiny guarantees that.
3Our fear bears on the form alone, not on the individual, the self, which never has anything to fear. We fear only as long as we are dependent on the form, on our envelopes, on the matter aspect. When we see that the self is not its envelopes, we see that the self has nothing to fear. We fear as long as we identify ourselves with the form, think we are our envelopes. And something of this identification always remains until we have become causal selves, liberated from the first self.
4As long as the very form of life is regarded as the essential, so long that experience of life is lost which the form else could afford. The attention is wrongly directed: to the matter aspect instead of the consciousness aspect. If the self as a first self saw this, then it would become a second self incomparably more quickly.
5We must want to live and want to live to serve evolution, mankind, and unity. There is no death, just the putting off of worn-out envelopes of incarnation. Life is an unbroken continuity if we see it from the view-point of reincarnation and know that the new life actually begins where the old life ended. (We are born in the same sun sign and in the same rising sign we “died” in, with our causal chain unbroken; a fact we shall find when we as causal selves can trace the chain of reincarnation. It is an unbroken life; symbolically spoken, a five hundred years life, where each day is a new incarnation.)
6It is important to see that there are no shortcuts to the second self. The individual must himself have solved the problems of the first self, mastered the consciousness and energies of his envelopes of incarnation, by theory and experiment seen that illusions and fictions are untenable. In that case it is no use for you to believe you can do it, to believe you have already done it. All such beliefs are illusions until you have definitively become a causal self. To the very last the first self is a first self anyhow. There is something lacking anyway.
1Nobody can become a second self save as a disciple of the planetary hierarchy; conscious of his discipleship in certain incarnations, unconscious in most of them; conscious after having realized, in his unconscious incarnations, what he knew in his subconscious or superconscious; having learnt to listen to the advice of Augoeides and followed it. As a causal self, he is still a disciple, and remains one until he has become a perfect second self.
2In the absolute sense of the word, all in higher kingdoms are “disciples” until they have reached the highest cosmic kingdom, and also regard themselves as such. Thus this is discipleship in another sense than that of men.
3It is one of the paradoxes of life that man, in order to become a second self, must first become a perfect first self and after that liberate himself from it, forget that it exists. Then it has fulfilled its function in the worlds of man, enabled man to acquire knowledge of these worlds and rightly use their energies. Thereupon his aim is to acquire consciousness in the worlds of the fifth natural kingdom.
4It is by “sacrificing” the first self (with everything this implies) that we can become second selves. That is the only way, which mankind will choose some time. Until this is done, suffering will be the lot of man. When he has sacrificed his first self, there is no more suffering but the voluntary sharing in the sufferings of others.
5The monad in the first triad reaches the second triad when it no longer needs the first triad for its development. The whole path of development through the human kingdom consists in an increasing understanding of higher kinds of consciousness and interests that are part of the higher kinds. It is a continuous elimination of lower interests for higher ones. The individual learns to realize that the meaning of life is development and that he in order to develop is dependent on energies from the higher kingdom, that the condition of receiving these is to serve life, that all life is a give and take until all have reached the highest kingdom. In the fifth natural kingdom he learns that development means entering into ever more comprehensive collectives. With his self-identity preserved he becomes a joint owner of the collective and its common consciousness. This goes on until he has in the highest kingdom reached the cosmic total consciousness. In the collective, he does his part of the common work, has his special function corresponding to his individual character and the capacity, all the qualities and abilities he acquired in all lower kingdoms.
6Many esoteric students wish to reach higher worlds as quickly as possible. But nobody can skip any stage of development with its levels. On the other hand, anyone who resolves to work for his development and does so purposefully, can pass the “degrees” in incomparably shorter time than those who take a mere theoretical interest in the matter. Those develop the most quickly who let the process become automatic by cultivating love and understanding of all living beings, self-forgetfulness, and service of life. So doing they develop all the requisite qualities and abilities in the simplest manner.
7If in addition the individual has learnt how to think in accord with the knowledge of the laws of life (the laws of unity and activation in particular), his envelopes will automatically be increasingly refined as lower kinds of matter are changed for higher kinds and so ever higher kinds of consciousness. Energy follows thought with an inevitable effect, whether we know it or not. Our thinking has made us what we are (with the quality of our envelopes) and can change us into what we shall become. Thus anyone who is earnest in his desire to develop must take care that he always is thinking right.
8The will to unity, the sense of the community (unity) of all life, love towards all, is the key to the consciousness aspect, the key to the psychological understanding of other people’s consciousness. Without love there is no understanding. Anyone who wants to understand must learn to love.
9The first self can gain understanding of the matter aspect of existence, a process culminating in causal consciousness. The special task of the second self is to acquire understanding of the consciousness aspect, which is done in the essential world, the world of unity, community. To fully understand you must be able to identify your consciousness with that of others. Until you have reached that point you will find that impersonal love of human beings is necessary to understand them. That love desires nothing for itself, only wants to understand in order to help others with their problems if possible (make the problems of others one’s own). When psychoanalysts realize this, they will enter upon another course.
1Slowly through his incarnations man learns how to think more independently and critically, learns to see that mankind’s political and social history largely presents phenomena and behaviour of the barbarian stage. This implies that he grows increasingly conscious in the higher molecular kinds of his envelopes. When he has once acquired the ability to perceive the higher kinds of attractive emotional vibrations, he discovers that mankind is still controlled by the vibrations of repulsion in the lower regions of the emotional world.
2Man begins to consciously strive after what he considers to be right. The “noble middle path” between the extremes is rather broad to begin with. It narrows as the individual grows more sensitive to what is right and wrong and more careful in his choice of motives. (That is no concern of moralists but everybody has to find his own way without interference.) Mental or causal discrimination does not suffice for this, but it requires also essential unity consciousness.
3He also grows ever more sensitive to and impressionable by energies from the essential world. Thereby he attains the stage of the mystic and comes under the influence of Augoeides whose task it is to make the individual acquire, through requisite experience, the qualities and abilities that are necessary for him to become a second self. Man “is wandering in the dark” but does not see it until the “light” of the second self begins to pour down into the monad consciousness. Then he begins to “seek the light”.
1When man has had sufficient experience to realize that wealth, glory, and power are worthless, that day will come when he wants to be liberated from all those illusions and he wishes to be annihilated. That wish is vain, since the self is immortal. Then he must try to achieve the same result by forgetting himself.
2On thinking it over, however, you see that also this wish is self-deception. You want to escape the unbearable and that is the selfishness of the self. Only gradually can you liberate yourself from “self” with its rooted tendencies. And you do so by lovingly understanding all and everything and by living to acquire that ability, by living to serve life. That is the way. Those of higher worlds find the very thought of separate self absurd. They have entered into unity where there is only one life, and for this they live, unlimited power and unlimited opportunities to put this power at the service of life.
3It is easier to forget yourself if you realize that the first self is a hindrance, stands in the way of the second self, that the first self is nothing else than a very deficient tool. Man has a causal envelope, and his task is to become a causal self. Until then, he is not a complete human being, for the causal self is the true man, and the monad cannot become one until it has ceased to be a first self.
4As long as man lives in his first self, as long as it is he who is speaking or acting, is feeling happy or unhappy, important or insignificant, etc., ad infinitum, so long is he a first self. When he has become a tool of the second self, he ceases to be something else. After that it is quite irrelevant to him what he is and where he stands and what happens to him. Then he is no longer his lower envelopes. He is a self that wants to be one with all because he already is it, even though he cannot experience it.
5By serving, the monad is liberated from the first self with its claims and demands.
6Liberation from the dependence on everything in the worlds of man entails a sense of isolation that lasts until man experiences community in unity. When he has once arrived there, he will do his work and duties but will not be attached to circumstances and people and will quit worrying about them. He has then acquired “divine indifference” to whatever happens in him and to him in the outer. He is then ripe for the transition to the second self.
1Most seekers get themselves knowledge of how to become a second self, elaborate an interesting world view and life view and are content with that. They forget why they got themselves knowledge and the fact that it is not an end in itself. The knowledge exists to teach us how to live; it exists to be put into real life. Otherwise it is little more than bad sowing for bad reaping, for knowledge entails responsibility, and we have not received the knowledge to merely be content with it. We have received the knowledge from the fifth natural kingdom for the purpose of striving to enter that kingdom and no longer be a burden to our guides.
2By acquiring esoteric knowledge, becoming mental selves and causal selves you do not estrange yourself from mankind. You just further increase your capacity to serve human consciousness development, become an ever more useful tool of Augoeides and the planetary hierarchy.
3It is not a matter of wanting to be quickly saved from the cycle of reincarnations, which to be sure is a sign of the opposite of self-forgetfulness, but it is a matter of being able to help others to understand reality and develop their ability to live in accord with the laws of life. We develop the most quickly by helping others to realize the meaning of life. That is the great compensation of unselfishness.
4To forgo your own development in order to use your energies to help others to develop amounts to no loss in the long run. Old debts, which always exist, are set off. And the law of compensation entails rather a quicker development than would else be possible. Anyone who thinks he may gain selfishly by such a “sacrifice” strengthens egoism. The one right motive is to be forced by your will to unity (“love”), because you “cannot do otherwise”. This will to unity is due to the fact that you have been able to utilize the energy of the essential molecules poured down on mankind by the planetary hierarchy (symbolically so-called blessing). Those higher kinds of matter are supplied to the planetary hierarchy by the collectors of cosmic energy called the nirmanakayas in the esoteric knowledge orders. They are sources that are always flowing.
5Service is no “sacrifice” but is based on the insight that all are one, the will to unity with all you can serve, an irresistible urge to live for all, something inescapable and spontaneous without thoughts of your own self and its development. There is for the second self nothing that can be called “sacrifice”, even though it may so appear to others, and hence the term. Forgetfulness of your own self means liberation from dependence on the first triad, later the second triad, then the third triad and so forth throughout the cosmos. The monad must assimilate the different kinds of consciousness and acquire the capacity to understand reality they afford, as well as the pertaining abilities to rightly use the energies, but this is done with a view to better serving life, not with a view to the self. That is the basic attitude of all beings in higher kingdoms and the condition for the monad in the first triad of reaching the second triad. This of course contains the insight of where you can best serve with your small and ever greater powers, make your small and ever increasing contribution for mankind, evolution, and unity. By faithfully serving in small things, where you stand, you acquire the powers that enable you to make an ever greater contribution. This is part of the law of destiny and the inevitable in the very process of evolution. The tempo of development is determined by the will to unity and its purposiveness and, as for the rest, by the capacity of individual character to acquire abilities. All in higher kingdoms do as best they can without a thought of merit or recognition. The powers they acquire by service guide them to their place of work in the processes of manifestation.
1Through mental consciousness we conquer causal consciousness; and through the energies of emotional attraction, essential consciousness. Intellectuals easily get it into their heads that the intellect is all, which is a big mistake. We help others by loving understanding, not by teaching. In order to become second selves we must profit by both emotional and mental energies. Emotionality is the essential driving force, but we need mentality to use emotionality purposefully. Or to put it differently: mentality leads the way, emotionality supplies the energy. Theologians have not understood this fact.
2The conquest of the second self consciousness means objectively that the individual builds a link between the first triad mental molecule and the second triad mental atom. Using creative imagination and mental ideas the monad builds, piece by piece, the bridge by which it can travel between the first and second triad. The individual builds this link himself by self-initiated consciousness activity, by independent creativity in accord with the laws of life.
3This he does by acquiring knowledge of reality and life according to the law of self-realization. This he does by helping others to gain a greater understanding of life on their levels, a greater understanding of the law of unity or love. This he does by serving all in the ways he is able to or as opportunities arise. This he does by lovingly understanding all and everything, which is something quite different from injudicious sentimentality or personal affection.
4The building of the bridge is no easy work, and it may take several incarnations, depending on the first self’s emotional powers of attraction and mental understanding of reality and life. For the highest emotional and mental capacity it can succeed in one incarnation, if the self, being free of emotional illusoriness and mental fictitiousness, wants to reach the goal in order to better serve mankind and unity.
5When the individual has built the bridge, he can by vitalizing the heart centre acquire consciousness in the second triad essential atom, to begin with only in the lowest kind of essential molecular consciousness (46:7).
6The building of the bridge is creative activity, which appears different in the seven departments. To those who in the essential world follow the line of wisdom it is activity in some one of departments 1, 3, 5, or 7. To those who follow the line of unity (line of love) it is activity in departments 2, 4, or 6.
7A few examples. The musician builds with vibrations of rhythm, harmony, and melody; the artist, with forms of beauty. The musician identifies with the rhythm and harmony of energies. The artist longing for the perfect form of beauty finally reaches the forms of beauty of the causal world. The actor identifying with other people finally reaches unity through loving understanding. These intimations may suffice to indicate how far mankind is from understanding reality and life.
8Everybody knows that human beauty is a power. Regrettably, at the present stage of mankind’s development, this power is in most cases detrimental or even fatal. It is not widely known that beauty generally (the forms, colours, etc., of nature) is a powerful factor. The admiration of beauty rouses attractive energies that to the highest degree link consciousness to the causal energies of the source of beauty. That is the true artist’s path to the causal world. The world of forms (rhythm, harmony, and melody) is the essential world, the world of eternal harmony, and the rhythm of life. From this fact it is evident that modern art has gone totally astray as have politics, the economy, etc. The agreement of “truth” with reality manifests itself without fail in collective joy and happiness. Where is that to be seen in our times?
1The transition from the first to the second self is not done at once. Before the monad can move from the mental molecule to the mental atom, the first triad must have centred itself in the causal envelope. When this is done, many people think they have become causal selves, a comprehensible mistake of both individuals and environment.
2However, not even causal consciousness suffices to become a second self. In order to pass from the first to the second triad it is necessary to have acquired also essential consciousness. And the first step towards this is to acquire group consciousness, a common consciousness shared by all the members of a select group. This means that everybody is aware of the physical, emotional, and mental consciousness expressions of everybody else. This group consciousness is subsequently expanded to embrace more and more groups as a transitional stage before essential consciousness, which embraces all beings in the same molecular kind of the essential world.
3Evolution means acquisition of ever higher kinds of consciousness. That is why knowledge of those higher kinds is a necessary condition. Further than that they did not go in the lower degrees of the esoteric knowledge orders. In the higher degrees (the existence of which was not even suspected by initiates of lower degrees) they were given knowledge of essentials, namely the overruling importance of the motion aspect, and this afforded quite another content to the idea of development. As the individual acquires a higher kind of mental consciousness (47:5) he approaches the causal world and finds it relatively easy (as a disciple) to come in contact with causal subjective consciousness and the causal energy absorbing, dominating, and utilizing the energies of the first self (in the envelopes). Gradually, as the higher kinds of consciousness of these envelopes are activated, the monad’s ability to absorb the second self energies increases, and this increases eventually the monad’s dependence on them, as they are necessary to the monad’s entrance into the second triad.
4The essential and causal energies are activated through energies from those worlds conveyed by the Augoeides. When man has developed so far as to being able to assimilate these energies (which is done when they activate the corresponding atoms of his lower envelopes), then the antahkarana is built between the first and second triad and the monad can move from the first to the second triad.
5Augoeides sees to it that man has the experiences of life that are necessary to understand life better and better. And when time is up for the “final spurt”, the teacher in the fifth natural kingdom enters and takes over the guidance. The most difficult phase of this development is the monad’s self-acquisition of understanding of life. Terms like one-pointed work, struggle, crises, conflict between higher and lower (on account of vibrations in the different molecular kinds), sense of loneliness, abandonment are used in esoterics, clarifying that it is no child’s play to hasten ahead of what is normal development during millions of years.
1Unity consciousness is the path to the second self, and will energy is the path to the third self. These are two “faculties” that must be cultivated, realized: the simplest and hardest of things. And what has been said on this has had a misleading and paralyzing effect. Small wonder when all must preach what they have not understood. Anyone who goes in for realization may always count on receiving the help for it he needs. He will be met “halfway”. It would be useless to help anyone who does not want help or who shows that he is not serious about his realization.
2Immensely more could be said. And that will come bye the bye when mankind has put to use the knowledge it has received. Before then, it would be pointless to heap up learning to no avail. Those who do not use what they have been given to know only increase their own responsibility.
1By objective laws we understand the existence of constant energy currents in constant material relations. This stability makes it possible for the worlds and the processes of manifestation to endure. What “law actually is” is a problem that occupies even the planetary hierarchy. Probably only the highest kind of cosmic consciousness can perceive it.
2It seems to take time before the concept of law has become a solidly established fact in the human conception of reality. We have progressed somewhat towards that first goal, and we owe it to natural science that the concept is more and more accepted. Meanwhile, we become the victims of all kinds of superstition and vagaries from all manner of fantasts in practically all spheres of life and in all belief systems, nowadays also including the speculative systems of occultists.
3The worst of all the concepts of lawlessness is the Christian doctrine of sin as a crime against a cosmic being who may forgive arbitrarily. This means that you may commit any crime whatever with impunity, if only you are of the “right creed” and, in case you are a Catholic, receive absolution from your confessor or, if you are a Protestant, confess your sin and beg forgiveness for Christ’s sake. The fact that otherwise rational people can accept such things shows that they keep the religious system in a particular pigeon-hole, out of reach of rational criticism.
1The most important laws of life are the law of freedom, the law of self-realization, and the law of activation. They afford man a free choice.
2The law of freedom guarantees the individual’s freedom under law.
3The law of self allows the individual to determine his tempo of development.
4The law of activation indicates the manner of the individual’s development through self-initiated consciousness activity.
5The four other laws of life – the law of unity, the law of development, the law of destiny, and the law of reaping – are laws than man simply has to comply with or else to take the consequences of his own actions.
6The law of unity guarantees that the unity of all life will be realized some time. The law of development and the law of destiny guarantee the never-ending development of all life. The law of reaping guarantees the implacable justice of life.
7Laurency has formulated these seven laws of life so that they are comprehensible to those at the stage of culture and can serve to orient and guide them. They are in full agreement with the laws which the planetary hierarchy has formulated differently for those who as disciples have been initiated into the esoteric knowledge.
8The laws of life are absolutely valid. The individual may very well choose to disregard them. But so doing he only increases the number of his incarnations, until he will apply them some day. The laws of life fall under the law of necessity, which means that they are inevitable.
9There are many temporary laws that are valid on special conditions, a necessary consequence of the law of freedom in all natural kingdoms, particularly the fourth, in which reason has awakened so that the individual himself (even though unconsciously) takes the responsibility for his actions.
10The esoteric history of the development of human consciousness into ever increasing understanding of reality is basically a continuous reformulation of the eternally valid laws of life, adapted to mankind’s comprehension. Only in our times does mankind stand a chance to see the power of ideas and the importance of the form the ideas receive at the different stages of development.
1Those who ponder on the laws of life and their importance to evolution and mankind will find these laws to be the securest guide to self-realization (the union with the second self, the transition to the second triad).
2The saying “from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” has of course been misinterpreted like most such sayings. It means that anyone who does not care for the laws of life and their application will be increasingly disoriented. Of course we need not have a precise knowledge of the laws of life, but certainly be law-abiding citizens and righteous people who do the right as far as we see.
3“Reincarnation and karma” (rebirth and destiny) were the two first and the incomparably most important facts that the planetary hierarchy had proclaimed to mankind after it decided to publicize the esoteric knowledge. The law of rebirth is a thing that people cannot do anything about. It is inescapable, whatever people think and believe. But their future destiny is their own business. The individual is weaving it every moment with his consciousness expressions: thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds. Man is not responsible for the “thoughts” that come from without, flash through his brain, and are spontaneously recorded. If he dwells upon them, however, and retransmits them reinforced in the “world of thought”, the effect and thus his responsibility is inevitable.
4The past incarnations of individuals can be studied with particular consideration of physical and social circumstances, sowing and reaping, and consciousness development. Leadbeater’s studies were mainly of the first category. Such studies can certainly trace effects of the law of reaping, but nothing of the consciousness aspect, and those are the two most important factors, which thus remain to be ascertained.
1On account of ignorant use and, consequently, abuse of words, a great number of words have lost their true import and effect. Among the most abused words is “responsibility” in a time of general irresponsibility in all respects. Law is law, however, even if most people do not care for it. And the effect is collective and individual. It is true that responsibility in life according to the law of destiny enters only with the understanding of the laws of life. Consequence according to the law of reaping is always inevitable.
2As insight increases, responsibility increases, a fact that must be recognized by everyone able to perceive anything at all of the knowledge of reality we have received from the fifth natural kingdom.
3You cannot throw the responsibility for your own implication on others. The laws of life know of no such things as “washing one’s hands”. If we allow ourselves to be influenced by others, we do so on our own responsibility. Beside collective responsibility there is always individual responsibility. It is a matter of individual responsibility to refuse loyalty where wrong is being done. The laws of the higher life are valid also in the lower, even if you do not realize it, for we are all parts of the whole.
4Life is a long series of opportunities offered and opportunities to make decisions. Man is constantly faced with choices, and his decisions linked together make up his sowing and his future destiny. Often his decisions also affect others in their circumstances, and the more man awakens the better he realizes his responsibility. The greater his influence, the more individuals are affected by his decision, directly or indirectly.
1The life view, not the world view, is the essential study, the knowledge of the laws of life, the laws of consciousness development of all life. This knowledge is not primarily intended to help yourself to develop individually, as the egoist always thinks, but to help everybody to develop. We develop most quickly by forgetting our own development and live for that of others, for unity in which we have a share. To live and to realize is the meaning of life, not to make up theories and to speculate.
2The mental system of Pythagorean hylozoics (KR 1.4–41) is quite sufficient as a world view, in all its simplicity all we need to live right. What is important for man is not to solve the problems of world view but those of life view, the problems of the art of living, the art of right thinking for right living, of acquiring the ability to understand everybody with love. We must acquire that ability ourselves by tireless, purposeful work. In this epoch of hatred this requires more energy than ever and in addition self-forgetfulness, forgetfulness of this foolish personality, so dear to us, a short incarnation, a day in our long life.
3The essence of the esoteric life view is the knowledge of the fact that everything practically is energy, since matter acts as energy. We live in a cosmic world of energies. To discover these energies and to use them in the right way is the foremost task of the esoterician. That is a fact, which so-called esotericians have considered very little. The individual is an aggregation of energies that have made him what he is and determine what he will become. Very few of the life energies discovered are used in the right way. And in that respect people are quite unaware of their great ignorance, a fact which most great authorities, full to bursting point of the learning of whole libraries, have such difficulty in seeing.
4In the cosmic motion, energy pours down from the highest to the lowest world. This current enables atoms to compound into matter and compounded matter to be active. Atoms receive and in their turn emit energy. It is a give and take without cease. This is a law of life and applies with ever stronger force in ever higher kingdoms. Anyone who wants to keep to himself what life gives him, not sharing it with others, becomes a hindrance to the unfrictioned distribution of energy and so a hindrance to evolution. This is the central problem of life. Everything is a loan and we can claim nothing our own save with self-assumed ownership. “Freely ye have received, freely give.”
5The energies pouring down through the causal envelope and keeping the lower envelopes alive act differently on different individuals, since everything is unique: the individual’s envelopes, the matter of those envelopes, the consciousness in the envelopes (due to unique experiences in all the processes of involvation, involution, and evolution). The energies pouring down are unique, since the compositions of atoms making up those currents always are unique. General features are shared in common, particular ones make up individual character. No two conceptions are absolutely identical in all respects, but essential features are shared in common. All this makes itself felt in the law of freedom and the law of unity, two fundamental laws of life, both reciprocally dependent and inevitable: the individual character of everything and the unity of all things.
