[Die Schöpfung aus nichts.]
Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
“Obedient to my will, my nature brings forth all that moves and all that does not move.” Bhagavad Gita. IX. 10
“And God said: Let us make man in our own image.” Genesis
It is one thing to peruse books which deal with spiritual things, and another thing to understand their contents. In our fastidious time of catching everything at once, the moment is too precious to examine closely; one can therefore only look at everything superficially, and therefore one judges most things superficially and wrongly. Science took a great leap forward when it denounced the superstition of creation from nothing, demonstrated that nothing can come from nothing, and that everything in nature proceeds according to the laws of evolution. Unfortunately, she overlooked the fact that the law of evolution cannot produce something high from something that is low, but that something higher that is to develop must be present.
To suppose that something higher could develop out of something lower without that higher already being in the bud would indeed be tantamount to believing in creation from nothing, and it is thus science and not religion that matters depend on this error. A million mindless men could never evolve a mind, but if there is reason in a single man, it can gradually manifest itself in and through him. It does not develop either, it is already perfect in itself, but the form can improve in such a way that it attains ever higher revelation within it. Even life does not generate itself anywhere; it is already in itself what it is and always was; but the activity of life can unfold in an organism that is suitable for this. Life does not end through death, only its divulgence in the body. The clock stops when the gear train is out of order; when it comes to order again, its new power is thereby created, but the power already present sets the wheels in motion anew. Life, like reason, is a thing which cannot be weighed or dissected, cannot be observed through the telescope or microscope and therefore cannot be proved scientifically, it is nothing to modern science.
Had not certain representatives of science presumed to make wrong judgments about such things in the name of “science,” then it would not be necessary to mention this “science” when considering things which do not belong to science at all but only to knowledge. Science deals only with the phenomena of nature, while religion deals with the essence of things. Religion looks at the whole, science breaks it down into its individual parts. First comes the perception; then the dissection. Where there is knowledge of the whole as a whole, all supposed knowledge of the parts is patchwork and not real science. Anyone who wants to judge spiritual things must be capable of spiritual perception.
Master Eckhart says: “God is everything and nothing.” “He is neither this nor that, his quality is essence” (262, 37). “He is the living, existing reason, which understands itself and is in itself, lives, and is identical with itself” (188, 29). “Creation is only God’s introspection of himself; when God introspects himself, he grasps himself as the fullness of ideas, the archetypes of all things. This eternal introspection of himself is God’s creative activity” (241, 8). “God is his own matter and form. Before the creation of creatures he was nothing to them, they knew nothing of him, but in himself he was eternally the same to them as he is to them now and will be forever. Therefore his creature could revealing God when she herself was not” (497, 32).
The same teaching is found in the Vedas of the Indians. The Sāma Veda says: “In the beginning there was nothing. This infinite being itself was. This wanted to be revealed. The egg (the universe) came out of it,” etc.
The whole misunderstanding between science and religion is that science considers phenomena to be essential and does not know the essence of things; Religion, on the other hand, shows us that appearances are nothing other than appearances (ideas), and since these things are nothing essential, nothing essential was done when they were “created,” but things are still today what they were then, namely nothing but a semblance.
In order to be convinced of the truth of the above, we need not believe the word of either Meister Eckhart or the Vedas; we can convince ourselves of these facts, since, like God on the whole, every human being is a creator in his own little world.
If we forget our personal self for a moment and immerse ourselves in the depths of our self-awareness, a world of ideas enters our existence, and from every idea a thought, an idea, an image can develop, which appears objectively, so that we can perceive it within ourselves. There, our ideas associate and produce new thoughts which are tested before the judgment of reason and are either accepted or rejected. Then the evolution of revelation begins within, one thought develops from another through the power of the spirit, and finally an insignificant idea becomes a great idea. All that is immutable about it is the consciousness of being; it neither becomes smaller nor larger, it does not isolate its thoughts, but they exist in it, and we contemplate these phenomena, which we do not think are alien; we know that they are in us and have their dream life through us. Nobody taught us any of this, we didn’t hear it from the pulpit or the lectern, and having read in his book we don’t need any proof of it either, we know it because it’s like that and we don’t care at all what someone else says who knows nothing about our inner processes, may judge about it, in our inner world there is no “other” at all; it belongs to us, and in it we belong to ourselves.