1The meaning of life is the consciousness development of the monads. That is why the cosmos with its organization has been made, the solar system with its planetary organization as well. That knowledge alone should suffice to show people that life exists for their sake, too, and that all shall be good in the end, when people begin to take an interest in consciousness development, can be accepted as disciples, receive knowledge of reality and life, and are able to help the planetary hierarchy in its work to help all to reach the same goal. We have been made human beings. One day we shall be causal selves. It is up to ourselves when this will be possible. Why worry about life when knowing that everything is watched over and guided in accord with eternal laws of life, and that the goal is sure?
2We are not here to enjoy ourselves but to develop. And we do so by working, everyone according to his ability and his prospects. Of course you can grade the work by its scientific, social, or general economic importance. It should be strongly emphasized, however, that all work that benefits mankind (all work that needs to be done, makes it easier to live), evolution, and unity, is “spiritual” work.
3“Sacrifice” is a much-cherished word in esoteric literature. In actual fact there is nothing in the way of sacrifice in the whole manifestation, even though it appears so to ignorance. You sacrifice the lower to reach something higher and more valuable. The law of compensation clarifies that the speech of “sacrifice” is misleading. Those who have sacrificed the most have profited from that “bargain”. But of course it would be abortive to sacrifice in order to profit from it, for the motive is the essential factor and the law of life does not favour selfishness.
1A work by a philosopher, Basic Rules for Our Life Together, covers the one part of our attitude to life, namely our relation to our fellow man, what is usually called “morality”. Without a knowledge of the laws of life, however, man will remain disoriented in existence.
2Anyone who does good in order to gain from it makes a serious mistake in life and grows increasingly selfish. Only the man who does the right for the sake of the right has understood the law of life.
3Life-ignorant man has no higher wish for his future life than to incarnate among those who possess wealth and power, have reached a very high social status. Cultural man seeks the environment where he can receive knowledge of reality and the laws of life.
4Individual evolution through all the natural kingdoms is a chain of intertwined causes and effects according to laws of nature and laws of life. The way he has covered is his own work. If his way through incarnations has been a devious one, then he has behaved deviously. To blame life for one’s own follies, as many people do, is evidence of self-pity, self-justification, life ignorance and injudiciousness, which all are qualities that hinder self-realization. Never throw the blame on others, for it could not have happened to you if it were not part of your reaping!
1“Morality” is the Latin word, “ethics” the Greek one, both meaning the same: “manners and customs”. The abuse by ignorance has made the meaning of words increasingly vague. What is actually meant in both cases is conception of right (concepts of right and wrong) and problems of human relations.
2The conception of right is subjective in the sense that it is dependent on the individual’s level of development and self-acquired experience of life (independent of other people’s conceptions of right, individual and collective ones). It is part of self-realization that the individual acquires his conception of right through his own experience of life. It is a slow process throughout his incarnations and has of course nothing to do with the child’s lack of conception of right, which it is the duty of the upbringer to teach him.
3The esoterician has realized the fact that existence is ruled by laws and has acquired some knowledge of the laws of life. Thereby he has gained an unshakable basis for his conception of right in full agreement with that self-acquired, common basis for life which eventually all realize to be the only tenable one.
4The opposition of good and evil can be better defined as the opposition of law-abidingness and lawlessness.
5The word “sin” has been so idiotized that it should be removed from dictionaries. It should be replaced with “mistake as to the laws of life” or, in short, “mistake in life”.
6The essential content of the laws of life has been formulated comprehensibly to life ignorance in the concepts of right based on the law of unity (the so-called law of love), which can be understood by everybody. Mankind still lives in lawlessness, even if it scantily applies some rules of civil law. Right and wrong are still very vague concepts. They are confounded with customs and manners and all manner of arbitrary conventions. It is the understanding of life and the conception of right that indicate the collective stage of development (stage of barbarism, civilization, culture, humanity, and ideality) and the individual level of development. Mankind at large is still found at the two lowest stages.
1The Law is no such simple thing as some people perhaps think, as appears from the fact that the so-called law of karma, according to a statement by a 43-self, is incomprehensible to human reason. This is also clear from the fact that the planetary ruler at his side has a guardian of the Law (a lipika) who sees to it that government decisions accord with the Law. Thus the Law presents some difficulties even to a 29-self.
2People hypnotize themselves with their primitive concepts, and with their catch-words they paralyse their reasoning power. The much talk about “freedom” is one instance. As if there were no limits to freedom! If there were not, then we would be free to murder, steal, and commit any crime whatever. If there were not, then any talk of human rights would be absurd. If there were not, then the law of the jungle would reign supreme. Try to use the little reason you have got and realize that freedom without law would undo even life itself!
3It would be great if the school could teach children some basic concepts of right instead of all manner of fictions. That the school should teach them how to think is asking too much. The one-track character of the school itself is too powerful for that.
4Perhaps you understand why these simple reflections have been put under the heading of the second self. It is because only causal selves are able to think. A long time will elapse before it is understood that common sense is the highest kind of reason.
5People do not know, cannot understand, what the second self means by “free will”. Without that free will there can be no consciousness development beyond the mental. This is not individual arbitrariness but presupposes a knowledge of laws of nature and laws of life, especially the law of unity and the law of development: the wielding of power without setbacks.
6This is connected with the fact that the individual is a part of the whole and what harms the whole harms the individual as well, apart from individual responsibility hitting the individual in addition to his share in collective reaping.
7The talk about freedom from responsibility is typical of mankind’s almost total ignorance of life. There is no such thing as freedom from responsibility. We all make up a unity whether we know it or not. This means that we are all responsible for everything that is and happens. Our common participation, during thousands of incarnations, in everything thought, felt, said, and done has contributed to making it as it is. Even by our thoughts we work for or against the consciousness development of all. We are responsible for everything we think or have thought. As human beings we share in the responsibility for lower kingdoms. If you think you can be free from responsibility, then you think you can make yourself independent of laws of nature and laws of life. There is only one way: to apply them.
1Man cannot live without norms. Those who claim the contrary do not know that they unconsciously and automatically follow norms. Else they would without inhibitions murder, steal, cheat, slander, etc.
2Without law man lives in a chaos as to right and wrong, with universal arbitrariness, and an orderly society is made impossible. “The land shall be built with law.” That law is civil law, not religious decrees. The social chaos of our times is due to the fact that the conception of right is based on old religious decrees. When the religious dogmas prove fictitious, the very religion loses its power and so do the bans that are motivated by religion. Public law has nothing to do with religion. Jurists, not theologians, should teach young people the basic concepts of right.
3Public law will be superseded by the knowledge of the laws of life when mankind has gained sufficient understanding of reality to grasp the meaning of the concept of law, which only science has clarified to mankind. Without law the cosmos would be a chaos. Without law there would be no processes of manifestation, no evolution, for process (orderly sequence of events) presupposes the rule of law. Without law there would be no organization. Freedom presupposes knowledge of law and right, application of law. If freedom is understood as arbitrariness, the result is social and political chaos, which fact our times should have sufficiently clarified. Otherwise it only demonstrates the stage of development mankind is at.
1Modern upbringing, allowing children to grow up in freedom, is ideal where incarnations of individuals at the stage of humanity and higher are concerned. Where individuals at lower stages are concerned, however, individuals who have not yet acquired that instinct of life which automatically applies the laws of life and so are greatly in need of guidance and upbringing, the modern method is utterly abortive and can only result in disorientation and aberration. That is not the fault of children but of irresponsible parents, who sow a bad sowing for themselves. You do not bring children into the world and then leave them to solve the problems of social life by themselves. The psychologists of life ignorance, with their always revolutionary discoveries and brainwaves, have of course found the causes of crime in material conditions, organic defects. Determinist fatalism has always found ways to free man from responsibility. However, the law of sowing and reaping makes no allowance for ignorance or Pilates who wash their hands of it. Some day it must dawn on those representatives of science that physical, observable reality is not the whole cosmos. It does not help them, however competent they are in their specialities, to solve problems the causes of which are in superphysical reality. Prejudice against everything esoteric is so ingrained that they refuse to examine how tenable is that one tenable knowledge. They counteract evolution.
2The most important feature of education is teaching children about the seven basic laws of life: the law of freedom, the law of unity, the law of development, the law of self-realization, the law of destiny, the law of reaping, and the law of activation.
1It is a common misconception that only religious people are “spiritual”. There is an analogous misconception among occultists. Esoterics makes no distinction between “spiritual” and profane. Everything in the whole cosmos is “spiritual”, all true knowledge of reality and life is “spiritual”. Everything in the whole cosmos is the “work of god”. It is quite another matter that spiritual things are misused by people until they have acquired knowledge and ability to apply it.
2All necessary work, cleaning up, for instance, everything that benefits biological evolution or consciousness evolution is spiritual work.
3There are many agnostics who rapidly develop their mental consciousness and stand good chances of coming into contact with the causal world. All who are motivated by the desire to serve mankind, evolution, and unity are on the right track, whether it be political, social, scientific or other work. The will to unity is the one essential thing, also in those people who have never had a clear idea of the fact that they possess this “will”. Especially such things as promote self-initiated consciousness activity are by the planetary hierarchy regarded as “spiritual activity”. Everything counteracting this is evil.
4From this you understand how the hierarchy looks upon theology and theological dogmas. The hierarchy makes a radical distinction between theology and religion. Religion is part of the emotional stage and is in most cases a necessary, in any case a justified, phenomenon at this stage of development, since the true nature of religion promotes the acquisition of higher emotionality, attraction. Whatever theoretical view of reality individuals at the stage of the mystic have is unessential.
1The essence of culture is the will to unity. Where this will is absent, any so-called culture is just masked barbarism. It is by this standard that we have to judge the things of culture in emotional respect. In mental respect, they must increase our understanding of life and must not, as they do in our times, have a disorienting effect. We have not received the esoteric knowledge in order to speculate on it. With the mental consciousness of the first self we cannot solve any supermental problems anyhow. We have received the knowledge in order to have an idea of the meaning and goal of life and the way of reaching the goal. We have received the knowledge in order to live and realize, to serve life.
2Man is the most delicate of all beings, not merely in respect of his physical organism, but also as regards his mind. Incurable harm is easily caused to either part or both. The higher the level of culture, the more the methods are refined with which causes and effects of harm are prevented, the more carefully everything is avoided that hinders the individual’s emotional and mental freedom of self-activity, the more the individual is encouraged to freely develop the potential that his present incarnation is intended to actualize. People learn how to protect each other and so doing protect themselves.
1The law of freedom is a law of life in all kingdoms in the cosmos.
2As a being sharing in the cosmic total consciousness man is a potential god (with all divine possibilities). It is quite another matter that the monad in lower natural kingdoms as mainly a robot unfailingly falls victim to the repulsive vibrations ruling. You cannot speak of free will, in the proper sense of the word, until man has acquired knowledge, insight, and judgement. Until then, he will be the victim of the illusions and fictions of his life ignorance.
3According to the law of freedom, everybody has a right to lead his own life and nobody has a right to criticize other people’s ways of life as long as they do not encroach on anyone else’s sphere of life. There can be no peace on earth until men apply this law.
4Roosevelt’s proclamation on January 6th, 1941, of the “four freedoms”, the best formulation hitherto, is in full agreement with the law of freedom, which grants man divine freedom to live, freedom to think, freedom to seek knowledge, and freedom to plan his life.
5Freedom entails responsibility for the right use of freedom. Otherwise freedom would lead to chaos and make all development impossible. If freedom is understood as a right to arbitrariness, licence, recklessness, right to abuse of power, it abolishes itself.
6Anyone who violates the law of freedom is the enemy of life. It is everyone’s duty to defend freedom against any power whatever that violates freedom. Anyone who omits to do this has to put up with some violation of his freedom, in this life or in a future one. For the enemies of freedom will always be around until all have become causal selves. It is our duty to oppose evil. Otherwise we hand over power to the enemies of freedom and must descend into slavery. God does nothing that men can do. The Gospels have put much in the mouth of Christos which he has never said. The Gospels are not the words of god. The words of god are the processes of manifestation.
7What conception of reality and life man has depends on his self-acquired experience of life and is right on his level, provided it does not counteract consciousness development. In the attitude to the law of freedom, no compromise is possible. Anyone who does not accept that law is the enemy of life.
8Our use of freedom has consequences as to all the other laws of life. Because of its abuse of this law mankind has, during the last twelve thousand years, been in this distress with nameless sufferings. Lies and hatred have ruled, and the history of the world is the world’s court of justice.
9“The necessity of evil” has always been an insoluble problem to human beings. The solution is very simple, however. According to the law of freedom, man has a right to act against the laws of life, and mankind has chosen that alternative to the greatest possible extent. No power in the world can hinder people from preferring evil to good. But then no power can hinder the law of cause and effect, the law of sowing and reaping, from restoring the balance of life disturbed. The necessity of evil is the inevitability of bad reaping, and this in all kingdoms at every violation of the law of freedom: parasitary existence in lower worlds. Mankind has chosen the path of inevitable suffering and still seems to prefer that path, despite the lessons of millions of years. Otherwise men would think, feel, say, and do otherwise.
1Freedom is the condition of all development. The higher the kingdom, the greater the freedom from all the limitations that are inevitable in lower worlds and kingdoms. That is why development is a process of ever increasing freedom.
2Freedom is a necessary condition also of self-realization. Only what you have realized, experienced and made your own by working it up is unlosably your own. Before we understand this, we have in many incarnations tried to understand and tried to realize, everything on our own responsibility.
3The individual character of the self, the monad, is unique and incomprehensible even to the monad itself, until it has reached its final goal. This is the ground of individual difference in the absolute sense, although we all can learn to understand everything essential in the consciousness of the 49 atomic kinds. The individual conception in everything is no hindrance to the common understanding. The law of freedom is the recognition of the right of individual character and a necessary condition of individual development. It also is the definition of the absolute restrictions there are in the mutual relations between all individuals in all kingdoms.
4It is freedom that enables all in higher kingdoms, independently of each other, with their self-identity preserved, to have their individual views and at the same time share the collective view as the one common to all without causing the least friction. Freedom guarantees individuality. Freedom guarantees self-identity. Freedom guarantees the rule of law, a fact that mankind cannot as yet understand. Only what is in agreement with law can be freedom.
1We do not possess sufficient knowledge of the laws of life to be able to exactly define them or the individual’s relation to them: so called free-will. The following facts, however, could perhaps afford us the understanding that is necessary for our needs.
2The original philosophical definition of will was the relation of consciousness to a purpose. Thus will is always determined by motives (the strongest motive), and therein is its lack of freedom. Free-will implies the possibility of free choice of motives. In primitive people, who are dominated by their impulses, the tendencies of their envelopes, this possibility is absent. The greater power over the impulses of his envelopes man has, the greater is his power to freely choose his motives. He is relatively free when his reason can always decide which motive he is to follow, independently of the tendencies of his envelopes. In practice, he is not even relatively free, since he is instinctively, automatically dependent on the motives that are latent in his subconscious (“complexes”).
3An expression of will is an expression of energy. If this causes friction, then resistance and reaction ensue, and so it does in all worlds. That is why only that man is free whose motives agree with the laws of life, the basic law of which is the law of balance and the energies of which see to it that the balance disturbed is restored. Otherwise the cosmos degenerates into chaos, and this is true in all worlds.
4The same is true of knowledge (of reality, of life, and of the Law), of insight and understanding. The individual is free to the extent that he faultlessly applies laws of nature and laws of life. To knowledge, insight, and ability, freedom and law are one and the same. But since the first self has insight and ability only to a very limited extent, this self is relatively unfree.
5Those ignorant of esoterics do not understand this fact, and that is why they cannot solve the problem of free-will or the problems of karma, fatalism, predestination, etc. Everything produced in that line is the guesswork and dogmatism of life ignorance.
6Prevision must not be confused with predestination. The course of events is not fixed once and for all but can be changed if new factors enter. An accident can be foreseen: an airplane crash, a railway collision, etc; and such things will happen if warnings are not heeded. The talk of inevitable destiny is erroneous. In any case we cannot possibly tell beforehand whether events are inevitable. There is every reason to consider the warning of a real seer.
7The planetary hierarchy fully realizes the distress of mankind, that life in the physical world, such it has developed on this planet through the monads’ basically hostile attitude to life and their will to power (the idiots of life desire power!!), through the hard conditions of evolution. The planetary government and hierarchy do everything they can. But man has his so-called free-will (inviolable according to the law of freedom). Mankind must itself, by its own work, liberate itself from its ignorance of life, its illusions and fictions. If men want to go on living in them, then no higher kingdoms are able to help them. By giving mankind the knowledge of reality and life, the hierarchy has indicated the path everybody has to walk. Anyone who does not want to walk it, must take his own path and go astray.
1Men still know but little of what freedom is; they do not understand what true freedom means. If man takes freedom as arbitrariness, transcending the limit of the equal right of all, then he is everybody’s enemy. At the present stage of development, only esotericians realize that the law of freedom is a law of responsibility.
2All call for freedom. Freedom to do what? Freedom to have power, to act arbitrarily, to rule individuals and peoples? They are all incapable of using freedom rightly. It is depressing that all think they comprehend and understand, are able to rule and do not see their practically total ignorance of life, do not see their unfitness for life.
3The more they call for freedom, the more freedom is restricted in almost all areas. The more propaganda they make for freedom, the more dictatorships arise. And so it is because freedom is abused to the detriment of other people, of everybody. Thus there are unsurveyable risks to speak of freedom to the injudicious masses who believe that freedom grants them the right to self-will, licence, arbitrariness, recklessness, lawlessness, all of which inevitably leads to political and social chaos.
4This best demonstrates that mankind does not understand that freedom must be based on law. Being ignorant of the laws of life, which all of them have freedom as their basis (which fact explains why the law of freedom is the first of all the laws of life), people abuse the little freedom they have and so counteract their own and other people’s development. Perhaps this fact better than any other clarifies mankind’s general level of development.
5You cannot grant freedom to those who only are able to destroy what the greatest capacities have produced through education and assiduous diligence, through work and toil. You cannot allow the barbarism of ignorance to thwart the contribution of knowledge and skill to the benefit of the whole. Schiller has unsurpassably expressed the matter with his: “Weh denen, die dem ewig Blinden des Lichtes Himmelsfackel leihn. Sie kann nicht leuchten, kann nur zunden und aschert Statt und Lander ein.” (Woe to those who give the heavenly torch of light to the eternally blind. It cannot bring them light, can only set fire, and lays cities and countries in ashes.)
6Only the second self realizes and understands what freedom means. Only he can call the law of development the law of liberation (the law of liberation from ignorance and impotence). The first self is unfree because he is the victim of his life ignorance, the victim of his illusions and fictions, is ignorant of the laws of life and particularly the law of reaping, which brings suffering upon the law-breaker. You may talk of real freedom only in the case of the individual who can realize the meaning of life without friction.
1The law of freedom does not imply that tolerance is allowed to the extent that people may do whatever they like, transgressing the limits of the equal right of all. Tolerance must be absolute, however, in the matter of individual opinion. You must allow people to hold and express any foolish opinions whatever. That is their own business. The fool has a right to be a fool.
2Intolerance is the desire to hinder others from holding and expressing their own opinions. Criticism of things and ideas is quite another thing. That is no violation of the right of others.
3It is typical of lower stages of development that people have difficulty in showing tolerance. Tolerance is noticeable only at the stage of culture. Knowledge of the levels of development makes you comprehend tolerance both logically and psychologically. The knowledge of the Law (in this case the law of freedom) makes you realize that tolerance is necessary.
1Moral compulsion (a force imposed on the individual from without) is of course as much violation of the law of freedom as any other force. It is a violation of the self. All psychic compulsion leads sooner or later to neurosis.
2It is quite another matter that educators must lay down prohibitions that are in force until the child has learnt to tell right and wrong and sees the limits of his own rights. Such prohibitions, however, must be based on parental authority and not on any power that is strange, unknown, incomprehensible to the child, at the most the right of the community to protect itself from violations of the equal right of all.
3Esoterically, no religion has a right to proclaim decrees as being the will of god, for that is a patent lie. If the will of god is to be mentioned in this connection, then it should be said that the Law, the laws of life, bind even the gods. No god has a right to prohibit anything whatever. The law grants freedom within the bounds to individual arbitrariness indicated by the laws of life. The Law is no prohibition but is based on the law of cause and effect, clarifies the absolutely inevitable (unpardonable) consequences of violation of law. Effect is related to cause so that absolute justice rules in a way that is incomprehensible to the first self.
1Every encroachment by curiosity on the personal domains of other people is a mistake as to the law of freedom. Every man has a right to live his own life without the curious interest of other people. Every kind of curiosity is a violation of the law of freedom: our personal statements on them as well. We have no right whatsoever to concern ourselves with other people’s private life. All the pertaining gossip amounts to violation of the law of freedom, a serious breach that makes striving after unity impossible. When will mankind realize that this is a basic error?
2Many old esotericians can be born with such a horoscope, such an organism and brain that they prove incapable of practical work in ordinary life and thereby are forced to cultivate their old capacity for esoteric knowledge and become experts in that area. They are problems to their environment and their possible readers who never respect the law of freedom but must try to solve also such problems of curiosity, which they are quite unable to solve. The subject under discussion is as interesting as it is inexhaustible. People seem to have immense difficulty in seeing their own limitation. They seldom apply the law of freedom to others, and so their curiosity hardly ever leaves esotericians in peace. Esotericians quite simply never discuss other people. They are taboo. It is the gossip in the occult sects that ruins the contributions they could have otherwise made.
1The only power to which man has a right, according to the Law, is the power over himself (his envelope consciousnesses). He takes no interest in acquiring that power, however. In that respect he prefers to be a slave. He must himself take the consequences of the mistakes he makes in that connection.
2As a member of society he has the power that civil law grants him, a power that he abuses by his mistakes as to the laws of life in one or several respects.
3Where the limits of freedom are transgressed, where the right of others is violated, there the knowledge of life is absent. The prime purpose of the state is to defend the freedom of the individual. Without freedom, everything is robotized and the individual is a soulless machine.
4Anyone who remains neutral in a war between the enemies of freedom and the defenders of freedom has condemned himself to slavery of some sort in future incarnations.
5Dictatorship is hostile to life for it conflicts with the laws of life (the law of freedom in particular), counteracts development (the law of development). That is apparently a thing which mankind has yet to learn: educators, theologians, and politicians. It is an illusion to think that dictatorship can train people in self-determination. Only the appeal to common sense and good will can do so and help understanding to unfold. The tendency to these abilities and qualities exists in all people, and it is these which the skilful educator stimulates and encourages.
6In communist countries, everything in the sphere of freedom is prohibited. The authorities supervise that nobody says or does otherwise than what they permit, for ever or what suits them for the time being, absolute arbitrariness in other words. This has the result that finally nobody dares even to think freely, since there is always the risk of a slip of his tongue. And then there are people who praise such a dictatorship! So doing they show that their understanding of psychology corresponds to the stage of barbarism without any ideas of culture.
7“It is quite impossible to produce with the means of injustice a happy, flourishing society whose members back up each other. Labour camps engender no pleasure of work, spying no trust, sentences on innocent people breed no sense of community.”
8“According to Soviet theory and the horrible tenet practised in action, right and justice should not exist as a protection of the individual but only have the character of norms of expediency for the promotion of the socialist state. It is just and right to let millions of people perish in labour camps, because of lack of food, lack of clothes to protect them from the cold, lack of hygiene and medical care, if only during their short lives they manage to do certain work, build roads, mine coal or whatever.” (Police State Russia)
9As abortive as communism is anarchism, preaching absolute arbitrariness, lawlessness, social chaos, and a war of all against all. And both idiologies are products of human intelligence, which fact should tell us a lot about that faculty at the present stage of mankind’s development. Rousseau had every reason for his saying that true democracy is impossible, since it presupposes a general, spontaneous law-abidingness on the basis of freedom, and that quality is absent in a mankind where fifty per cent of the individuals are on the 400 levels of the stage of barbarism.
10The only possible form of government is an organization of society where dictatorship, democracy, and communism have been combined into a higher synthesis. This presupposes that the ruling power is a true elite in contact with the planetary hierarchy or at least having a knowledge of reality.
1The fundamental law of life is harmony, the frictionless co-operation of the energies of life. We are all monads (primordial atoms). We all share in the cosmic total consciousness. We are all found somewhere on the path to the highest cosmic world and kingdom. We are all one.
2Striving towards unity, will to unity (“love”) is the greatest power in the solar system. It also solves all essential problems. The law of unity is the most important law of life. This it was that Christos tried in vain to make clear to his contemporaries, and this it was which all other pioneers failed to bring home.
3Unity is disturbed by repulsion – hatred – causing friction and misdirection of energies resulting in disease and general misery.
4Any division counteracts consciousness development. Evil must serve good, which appears in the fact that division directs the attention to some error in the prevalent view, a misconception that has not been seen through, a problem that must be solved, and will be solved some time, in which the work at the solution also increases the activation of consciousness.
5The law of unity is a law of collectivity. We sow and reap together throughout our incarnations. Such as our reaping is, such was our sowing. Nobody may suffer who has not caused suffering to other individuals, and so it is in all natural kingdoms. And mankind still pursues this perverseness of immeasurable folly by its consciousness expressions, by its thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds, which all have their consequences.
6A cultivated kindness to everybody is certainly valuable, but it is not consciousness of unity to which one’s own self does not exist even though it exists as self-identity, which is something quite different. A true saint does not know his own sainthood. He just is such a one and “cannot help it”. He must serve for that is the very life for him. There are such people without theology or other queer theories. They have solved the problems of life without knowing it. It is just how it should be. They already live in the “heavenly kingdom” and to them the path lies open into the planetary hierarchy.
1It is a characteristic trait of fanatics that they, like the father of the church, Augustine, would preferably destroy all who do not hold their creed. They are typical people of hatred. The totally misunderstood, misleading, symbolical formulation “sin against the holy spirit” refers precisely to hatred. True believers imagine that they are “saved” on their theory and by their hatred. In that respect most occultists are not much better. But the individual will be free from the cycle of incarnations only when he has become an incarnation of love towards all and everybody.
2Only with love can the world be “saved”. Love (energy of unity) is the most powerful energy in the worlds of man. Men live in hatred (repulsion). “Hatred is never overcome with hatred, only with love.” (The Buddha). Man can acquire love if he will work methodically at it while relinquishing his egoism.
3There is a difference between emotional (sentimental and often personal) love, mental (intelligent) love, and essential love. Essential love is that unfailing intuition which knows what everybody needs.
4In order to serve people in the right way you must love them with the impersonal love distinctive of the great ones. The condition of this is that you forget yourself (your importance), live in order to serve, acquire the will to unity, strive after unity with all without exception, and “sacrifice” yourself. The law of love is the law of sacrifice. It is by sacrifice we learn to love, and to anyone who loves, his sacrifice is no sacrifice but a source of joy (which indeed most people experience when falling in love). If something is felt like a sacrifice, we have not forgotten ourselves.
5Love is the use of forces that guide evolution. Love is not acquired at once, not with good resolutions or sporadic attempts. It is a long-term work, an unceasing daily work throughout the incarnations, until you have entered into the world of unity. It is the only way of reaching that world.
6Anyone who does his best to love automatically draws down energies of unity to the emotional envelope and thereby strengthens the energies of attraction so that the two influence each other. It is of course a matter of avoiding everything repulsive that can sever the connection, and eliminate the tendency to criticism and the pertaining emotions whenever they can be traced in the mental or emotional envelope, and to replace these consciousness expressions with such ones as are of the opposite kind.
7The energy of love (essential molecules), which we receive through our Augoeides, if we want to receive and rightly use it, goes through the emotional envelope to the heart centre in the etheric envelope. It also vitalizes this envelope centre so that its “spokes” are loosened, start functioning and attract still more energy. To many people it is helpful to have some idea of the “mechanism”, so that they understand that “realities” are involved, material things as well as energy and consciousness.
8“Love is not a sentiment or an emotion, nor is it desire or a selfish motive for right action in daily life... Love is a hard thing to cultivate ... it is a difficult thing to apply to all conditions of life, and its expression will demand of you the utmost you have to give, and the stamping out of your selfish personal activities.” (D.K.)
1Anyone who meets people with loving understanding understands them better than they understand themselves. For he sees what is beneath their superficial waking consciousness, which they take to be their self.
2Loving understanding must be acquired by exercise. Instead of criticizing the speech or behaviour of other people you can positively try to understand the consciousness activity that contributes to developing their various powers: power of observation, power of communication, power of formulation, power of reflection, etc., on the different levels. You can try to understand the motives activating them, rejoicing in the good ones and stimulating them.
3A help to those who wish to acquire loving understanding of everybody is the thought “Such is the first self at that stage of development, such was even I on that level”. We have all been among the worst; we shall all be among the best. That insight is part of the understanding of life.
1According to D.K., there are four basic facts or factors, still seen as ideals, which men must learn to understand and make living realities in their relations to each other: stage of development, responsibility, sacrifice, right human relations.
2The stage of development, which D.K. in his generosity calls “hierarchic status”, appears in the development in the stronger of a will to protect and help the weaker and this is all respects, responsibility in the relation of the older to the younger or those of less knowledge.
3The ability to sacrifice, especially as forgiveness through identification with others and in responsibility for all and everybody, giving “all for everybody”.
4Right human relations to everybody – individuals, groups, nations, races – in which all barriers between people are pulled down.
5Nothing of this has anything to do with the all too common sentimentality, but it is all about realization as if it were a matter of life and death, which indeed it is.
6The power of the past appears in family relations, class consciousness, tradition, racial instinct, nation, national pride, all of which make up barriers against the “others”, hindrances to the insight that we are all one.
1It is all a matter of will to unity and, in practical life, will to serve. Many people have realized that life is development. When they then have realized that development is service, they have made an even greater discovery. It remains to be discovered that the condition of this is loving understanding. And then they only need to apply that knowledge in their dealings with everybody.
2This cannot be said to the infantile who tolerate lawlessness. This knowledge is for those who are able to understand, are able to serve in the right way and have acquired the ability to love all people and all living things.
3All kinds of service are in that respect equivalent: from the service consisting in faithfully doing the most simple work to the service of mankind. We all need each other. We are all dependent on everyone’s doing his best where he is placed. The spirit of service is the essential thing. Without it mankind will perish sooner or later and the individual will not progress. Anyone who is faithful in small things will in subsequent incarnations be able to be faithful in ever greater tasks. This has been said countless times and been as often forgotten.
4It is by service that man acquires all the good qualities that make discipleship possible, that liberate him from his egoism, his self-assertion, his self-aggrandizement (the compensation for his life ignorance), that liberate him from hatred in all its expressions in life.
5Karma yoga is the least understood of the five yogas. It is the most important of them all. For it is by service that man acquires all that is in the others. They would have understood that if they had seen the point of the story in the Mahabharata about the butcher who instructed the yogi in yoga. It is by service the individual gains knowledge and all the requisite abilities (of course during several lives). By living for mankind, evolution, and unity you have solved the essential problem of life for your own part.
6You cannot give to others more than the small share you have assimilated of the knowledge you have received as a seeker. But you “do as best you can, e’en it be little, do it willingly and gladly”. That is putting your talent to good account. And that affords you more and greater opportunities of service, perhaps in this life already and certainly in future ones. All servers of life are aspirants, whether they know it or not. And they all “get their chance” of serving even better.
7For efficient service much more is required than just the will to serve. All good qualities and abilities are put to use; your own capacity and the discovery of other people’s needs of which the person in need of help may be quite ignorant. Whenever something “personal” contributes (conceit, complacence, self-aggrandizement, vanity, thirst of power, vulnerability, demands of gratitude, etc.), you can do more harm than good.
1You can serve the planetary hierarchy, mankind, evolution, unity in countless ways. Above all it is a matter of rightly using time. You can get knowledge with which you are in a better position to serve. The more you know the greater prospects you have of becoming a suitable tool of the planetary hierarchy from the position you have reached in life and among people. You can be of great use even by thinking right (in accord with reality). Thoughts are vibrations in the mental world and can be picked up by those who are tuned in to the right wavelength. They become conscious as individual thoughts, can serve to solve problems, to comfort, to give assurance to people who are in doubt, in many other ways. You can serve by just being. Your aura (the different aggregate envelopes) radiate energies that unconsciously influence the environment. There are countless opportunities of doing small services of love, such as a kind look, a kind word, by just being glad.
2You can be of use as a writer, a journalist, everywhere where you can fight for what is true, right, and beautiful.
3You can be of use by rightly doing your task of life, however small it is. We can all serve.
4There are unconscious disciples of the planetary hierarchy in politics, in science, in finance, etc., who benefit mankind by their contributions.
1The important thing is not whether individuals can receive whatever you want to give but whether you can give them what they need and in a way they can understand.
2The primary thing is not to supply an esoteric world view and life view, for you do not help people by giving them an idiology that they do not understand or cannot use. The important thing is to meet everybody with loving understanding and try to help them solve their own problems on their level and on their terms.
3People are very fond of talking about themselves, their interests, etc., particularly to anyone who has acquired the art of listening (and does not talk about himself). It is then easier for him to ascertain the stage of development and in what way he may help them to reach a better understanding of life, not by preaching but usually best by throwing in an idea that can grow. Their reaction to the idea can also be informative.
4“Your fellow man” in a particular sense is the man who is exclusively thrown upon your help. You cannot help everyone materially, and you should not do it even if you could. There is responsibility also in such matters. There is a help that harms and hinders. Many people have unnecessarily assumed responsibility, which life never intended, which exceeds their ability. Goodness should be combined with common sense. And it is positively wrong to help those who do not need help. It is not our business to act the part of providence.
5You can help very few people by appealing to their mental consciousness and its content, since the majority are still far from having reached the mental state. You help them by loving understanding, through their emotional life and possibly their so-called reason or intellect (mentalized emotionality). Being ignorant about the effects of mentality in emotional matter, psychologists are totally in error about mentality. Only essential selves are able to afford the requisite facts for a scientifically correct psychology. Until such information is possible, psychologists must be content with their quasi-knowledge. No philosophers have reached the stage of the mystic, for then they would be philosophers no more but would have seen the fictitiousness of speculation. That does not prevent them from accepting humanist ideas intellectually and emotionally and realizing the importance of the universal brotherhood of mankind, which makes wars impossible. You can reach far, as it appears to men, on the higher civilizational levels and with principle thinking.
6What most people need is affection and sympathy, a joy that supports and lightens so many heavy burdens. To be a cheerful soul is a great task of life in our chaotic time where everything is poisoned. If people knew how much a kind smile means, they would not be so chary of it. It acts as a sunray on a bleak day. People seek happiness and are instinctively attracted to those who spread sunshine about them. It is a matter of will that is worth the trouble and comes more easily by daily exercise. What a mighty impression makes an “enchanting smile” from someone with a fragile body, afflicted with ailments of various kinds. It is like a message from a higher world. And how it beautifies the plainest appearance. Klinger’s etching, The Satyre Admiringly Looking at the Sleeping Nymph (divine art), shows how beautiful even such a face can be.
1To receive the truth – the knowledge – certain requirements must be met: There must be understanding latent from previous incarnations and a seeking attitude (often unconscious). There must be the ability to adapt your speech to the perceptive powers of those to whom you entrust what formerly was the “secret, sacred knowledge” of the initiates. Many enthusiasts make fools of themselves and harm the cause by “casting pearls”.
2This means that the esoterician’s service does not at all mean onesided work at propagating esoterics. Since utterly few people (only a small percentage at mankind’s present stage of development and of those incarnated in this epoch) are in need of the true knowledge of reality, the esoterician serves everywhere where he can make his contribution. The important thing is service, not a particular kind of service.
3If he must economize on the light of knowledge, he may always give the energy of love. There it is right to be lavish: with kindness, joy, encouragement, liberating humour, helpfulness, gratitude, and good thoughts. With love (aspiration to unity) we benefit, with hatred (in all its countless kinds of expressions in life) we counteract evolution and determine our pace of development, our future lives.
4There are innumerable ways of serving mankind, evolution, and unity, and on all levels. There are countless tasks in all domains of life, and where mankind is concerned most problems of life are still unsolved. For most people their next worries are physical provision and personal security. There are so many other needs that must be met during slow physical, emotional, and mental consciousness development (political, social, economical, medical, etc., ad infinitum), and the esoteric needs do not come up until the individual approaches the final stage.
5There are esotericians in all the seven departments, and they are educated for all the different tasks of life that need to be done. And on all the various paths there are opportunities to develop the requisite qualities. All paths lead to the goal, though not the one indicated by theological dogmatism. All dogmas lead astray.
1We are all one because all monad consciousnesses together make up the cosmic total consciousness. We are all equal in the sense that we are all brothers. The elder brothers have no reason to be proud of the fact that they are older. It is the duty of the older to help the younger. Those who do not wish to help lose according to the Law the right to receive help to reach higher, lose the right to discipleship without which nobody reaches the fifth natural kingdom on our planet in this eon.
2The differences between the various kingdoms are largely a matter of time. Individuals of higher kingdoms were earlier introduced into the cosmos from the primordial manifestation (chaos). The same is true of the stages of human development, the times of transition from the animal to the human kingdom.
3The higher the level of development the individual has reached, the greater is his participation in the cosmic total consciousness in which he has an unlosable share. This means that his monad consciousness comprises all the lower kinds of consciousness, that he has access to them whenever he wishes.
4The monad consciousness of the planetary ruler is the most extensive of all in the planet. His personal aura (material envelope) should not be confused with the monad’s extent of consciousness. The planetary ruler can identify his monad consciousness with the collective consciousness of the planet and of the planetary chain.
5All individuals in worlds 1—44 are aware of their share in the cosmic total consciousness, even if that share be limited for the different selves to the worlds they have once “conquered”. Since the collective consciousness also implies participation in the processes of manifestation, everyone has his task in these. They live in order to serve “life”. The whole cosmos is a total organization in which every monad has its given position. Every solar system has its organization, every planet has its own. In such an organization, every monad has its special function, and all collaborate for the welfare of all.
6Evolution is made possible by the fact that individuals in higher kingdoms help those in lower kingdoms to develop. Men receive everything they need for their development from the hierarchies, and they in their turn receive help from higher kingdoms, last of all from the highest, the seventh cosmic kingdom.
7Since everything in existence is made up of monads that constitute the cosmic total consciousness, there are relations between all monads, being conscious to the extent they have acquired understanding. These relations imply that all individuals in higher kingdoms do what they can for those in lower kingdoms, although mankind, at its present stage of development and idiotized by the idiologies of ignorance, knows and understands nothing of these relations. Since all share in the collective consciousness, all participate in everything whether they know it or not. Our participation is conditioned by our understanding, our level of development. If you have once seen this fact, such a gnostic expression as “the kingdom of god is within you” is immediately self-evident. You need no incomprehensible theological explanations.
8Of course theoretical understanding is not the same as practical realization. The great shortcoming of human judgement is its lacking sense of proportion, its inability to tell potential and actual, possible and real. Whenever occultists fantasize about cosmic omniscience as if they possessed it, knew what it means, this proves that they are bereft of common sense.
1Not just the whole cosmos is a unit of consciousness, but everything that can in any respect be regarded as a collective is likewise a unit: various kingdoms, various worlds, the many kinds of group-souls and the countless kinds of collective beings. Mankind thus makes up a “collective soul”; the various races, nations, groups within the nations are group-souls. Unity is always the primary thing, individuals belong to group units of many different kinds. In the long run, no one can break away from unity, cannot even act against it. They only increase their debt to unity, a debt they must pay to the last penny, however many eons it will take.
2Units are also indelible unitary memories, in ever more extensive collective memories and finally in the total cosmic unitary memory. They are deleted in the processes of manifestation only when collectives as well as individuals have fully settled their accounts with the great Law.
3Instinct like divination is the monad’s ability to share in a collective consciousness of some kind, for collective consciousness is made up of an almost endless series of ever higher kinds of consciousness. Many problems that psychologists deem insoluble would be solved of themselves if they started from the unity of the consciousness aspect. It is in unity we have to seek for the key to “dynamis”. We are omnipotent when we are one with the all.
4Instinct may be said to be the basis of evolutionary activity, the self-activity of the monads, which always starts from below with an unceasing striving to reach ever higher kinds of consciousness. It also affords the monads ever increasing ability to use the energies supplied (in the cosmic motion) for further evolution. Without this ability to strive after unity the law of self-realization would be meaningless.
5Mankind makes up a unity, and all exist to help each other. It is a great error to believe that the individual or nation may progress by leaving others behind. The different stages of development are results of the different age of causal envelopes and no proofs of individual superiority. Those who are ahead of others in evolution have to help those who lag behind. Those who refuse to serve life will be passed over in evolution. That was the meaning of the esoterism: the last shall be first. The law of unity and the law of development are closely connected. You have no reason to be proud of the fact that you are ahead in evolution. That means you have a greater responsibility to rightly use your qualities and abilities.
1There is much talk of the “group” in esoteric literature for all esoteric work is group work. The word “group” could in most cases better be replaced with the word “collective” or the “general” as opposed to and as a condition of the individual. The word “group” refers to a gathering of individuals with common tasks of work. Likewise, the expression “group consciousness” in esoteric literature could better be replaced with “collective consciousness” (on a certain level). There are as many different kinds of collective consciousness as there are levels of development, degrees of acquired understanding of life, individual and general.
2Whenever the uninitiated hear about a group, they think of something separative, exclusive, a group in opposition to other groups. Where esoteric groups are concerned, that view is utterly false. There is no exclusivity in unity, and esoteric groups are no isolating entities in the collective. All groups collaborate. The only raison d’etre of the group is the efficiency it makes possible.
3Everybody adds to the group his individual character, his special ability, his special talents, and the combination of these different energies strengthens the individual’s contribution a hundredfold. The group power is superindividual and that is why it is so efficient.
4When the power of understanding – mental and emotional, psychological and cultural – and the capacity for tolerance are almost non-existent, it is natural for people to gather into groups where people can meet in at least one of the respects mentioned. Such self-formed groups are not the same as esoteric groups. According as intolerance increases and understanding is ever rarely seen, such groups appear to be ever smaller.
1Long before a universal religion or a common conception of reality can be realized, tolerance of other people’s views and loving understanding of them must prevail at the higher emotional stage. All development occurs gradually in an extensive process of consciousness, and everything takes time. What may appear as a revolution has been slowly prepared in the unconscious and partially in the waking consciousness of ever more people.
2There is emotional happiness, mental joy, and essential bliss, and it is only mankind’s and our own bad reaping that prevents our experiencing them. When we have discovered the secret of forgetting ourselves and living in unity, life is wonderful beyond words.
3Theologians have made a great feature of the gnostic expression “born again”, as usual without knowing what it stands for. It means the same as “repentance”, theologicized, it too, and so falsified. Both expressions stand for a total change of man’s attitude to his “own self” (egoism) and to life (altruism). Instead of regarding himself as the only important being and everybody else as existing for himself and his insatiable desires, the individual, who has seen the insignificance of his own self, decides to live exclusively to serve mankind, evolution, and unity. The “will to unity” is the only essential when you have once realized that the meaning of life is that all life enters into unity, that it is by joining ever greater units that we reach ever higher kingdoms, that cosmic omniscience and omnipotence can be acquired only by living for the cosmos.
4It is true that the meaning and goal of existence is that the monads acquire the cosmic total consciousness. This applies to all monads in all kingdoms. But this is possible only if the individual enters into unity and participates in the work of all for all, the common work in the processes of manifestation, by helping everybody whom the individual can help, in all kingdoms. Having that perspective the direct meaning of life is seen to be the service of life. By living for ourselves we counteract this task, we exclude ourselves from unity, we misuse the possibilities life has granted us, we misuse the vital energies life supplies, we keep for ourselves what belongs to everybody, we refuse to repay the loan of life without which we would not even possess any consciousness at all.
5That individual has understood the meaning of life who lives to forget himself, who lives to live for others, who lives to help and serve life. The monad cannot do that in the first triad but only when it has contacted the energies of the second triad, when it has been able to automatically activate consciousness in the heart centre. And the method of doing this is the will to unity and the awakening of this will. Willing what you will not do, doing what you cannot do, are two paradoxes of life. This is impossible to understand for the monad as a first self, until the monad has learnt the lessons it must learn as a first self. That is why the esoteric life view must not be forced on people. It is understood only by those who are finished as first selves. Being a mystic, “desiring to be one with god” is not sufficient, for that is the desire of the first self. It remains the will to forgo god, forgo one’s own development, to forget oneself in service. Then you are ripe for discipleship. Then you may become the tool the planetary hierarchy needs.
1The tendency to grieve and suffer is based on such an age-old habit of thought that the directly opposite attitude to life seems impossible. The activity of life ignorance in conflict with all laws of nature and laws of life has had the result that the effects of the law of reaping have even occasioned the beliefs that the gods are envious of human happiness, that karma is a law of vengeance and retaliation. They have not wanted to see that the law of unity is the basic law of development – the law of joining ever greater units – but they have counteracted unity everywhere. And then they blame life for their own stupidity and bestiality.
2As usual, the causes of these facts are sought in the historical past. For instance, with a multitude of guesswork as to why civilizations and cultures have perished. They overlook the one cause, clarified in esoterics: the absence of the community spirit, the presence of insatiable individual egoism, the absence of the will to unity and the will to serve others, everybody, the whole. When people live in order to serve, then social paradise will be realized, and only then. All other approaches must fail, as history demonstrates and as present-day and future social and political experiments will confirm.
3At mankind’s present stage of development – where men, not understanding it, counteract evolution – races, nations, sects, societies have the effect of excluding the others, making up opposites to the others, which all has a dissolving effect on unity. All mankind is divided, and it is this division which arouses emotional repulsion and hatred. The fact that they are unable to see this demonstrates their irremediable life ignorance and limitation, their blindness and impotence.