This is roughly how we can imagine it in the macrocosm, and by the law of analogy it must be so. God is the self-conscious being (self-consciousness), the ideas contained in his mind have within them the types of thoughts and conceptions which are eventually born into the outer world and come into existence according to the laws of nature as embodied phenomena. The whole thing is a dream that the world spirit dreams, and God is the silent spectator who sees what is going on in himself, who knows that he is, and needs no other proof than that he recognizes his existence, and who is absolutely indifferent to what the world or science (including theology) thinks of it: after all, he himself is the whole and nothing outside of it.
Among these phenomena, which in themselves are nothing, man occupies the foremost place, because he is “made in the image of the gods,” by which we mean that “man,” i.e., his soul, is capable of making the impression to absorb divine wisdom (self-knowledge), so that the divine wisdom recognizes itself in it; for our own reason tells us that the frail shell of man cannot be the true image of a god. Not the earthly body of man, but his spirit reaches up to the stars; his thought penetrates the furthest distance, his soul embraces the world.
What is the human? —This question, which thousands of years ago the Egyptian sphinx put to those who walked the path of life, and in which anyone who could not solve the riddle sank into the abyss of nothingness, is still relevant today, despite all scientific faculties, is not solved and cannot be solved in any other way other than by man knowing himself. We can say: man is a thing in which deception, four the number of truth, both together make ten, which is the number of union. In ten, unity comes first and then zero. Man without unity is nothing; only connected with unity can he recognize the value of unity and thereby acquire his own value.
In order to gain a correct view of the nature of man, every human being would first have to have attained divine self-awareness himself, only then would spiritual perception, an eternal memory be available to him, only then would he be able to look at the various periods of his evolution, his re-embodiments on the planet, and the intervals between them, because the earthly house that he now inhabits was never there before and therefore also has such a memory. Therefore, if we want to know something about the true nature of the human being even without this personal experience, we must turn to those people who have succeeded in entering this spiritual self-awareness and getting to know themselves. We are then in the case of one People to whom a traveler describes the path he has taken. He doesn’t describe to him what he dreamed or what was “revealed” to him, but what he really confessed, felt, lived through and experienced, and if we’ve traveled a little ourselves, we’ll soon see how far our own experiences match his own. However, such knowledge is by no means knowledge, but it is a light on the path that illuminates the goal we are striving for. The true knowledge, the knowledge of God (theosophy), rests on no other basis than on itself; it does not depend on any opinions, on any belief in the authority of any person, on any traditions, external observations, and the like. There is no accepted article of faith in self-knowledge, no cult of any book or person. It is just as foolish to speak of “followers of theosophy” as of “followers of one’s own reason”. There are “followers” of people who spread theosophical teachings and “followers” of certain opinions. But the one in whom the light of knowledge has dawned is not attached to anything; he has this light in himself and only he is a real theosophist.[2]
But how does this self-knowledge in man come to revelation? How does divine grace break through in him? How is reason born in him?
He does this by overcoming and removing the obstacles which stand in the way of this revelation, the “grace” that fills the whole universe, by opening the windows so that the light that is everywhere can flow in. But man usually only does this when he has recognized the necessity of doing it through his own experience. Let us mention one example out of thousands of such cases:
Man rests happily, or if one has to say “the spirit” of man (Manas) in Devachan. In a rosy light he slumbers and dreams of all that is ideal and beautiful, which was the object of his desires during his dream on earth. He is surrounded by everything he loves, for what surrounds him is the product of his heavenly imagination, and the images he sees are as real to him as his surroundings were in his life on earth. But here, too, the store of accumulated sensations and ideas is exhausted, and since he has not yet freed himself from the attraction of earthly existence through the knowledge of the truth, the hour comes for him when his dream of heaven ends and he returns to his earthly dream illusory life must return. His dissolution approaches and for a moment he becomes one in consciousness with the spirit of the world (planetary spirit) and as such foresees his next life on earth, according to the same law by which, when he died on earth, he looked back over his whole previous life and recognized the reasons for his actions. As a spiritual ray of light rooted in heaven, he lowers his head back to earth and descends to matter. It is the “sacred fig tree” “which has its roots in heaven and whose branches extend over the earth.”[3]
It has now been more than a thousand years since this soul separated from its earthly appearance. When she left earthly life, one by one she took off her earthly garments; now it takes them up again, for even the lower fundamentals, the “flesh” (kāma-manas, astral body) celebrate their resurrection, though the physical body to be inhabited is different. The tendencies and inclinations ingrained in man draw him to a family which corresponds to his character, his karma. In his former existence this person was a prince, but as such he had everything he wanted, found no contradiction and therefore had no opportunity to exercise self-control, he became morally degenerate, and it is a morally degenerate family to which he is drawn by the unchangeable law of the harmony of the universe.