4Theology as well as philosophy are indications that among intellectuals, theory has precedence over practical life. People are overly theoretical. How many understand that the essential things in life are service without thoughts of return service and loving understanding of everyone? Instead, critical and loveless or indifferent attitudes to fellow human beings are rampant. Small wonder then that life appears empty and meaningless to them, poor in warmth of heart in themselves, poor in the only quality that makes their lives rich, independent of other people’s behaviour. We demand of others what we do not give ourselves. This demand of life makes most people disappointed and discontented, also when they possess everything they reasonably need. Not what we receive but what we give of ourselves is the richness and inmost secret of life. That was the meaning of the esoterism: “He who gives will receive” (not from others but from his own higher self).
5The disciple does not want to be “paid” for his services but refuses to receive. Everything he possesses he has received freely and he gives it back to life freely, which is all an absurdity to those who are uninitiated into the mysteries of life.
6This is what the planetary hierarchy, for millions of years, and Buddha and Christos, for the last 2500 years, have tried to explain to mankind. In vain. It is too simple. You must complicate it. Then you are very acute and profound, very learned and very wise – still a man at the stage of idiocy as to understanding life. You do not want to see because your insatiable egoism forbids you, your self-assertion, self-importance, self-glory: your hatred of all which is not your own dear self.
7The planetary hierarchy has made countless attempts to teach people the fact that the law of unity, the law of service, is the law of life, that we all should live for each other and not against each other. It would seem as though those attempts were wasted. If that is so, mankind will annihilate itself, using the resources of annihilation that nowadays exist.
8If people will not realize unity, then life will remain a war of all against all, which condition will unfailingly end in the annihilation of mankind. The law of unity is the law of life, and those who do not want to enter into unity have excluded themselves from life.
1The consciousness content of the atoms of course is ever more “rational” with each higher atomic kind. This is due to the ever more extensive power of apprehension (the ever decreasing density of primordial atoms in the atoms) and, as a result, the ever more exact working up by consciousness, the ever increasing prospects of consciousness communication, and all this during millions of years.
2It should be evident from these intimations how utterly hopeless it is for first selves (“poor foolish things”) to form any true conception of reality. The consciousness in the atoms cannot be apprehended by others than those who have acquired consciousness of unity with its ever increasing prospects of studying the consciousness content of ever higher atomic kinds. What man can (unconsciously) assimilate corresponds to the powers of apprehension he has acquired. How faint this has been and still is appears all too clearly from his history in past and present time.
3The whole cosmos is one great process of development. All the processes of manifestation (also the processes of involvation and evolvation) can be regarded as stages preliminary to the final process. The process of evolution goes continuously from unity to manifoldness, and from manifoldness to unity. When the next goal has been reached, a world has been conquered, striving begins anew and so it goes on until the individual has entered into the cosmic total consciousness, an endless service with endless powers to do it, work for the liberation of everybody from the limitations of imperfection. The more people are liberated, the greater is the common bliss. The striving after power is a striving after isolation resulting in fear of greater powers and contempt of lesser ones.
4According as the monad in its atomic chain reaches higher kingdoms, its power to identify itself with the consciousness of ever greater material forms already existing (collective groups, worlds, etc.) increases. The consciousness expansion consists in the very power to participate in ever greater parts of the cosmic total consciousness.
5“The Self is only a passing guest” is 44-self K.H.’s definition of the evolutionary monad, primordial atom, self-atom, individual, self. Giving it, he has appositely stated the monad’s continuous, ongoing evolution (consciousness development). It is a journey through ever higher worlds of consciousness, a journey that goes on until the final goal has been reached. It is a journey that all must make, however much they are against it. Their resistance only delays the journey to their own detriment. All shall reach the goal, and all will do it sooner or later.
6The natural kingdoms are as many classes in the school of life, and each kingdom consists of a long series of developmental levels.
7In the fifth natural kingdom, all know that they are one since they consciously share in the cosmic total consciousness. This does not mean, however, that all are equals. Also among disciples of a 45-self there are many different levels. Everyone of them knows his own level and who belongs on a higher or a lower level, which appears from their self-acquired understanding of life, different degrees of insight and ability. All know their places, and all help each other.
8Consciousness development appears as a spiral motion, not as a straight line. To the ignorant of life it appears as a circular motion. But every time they return to seemingly the same point, it is on a higher level and not a relapse.
9The planetary hierarchy tries to explain that everything is development, not just (as development is usually conceived) the monads’ continual transmigration to ever higher natural kingdoms, but also as a constant transformation within each kingdom, so that the different stages of development automatically rise to ever higher levels. Nothing is permanent, since the inmost purpose of the cosmic motion is evolution. An individual at the stage of barbarism thus is on a higher level, relatively speaking, than the barbarian of ten million years ago, and there is a great difference between a causal self of today and a causal self of a million years hence. This is true of all kingdoms. Only the highest cosmic kingdom has realized the “absolute”, if that word has any meaning in this connection. All lower kingdoms are “transformed” into ever greater agreement with their “ideal”.
10Consciousness development, consisting in the acquisition of ever higher kinds of consciousness, is absolutely inescapable, an inevitable law of life. That is one thing. In what way this development is done, however, always remains a problem due to the individual characters of the monads of the various kingdoms, and their collaboration. And how long time, how many eons, how many millions of years this process requires also remains a problem forever, an individual as well as a general problem.
11The monads that refuse to develop are transferred in due time to other, new solar systems where they remain until they at last decide to will for development. All shall reach the final goal, however long time it may take.
1The meaning of life is consciousness development. In actual fact, this means that the meaning of life is work. It is good for anyone who has understood that without work there is neither enduring happiness nor joy. The more beings our work benefits, the greater is our satisfaction, quite apart from the fact that our work strengthens the prospects of attraction and the will to unity and, moreover, entails the best possible reaping in future incarnations. Idlers, drones are parasites that condemn themselves to some kind of future slavery.
2The first self at the lower stages of development is justified to feel egoism, ambition, lust for power, because such feelings are the most powerful incentives to work and exertion. Such motives are eliminated in due time, when the individuals have reached higher levels. It is abortive to demand the same high ideals from all people, at all the different stages of development, as moralists do (having no knowledge of life and no sense of proportion). Besides, moralists (who all are at some lower stage) have always condemned those who (in all their imperfection) have worked to serve the “kingdom of god” as they have seen it. Hatred is still the moralists’ elixir of life. This hatred easily combines with their demand for perfection, which is the best proof of their incurable self-blindness.
1The processes of manifestation are divided into three kinds: processes of involvation, involution, and evolution. These three main kinds have practically countless subdivisions about which very little has become exoteric as yet. We have an intimation as to their existence through the knowledge of the three different kinds of solar systems in which matter is gradually refined so as to make it easier for the monads (evolutionary atoms) to acquire higher kinds of consciousness and assimilate higher kinds of energy; to make it easier to design higher material forms, which are ever more easily automatized. It is among the tasks of man to contribute to that process of refinement, which will enable these kinds of matter to enter into the solar system of the third kind. This he does by refining the matter of his own envelopes. This process of refining man’s envelopes is as the same time the condition of acquiring consciousness in ever higher molecular kinds.
2This is just one example of how the various processes interlock and how they all serve the great final purpose. It is a system of mutual assistance in countless respects, in which also what to us appears to be the evil of existence does a necessary work in the process of involution. True, this “evil” counteracts to some extent the process of evolution, but one good thing about it is that the monads are forced to use understanding and energy of a higher degree and so doing develop their consciousness and their will. It is true that esotericians have always hinted that “Evil is a force that serves good”, but ignorance has known better as always. And however often ignorance is exposed it stubbornly adheres to its fictions. When will it be less cocksure that it is always right? It is out of the question that it would see through its own ignorance.
3Consciousness development, the acquisition of ever higher kinds of consciousness in ever higher kinds of matter, has been symbolically represented as climbing up a ladder. It can of course be represented in other ways. All atomic worlds are found within us and consciousness development consists in discovering their existence, symbolically a shifting of the focus of the self. Starting from that representation it is easier to understand the saying “The kingdom of god is within you”.
1Consciousness development is a slow process through millions of years. The consideration of mere historical epochs is deceptive since men are ignorant of everything concerning consciousness in the various natural kingdoms, everything about stages of development, about the consciousness classes of mankind, about the purposes of civilizations and cultures, about the levels of incarnated clans, about the individual’s given task of life, just to cite a few factors.
2Most of the individual’s incarnations are unimportant for his development and amount to a (random) gathering of experience. It is only as the individual begins to “awaken” and demands answers to his question about the meaning of life that his incarnations gain importance and Augoeides is at all interested in his protege.
3All development, in nature as well as in human life, is a process of maturation that takes its time, and this at all stages. The twelve essential qualities, which the twelve zodiacal constellations enable the causal self to acquire so that he will some time be able to perform the “twelve labours of Herakles”, are not acquired at once.
4Anyone who wants to be “finished” too quickly is bereft of the sense of proportion that is part of common sense. No absurdities are required of him, only that he does what he can within the range of his given, his always limited, powers. This must be said, for any overstrung effort defeats its purpose. Our organism must be meticulously taken care of, for it is a necessary tool and must be able to fulfil its purpose. We must be particular about our health and economize with our powers.
5This said it remains to examine what is meant by “do what he can”. We seldom do it, for we do not know what we can. It is more than we believe. Life offers us so many opportunities that we omit to grasp, so many small daily opportunities of being kind, of making the people around us happy, of saying an encouraging word, of giving assistance where it is needed. The many small, seemingly insignificant things we do are preparations for ever greater tasks. We shall have no great opportunities if we have missed the small ones. It is by heeding the small ones that we may discover the great ones. The small ones most often include our daily duties where we stand.
1To those in the planetary hierarchy the only essential thing is what furthers evolution, individually and collectively. What does it matter whether the individual’s view of reality or of life agrees with reality or not? What does matter, however, is whether his illusions or fictions promote his consciousness development on his level, in his circumstances of life. We help him, not by depriving him of the fictions that enable him to reach his next higher level, however insignificant it may appear to us. We understand what Blavatsky meant when in the Introduction to the second volume of her Isis Unveiled (treating of the theoretical side of religions) she hoped that her book would not fall into the hands of those whose religious delusions helped them to a right living.
2It is a constant rule that in order to serve their purpose (which is requisite to further consciousness development), lower and higher conceptions should be seen in their mutual relation and both be granted their importance for consciousness development through the different natural kingdoms. Absolutification always entails confusion of ideas, of which fact the history of philosophy bears witness.
1In all natural kingdoms everybody receives the help that is required for consciousness development. That is fact which should be completely clear to us. Just a fraction of this help is received consciously. Almost everything occurs in the unconscious.
2If we did not receive help “from on high”, we could not even exist. Without help from higher kingdoms the monads would not pass from a lower to a higher kingdom.
3We receive energies from all directions; from causal, mental, emotional envelopes, from the celestial constellations (the zodiacal constellations), from the surrounding worlds, and from living beings in them. Only an exceedingly small fraction of the energies penetrating our envelopes affect us and an even smaller fraction is consciously perceived by us. All development depends on how much of these energies can be assimilated by individuals. It depends on the collective heritage in several respects, as well as on the individual’s experience and his working up of it.
4“Ideas rule the world.” And mankind can “be saved” (gain understanding) only by means of reality ideas. That is a fact which is obvious to all esotericians and to common sense. The fact that it needs to be said is one of the many proofs of the total disorientation of mankind.
5It can take several hundred years before an idea belonging at the stage of humanity is assimilated at the stage of culture, and many thousands of years before it is understood at the stage of civilization.
1The law of rebirth is by the planetary hierarchy called the “law of opportunity”. The law of the “rebirth” of everything is the condition of the monads’ evolution. An ever improving form for the expansion of consciousness is made possible thereby. The law of development guides everything to final perfection. Only in our time there is a chance for mankind to see this, thanks to the increasing understanding of the facts of nature and the critical judgement of world history furnished by research.
2The incarnations deposit layers, as it were, in the subconscious of the triad. The study of the entire series of incarnations shows that very few of them have been of any significance to consciousness development. If incarnations have amounted to progress, this has been due to the fact that the living interest has worked up the experience had (self-initiated consciousness activity).
3Generally speaking, the last incarnation which amounted to progress influences most powerfully the choice of life view in the new incarnation.
4Still the majority of mankind are at such stages of development that separate incarnations by no means are of any great significance to consciousness development. As a rule people gain from having the opportunity of a new incarnation. The higher stage of development the individual has reached, the more significant is his incarnation, since the authorities of destiny have planned it with particular regard to the acquisition of qualities and abilities as well as to the possibility of serving life.
5Only our sweet mankind needs to develop through reincarnation. On other planets there are no human organisms, and all the other ways of evolution consist in the automatic acquisition of higher envelopes through the consciousness of higher molecular kinds. There individuals learn that development is a result of serving life and not of egoistic demands. There too the individuals’ lower aggregate envelopes are renewed for an unlimited length of time. They are formed anew until higher ones are acquired and are put off only then.
1It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the process of development is one of liberation, and that liberation is a condition of development. These facts have been overlooked, in some respects misrepresented and distorted. Consciousness development is a liberation from all unnecessary physical needs, from selfishness and all manner of illusions, from belief in fictions and authorities that hinder self-initiated consciousness activity.
2Consciousness development consists in an ongoing identification and liberation. The self identifies with its envelopes and their content of consciousness. The physical self believes he is his sense perceptions; the emotional self, his feelings; the mental self, his thoughts, etc. To be able to identify with higher kinds of consciousness you must renounce lower kinds, liberate yourself from your dependence on lower kinds. You are attached to the lower as long as the sense of sacrifice and self-denial remains. Renunciation is a natural consequence as the lower has lost its power to entice. The child loses interest in his toys when he has got other interests, has grown away from such childishness. Development consists in a series of revaluations. To the emotional self physical things have lost all attraction. To the mental self both physical and emotional things have lost their power to fascinate, to delude, to make the self value the lower more than the higher.
3Consciousness development is a continuous process, extensively and intensively, the acquisition of subjective and objective self-consciousness in the ever higher kinds of consciousness of ever higher kinds of envelopes. You do not begin activating the higher kind until you have seen that it is incomparably more valuable thanks to the insight and understanding as well as freedom and power it grants.
4The Buddha tried to explain that you must be liberated from the illusoriness of the lower to be able to develop your power of judgement, that the path to common sense (at the present stage of mankind’s development, the emotional stage) goes through acquisition of the energies of emotional attraction as a condition of liberation from the lower emotional and the physical. The lower blinds. You acquire higher powers by mastering the energies of the lower envelopes. Consciousness development is simultaneously a process of energy.
5You master the matter aspect through the consciousness aspect, and you master the consciousness aspect through the energy or will aspect. The lower enters into the higher, and that is why the “will” is more reasonable than reason on the same level of development.
1The matter aspect and the consciousness aspect fight today their eternal war, and mankind is standing before the decision. If it chooses the matter aspect, a new catastrophe is inevitable. Then we must begin anew from the beginning, and this will be repeated until mankind has learnt its lesson, that the meaning of life is consciousness development and not remaining behind in physical material life. The consciousness aspect (so-called spirituality) must be the one essential thing. It is by consciousness that we shall reach unity, the worlds of the fifth natural kingdoms and realize the so-called kingdom of god in the physical world. For only in the physical world can we acquire all the qualities necessary to reach higher kingdoms. That is the way trodden by all who now make up our planetary hierarchy. There is no other way. How slow has been the development during 21 million years is best demonstrated by the relatively small number of “saved souls”, the individuals making up the hierarchy. It must be underlined ever and anew that we are all accessary to this slow jogtrot, for it is our task to do whatever little we can in order to reach the world of knowledge and realize unity on earth. Without this unity we defeat ourselves, our own development and that of other people. The opposite of unity is hatred. Development requires freedom and will to unity.
2Man is a union of two opposite aspects – matter and consciousness – and he must choose between them. Anyone who chooses consciousness has particular forces at his disposal, the forces of causal knowledge and of unity.
3In order to highlight the opposition of the consciousness aspect and the matter aspect you may denote them by the wellknown terms god and the devil, Christ and Antichrist, white and black magic, etc. In matter, consciousness is roused to life in order to learn how to control matter and thereby acquire all the necessary qualities.
1Teachers of esoteric wisdom adapt their rules of wisdom according to the stages of development, according to the varying ability to appreciate ideals. Ideals are different at different stages, and it is not just meaningless to present too high ideals but even harmful, since it breeds either indifference or contempt. It is also psychologically abortive to speak of “love” (essentiality) to those at the stage of hatred whose feelings can be vitalized only through hatred. That is a thing which theologians have never understood except possibly Catholic confessors, who have learnt how to adapt their “demands” to the individual’s conception of right.
2No nation has as yet reached the stage of culture. It bears witness to a real ignorance of history to speak of Greek culture when this comprised the achievements of an incarnated clan at the stage of culture. This clan of about 400 individuals gave Greece her architecture, sculpture, literature, and philosophy. The Greek people at large remained unaffected, for they were at or near the stage of barbarism, which appears from their eternal hatred and civil wars.
3In occult literature they have made too great a business out of the Greek mysteries. Their relative insignificance is seen from the fact that almost all the citizens of Athens were initiates and they nevertheless murdered or ostracized all their great men (except Perikles, which was a near thing). Platon saved himself by acting the mouthpiece of Sokrates, who had been rehabilitated, and Aristoteles fled. The culture of Rome was made up of a few individuals.
1The individual’s level appears in the conceptions he accepts out of those predominating in a certain collective.
2The age-old experience is proved right: “Tell me with whom you associate and I will tell you who you are.” It is fashionable to reject the collected experience of mankind. We shall then have to start all over again from the stage of barbarism.
3Man’s insecurity, tendency to doubt, desperation as to trust in life and trust in law at the least strain is a perverse instinct of life, the outcome of cultivation, in many incarnations, of skepticism and ridicule of the quite different attitude to life in people of higher stages. He has a long way to go before he is as firm as a rock in the most desperate situations, in the final catastrophe for his physical envelopes (“all that is” to him). One of the many indications of the level, individual and general.
4Those who are not idealists, that is to say: serving impersonally, do nothing for the general good by which they do not think they have personal, direct or indirect gain. That, too, is a factor to observe when judging levels.
1Strange enough, the idea of equality seems never to have been rightly conceived by the learned. We are all human beings with a right to human dignity, human happiness. We all have a right to freedom within the limits of the laws which are common to all. We all have a right to the knowledge we are able to acquire. We all have a right to free competition and a right to be justly assessed on the basis of our qualifications. We all have a right to hold any views whatever in any respect (religious, philosophical, esoteric, political, social, cultural, etc.). We all have a right to freedom from economic misery and poverty.
2However, nobody has any right to consider himself equal to those who possess greater knowledge and power of judgement, greater capacity (capability); esoterically: a higher kind of consciousness. The fool has no right to consider himself to possess as much power of judgement as the wise, the ignorant as much knowledge as the knowledgeable, the incapable as much skill as the skilful.
3As long as there are people at different stages of development, there can be no talk of equality in the sense that all have equally great capacities, have the same prospects to assimilate knowledge and skills, acquire as much insight, understanding, and power of judgement. In that sense there will never be any democracy. That is a fact which can be established once and for all. The inequalities of nature in these respects cannot be abolished by any social legislation.
4Equality in the esoteric sense is based on the right sense of proportion, self-determination, the laws of rebirth and reaping, understanding of the age of the causal envelope, and the monad’s acquired experiences of life, and has nothing to do with the talk of life ignorance that “all men are equal”. (D.K.)
5We are in a very critical phase in the development of mankind. Also those at the stage of barbarism have begun to develop the power of deduction. The mad idea of everybody’s equality, so totally bereft of knowledge of the levels of development, has entailed that all (being ignorant of reality and life and the laws of life) believe they are able to judge everything, being victims to all the brainwaves of infantility. The result seems to be a final chaos in all domains, in politics and in social relations. In culture, there are lots of litterateurs who fob off their banalities and trivialities on people and work to strengthen illusoriness and fictitiousness without any sense of responsibility. They are always able to find publishers and readers, which is a proof of the cultural standard ruling.
6Madness prevails as long as the ignorant of life are to be authorities and dictators. Too many clans at the stage of barbarism have incarnated in the 20th century. We must hope that epoch will soon be over!
1Mankind consists of a vast number of clans at the five stages of development. What historically (without a knowledge of reality) may appear as development is the fact that clans at the various stages incarnate in turn. Clans at higher stages build civilizations and cultures, which in due time are crushed when in other epochs clans at lower stages take over the cultural heritage. Also in such barbarian epochs, disciples of the planetary hierarchy incarnate to try to help the barbarians in various respects.
2People in Atlantis did not know how to use the consciousness of their mental envelopes. Since then we have learnt how to use that kind of consciousness.
3The saying “mankind progresses, but the individual remains eternally the same” is a psychological error, since the general progress is the sum of that of all individuals.
4The fact that the contribution was different on different levels but still ascertainable on each level refutes the saying often heard that the merit is due exclusively to the relatively few geniuses. Many are they who have done their small shares.
5On the other hand, it is correct that the scanty elite have made the greatest contribution in this process, a fact that is overlooked when mankind is assessed as a mass of normal individuals.
6Evolution is both a product of law and continuous. At mankind’s present stage of development, however, it moves in what appears as revolutions in the framework of 2500 years, the different zodiacal epochs. And that depends on the various kinds of zodiacal vibrations, which have a destructive effect on the existing forms of life.
7The esoterician can look forward to a state of mankind where there will be no disease; where the individual himself abandons his worn-out organism with its etheric envelope; where child-birth is so agreeable that women long to give birth; where the child is given the best care from the beginning, receives knowledge of reality and life, and knows what is right action and leads a happy life; where everyone knows his place in the service of mankind, evolution, and unity, and all are prepared to help each other. It is up to mankind when this state will be achieved. It is consoling to know that this will be real and that we can look forward to that goal.
1The individual’s consciousness development goes slowly forward. As a rule, it takes 35 years in each incarnation before reason is so developed that the former initiate can start liberating himself from all the illusions and fictions he has been inoculated with in childhood and at school. And that process goes on during the period which demands the most of him as a bread-winner. Not much mental energy remains for his change-over and practical application, perhaps beside the daily family duties.
2When students are given to know how many incarnations they have done with seemingly so small results, many think they have learnt very little from all the experiences they have necessarily had. But they have acquired a fund expressing as instinct in life, often warning them, often clarifying to them. When they have reached so far that their experiences lead to the activation of passive causal consciousness, a connection is made between the super-and subconscious which affords their incarnations quite another significance and effect. For only now they gain a true understanding of life and thereby an accelerated consciousness development.
3The relative ease with which many people succeed in reattaining their latent level has entailed a total underestimation of the immense difficulties to be overcome by consciousness development. Those who expect to become causal selves in the course of some twenty incarnations should be clear about the fact that this is an objective, which about 40 per cent of mankind will reach only in the next eon (the mental eon). Certainly the Buddha’s religion of wisdom and Christos’ religion of love were intended to clear away the greatest obstacles to consciousness development, but the immediate purpose was to teach mankind to overcome hatred, which keeps it in the lower emotionality and makes true culture difficult, not to say impossible altogether.
1Consciousness development is a methodical and systematic process, incomprehensible to the first self’s emotional illusionism, sentimentality, and mental fictionalism. Expressed most simply, it is done by moving attention away from everything there is in the consciousness content of the envelopes of incarnation to the consciousness of the second self and keeping it there. There are sufficient problems to meditate on, problems of the causal and essential selves, when not dealing with those of mankind, to solve in the right manner. You are spared the illusions and fictions of your own self.
2Consciousness development towards unity includes ennobling our feelings (expressing in the refinement of social intercourse). Crudeness and recklessness belong at the stage of barbarism, which we should have left behind. Present-day so-called cultural radicals, who proclaim arbitrariness and licence, are apparently ignorant of the fact that there are stages of development with entire series of levels of development. One wonders what stage they belong at.
3The condition of our emotional and mental development is a continual discrimination and choosing between opposites occurring in pairs: true–false, right–wrong, beautiful–ugly. Mankind lacks the knowledge of reality, of the laws of life and of ideal beauty. Our daily life is made up of constant choices, and we choose wrong constantly.
4If you have a knowledge (not mere learning) of the law of development along with an understanding of the fact that the ever higher kinds of consciousness are of enormous significance for your own development as well as that of all life, then you try as best you can to use that knowledge. Mere information entails no activation.
5As a conscious process, evolution presupposes understanding of the energies that influence consciousness and enable the individual to reach ever higher until he has reached and been able to enter into the collective consciousness. The process vitalizes the envelope centres of various kinds of consciousness and energy, supplies the individual with new energies and demonstrates how these are to be used for further development.
6When man has reached the level of development where he understands the meaning of life, he makes up his mind to serve evolution for all time to come. This decision then remains in the memory of the causal envelope. Augoeides sees to it that the man in a new incarnation is given the opportunity to remember anew the knowledge which led to the decision to serve. If the instinct of life then does not effect the renewal of the decision, it only means that the original decision was made on too low a level.
7Consciousness development does not only imply acquisition of ever higher consciousness but also presupposes elimination of everything that is an obstacle to further development. This means gaining knowledge of life, changing lower interests for higher ones, working at the realization of the knowledge gained. Men are too passive, waste their time with unessentials, wait for help, for impulses to come instead of acting, instead of doing it now.
1The Law of self-realization with its conditions, self-reliance and self-determination, is a universal law. It is valid not just for the individual but also for the collective, for collective beings and their common tasks in which everybody makes the contribution of his individual character (individual character with acquired abilities in various respects) in a collaboration where they complement each other.
2There are many grounds and causes why certain individuals speed so far ahead of the common development that they are able to pass to higher collective beings or as a group to form their own collective being. These individuals are exceptions to the universal rule saying that the members of a natural kingdom jointly pass to the next higher kingdom.
3The law of freedom is of course the fundamental condition of the law of self. It grants us the right of life to form our own view based on our individual character and experience acquired through our incarnation, and to act accordingly within the limits of the equal right of all. It grants us the right to be ourselves and not slaves under any god as is the case in the Israelite, Christian, and Islamic religions with their monotheism. There is no single god; there are only collectives of gods, ever more comprehensive ones in ever higher kingdoms.
4The law of self-realization implies that man must save himself, however many incarnations he uses on that matter. The law of self-realization is an absolutely firm law which no god can do anything about. Paul’s teaching, “salvation is in Christos”, did not intend any person but unity, essential consciousness, the fact that man saves himself by acquiring that consciousness. We are saved when we have entered into unity; outside rule the deeds of hatred and eternal life-blindness. Only in unity does man find the light that dispels all darkness.
5This salvation presupposes that the individual acquires knowledge of reality, of the meaning and goal of life, and of the laws of life.
6According to the law of self-realization, all must by themselves acquire all knowledge in the course of development. Knowledge, which the individual receives from others, he must check himself in due time. He can, if it is deemed suitable, receive knowledge of otherwise inaccessible matters. Unnecessary knowledge is not communicated. There are possibilities for all in the fifth and higher kingdoms to acquire knowledge also of things cosmic (inasmuch as such things can be understood on lower levels) thanks to the entire series of ever higher selves who are able to communicate their knowledge to the series of lower selves. However, that is a possibility which is limited by the law of self-realization. The law has such a restrictive effect that the individual hesitates to ask for even desirable knowledge of something in higher worlds, knowledge which otherwise he could receive. Also, he does not want to trouble, without due cause, higher selves in their more important work. He assumes that the higher selves know best what the lower selves need and that the higher ones unrequired communicate everything necessary.
7“At any cost, man must sooner or later learn to stand on his own feet, learn to master his circumstances and the reactions of his first self,” a teacher told a disciple of his who had counted on assistance to himself.
8However many incarnations are needed for this, the individual must learn to be self-reliant, independent of the help of others, in his gaining of the right conception of reality and the ability to rightly realize the meaning of life, to become independent of any spiritual authorities, holy scriptures (“words of god”), etc. Such writings may give us thoughts that we can analyse until we have seen that they are right or wrong, but they must not instil dogmas that make us dependent.
9Unsolved problems come up again in life after life until we have solved them in the one right way. They are part of our necessary qualities and abilities and our self-realization. We can never botch them away, cannot escape from them by suicide, as many think. If we do not learn our lessons, we shall have them turned, and then they will not be any easier. They may fall under the law of reaping as well as the law of destiny. The great Law, the sum total of all laws of nature and laws of life, is a law of necessity.
10The most life-ignorant and injudicious man is the “master of his own wisdom”. So it must be according to the law of self-realization. Step by step through countless experiences the monad acquires the knowledge of reality. And everybody’s view is absolute. Nothing can be done about that fact.
11The entire consciousness development is an endless progress from the incomprehensible to the evident. In the proper sense, the evident is only what reveals reality and the Law. What men call evident is whatever agrees with their illusions and fictions. In the esoteric sense, the evident is whatever in our self-realization we have experienced as a revelation.
12Self-realization, the “realization of the self” (“become what you are”), means, where man is concerned, the acquisition of causal and essential consciousness as well as the application of the laws of life, however trying this may be.
13Without self-realization there will be no consciousness development. True, the knowledge of reality, of life, and of the laws of life is essential, but only for right living. When knowledge has been acquired, the application of this knowledge is the only necessity. We are here in order to live, to have experiences, and to learn from them, to acquire necessary qualities and abilities. Anyone who thinks that he lives in order to amuse and enjoy himself is seriously mistaken. Anyone who does not see that “when life is at its best, it is work and toil” has much yet to learn.
14The acquisition of the esoteric knowledge can be easy work. The application of it, however, may take many incarnations. Understanding is one thing and the ability to realize is another and quite different thing. Understanding is part of the consciousness aspect and realization is part of the motion or energy aspect. That is a fact which has not yet entered into general psychological learning, since they have missed the knowledge of the three aspects of reality. Add to this the ignorance of how to make use of the energies that are at man’s disposal.
15Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras may be presented in connection with the law of self-realization. They show the way of man to higher kingdoms. It is an arduous way, every step of it paved by his own work. It is no way of cheap salvation. It has cost “blood, sweat, and tears”. That is the way which everybody must wander, however many incarnations it will take.
16Self-realization is done automatically, if you live for others and forget yourself, which means that you cease to be the centre of your circle, have your attention directed to something else than your “dear self”, do not live in your envelope consciousnesses. “My envelopes want this; I do not want it”, is a good rule. It is particularly difficult to free yourself from the content of your emotional envelope. The esoterician is taught how to determine himself what is allowed to exist in his envelope consciousnesses. But this requires that he has eliminated the lowest molecular kinds of the envelopes. This he does most easily by never heeding the consciousness content of those lowest molecular kinds. Then they gradually lose their vitality and power of magnetic attraction, are removed from the envelopes, and are replaced by higher kinds.
1Self-determination means that you determine yourself, that you want to control the consciousness content of your envelopes. Disciples learn how to control a lower kind of consciousness by the next higher kind in an uninterrupted series: to control the emotional by the mental, the mental by the causal, the causal by the essential, etc.
2There is a considerable difference between liberation from fear and anxiety through trust in life and trust in law and liberation by yourself alone and without such aids.
3In your conscious work to acquire self-determination, the following insights are important: If people are ignorant of life, think ill of everybody and take joy in it, then whatever views they hold are quite unimportant to you. In due time, in some future incarnation, they will relearn. Anyone who is dependent on the views of others is their slave.
1Understanding other people presupposes some knowledge of the stages of development. Your knowledge of an individual’s prospect of understanding life depends on your level of development. Judging people from your own level is abortive. Anyone who is thousands of incarnations older than another must not demand the same understanding of life and things of life than he possesses himself. In this chaotic epoch, often even brothers and sisters are on different levels. They have been brought together according to the law of reaping (opportunity to make good) as well as the law of destiny (opportunity to help).
2It is a common mistake to regard intelligence as a sign of understanding of life. Intelligence is just one of the conditions. The most important one is the experience of life acquired during many incarnations.
3In order to be able to help others to understand you must have acquired understanding of life, understand the meaning of life, have some knowledge of the different stages of development (to know what the people you talk to are able to grasp), have some experience of the difficulties met with at the different stages. You do not help people by presenting a teaching of reality that they cannot comprehend, but you start from their religious, philosophical, scientific views or perhaps even more primitive views on life. Those who are content with their idiology you can only meet with loving understanding, knowing that they will have opportunities to rethink in new incarnations.
4The esoteric expression, “loving understanding”, does not imply (as many think) a refusal to see faults and failings, but understanding of their causes and sympathy with those who suffer under them. We love them, not because of their faults (Stevenson’s exaggerated formulation) but in spite of them. Trying to understand other people is one thing, learning to see as they see is another.
5People have of course misunderstood the exhortation not to criticize as meaning that we should not judge. To judge things and people, however, is necessary for all who want to develop their understanding of the ever finer distinctions between “right and wrong”, distinctions which on the “noble middle path” narrow down more and more, until the path, as mentioned in esoterics, is as sharp as a razor’s edge, cutting egoism from altruism, self from not-self, lie from truth, individual interpretation of the law from the law. That is the path which the disciple is taught how to walk, and it is no easy path, the work of many incarnations. The broader the “noble middle path”, the lower the individual’s level.
6There is a great difference between seeking for faults and trying to understand them. Those who try to understand are the ones who will “find”, who will acquire the ability to serve.
1A man’s merits make up his individual character. His faults and failings belong to mankind’s stage of development. Do not put people’s failings on the individual but on the level they are on! The individual has the failings belonging to the level, the failings that belong to his collective (race, nation, clan, etc.), the faults which are part of his past and which he is now suffering under, which others do not understand and which the poet expressed by his “What knowest thou of the burden laid on his back by fate?” and the saying by “The heart knoweth his own bitterness”. The esoterician tries to lift that burden and lessen that bitterness for all and everyone, not to increase it.
2Very often what moralists call “failings” are prerequisites of the creativity of genius. One example of this is Voltaire, who is the “quinta essentia of all France and all the 18th century. And as a consequence he is also a compendium of all the faults and errors, character flaws and incongruities of his nation and time. It is perfectly absurd to reproach him for the fact that there are also blemishes in them.” That is also the view taken on man by those in higher kingdoms. The contribution he has made for mankind, evolution, and unity has brought him forward. His mistakes fall under the law of reaping. Whenever a man starts moralizing he is on the wrong track. By his moralizing, the moralist displays his lack of judgement.
3You cannot judge a man’s level of development from the mistakes he makes. Even the most advanced people can do almost any stupid thing and make quite incomprehensible mistakes. That is a fact which neither theologians nor other life-ignorant people are able to understand. The theological fiction of the saint is, like all the other theological psychology, quite abortive. The law of reaping (mistakes made in past incarnations, which causes become effects in subsequent lives) can for a long or short time blind even causal selves completely (who by no means have made their final payment).
1So-called self-knowledge of which there is so much talk is of the most superficial description where the first self is concerned. The disciple will soon see that he does not know himself; for the competent aspirant a humiliating insight, which teaches him true humility. The bad qualities he has acquired throughout his incarnations exist in his subconscious, and their power is greater than he will ever be able to grasp. There were very good reasons for the old theological experience that man is “essentially evil”, although life ignorance was unable to explain this “appearance”. The individual has not just acquired all those bad qualities in his incarnations ever since the stage of barbarism, but they are strengthened to the point of being seemingly ineradicable through the individual’s share in mankind’s collective tendency ever since the stage of barbarism and are veiled only superficially at the stage of civilization. Only at the stage of culture (the stage of the mystic) does man seriously start acquiring the necessary good qualities, which before that he already thinks he possesses because he has been brought up to put on the outer forms of decency and social respectability in the conventional cult of lies.
2One of the last bad qualities man is able to free himself from is pride, which certainly remains before it has been completely replaced with loving understanding of everybody without exception.
3Many people having a “sensitive conscience” dread diverse subtle expressions of egoism, which they discover in themselves, and they torture themselves unnecessarily and all too early. They should learn to see that they are egoists and that it will take a long time before they have advanced so far that such subtleties, belonging to the razor-edged path of right cutting through wrong, mean anything in comparison with the gross expressions of egoism in themselves to which they are totally blind.
4What psychologists call “self-knowledge” is the individual’s experience of his emotional and mental qualities with their failings in his present incarnation. Before the individual has made serious attempts at achieving a contact with his superconscious, he knows nothing of his prospects of self-realization.
5As soon as he hears the phrase, “Man, know thyself!”, every man thinks that he knows himself. Psychoanalysis, at least, has explained that the phrase, “Man, know thyself!”, could be replaced with, “We are psychological idiots” or “We are so little aware of our true motives, the causes of our daily habits, that we hardly deserve to be called human beings”.
6Only that man knows himself who is aware of his godhood, and you will be so only as an essential self. A causal self has reached the insight that it must be so. With each higher kingdom you will be ever more aware of the unlimited possibilities of your monad.
7Only that man knows himself who is aware of his share in the cosmic total consciousness, of his monad’s prospect of becoming a second self from being a first self.
8To know yourself is to be able to judge your own stage of development, the possibility of understanding life you have acquired, the capacity of your own envelopes; practically it implies to see your own limitation. You hardly learn to do so without the esoteric knowledge and the knowledge of which higher kingdoms remain for us. Anyone who thinks he is important evidences his ignorance of life. Strange enough, such types can be met with also among occultists who consider themselves advanced. Humility is a rare quality.
1Man is and remains an imperfect being, however much he strives after perfection. In our ignorance of life we make the mistake of absolutifying the relative. That always results in absurdities. Having a knowledge of reality and life and possessing common sense, we can more easily decide where the limits to the possible are, humanly and individually. Perfection in the absolute sense is achieved only in the highest cosmic kingdom. The weaknesses and defects that moralists condemn may be “karmically conditioned”, more or less inevitable. The mistakes that are due to ignorance or inability belong to the level. That is a viewpoint which has never been considered. Men believe they comprehend immensely much that is beyond the range of human understanding. And the moralists (the most ignorant of life) in particular believe they are able to judge.
2A just assessment of man is out of the question. We know nothing of the monad’s level of development in the causal envelope. The present incarnation may be the result of bad sowing with very tragic consequences. Least of all should man be judged according to the mistakes he has made. In another incarnation he may experience quite other sides.
3You can see in other people only what you can see in yourself. Anyone who cannot see the soul in others cannot see it in himself either. As soon as you have found your own soul you see the soul of others as well.
1We are all specialists in some certain respect, having some latent quality and ability acquired through our incarnations. This does not necessarily imply that we are aware of it. On the contrary, this latency is so direct that we never notice it, but instead may imagine that we have precisely the quality and ability we totally lack. This easily has the result that we choose the wrong profession.
2The bad qualities, the qualities of hatred, we acquired automatically during our incarnations at the lower stages of development under the repulsive energies of the emotional world. The good qualities, the qualities of love, we have to work to acquire in order to reach up to the regions of attraction. That is not easy in the present madhouse-like chaos.
3The evidence that a quality has been acquired one hundred per cent is that its opposite is inconceivable. Tolerance, for instance. To anyone who is the “incarnation of tolerance” intolerance is absurd.
4There is some kind of natural goodness, which is the result of good reaping. But there is self-acquired goodness, and that evidences a higher stage of development than a brilliant intellect. For self-acquired goodness reaches 48:3, and the intellect at 47:6 is sufficient for any intellectual achievement whatever, possible in our time. What people call talent has been acquired during three incarnations and genius during seven, whether it comes to specialization or general orientation (easily confused with perspective consciousness).
5It is by no means strange that we do not know what is meant by the term the twelve essential qualities and have no names for them. The term refers to qualities which are essential indeed and which are received by mastering the energies of the twelve zodiacal constellations with which the “twelve labours of Herakles” can be performed.
6“Virtue” means in esoterics (the planetary hierarchy’s view on reality) the cooperation of brotherhood dictated by unselfishness, understanding, and complete forgetfulness of self. “Vice” is the opposite of this attitude. True, ability exists in different degrees. The essential, however, is our conscious aspiration to unity.
7Ambition, desire to achieve and to know, are good qualities at the stage of civilization, for they impel man to acquire qualities and abilities. But at the stage of culture, these desires are superseded by the will to help those at lower stages to reach higher. The motive for acquiring more knowledge is the desire to be able to help better.
8Enthusiasm is a good thing as a driving power. It has a disadvantage, however, in that it often befools the power of judgement. Besides, the same is true of most functions of emotional consciousness, since the sense of proportion is part of mentality and is completely absent in emotional thinking.
9Much is contained in the art of being silent, such as the ability of right speech, the power of saying only what is true, kind, and helpful. And the condition of that is loving understanding, the desire to serve everyone on his level.
10Trust in circumstances and people, in your own first self, in its power and knowledge, is an evidence of life ignorance. That trust lacks that firm basis in reality which only the laws of life can afford. The second self is so pervaded by the lawfulness of existence that he has become, as it were, a manifestation of the Law by entering into unity. The will to unity is at the same time the will to law, the law of unity, the “divine love”, which the first self must acquire in order to become a second self.
11Three abilities are particularly characteristic of the esoterician: his ability of joy, of divine indifference to whatever happens to him, of impersonal observation (watching and understanding and loving impersonally despite everything). Divine indifference does not in the least imply that he allows himself to be treated just anyhow. Cowardice is a quality of hatred as well as cruelty (something for psychology to explain if it can). Cowardice enables evil and violence to rule.
12Leaders of men (first department) need above all the power of vision, a sense of proportions, the ability of synthesis, and freedom from criticism. Vision clarifies the goal. Sense of proportions makes the man humble before his task, entails self-criticism and willingness to always learn and learn from everybody. Anyone who believes he understands everything best becomes ever more narrow-minded. Synthesis entails inclusiveness and universality. Criticism raises barriers between people, is the opposite of loving understanding.
13All true experience of life is hard-earned and the result of many experiments in the past as well as in the present incarnation.
1“Life is suffering”, according to the Buddha. An esoterician can make the statement even stronger, “life is horror”, since the physical and emotional worlds of our planet are one big madhouse (full of fools and knaves, to use George Bernard Shaw’s expression). How could it be otherwise with individuals who find their pleasure in inflicting suffering and destroying everything culture builds up to make life easier to live?
2However, suffering exists only in the three lowest regions of the physical and emotional worlds. The fact that higher beings are able to suffer is due to their share in this suffering through identification of their consciousness with that of the beings in these lower regions, not in any other way. Christos was called a “man of sorrows” because of this very sharing.
3Mental suffering on account of the understanding of man’s immense life ignorance is probably inevitable for those who have reached the mental stage. But emotional suffering can be overcome by applying the Buddha’s teaching of the art of living. It consists in not identifying oneself with the “desires” of the emotional envelope, in acquiring the ability to rightly value, in not being attached to physical belongings and physical existence, in upholding right relations to human beings and to all life.
4There is a simpler way, to forget oneself and to love all and everybody, simpler but, paradoxically, more difficult for those who value the first self.
5Life is happiness that cannot be lost when you have liberated yourself from the lower emotional and from desires of anything in the physical and emotional worlds; life is joy when you are mentally free from any vagueness; life is bliss when you have become one with all.
1The first, simplest rules of living include contentment with what life gives you, taking everything that faces you with Stoic calm, taking people as they are, seeing your own inability and limitation and that any self-importance and vanity is ridiculous, being totally unconcerned by other people’s opinions about you (at the present stage of hatred you are to others, whatever you are in reality, something that should end up in the slop-pail). There is hardly any infamous lie that has not been told about the saints of all ages, so we cannot expect anything better.
2The following rules of living were considered essential to that orderly way of life which was part of the instructions for neophytes of the esoteric knowledge orders, referring to physical as well as emotional and mental life:
3In physical respect he was instructed to observe harmlessness, truth in everything great and small, honesty; in emotional respect: freedom from desire for anything attaching the self to the object of desire, craving for amusement, the unnecessary demands of feelings; in mental respect: all the various kinds of greed (for everything beyond the necessities of life, for things belonging to other people, also mentally).
4Harmlessness may appear simple enough, but anyone who has tried for one single day to be harmless in thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds sees that it requires a total control of thought with mastery of thoughts and feelings. Such a self-critical attitude also entails automatically an elimination of all the views divorced from reality and life which the individual is impressed with when growing up and receiving his education.
1If the envelopes of incarnation are not fully capable of functioning, there may be various causes and grounds for this. It may be a case of bad reaping out of bad sowing. It may be a case of forcing us to develop various abilities. It may be a case of trial; teaching us staying power, unconcern, invulnerability. It may be a case of teaching us independence of any seemingly necessary qualities. (To give a symbolical example: Paganini could lose up to three strings of his violin and complete his concert on the G string only.) We can never tell why we are handicapped in various respects. The only thing we know is that everything has a meaning. We can learn from everything. Most people learn too slowly from their experiences, since they do not work them up.
2There are many so-called failings and weaknesses that drop of themselves when man reaches higher levels through his incarnations. Disciples are exhorted not to look at them, whether in themselves or in others, but to learn to take themselves and others as they are. Self-torture is as wrong as torture of others. We must have forbearance with ourselves. This exhortation of course is no defence of easygoingness.
3There are indeed plenty of thoughtless people, who do not care about the horrendous distress of mankind. But the “live” people cannot take such an attitude. Nevertheless they are encouraged always to be glad and happy, which seems psychologically unfeasible, as indeed it would be if they did not bear in mind that their pity does not decrease but on the contrary increases suffering in the world, that all shall be well in the end, that suffering will pass, that not every incarnation is a paying off. The contact with our Augoeides in the worlds of happiness, joy, and bliss and the essential molecules he sends also bring about a sense of happiness that no suffering can hinder. By being glad and happy we contribute in our small measure and in our environment to lightening the burdens of life.
4Know your own limitation! Accept your situation in life (without complaint)! Laugh at yourself! Take others as they are!
5That saying attributed to Christos in the gospel novels, “resist not evil”, is a representation of a very ancient esoteric rule of living about “non-resistance”. It is a matter of our inner attitude to what we meet with in life, an attitude related to the unconcern of the Stoics. Most people have an attitude of antagonism, face life with their disoriented view of life, their prejudices, their fictions, which all makes it impossible for them to judge rightly, impersonally, objectively, and often manifests itself in a kind of “spiritual cramp”, which unfailingly makes the vital energies go to the wrong centres and so often lays the basis of disease of many kinds. The non-resistance intended is the expression of a sense of freedom understanding everything and not in the least excluding a definite course of action in matters belonging under the laws of life. It is our imperative duty to resist violators of the law, be they individuals, groups, or nations.
6Having gained a somewhat greater experience of life you stop correcting the wrong views of other people. The people you correct do not like it, and so you keep your views to yourself and do not preach to others but only answer questions if you are asked and if you understand that the person asking you wants to learn something from you. On the other hand, you have no duty to answer questions about your personal matters, to satisfy unwarranted curiosity. The esoterician never talks about himself except to his esoteric group.
7The brains of most people are little more than robots pouring out their muzak, and thinking people are not concerned by such things; least of all are they annoyed at it. We must learn to take people as they are: largely “irresponsible” for what they say and do (victims of uncontrolled and often uncontrollable impulses). Seeing this is part of loving understanding as well. Most people probably have experienced that they have said things they did not mean.
8By reading the great mass of literature of no value for the art of living you weaken your ability to assimilate the life value there is in true cultural literature. The more you read, the weaker are the impressions you take from what you read and the faster the lessons you derive evaporate. That is what is meant by having “read your brains out”. The choice, the discriminating choice, of valuable literature is of much greater importance than many people have seen. You may say with perfect justice that a book-case reveals the level of its possessor, provided of course he reads those books. Anyone who does not read at all is content with his own experiences and what he has learnt by hearsay. Most of what you learn that way will disorient more than inform you.
9Everybody puts into his words the “content of reality” he is able to grasp on his level, in his circumstances and opportunities to have experiences. All too often people talk at cross purposes, and misunderstandings are inevitable. This appears best when you hear people reporting what others have said. They turn it into something different from what the original speaker meant. When something you have said is reported back to you, you will not recognize it and you may honestly assert that you have not said it. It is another matter that many people do not know what they have said, do not mean what they are saying, and then are indignant when it is reported back to them. It is frequently seen that people say one thing, mean another thing, and do a third thing.
1A condition of development is liberation from the lower. This liberation is called sacrifice (the law of sacrifice), since it appears to be such. You make the sacrifice before you can gain certitude whether you will be “compensated”. Only when you have sacrificed you will be able to enter your new world. Your sacrifice is your “entrance fee”. It is meaningless to make this sacrifice, however, before you have reached the entrance door. It is quite abortive to sacrifice in order to gain something for your egoism. This may be a good sowing resulting in a good material reaping in a future life but it will increase selfishness.
2As long as the individual identifies himself with any one of his envelope consciousnesses or with anything contained in these consciousnesses, he cannot possibly grasp that he is a self independent of these states. He is what he identifies with. A condition of a possible liberation from a thing identified is the insight that he is something different, someone who wants to be something different. Thereby he has made his first faint discovery of his self. If he then proceeds on the path of liberation, he will discover ever more of himself, that he is a self which can identify with ever higher kinds of reality and that this identification depends on himself.
3It is true that liberation from the lower is necessary to acquire the higher. But liberation is pointless in itself if you do not understand what you should liberate yourself from and why. Many people abstain from such things as are necessary to their development and so doing demonstrate how everything can be misunderstood. Mere renunciation is no way of reaching higher levels. Also in that respect you may calm those who strive to develop, telling them that they will learn in due time what they have to do and what are the necessary conditions, which in many cases are individual. Liberation often is an automatic procedure. What is not necessary drops by itself. Sometimes liberation is a result of outer circumstances of life. It should be pointed out that a liberation made too early is abortive.
1Forgetting yourself, disregarding the reactions of your emotional envelope (all kinds of feelings about your own self), seems to be the most difficult thing for most people. However, it is the prerequisite of acquiring higher kinds of consciousness. Otherwise you reinforce what you should starve out by not considering it. Learning how to control your attention, how to determine by yourself what it should be occupied with and not letting it be passively drawn along with the tendencies of the envelopes – those are prerequisites of the art of living. Man is free only when he can himself decide his own states of consciousness. He can learn how to do it.
2The aspiration to sainthood is abortive in itself. You do not become a saint by trying to be saintly, by being busy with yourself. You become a saint by forgetting yourself, forgetting that you will become a saint. You will automatically become a saint by serving life and living for others. Any zeal, frenzy, hurry, bustle, intense desire to develop defeats its own purpose. The plant will not grow more quickly if you constantly pull it up to look at its roots. Growing takes care of itself according to its own law, if you remove the obstacles and in addition fulfil the conditions in a simple, direct, natural, calm, trusting manner according to common sense. Everything takes time, and you must take the incarnations into account.
1One of the biggest obstacles on the path is the inability to be silent. To be able to be silent is the most important ability of the art of living, and it contains much more than the uninitiated may suspect. You do not fob off your knowledge on those unable to receive it. You do not testify to yourself. You do not speak ill of others (the first stage, until you see that the law of freedom is valid and stop being interested in the first selves of other people with all their faults and failings). But the art of being silent goes deeper than that. It is about the art of not feeling and not thinking other things than such as are true, right, and helpful. (Our thoughts about other people are returned to us with the same effects.) If people could think by themselves and not just thought what others had said, then they would have been able to figure this out from their knowledge of the laws of life.
2It is sufficient to know about the law of cause and effect, of sowing and reaping. If people inquired as to the cause of the effect they experience in all respects of life, a cause they could figure out themselves, then they would be able to start living a rational life. But note here that this refers only to themselves just because they drag their past incarnations along. How it manifests itself in others they cannot know, since those people have had other experiences: everybody is a unique being. Verily, it would be in a bad way if people could rightly judge others. Fortunately, it is impossible. Only a 45-self can judge a first self.
3By our gossip about others we hinder them and thereby indirectly ourselves. And that is not the end of it. We become unable to live in the right way. Study gossipers and ascertain their inability to match the norms they set up for others. The faults and failings we notice in others we have ourselves. Else we would not notice them. Exaggeration? It is an axiom of esoterics, which may be confirmed by 45-selves, who see through the latent subconscious, that which will some time come to light just because we have gossiped about others.
1The ordinary lack of judgement is generally due to the prevalent disorienting idiologies with their fictitiousness and illusoriness, to the fact that these idiologies have paralysed the latent instinct of life, and also to the still incurably infantile psychology. All this has the effect that many people never reach their true level of development. They become idiotized by all theories that have weakened their instinct of life so that they no longer dare to trust it. The result is a both inner and outer uncertainty, which the ordinary superficial observers take as evidencing a low level. If they have been liberated from their uncertainty through esoterics, then they can follow their instinct of life with greater self-confidence. How many deplore that they only at the end of their lives have reached the certainty they should have got in childhood if they had been brought up in an esoteric atmosphere and could have been able to use their latent experience? How many deplore that they did not better understand the promptings of their Augoeides? The elite share in the systematic victimization of the common life ignorance instead of being able to guide development; a typical instance of shared responsibility.
2A typical example of the general lack of judgement is the phenomenon that people judge themselves by comparison with others. If they have some more knowledge, are superior in various respects to the people surrounding them, then they consider themselves important. But the general level is consistently of such a description that it cannot be used as a starting level of judgement. A sound rule is never to compare yourself with anyone you consider to be inferior to you but only to those who in some respect are superior, if you should make comparisons at all. An esoterician uses other measures. He ascertains how much he has yet to go to reach the causal and essential stages. And then he will be humble, the first sign of true self-knowledge.
3Another typical instance of the general level of judgement is so-called student demonstrations in all countries at all times, expressions of so-called juvenile idealism (which lacks a sense of proportions, knowledge of reality and life). Having school learning as your only basis and lacking experience of life it is quite impossible for you to judge objectively, impartially, understandingly. Most people never achieve it; those on the higher civilizational levels do it only at the age of about 35 years.
1Those who trust so-called sacred writings more than their own common sense (the result of the work of untold generations for consciousness development) thereby have made it more difficult for themselves to apply the law of self-realization. Man’s “soul” (causal consciousness, consciousness of the world of ideas) is his one true authority. Sacred writings are human creations and have always proved to lead astray in the end. Both the Bible and the Koran (the paper popes of the three Jewish sects) are falsifications. Two thirds of the suffering of mankind can be written up in their record of misdeeds.
2There will always be those of the emotional stage who need a firm, unchanging belief for their development. It is a psychological error to deprive them of the aid they need to think and act at all in accord with their ability on their level.
3The dogmatic standpoint is always in error, no matter whether you are a theist or an atheist. You make statements about things you do not know. The one right attitude is that of the agnostic who leaves the question open until he will know.
4Blind believers are incurable for this incarnation. In their next one, they may be blind believers in something else. Those who believe they understand are in an almost equally bad situation. They have at least tried to comprehend and stopped at some (mental) fiction which they have accepted. Also in such cases it is probably hopeless to try to make them consider new facts that could effect a bit of rethinking.
5Sokrates tried to teach people how to think and has failed to this very day, which is proved by theology, philosophy, and all other dogmatic thinking.
6Almost everybody believes he understands. Only a few understand truly. Manners of speaking are confusingly similar, but the degrees of understanding reality are quite different. The levels once again: you do not understand above your own level and you do not even know your own.
1“May truth rule in my life.” People are unconsciously such liars that they have destroyed any instinct of truth. This also explains why they make nothing but mistakes in life. It takes many incarnations of purposive research into your own motives, before all the hidden motives can be brought up into your waking consciousness and be eliminated. The subconscious of the triad (the sum total of that of all the envelopes) follows us throughout our incarnations.
2A psychological explanation for the unconscious hypocrisy of most people is the fact that they do not notice how little their way of life agrees with the ideals they still believe they “would realize if only...” There are many excuses. Having some self-knowledge you see your own hypocrisy and cowardice in shirking your responsibility. Recognizing your insufficiency in all (not just a few) respects is part of honesty and stability. And the outer sign of it is the fact that you cannot judge.
3The risk of esoteric knowledge is that people find it so easy to imagine that their ability matches the learning they have received for nothing. How many of them confuse their higher emotionality with essentiality, not understanding that essential consciousness is part of the second self and that they are not even mental selves, complete first selves? Self-deception is incredibly great.
4“If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true.” This axiom of esoterics exposes irremediably all self-appointed prophets and world saviours in all domains. It should be borne in mind pending the appearance, in the next few centuries, of countless world-improvers. Self-deception is as great as injudicious credulity is strong in numbers.
1According to the moralists, man is made up of faults and failings. To this it may be said that, if so, they are factors of development, since man nevertheless develops. And the esoterician might add that if they really are faults and failings (and not, as they generally are, the products of other people’s wrong views), then they are necessary experiences.
2When judging and assessing people we must never start from an ideal of perfection made absolute. An individual may be a genius even if in many respects he is mediocre, he may be a “saint” in spite of many failings. You must not, as one writer does, call Copernicus a coward, Kepler a hypochondriac, Galilei a proudly cantankerous neurotic. Those are subjective judgements, passed without understanding of the situations those people were in. We have no right whatsoever to pass such judgements, for we know too little about man, and everyone has the right to be such as he is, with all his limitation (protected from moral judgements), when he does not transgress the limit of the rights of others.
3All the moralist prohibitions, which may be justified at mankind’s stage of infancy, have entailed a negative, passive, inactive attitude to life. For those who have acquired a knowledge of life and the laws of life and strive for self-realization, freedom from prohibitions, the “wonderful freedom of the children of god”, is of great importance. You must be “free” in order to develop. The attitude of “you must not do it” is replaced by the attitude of you are grateful to be spared it, you will not, you cannot do it.
4Only the man ignorant of life expects gratitude or similar things from the people of hatred. As a rule it is the other way round: they must find motives for their hatred (he who seeks will find) to free themselves from the painful sense of owing a debt of gratitude. Having learnt what they think the teacher can teach them, they throw him away like a squeezed-out lemon: pedantic, antiquated (if not something worse). It is part of the system of victimization.
5“People (on the lower civilizational levels) never forgive”, not even in matters that do not concern them. They do not see that they have no right whatever to judge or forgive. All those perverse views belong in the moral swamp.
1Many people are held back by the power of the past, are paralysed by their many mistakes and think they have failed and are unworthy. That attitude is seriously mistaken. The past has enriched their experience. When we see our mistakes and learn from them, their power is broken. That was the original symbolic meaning of the “forgiveness of sins” (with the intended psychological effect of the ritual: forgetfulness of the past), which has been so totally misinterpreted in Christian theology. It is important to see that our vices, when we have once seen their perversity, are turned into our foremost virtues in future incarnations.
2First and foremost we have to fight against the innate tendencies of our envelopes of incarnation, acquired during thousands of incarnations, and with the subconscious illusions and fictions which make us accept as a matter of course everything we recognize in our new lives. And this is true also of those who have reached the higher levels, whenever they grow up in an unsuitable environment. For them it may take as much as 40 years before they start discarding all the perverse things they have been fed with by parents, brothers and sisters, friends and teachers. Small wonder that development is slow through the incarnations. There are many people who do not reattain their true level in a new incarnation.
3The inferiority complexes of many people are due to unsuitable upbringing and environment or to their comparing themselves with truly superior people or demanding too much of themselves. The superiority complex is in most cases due to either compensation in self-assertion or true superiority to the environment. Inferiority as well as superiority complexes are in all respects hindering complexes from which the individual must liberate himself in order to acquire an impersonal, objective view on men and a true understanding.
4Having witnessed in our time the atrocities of bolshevism, fascism, and nazism, and the defence of brutality and bestiality put up by those idiologies, one realizes how close to the stage of barbarism mankind still is, one understands how little we can learn from the “clairvoyant” study of our own incarnations. It is not edifying to view all the mistakes we have made in the past. The exhortation of esoterics “do not look back!” (the psychology of the forgiveness of sins) applies not just to the present incarnation but also to previous ones.
1”Best as it was, is, and will be.” It is difficult for the people who have experience of the individuals of the third and fourth natural kingdom of our planet to see that this axiom of esoterics is true. Also poisonous plants have a purpose in nature, if people understood how to use them as medicines.
2It is part of this insight to know that organic life is not a normal phenomenon, does not enter into the general plan of the monads’ consciousness development. On other planets, where all have only aggregate envelopes, so-called natural catastrophes are without consequences and there are no so-called accidents.
3Many problems would be solved themselves, many misconceptions would be cleared away, many mistakes could be wholly avoided, if we were clear about the fact that the entire cosmos is composed of primordial atoms–monads and that monad means “individual”. Everything consists of individuals on different levels of development, from the unconscious initial state to cosmic omniscience. Every individual is a unique character in all respects, which means a unique manner of perceiving, experiencing, working up experiences, etc. No two individuals have had the same experiences through all the processes of manifestation. No two individuals are alike, but all on the same level can understand each other in all essentials, and a higher kind of consciousness with a common consciousness actualized can experience a lower consciousness as its own.
4The consequence of the above is that everybody must be judged individually in all respects. This ability to individualize, to rightly apply the general to the individual, characterizes the “born” educator, psychologist, teacher, doctor, yes, however absurd it may sound, also the craftsman or professional generally. This is what gives him the knack, his ability to take people in the right way, his skill in action.
5The many incarnations are not meaningless. Throughout the series of incarnations we are trained how to master one domain of experience and life after another. This is particularly manifest through male and female incarnations with quite different tasks of life. It is the purpose of the future esoteric psychology and education to teach people to see the meaning of their incarnations, what experience needs to be had, what abilities and qualities need to be developed further. Ignorance in these respects has the effect that many incarnations are lived at random, resulting in an unnecessary slow acquisition of experience.
1People have difficulty in taking life as it is and in adapting to the circumstances of life existing. Many people live in a constant rebellion against life, not understanding that the experiences they have (if they take them right) are intended to develop necessary qualities and abilities.
2Mankind’s irresponsible way of producing children carelessly, without a thought of their future, has its consequences for the parents in their next incarnation. Mankind shall not accuse life of the indescribable misery of overpopulation. Millions are born at a wrong time and are forced down into the physical world practically against their will and in any case contrary to the purposes of the powers of destiny. The Catholic Church still encourages the production of children in an overpopulated world, which is not in agreement with what it calls the “will of god”. That will has never been known to that church, since it has never been in contact with the planetary government. This is a fact which also should be evident to anyone who has studied and understood church history. The church has in all its policies worked against the “will of god”. It has counteracted consciousness development systematically and idiotized mankind with its dogmas hostile to life.
3It is wrong that races are mixed and, as often happens, that Westerners move to the East and become Easterners. It is the effect of the law of destiny and the purpose of life that individuals incarnate in certain races and nations. Every race and nation has its particular qualities, its particular departments, enables its individuals to acquire certain experiences more easily. It is not at random that the individual is born into a race, nation, clan, and family.
1In theology as well as in mysticism and occultism there has been much talk of “divine guidance in the life of man”. Most of what has been taken to be such guidance is wishful thinking. Certainly there is a guidance according to the laws of life. However, that guidance is not intended to counteract the law of self-realization, counteract self-reliance and self-determination, counteract the individual’s self-initiated consciousness activity. Everything that makes man passive, inactive, everything that hampers, paralyses man’s initiative and activity, everything that weakens man’s will is totally wrong. Guidance manifests itself in outer events, in circumstances and not in consciousness. True, Augoeides may help, but only those who approach the causal stage are able to rightly interpret his instructions. Others fall victims to all manner of illusions and influences by life-ignorant beings, all kinds of “voices” in the worlds of man.
1The seven departments of our planet, corresponding to seven atomic worlds (43–49), are subdivisions of the second department (department of love and wisdom) of the solar system. This means that unity is the strongest material energy. But what is the use of it to men, if they do not want to receive and assimilate that energy, if they go on hating each other and all living beings? Opposition to a force of nature sooner or later brings catastrophe, a fact that mankind has experienced twice and does its best to face a third time. Surely it can be said that it is a strange, incorrigible collection of monads that makes up the mankind of our planet.
2Of the twelve planets existing in our solar system only seven are called “sacred planets”, it is true, but none of the other five evinces such an incorrigible tendency as does the planet Terra. This is a phenomenon which is studied by visitors not only from other planets but from other solar systems as well.
3It was this esoteric fact, duly (as always) misunderstood and distorted, which the fathers of the church (quasi-gnosticians) used when constructing their imaginative notion that our planet has a unique position in the universe and so needs a son of god as its saviour. That fiction fitted well with many others: our planet as the centre of the universe, sin as a crime against an infinite being, our incurable original sin, etc. The fathers of the church were on the same intellectual level as the sophists of their times, and the result was, to be sure, balderdash of a similar kind.
1Just as all esoteric terms, “karma” is used in different senses. In its usual sense it means the law of cause and effect, the law of sowing and reaping (the law of reaping for short). This law exists in all worlds. There are as many main kinds of cause and effect relations as there are main kinds of envelope consciousness with their energies: gross physical, etheric physical, emotional, mental, etc. Such things should not, but still need to be said, since people do not think.
2The Indian conception of karma as a course of events fixed once and for all is erroneous. Sowing has to be reaped; that is the one fixed thing. In what way it is reaped, however, depends to a large extent on the individual himself. For instance, we can make good the suffering we have inflicted on others by a “sacrifice” we choose ourselves.
3”Karma” is mostly taken as bad reaping and so has got an ominous ring, which is due to the fact that we have in the past produced mostly bad sowing; it can be asserted that our consciousness expressions with their various consequences have been 90 per cent repulsive. Mankind must “save” itself by the will to unity and common sense, not by untenable idiologies. But there is not much to hope for, until the human elite at the mental stage considers the common experience of the wise people of all ages.
4In its widest sense “karma” has reference to the plan of the processes of manifestation, a plan that only the planetary hierarchy can understand and know anything about. Since the plan of course embraces the future, “karma” has been taken to mean the sum of past and present events, thus time itself with its cycles of countless kinds.
5The law of reaping is and must be the primary law of maintenance of that balance without which the cosmos would degenerate into chaos. A sowing must be reaped; a cause has an inevitable effect. When determining the horoscope and the vibrations that are to influence the individual most strongly, the law of reaping has precedence of everything else. This is what makes the law of reaping what the planetary hierarchy itself calls a “terrible law”. The evolutionary monads in the physical, emotional, and mental worlds of our planet are so burdened with reaping that life must appear a hell to all who possess a real knowledge of world history and of our present-day world (and not just consider their own experience of a happy incarnation, which may occur).
6There is a justification for the view that the law of reaping exists only in the human kingdom, namely in the sense of good or bad reaping as the consequence of a choice of motive. In the subhuman kingdoms there is no chance of a free choice. In the superhuman kingdoms, motives are always in agreement with the laws of life. There, no good reaping is produced but instead an ever-increasing capacity: the result of a perfectly done work.
7In this light you understand why the concept of “merit” does not exist for the esoterician who strives to acquire the second self’s view of life. He refuses to look upon his service as a good sowing for a good reaping. At the utmost, it may be a matter of redressing one’s own mistakes or those of one’s group (shared responsibility). According to the law of collectives, all mankind is responsible for each individual human being in a way which men cannot grasp. The similar is true of all groups.
1The causal law is valid in all natural kingdoms, and the effects of the causal law, or “karma”, exist in them all. The “karma” of the animal must be “set off” before the animal is able to causalize, just as that of man before he is able to become a second self. The individual’s sowing belongs to his natural kingdom and must be reaped or be brought to an end in some other manner in this kingdom; it cannot be reaped over to a higher kingdom. The statements by Blavatsky and Besant to the effect that there is no karma in the animal kingdom refer to the so-called moral responsibility. No such responsibility can exist in the animal kingdom, since the animal is unable to understand the significance of the choice of motive and the meaning of the concept of law. As understanding increases, also responsibility increases.
2The debt of the animal kingdom to the human kingdom appears to be soon “paid off”. During twenty million years man has been practically defenceless against wild beasts, and the number of men killed by animals amounts to billions, according to D.K. Starting from the fact that a human causal envelope corresponds to an animal group-soul of thousands of animals, you understand that the debt incurred runs to fantastic figures. The planetary hierarchy considers, however, that the immense slaughter of animals now going on will have soon produced a balance, probably within one hundred years. Then mankind will be wholly vegetarian in its way of life. Until then, people’s meat-eating cannot cause them any “karmic debt” and cannot be considered morally reprehensible. It is quite another matter that animal food is unsuitable and the cause of a great number of diseases, a fact that science will soon recognize.
1Bad sowing can be divided into three main kinds: harm we have done to the collective, suffering we have inflicted on men and animals, mismanagement of our envelopes (physical by wrong diet and wrong way of life, emotional by cultivating hatred, mental by idiotizing our reason).
2It is not sufficient to have attained a certain level of development to reach the next higher one. You must also have acquired the right to attain it, a thing determined by the law of reaping. Old bad sowing may hinder you.
3We have in past incarnations sown incomparably more bad than good sowing, in quality and quantity. Therefore, it would not be strange if the effects of the law of reaping were negative rather than positive, hamper rather than further our development. We should be grateful if we are spared much bad reaping until we have reached such a level that we can face it with understanding and in such a way that we do not sow new bad sowing.
1Reaping is the result of the individual, national, racial application of laws of nature and laws of life, known and unknown ones, in all envelopes in all worlds and as to all the three aspects of reality during millions of years and tens of thousands of incarnations. Perhaps you see how impossible it is for mankind to judge the pertaining problems.
2It might be said that the individual’s reaping largely shows in his level of development and cannot be judged from the effects of the law of destiny and the law of reaping in one single incarnation or even in one series of incarnations.
3The individual may have his causal envelope well developed (filled with mental atoms as well as molecules) and yet appear undeveloped in his physical incarnation. This is due to the reaping envelope (etheric envelope), which by its quality can hinder energies from higher envelopes from penetrating down into the brain. None of the causal faculties can then assert itself. In such cases, most people will probably experience the judgement of those around them before they are finished.
4Those who have been informed about the law of sowing and reaping have often wondered how this implacable justice could allow Christos to heal sick people. The reaping measured out for a certain incarnation can be settled per contra at any time. Otherwise the remaining reaping is transferred to the next incarnation. Sowing must be reaped. That law is inevitable. But how and when we cannot tell, which too many occultists have believed. Perhaps they correct their views if they are given to know that the authorities of reaping after careful scrutiny decide the case for each individual incarnation according to the circumstances in countless respects. We can never know when and how we are to reap or what sowing we are to reap. When studying the law of reaping one is constantly surprised at the most unexpected and also seemingly causeless things.
1Much individual bad sowing is reaped collectively (by family, caste, nation, etc.). Man is not in a position to determine to what extent an individual’s misfortunes, etc., are conditioned by individual or collective sowing. It is emphatically stated by the planetary hierarchy that man is unable to judge the effects of the law of reaping and whether there is individual debt in the particular cases.
2It is absurd to ascribe to a nation the merits of its geniuses and great men. They are products of hundreds of incarnations. The fact that such individuals were born into a certain nation is not the merit but rather bad reaping of that nation. As a rule, the nation treated them badly.
3In its distortion among the Indians, the teaching of rebirth and karma has had the effect that most people do not work for self-realization but put off that trouble to the future. That attitude has re-acted upon the entire life of the nation.
4One hundred years hence, the Swedish nation will be as poor as it was one hundred years ago. They will be forced to revert to agriculture as the national source of income. Fortunately, the Swedish people will suffer much, because that is the only way of rousing the nation, so that it comes to see the true reality and the meaning of life.
1Anyone who knows the right and will not do it (which is characteristic of the majority of mankind) not only loses his ability to see what is right but also counteracts his ability to acquire the conditions of rightly applying what he knows. That is a truism to the initiated (by which term is meant those who were once initiates) though not at all to our psychologists and educators as yet.
2There are those who make mistakes quite consciously, in full awareness of the fact that bad sowing yields bad reaping. They say they “take the consequences”. Then they should be informed that such a sowing turns into particularly bad reaping, but probably they need to learn that lesson. The same is true of so-called white lies. They unconditionally weaken the ability to tell right from wrong, strengthen the tendency to illusoriness.
3There is something that can be called the “law of the granting of prayers”. If the man has his prayer granted then he either has acquired the right to have his prayer granted or he must pay the price of the granting in the future. For cause and effect can never be separated. Everything has its price, and everybody must pay.
4If knowledge is given man “for nothing”, then this entails a responsibility, a debt that must be paid, either through right use of the knowledge for the welfare of all (pay off through work) or through loss of knowledge or loss of a right to knowledge or through loss of his reason (in conjunction with some other debt) or in some other manner. In what manner a sowing will be reaped depends on many factors, but reaping is inevitable.
5Cause and effect are equal, in countless combinations that men are unable to grasp. Effect can appear totally separated from cause, and nevertheless sowing and reaping tally “unto the last grain”. Many people would have repented their desire, if they had known the price. Anyone who is surprised should ask himself what is meant by the law of absolute justice, a law of life.
1The contention that the individual cannot meet with any evil that he has not deserved is one of the theosophical exaggerations. Also some yogis have a similar misconception. This presupposes that the individual was invested with a guardian spirit who constantly watched over everything that happened to him or that he involuntarily incurred, staving off everything that was not according to the law of reaping. In this, these speculants disregard that he from then on has to apply the knowledge of laws of nature and laws of life and that every omission of it creates “new karma”. Otherwise the individual might be thought to be in a position to defy the laws of nature with impunity. The law of cause and effect must of course refer also to the present, the here and now.
2On the other hand, it is correct that the final balance at the transition to the next natural kingdom is exact, for instance at the human monad’s definitive passage to the second triad essential atom. Compensations are made at new incarnations when “undeserved” suffering is taken into consideration.
3Let us take a drastic example. If an incarnated 45-self is driving a car and in a moment of distraction runs against a tree, so that the car is crushed, then also the 45-self’s organism is crushed. The causal law does not care about who was driving the car.
4One example (a small one, true) taken from real life and refuting the contention that no evil can befall anyone who has no bad sowing to reap: D.K., who resides in the vicinity of K.H., went to call upon him one night, but hit a tree and injured himself.
5They have wondered how Jeshu (a 46-self) could be murdered although he could not have had any remaining bad sowing to reap. The great ones incarnating must expect to share the lot of men, to be injured on account of carelessness, for instance. They have to put up with being subject to the laws that are in force in the worlds of man, in natural catastrophes, etc. That no evil can befall them is a notion which is as common as it is wrong.
6That Jeshu foresaw the murder and willingly submitted to it was also an instance of the fact that there is no limit to the consciousness of unity as well as an inimitable example to mankind. Whatever the motives, one thing is certain: Paul’s exposition of the matter was wrong and was also the biggest mistake psychologically, which the history of theology demonstrates. Sin as a crime against an infinite being is the most grotesque fiction human imagination has been able to construct, a truly “Satanic invention”.
1There are two paths to chose between in the matter of bad reaping from the past. The one is to suffer involuntarily the same evil as you have inflicted on other living beings. The other is to walk the path of voluntary redress, to pay off one’s debt by acts of love and a life of service. We can to a large extent choose whichever path we will walk. Redress to the collective by proclaiming the truth (the knowledge of reality) and by all doings that benefit lifts mankind.
2We must redress also mismanagement of our own envelopes and their primordial atoms (monads). We often have to put up with experiencing the effects, but also in this respect we may, by living purposively, redress many mistakes which would otherwise have had bad consequences. Mismanagement of our organism is hard to redress. It is done in a series of incarnations in which we methodically refine our brain and nervous system and the various internal organs. In the meantime we must expect to be stricken with illness of various kinds. It is not possible to do it in one incarnation, as many people say, for that negligence which has been going on during a series of incarnations takes a long time to rectify. In each incarnation we can refine this organism, until finally all germs of disease are eliminated.
1According to D.K., much in the traditional description of the law of sowing and reaping is part of imaginative speculation. Writers have believed themselves able to present the views of the manner of reaping held by the authorities of reaping. It is not as simple as described by them, however. Much of it is part of collective reaping, much is set off in the aspirant’s trials, much is brought to an end in the first self’s renunciations and so-called sacrifices of everything lower. In our practically total life ignorance, we human beings are generally unable to understand both cause and effect. We know the significance of this law in a most general sense, and that is all.
2In other words we know too little to decide what belongs under individual reaping in particular cases. In our ignorance we are guilty of the most unjust misjudgements. Such ones are especially obvious in the Indian view of “karma”, which has brought about an attitude of not doing one’s utmost to alleviate the suffering of others. We must learn to see not just the individual but also the collective common responsibility for individual emergencies. Our common debt is the true cause of much that befalls the individual. Every unloving thought, every unloving word has both an individual and, above all, a collective effect. Therein is the basic flaw of our misconception of the law of reaping. It is the law of unity that we violate by our indifference, unconcern, lack of love, and that goes before everything individual.
3We have been informed that the law of reaping is inscrutable to man. That does not prevent us from trying to understand at least some of its activity. There is every reason to assume that it all is an interaction of idea material energies of various kinds in different atomic and molecular kinds; in the emotional world manifesting itself in an unsurveyably ramified network of relations under eternal attraction and repulsion, affecting the material energies of the etheric envelope and, in the last analysis, the organism. The expressions of the law of reaping are rather referable to the motion aspect, energy aspect, will aspect. That could explain the esoteric saying “all is energy”, implying that all events are the results of the interaction of energies.
4By that explanation you have at least stripped the law of reaping of its mysticism favouring unbridled imaginative expansion so repulsive to Western philosophers and scientists and so attractive to mystics and Orientals.
5Two quotations from a 45-self: “Karma ever works in the most unexpected ways.” “You know nothing of the ins and outs of the work of karma – of the ‘sideblows’ of this terrible Law.”
1It would be easier for us to “forgive our enemies” if we considered that they actually do us a service by all their persecution. They liberate us by making us (generally in an easier manner) reap old bad sowing. That has also been the gain of martyrs at all times. For all injustice, all suffering the individual meets with, there is a law of compensation, closely connected with the law of reaping as well as the law of destiny.
2It need not concern us which experiences of life we have to go through. Everything coming to the individual from without are results of reaping from previous incarnations. There is nothing to be done about that, and so there is no point in worrying about such things. Most people, however, take them in a wrong way and allow them to cause unnecessary sorrows and sufferings. By bearing them such as life has intended it we develop our character for the future.
3The law of reaping grants us no rights. To a certain extent its expressions may rather be what the Christians call “grace”. True, the fact that we have a good reaping in a certain incarnation is an indication of good sowing. But we do not know how much bad sowing remains to be reaped. At mankind’s present stage of development, with thousands of incarnations of bad sowing, the reaping remaining is generally horrendous. So we should not think we are important and advanced because we sometimes have an incarnation of good reaping. Anyone who does not see this must have the requisite experiences in new incarnations. We have to be very grateful for the good things that life grants us and in the midst of suffering be grateful that it is not worse. Most people’s conception of what they call karma is totally wrong.
1It is through the activation of the passive consciousness in his envelopes that the individual (the monad) learns how to master consciousness in these as well as becomes conscious in the ever higher molecular kinds of the envelopes. The boundary of the next higher natural kingdom is marked by the individual’s highest envelope. When he has learnt how to self-activate the highest molecular kind of this envelope, he passes to the higher kingdom. This activation of the monads’ consciousness in the ever higher envelopes of ever higher natural kingdoms is the meaning of life.
2Consciousness is activated by vibrations from without, impulses from the subconscious, inspirations through the superconscious as well as the monad’s self-initiated vibrations.
3Activation is done from below, since the monad is in the lower and seeks to reach ever higher.
4When the individual is not active, he is a slave to the activity of his envelopes, which activity is determined by vibrations coming from without. The envelopes are perfect receivers, robots recording, with unfailing precision, all impulses coming from without or from the monad. Self-activated consciousness is the monad’s own consciousness, any other is robot consciousness. The monad can master the consciousness of its envelopes when the monad’s vibrations are stronger than those coming from without.
5It is this self-initiated activation of consciousness that brings about the most rapid development.
6It is through work that we develop, attention is occupied, and experience makes us ever more skilful in solving our daily problems.
7No consciousness expression can be lost in the collectivity of existence. From this it also follows that no “exertion” is ever wasted.
8What people call “forgetfulness” is evidence that consciousness has become latent, sunk down into the subconscious, become inaccessible to waking consciousness. This is also due to the inability of brain-cells to reproduce vibrations experienced some time.
9Since the self is the centre of consciousness and that which is to develop in its own envelopes, whatever view the self holds is the definitive one. Any attempt by other individuals or groups at forcing their view on the self is a violation of the divine, inviolable law of freedom and counteracts the meaning of life. It should be added that there are many kinds of violence, or the use of force.
10Most people are dependent on their illusions and fictions. This need not at all mean that their incarnation is unsuccessful. They can strengthen good qualities and acquire abilities by working up experiences and consciously striving to a certain goal, by thinking their own thoughts free themselves from their dependence on the views of ignorant people. Even if this may mean just an exchange of old fictions for new, yet self-initiated consciousness activity is important. In a new life, the self-active people do not fall victims to all sorts of influences as easily as do the ever unsure ones. Thereby they have taken a definite step forward.
11Man is a slave to the consciousness of his envelopes of incarnation as long as he is controlled by energies from the centres below the diaphragm. He wins liberation by transferring sacral energies to the throat centre and solar plexus energies to the heart centre. Without knowledge of the envelopes of man and their centres of consciousness and activity, psychoanalysts cannot solve their problems. It is a matter of rousing the energies of the throat centre by “creative” (actually formative, shaping work by the imagination in combination with visualization and meditation) and to open up the heart centre by loving understanding of every living creature. This is what esotericians call “sublimation”, a word that has been terribly misunderstood.
1Anyone whose consciousness is not active but passive runs the risk of falling a victim to vibrations from without, and anyone who does not live in the mental runs the risk of being affected by the vibrations from the emotional swamp. Mankind lives in that swamp, and that is why it surrounds us all. This is particularly so during sleep.
2Anyone who has not gained control of his consciousness and the energies of his envelopes is constantly and anew the victim of the activity of those robots.
3Men are victims of their own energies, suspecting but little what possibilities those energies would offer if they were used purposefully.
4We attach too much importance to the self-activity of our robots; the stupid remarks of the mental robot and the feeling expressions and reactions of the emotional robot. The less we heed such things, the easier will it be for us to tame the beasts. The more we blame ourselves, fretting over such things, the greater is their power over us.
5It is much easier to remain unconcerned by the sayings and doings of other people when you have seen that most of them are largely the victims of their emotional and mental robots whose individually conditioned impulses from the swamp of public opinion they are quite unable to understand and control. They are unaware of their irresponsibility; that, too, is an indication of mankind’s general stage of development. All reciprocal influence is ground and cause of that collective bad reaping of which the history of the last millennia bears witness. No race, no nation is free of implication in the common responsibility for the bad sowing and reaping of most people.
1In esoterics, the monad or self, the envelope, the envelope consciousness, and the content of the envelope consciousness are distinguished. The envelope is the tool of the monad, and the content of the envelope consciousness is the object of the self’s attention.
2The unconscious is all the content and activity of the envelope consciousnesses except the self’s attention directed to and involving some certain content of some envelope consciousness. The envelopes are practically never at rest, since they react to all vibrations pouring into them from the worlds of the envelopes. Those external vibrations are consciousness expressions of other people (the many millions) which are emitted from the individual envelopes night and day like as many active radio stations. Particularly powerful are those etheric waves which are emitted from the proper radio stations and like flashes circulate the Earth. They have added to the strain. When the monad has acquired continuity of consciousness in its envelopes, it can make itself independent of those external vibrations, for then the envelopes react only to the monad’s vibrations. Only then is the monad sovereign in its envelopes.
3Then you see that second selves are protected from the thoughts of men. The disciple, however, is taught how to use a method of calling his own teacher’s attention, a privilege he must not misuse for his own purposes.
1In the subconscious of the triad there are all the experiences man has had and worked up, all the qualities and abilities he has acquired. The triad subconscious is also the sum total of the illusions, fictions, and mistakes in life of past incarnations.
2We overrate as well as underrate the importance of the subconscious. There is so much that is due to the opportunities the new incarnation provides to contact anew what we have once mastered. Being born into circumstances that directly counteract our developed basic instinct, we may go most seriously astray.
3The power of the subconscious is immense, the result of the monad’s emotional and mental consciousness activity in the envelopes – put on and put off – of thousands of incarnations. If, moreover, the basic tendencies of its individual character are strengthened in the present incarnation, that character will not change. A deviating tendency in a new life can make itself felt if it is particularly cultivated, but there is a risk that we in old age “relapse” into old emotionality without noticing it.
4Only thorough studies can impress the esoteric student with the fact that man’s subconscious is an enormous burden to him. It has an automatically degrading effect with its once acquired tendencies from which the individual can liberate himself only after many incarnations of strenuous, purposive work. All the mistakes man has made as to the laws of life in tens of thousands of incarnations (and certainly largely reaped during them), all the superstition which he has accepted as facts and which has misled him and the collectives he has been part of, all of this explains quite sufficiently how theologians could make up their fiction of original sin.
5The subconscious is not, as philosopher Hartmann thought, for ever inaccessible to man’s consciousness, but is the latent fund of experiences he has had in previous incarnations. That fund indicates the level he has reached in development, and its content is roused to life by corresponding experience in new incarnations.
6Psychoanalysis tries to explore man’s subconscious (depositions in layers after tens of thousands of incarnations), particularly by means of so-called interpretation of dreams. To the esoterician, this method is abortive. At best, it can only amount to sporadic divings into the most superficial layers. The results had, which are often symbolical, require interpretation. Without a knowledge of reality (hylozoics), each researcher has its own fiction system to replace the knowledge. Therefore, the explanations of psychological events presented by each eminent researcher must differ from those of the others.
7In order to analyse the depositions of the subconscious you must be in a position to study man’s past incarnations. In each incarnation the individual has new and different departments in his mental, emotional, and physical-etheric envelopes, and the study of departments is of fundamental significance. That is why Leadbeater’s studies of past incarnations cannot clarify the development of the monad’s consciousness. What we above all miss is the account of the contribution to this development made by the superconscious causal consciousness.
1The division of consciousness into different kinds of atomic and molecular consciousness is intended to orient those ignorant of esoterics in a world unfamiliar to them, the world of consciousness, of cosmic total consciousness in which everybody has a share he cannot lose.
2Since the disciple has learnt how to activate ever higher consciousness areas and has made them part of his own monad’s consciousness, all these various kinds make up a unity appearing indivisible, without conscious division into physical, emotional, mental, etc., consciousness. A too-sharp division of the superconscious may present an obstacle to the perception of the pertaining areas of consciousness. It makes it easier to acquire a higher consciousness if you start from the very unity of collective consciousness and do not tie it up in a division into categories. The method of acquiring higher consciousness is individual, due to individual character, departments, control of consciousness, individual attempts at perceiving higher vibrations, experiments with telepathy, etc. It is a strenuous long-term work, perhaps without noticeable results. No effort is wasted, however. It is put down to your credit for the future.
3Objectively, the superconscious consists of long series of vibrational frequencies. The problem is how many of these we are able to perceive and relate to reality we can comprehend. A “soul researcher” may be compared to a researcher in a scientific laboratory where the very consciousness, “perception”, is the object of research. The greater our sensitivity to the vibrations we perceive ever so faintly, the greater our faculty of reception of, and prospect of contact with, a higher reality.
4The acquisition of superconsciousness over incarnations is done step by step to ever higher levels in which every step the individual takes appears to him as a “revelation” of reality.
5It may be said that what we call divination is a stage preliminary to intuition, best understood as an evolutionary drift of the self, a “flair of the soul”, an unceasing, unconscious aspiration to the superconscious or unexplored, a result of the attraction automatically exercised by not yet conscious causal consciousness.
6In order to conceive causal ideas (47:3) man must have activated mental atoms in his mental envelope; and to conceive essential intuitions (46:7), essential atoms in the same envelope. This unconscious process goes on simultaneously as feelers are thrown out to those worlds from the knowledge centre and unity centre of the causal envelope. These feelers can be strengthened through the activation of the throat centre (emotional and mental creativity).
7“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” is a law of life. Constant longing after knowledge and unity must result in a change and transformation of a man’s attitude to life, for this attracts from the causal and essential worlds energies that eventually perform their work of liberation. If in addition you have an ear that is sensitive to the “still small voice” heard in the silence (after the emotional and mental vibrations have come to rest), you will get into contact with your Augoeides. There will not be much left of everything man has till then absorbed into his consciousness.
8At the moment when man decides to live for mankind, evolution, unity, he establishes a contact, albeit unconsciously, with Augoeides, who has long been waiting for this moment. From now on he is able to send down his inspirations (mental thought-forms) into the mental envelope, which is constantly expanding through the supply of ideas from the world of ideas, ideas calculated to be perceptible to the individual, able to slowly work their way down to the brain and the waking consciousness of the self. How long this will take depends on the individual’s interest in putting these ideas into practice, purposeful activity.
9The “sensitivity” to the reality content of the ideas develops automatically. In the superconscious part of mentality there is formed a magnetic area which attracts more and more “ideas” and expands as these ideas are able to penetrate to the waking consciousness via the individual’s heart centre in his etheric envelope, a centre that is vitalized by aspiration to unity, service, and will to sacrifice.
10Much is done in the unconscious when the individual has acquired trust in life and trust in law through his own experience and insight (the exact opposite to the senseless acceptance of all manner of theological absurdities). Then Augoeides will be able to guide the individual, in his mental consciousness and in the protection of the unconscious, according to his possibilities in various respects, above all to increase his understanding of both reality and purposeful service. Our entire consciousness development is an automatic process when we live for others, for things other than ourselves, when we forget ourselves and, being divinely indifferent to our own development, work for what is best for people. If we are anxious about our development this will be a real hindrance to us. The esoterician knows that all this is a free gift from higher kingdoms and that his understanding of life is the result of his forgetfulness of himself and his work for things other than his own self, which is never given attention in unity.
1Until man has become a mental self, his consciousness development is a process that goes on automatically by his having experiences and working them up, by his automatic acquisition of abilities and qualities. This development manifests itself in two parallel processes: consciousness and abilities (qualities) are acquired simultaneously as centres (chakras) in man’s envelopes are activated. The latter process goes on automatically as qualities are acquired.
2If the individual’s attention is called to the possibilities, it may happen that he starts dabbling in the work of the subconscious. For instance, laya yogis believe that they can acquire faculties by directing their attention to the centres of the etheric envelope and so vitalize them. This is the reverse of the right procedure, and a “shortcut” that will prove to be the longest way round. Moreover, it is an exceedingly risky endeavour. Generally, damage is wrought that must be remedied first and then the work must be done all over again in many otherwise unnecessary incarnations. According to esoterics, centres may be vitalized only after they have been automatically activated through the individual’s acquisition of the qualities belonging to the respective centres. First the quality, then the ability. The reverse procedure is part of black magic and, moreover, requires an experienced teacher in one of the secret knowledge orders of the black ones.
3The so-called purification of the envelopes bears upon the matter side of consciousness activation, namely the elimination of the lower molecular kinds that results as attention is consistently and persistently directed to the next higher consciousness. Particularly important is the elimination of the molecular kinds 48:5-7. Those who have succeeded in this are free from influences from those three lower regions and influences of the pertaining vibrations.
4Intentionally Laurency’s writings contain no directions as to methods for the activation of consciousness in higher molecular kinds or worlds. The only exact methods, those approved of by the planetary hierarchy, cannot yet be made public knowledge. If they were publicized, they would, like all other knowledge, be abused to the detriment of life. Only disciples of the planetary hierarchy can receive knowledge of the right methods, and they are silent.
5When the first self has acquired the qualities and abilities that are necessary to his further evolution and he has moreover consecrated his life to the service of mankind, evolution, and unity, he will of necessity become a disciple of the planetary hierarchy. Before then, any method of activation may easily lead him astray.
6It is true that also the publicized part of the esoteric knowledge is always distorted and so abused. However, such distortions can always be corrected for the misguided when they have come into a new incarnation. If the abuse amounts to an all too serious disorientation, the knowledge made public may be taken away from mankind. It has happened before and may happen again. Those who lead others astray by their own speculations must in new incarnations reap their sowing of falsehoods by being deprived of the ability to understand. There are already plenty of such examples in all religions, philosophies, and occultisms. The warning, “Be ye not many teachers”, had a deeper meaning than they have seen yet. The law of sowing and reaping has a much more terrible significance than the one expressed by the somewhat halting symbolic name.
7We are not amazed at the distress of culture in our mankind with such orientations in reality and life as theology, philosophy, and scientific physicalism offer, orientations which on the whole disorient people. Small wonder that consciousness development takes millions of year.
1Meditation is not prayer. Prayer belongs to emotionality, meditation to mentality. Prayer is a demand. Meditation is a mental consciousness process.
2There are different degrees of prayer, demands: of physical benefits and assistance, of qualities, for other people, of knowledge. The highest kind of prayer is devotion, adoration.
3Like all consciousness expressions a prayer has an energy effect for better or for worse. A prayer for your own self strengthens egoism. A prayer for others has at least a good reaping effect (can strengthen unity).
4Prayer need not weaken the will, as Blavatsky thought, unless the individual uses it instead of his own energy. On the contrary, prayer may strengthen the will, if it is done in the right spirit and with a right motive.
5When religious people and mystics pray to god, when they desire or long for god, they conceive of god as a person outside themselves. The esoterician knows about the causal envelope and the triad chain and knows that there is one single consciousness in the universe. He seeks an ever greater share in this universal consciousness by acquiring consciousness in ever higher worlds. He does not conceive of god as transcendent but as immanent. God is in everything, since everything is one consciousness. Therefore, god is not in opposition to the self, but the self is a portion of god.
6If by “god” you mean higher natural kingdoms than the human, then you have the concept of “god transcendent”. When the yogi says, “I am god”, this may mean, either that he understands the unity of consciousness and the unity of everything and that he is part of unity or that he believes he has reached the final goal (the most common mistake).
7Both concepts, “god immanent” and “god transcendent”, are inevitable until the monad has reached the highest, or seventh, natural kingdom. This is implied in the concept of “consciousness development”.
8When human beings pray it actually means that they request of their Augoeides to be assisted in some matter. This is a consciousness expression and as such has always an effect, benefiting or harming the praying man. If the request passes on to the planetary hierarchy or the deva hierarchy (the authorities of law) and is granted, then this entails a charge on the individual’s balance account. Everything we receive we must pay for some time, because everything has its price.
9We have no automatic right to have our prayers answered. If our request is granted, then it usually is due to several factors: that it benefits (a thing we cannot judge), that we have done everything in our power to do for the matter, that it is in agreement with the laws of life, that we have not ourselves put obstacles to its granting, etc.
10We have no right to any other knowledge than the one we can acquire by our own work. If we receive knowledge for nothing, then it is a debt that we must pay like all other debts of life. The law of reaping (“karma”) should better have another name: the law of debits and credits.
11All these things are problems which mankind, strangely enough, has paid very little attention to. The solutions hitherto presented are largely misleading, as it mostly is in theology and occultism.
12Most generally it may be said that every higher kind of consciousness and energy controls the next lower kind. It is quite another matter that if you want to achieve a real effect, you must have a knowledge of the right method. That method can be granted only to those who are unable to use it for their own good. It remains to appeal to Augoeides. The question then is if he can be reached and if he may intervene. Is it allowed by the law of reaping (the reaping taken both individually and collectively), in consideration of benefit and harm, by the law of self? Has the individual done all in his power?
13An “ardent” prayer always has an effect, for it rouses energies and builds a “thought form” that will do its work.
1The mantras we receive from the planetary hierarchy and which it uses daily have the functions of vitalizing, by their vibrations, people’s thinking; of activating the mental molecules in the mental world so that they can be more easily received by those who are tuned to the pertaining wave-lengths; and also of dispelling emotional illusoriness.
2”Let reality govern my every thought, and truth be the master of my life.” Using that motto, renewing it every day, man would reduce fear and worry to a minimum, eliminate all unfounded speculation, assumptions, suppositions and so his sense of being lost in life; his conviction would have a firm basis.
3The simplest, shortest meditation is to say, as you rise every morning, the following mantra: “All life is one. Men are one and I am one with them.” Let this known truth be the motto of your day, and it will not be long until you contact your Augoeides. He is waiting to hear precisely this.
1When man has become a mental self, sovereignly controls consciousness in his emotional and physical envelopes, and wants to develop further, he directs his attention to the superconsciousness and tries to conquer this by meditation.
2In the activated consciousness of the mental envelope there is much that never reaches down to the brain. In the consciousness of the causal envelope there is much that mental consciousness is unable to perceive. Only a few causal ideas become conscious by concretization (mentalization). The mental energies which the monad in the mental envelope has at its disposal are insufficient to activate the consciousness of causal molecules. Otherwise also the black ones could succeed in this in what remains of their triad chains.
3For man it largely remains to work up (meditate on) the facts and ideas he is able to assimilate until he gets into contact with Augoeides. It is necessary that his Augoeides meet him halfway, and he will not do that unless the human monad gives up its egoism and wants to use its causal consciousness only to serve better.
4The kind of meditation (“prayer”) used indicates the level of development, indicates the understanding of the true relations between the various natural kingdoms, indicates the ability to use the energies demanded.
5Egoism does not pay. All such things fall under the law of reaping. Our attitude to things that we all have in common indicates our understanding of life. We are a collective where we are responsible for all. We cannot or will not see that, or we forget it all the time.
6There are many kinds of meditation, adapted to different stages of development, departments, and, in the last analysis, individual characters. The individual adaptation is done by the teacher. There is meditation on the three aspects, on acquiring higher consciousness, on acquiring various abilities, etc. All in higher kingdoms meditate. All processes of manifestation are results of meditation.
7For the mental self to be able to meditate in the right way it must use emotional attraction to seek a contact with the consciousness of unity (essentiality) and use its energies to activate causal consciousness.
8Meditation consists in a series of consciousness expressions, and all such ones have an energy effect. This fact is overlooked by the ignorant who have no idea of what way energies take and how they work. Esoteric meditation must be based on a knowledge of the three aspects and a plan for the systematic carrying through of meditation.
9The process of meditation runs through three stages: concentration, meditation, contemplation. In the actual process, concentration means the unceasing attention of the self; meditation, the direction of mental consciousness to the superconscious; and contemplation, that state in which the esoterician achieves a conscious contact with Augoeides. Until the disciple can reach his teacher directly, the contact with him goes via Augoeides.
10One purpose, among others, of mental meditation and causal contemplation is to bring down ideas into the brain so that they daily vitalize it and thereby automatically do their work.
11In right contemplation a contact with the causal world (world of Platonic ideas) is achieved. Without an esoteric teacher, however, it will as a rule be a contact with the emotional world and the things received will stem from the world of illusions like other irresistible freaks and vagaries, “inspirations” and “ideas”, occult weed in the field of esoterics.
12As teachers of meditation appear too many people who have no understanding of its true significance. We must expect that such teachers will increase in numbers as the interest in meditation gains ground. That, too, may be turned into a business. No truly “authorized” teachers charge people for their work. Nor do they need to, since their needs are provided for in another way.
13You should be clear about the fact that expressions of the consciousness and motion aspects in man’s envelope centres (chakras) are the result of a long process from the initial mere rotation of the “wheel” to the release of the various spokes and their increasingly rapid rotation in ever higher dimensions. All wheels in man’s envelopes of incarnation are nowadays active, particularly those below the diaphragm, though full activity is not achieved until at the causal stage when the central channel (the Sushumna) is opened up for the energies passing between the crown and basal chakras in the causal self.
14As subjects of meditation the following postulates are of importance:
15The powers of the causal being pour uninterruptedly through my life. I sense it in my attitude to life, in the life I receive and which helps me to serve, helps me to see the light in other people.
16The unity energies of the second self going through my heart raise understanding, compassion, and help me to meet all people with love.
17The joy of the soul lightens the burdens of life for myself and for all I meet. “The joy of the Lord is my strength.”
18The will of the higher self becomes my will and fills me with love, peace, and strength to live.
19Augoeides, my soul, my guide, my god, makes me “wander with god” day and night. His nearness is revealed in all and makes me see the godhood in everyone.
1Meditation is a much more serious business than is clear from the many methods recommended in West. There are very great risks involved in engraving psychologically erroneous views into the subconscious. However, also methods that are right in themselves have their difficulties. Periods of activity and passivity are desirable, since man cannot live constantly in a state of high tension. Overstimulation then easily ensues, since the envelopes do not manage to consume downpouring energies purposefully. The change of lower molecular kinds to higher ones in the envelopes also takes time. Depending on the state of the envelopes before the individual sets about to “re-educate” them several incarnations may be needed for this. Nothing is gained with desperate efforts. On the contrary, there is a risk of a setback resulting in a loss of time.
2Instead, the teacher of esoterics advises the aspirant to postpone systematic meditation till a 45-self will assign it to him as a disciple. Only then will he have a meditation corresponding to his individual character, level of development, the departments and constitution of his envelopes. The best meditation is to read something daily in a book of esoteric knowledge and reflect on every sentence. As a rule you make a new discovery every time if you put the sentence into the context where it belongs.
3”Energy follows thought.” Meditation (“prayer”) draws down mental, causal or essential energy from the worlds reached by our thought. It is important that these energies do not remain in the emotional or mental envelope but are used purposefully. Otherwise they may harm the one receiving them. The disciple emits these energy ideas into the emotional world in order to mentalize emotionality and so doing help to liberate mankind from the illusory phenomena that captivate and mislead. He sends them out into the mental world so that those who have the prerequisites of understanding and assimilating them with their mental consciousness have the necessary clarity.
1Blavatsky was no teacher but a magicienne. Also her literary achievements were rather magical feats. Apart from the fact that she was seldom allowed to “say it as it was”, she obviously had difficulty in rightly formulating the answers of questions put to her. Just one example of this is the Sanskrit term, samadhi, on which many expositions have been written without affording any real clarity (not even Besant and Leadbeater from H.P.B.).
2In actual fact, “samadhi” is a term of several different states, which all have in common that the monad in a higher envelope consciously leaves all the lower envelopes. Samadhi of the lowest kind possible for the first self is the stage ensuing when the emotional envelope consciously and intentionally leaves the organism with its etheric envelope, also to enable the organism in this state of deep sleep to assimilate etheric energies for “regeneration”. The highest kind of samadhi possible for the first self is the ability to release the mental envelope and leave the emotional envelope with the organism.
3There are several kinds of samadhi also for the second self. The lowest kind is the ability to release the causal envelope, allowing the entire first self with its triad envelope to lead its own life, while the monad in the second triad moves freely by means of the causal envelope in the causal world. So doing, the second self is better able to assimilate the energies from the third triad and thereupon take up his normal work again with renewed strength. Only this kind is by esotericians regarded as true samadhi.
4Many people have thought samadhi is connected with the faculty of meditation, but they are quite different faculties. Meditation belongs to the consciousness aspect, samadhi to the matter aspect. The yoga philosophers have not distinguished between these two faculties, which is one of the many proofs of their insufficient knowledge.
1Just as Christians daily read their Bible to stimulate their emotional need, the esoterician is wise in daily refreshing his mentality by reading something of his literature. The psychological effect of this should not be underrated. Without a daily repetition you all too easily slip into all the worries of ordinary physical life, and the knowledge will be just a theoretical basis without significance beyond that.
2A diary in which you note all your reflections on esoteric matters, all your unusual observations and experiences, can become a intimate friend to converse with and may largely replace the exchange of views with others who do not have the requisite knowledge or understanding. It will be a good exercise in formulating, concretizing the abstract in the most exact way; particularly valuable for all whose task it is to teach or to report the content of texts. It also makes it easier for you to control your consciousness, to attend to your own thoughts, words, actions day by day. A collection of such diaries can also inspire to a valuable publication in the future when the content has been arranged in a unitary form. At all events such work amounts to a self-activation, which is of value to both emotional and mental consciousness. Experiences had are worked up and are not so easily forgotten.
3A good preliminary exercise in consciousness control is “living in the present” (in the moment), having your attention firmly fixed on physical consciousness, observing the present, not allowing thought to deal with anything else than what you are doing. If you are reading a book, then you concentrate on the content until you have finished reading and go on to analyse what you have read. Thus you are aware of what you are doing and decide for yourself what your attention is to be directed at. By daily exercise this finally becomes an automatized habit. In all such things you have to persevere until you have achieved the result desired. Otherwise there will be no result.
4In many people, the reflective attitude along with a constant recurring remembrance proves to be of greater significance than intensive meditation. It is also less risky, since it does not draw down too strong energies that will not be used expediently. Such an attitude, which is common in the mystics who do not know the right method of meditation, need not at all reduce the efficiency of your daily work and duties. Remembrance recurs upon the completion of physical tasks, when attention is not occupied with those which always must be done before everything else. Duty above all. Anyone who neglects his duties for his so called spiritual work makes a mistake which regrettably is too common. Duty, faithfulness in small things, the basis of reliability, is of fundamental importance to the acquisition of the essential qualities. An unreliable man has a very long way to go to discipleship.
1We all influence each other, consciously or unconsciously; unconsciously by the vibrations of our feelings and thoughts; consciously by our life, our behaviour, our speech. It is easy to lower the level in a group, in a company, for we have, everyone of us, the lower levels in our subconscious (the deposits of our previous incarnations). It is impossible to raise the level unless the people present have reached a higher level. You cannot raise other people’s levels. What may appear as such a raise is the possibility of influencing the behaviour of other people, temporarily raising their emotional level and the subject under discussion.
2Anyone who wants to raise his level must try to live on this higher one in his thought and feeling. Otherwise you will be kept back on your ordinary level. It is not sufficient to make sporadic efforts, some minute of the 1440 there are in a day and night, or a couple of hours once in a week. We must by our thoughts live in the higher whenever our duties do not require our attention. There is sufficient material for meditation in our esoteric world view and life view with the pertaining problems. There is no need for constantly new thoughts. Noble thoughts can be repeated however many times.
1There have always been groups, and at the stage of ignorance (lacking esoteric knowledge) they have mostly been to the detriment of those who have really known. In such groups, as a rule the worst hypothesis has won, since it was grasped by all, or a dominant intelligence has set the tone.
2However, beside degrading mass thinking and psychosis effects there is a related phenomenon which has been too little considered. It is the so-called group power. The collective energies of the collective consciousness are capable of immensely more than the uninitiated (ignorant of esoterics) suspect. If these energies are in accord with the Law, they may effect things that people call miracles.
1At lower stages, people can have the same kind of experience in however many incarnations without learning anything from it. At higher stages, they work up their experiences, which then enter into the subconscious as instincts for future lives. Experiences that are not worked up are practically wasted.
2That people walk through life like mechanical robots is due to the fact that they do not reflect, do not analyse, but are content with ready-made opinions. It is these fictions that blind us to our own ignorance; they replace both ideas and facts. The mentalist has no finished opinions but is rather skeptical about everything in the matter of opinion and uses every opportunity to examine them and analyse them anew. The mental consciousness of most people has a content that is fixed forever, whereas that of the mentalist is always fluid. He has learnt to think, not just to parrot.
3The old contempt for the opposite sex is inconceivable to those who know the significance of the sexes for consciousness development. Do boys who despise girls never reflect on the fact of their own mothers, that they owe their very existence to their mothers, and that girls will be mothers? The usual idiocy or thoughtlessness. People walk through life like mental parrots, repeating what they have been conditioned to say, not using the wee bit of reason they have. Individual, independent thought seems to be a rare phenomenon. Parrotry, however, is among their faculties, and so they think they are very smart. Anyone who has learnt to think by himself is amazed at this stupidity. If people thought, the world would be transformed.
4You solve problems by thinking of them. There are problems that require years or many incarnations to solve. But they must be solved by everyone. The problems that others have solved for you come up again in new lives until you have solved them yourself in new connections. Only what you have worked up yourself you will never lose.
1Every thought has two effects. The one: a mental elemental is formed (a live thought form) that floats out into the mental world and can be picked up by someone who is tuned in to that wavelength (as a rule on a low level, since the thoughts of most people are erroneous). The other: mental vibrations are emitted and can reach many people. This explains our responsibility for what we think. We can by our thoughts benefit our harm both ourselves and others.
2Ideas are powers, forces, dynamic mental atoms, by no means things to play with. They may have a destructive effect both mentally and physically.
3Three esoteric axioms of great significance are: “thoughts are things”, “energy follows thought”, “right motive entails right action and creates right forms”. It will certainly be a long time before people see the truth and fundamental importance of these axioms. To the aspirant to discipleship they demonstrate the necessity of thought control. To this should be added the importance of constantly examining the causes of effects, the consequences, the effects of words and speech.
4”Energy follows thought.” Practising this in fact you should use your imagination to visualize a live picture of what you desire and let this thought form do the work, which it will unfailingly do if you have used the right method.
5You may sometimes hear that amazing phrase, “thoughts are without force”. The truth is that thought is the strongest force at man’s disposal. Thought is the greatest factor of reaping. Thought is the origin of feelings; and feelings, of speech and action. The effect of thought is inevitable even though psychologists are not able yet to see it.
1A fundamental principle to be observed by anyone who is striving to activate a higher kind of consciousness is to consciously refrain from paying attention to the negative apart from what is necessary to explain the positive. The “negative” is taken here in its widest sense to include everything belonging to the life spheres of repulsion, but in addition also whatever is defective, erroneous, unfit for life, ugly. Even if the negative attitude to life tends to suggest us the opposite, there is in the deficient physical world so much perfection, truth, goodness, and beauty that it is quite sufficient for us to fill our attention with. Some examples may clarify what different kinds of negative life expressions we should disregard.
2The serious feature of all misconceptions is the fact that they are reinforced by each repetition according to that law which says that energy follows the direction of consciousness. Since repetition is a universal phenomenon, not least on account of mental and emotional associations, it is practically always hopeless to try to correct erroneous views, which is also clear from the endless disputes resulting in nothing.
3When you have reached the age where habits have become well-nigh ineradicable, old tendencies with faults and failings endure despite everything, it is better to leave them alone, not to consider them, and direct your attention to the qualities and actions of service than waste your time on the negative, which you strengthen by fighting it.
4The art of our times, which through its caricatures and all other twisted things strives to uglify existence, is the judgement on the so-called culture of our times. Like the esoterician, Goethe was wise in refusing to watch anything ugly at all. He coined the expression “eyesore”.
1Sense perceptions, emotions, thoughts, causal and essential ideas make up the totality of the subjective consciousness possible for man. By observing all kinds of impulses and ideas ? from the subconscious, from the environment, from the superconscious ? the individual eventually learns how to distinguish the different kinds of vibrations pouring through his envelopes and brain, he learns to separate these different kinds of consciousness expressions. Thereby he eventually acquires the ability to decide at once from which envelopes and worlds they come. Causal ideas from the world of ideas afford knowledge of material reality. Essential ideas afford understanding of life and understanding of the various consciousness expressions of our fellow human beings.
2By constantly paying attention to these subjective consciousness expressions we learn to live in consciousness and to activate the kinds of consciousness belonging to our superconscious; we develop our consciousness, which is the meaning of life.
3The restless emotional thinking of universal life ignorance produces in the lower regions of the emotional world a continuous flow of vibrations pouring through the emotional envelopes of all people and affecting their subconscious (being unconsciously picked up by the solar plexus centre). The esoterician who has learnt how to consciously apprehend them can also ascertain that those who try to acquire a correct view of reality must wage an unceasing defence battle against those idiotizing thought forms (or depressing moods), until they have liberated their emotional envelopes from at least the three lower emotional molecular kinds (48:5-7).
4Those emotional vibrations should not be confused with vibrations issuing from the planets, so manifestly reflected in man’s states of mind, changing constantly from hour to hour day and night. The Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, and Mars vibrations are the most easily ascertainable.
1Many people eagerly receive the promise of a coming accelerated development. But when it comes to their participation in the realization of this idea their interest and hope are limited to mentality. This may certainly, if it reaches emotionality, strengthen desire. However, when efforts and sacrifices in physical life are required, it all gets no further than to feeble attempts.
2Because it is not consciousness that yields results. True, the idea is the prerequisite, indicating meaning and goal. But it is energy that works the change.
3The man experienced in life has learnt the difference between his youthful idealism with its simple, direct easiness in the mental world, and the difficult art of realizing the ideal in the physical world.
4There is a difference between the theoretical humility sensed when knowing what remains for the first self to acquire and the “humility of the heart”, the self’s experience of being nothing: theory put into practice. The purpose of theory is to enable realization. Most people are happy with their theories and seem to think that “the rest comes of itself in time”, which is the great mistake in life. Without living for realization there will be no realization. Unless the word “meditation” had been so misinterpreted, you would advise people to “live in meditation” when they are not busy with the necessary cares of life. There is much we can do with our thoughts. We can help most people using thought. Every thought is a power, a molecule that goes straight to the goal set. And most people need an addition of power that lightens their burden of life. Also those in the emotional world need this. If thought is mental and not emotional, those in the mental world are reached; an idea to work at in that blissful state.
1German philosopher Vaihinger, who clearly saw that we deal with fictions, called his teaching “Die Philosophie des Als-Ob” (the “as if philosophy”), in which he started from the assumption that we are forced to use conceptions in religion, science, etc., although we know that they are not correct.
2We can use that method even when we consider ourselves to have correct ideas, although we cannot prove it. And that is a method which the teachers in the planetary hierarchy recommend to their disciples, to live “as if” they already were causal selves. The one thinking this is not me, the one feeling this is not me, the one saying and doing this is not me. It is my envelopes, not me. Caution and discrimination must accompany this method, however. It must not be used to shirk responsibility for thought and action; indeed, it cannot liberate us from that responsibility. It does liberate us, however, from identification with our envelope consciousnesses and is the first step to the conscious liberation from dependence on them and to the mastering of them.
3This “as if” can be used in many situations and is of great significance when imagination can help us to act as if we already had a certain quality, etc.
4Even if this method is psychologically purposeful, there are those who find it illogical. They say to themselves: “I am not god, since my monad is centred in a first triad, and you cannot speak of godhood until the monad is centred at least in the third triad. But I can become an instrument of my Augoeides and so remain until I have become a causal self and a second self, and I want to do everything I can, with the assistance of my Augoeides, to become an instrument for him and, in due time, for the planetary hierarchy.”
5It is a fact that all monads are potential gods through their unlosable share in the cosmic total consciousness. It nevertheless appears that the oriental “as if method” is unsuitable as a method of meditation for too-sensitive occidental logicists.
Endnotes by the translator into English:
9.21.2 “A house divided against itself shall not stand.” The Bible, Gospel according to Matthew, 12:25.
9.35.2: “From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”. Bible, Gospel according to Matthew, 25.29.
9.37.4: “Freely ye have received, freely give.” Bible, Gospel according to Matthew, 10:8.
9.42.2: “The land shall be built with law.” From the medieval Swedish Upland Law, recorded in 1296. The same is found in the introductory words of the Preface to the Danish Jutland Law from 1241.
9.49.5 The Schiller quotation: “Weh denen … und Lander ein,” means “Woe to those who give the heavenly torch of light to the eternally blind. It cannot bring them light, can only set fire, and lays cities and countries in ashes.” This is a literal translation that does not emulate the beauty of the German original.
9.58.6 “Putting your talent to good account”. Allusion to the Bible, Matthew, 25:14 ff.
9.62.7 “The kingdom of god is within you.” The Bible, Luke, 17:21.
9.82.13 “When life is at its best…” See note to
9.82.15 The expression “the way of man” used.
9.85.1 “The heart knoweth his own bitterness.” The Bible, Proverbs, 14:10.
9.89.1 “Fools and knaves.” Actually, this expression is first recorded as enounced by George Villers, Second Duke of Buckingham (1628-1687): “The world is made up for the most part of fools and knaves.”
9.97.4 “If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true.” The Bible, Gospel according to John, 5:31.
9.98.2 “Copernicus a coward, Kepler a hypochondriac, Galilei a proudly cantankerous neurotic.” The writer in question is Arthur Koestler in his book The Sleepwalkers.
The above text constitutes the essay The Second Self (Part 1) 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.