In a corner of a notorious London quarter, a child is born into a beggar’s family. Nobody knows where this soul came from; no one knew the prince she formerly animated. The child doesn’t know either. He smiles kindly because he still feels the echoes of his being in heaven, but soon his joy turns to sorrow. Instead of milk, it is given brandy, which atrophies its brain, and it grows up with scolding and beatings, and is brought up to beg and steal. He knows not the spirit crucified in him, he knows nothing but his own animal nature; the satisfaction of his hunger and his animal passions are his highest ideal. At school he learns what one must know in order to be able to take advantage of others, in religion class he learns what one must appear in order to deceive others. It is true that he is not lacking in preachers of morals, but he has enough sagacity to see that these people themselves do not believe in their teachings, or at least do not follow them. Instead of food he receives pious sayings which have no meaning for him; instead of putting his talents to good use, society throws him out. Also, the whole preaching only appeals to his fear. “If you do this and that,” it is said, “this and that will happen to you,” and he thinks to himself: There is a tried and tested remedy, namely not getting caught.
Now a series of crimes begins, which he does not commit, but civilization through him; for he no longer has free judgment to value good and evil according to their value. The society that dumbed him down bears most of the responsibility for what he does. It is true that the soul bound in him (the human being in him) suffers the unspeakable, but he blames his dissatisfaction, his discomfort on external circumstances, which he now tries to improve in his own way. How should he recognize the suffering of the soul? After all, science has enlightened him enough to make him believe that man has no soul, but is only an improved edition of the monkey race! There was never any talk of a spiritual person.
Outcast by society, persecuted by the police, he becomes an enemy of society and the police; he sees in the wealthy as his oppressors, in those who stand above him as his tyrants. Since he himself has become a deceiver, the whole world is nothing but a great deception to him. By “punishments” his mind is hardened; he learns nothing in the process but the feeling of revenge.
There he may come together with other fellow sufferers and on some occasion he experiences a trait of true humanity, which may well be gradually eradicated by culture, but where it exists it cannot be suppressed. This experience works a greater change in him than all the preaching and punishments have been able to do; he sees a glimpse of his own better nature that makes him think. The magic charm of the good example has shown him the way of self-restraint. He recognizes the abominations of the crimes which he committed but which were morally perpetrated by society, which miseducated and mistreated him. Thus he is exalted by his knowledge, and the animal, which as man was nothing, becomes man, who, when he bids farewell to earth, leaves behind his folly and enters heaven again to enjoy a higher existence. When the forces that he has collected in material existence are exhausted there, he enters it again. The wheel turns in this way until man has come to the knowledge of God. This knowledge of God makes man God; for in his inmost depths man stands in God, and when he recognizes himself in the inmost depths of his being, he is in God, one with God and God himself, because there is no difference between him and God; the one is only one and not two. Thus the thing that was not a man becomes a man, and the man that was not a god becomes a god. Every being consists of the sum of the qualities that belong to it; When such a sum is born into existence, something is created out of what was not there before.
The real man (Buddhi Manas) is an indweller of heaven, his realm is the whole world. The earthly man (Kāma Manas) is an inhabitant of the earth; his realm is the part he plays in a brief existence. One is a son of light, the other a product of darkness (matter and ignorance). Both opposites are united into one in this life, and therefore a constant struggle for existence takes place between the two, in which one always wins and the other perishes. The son of light attains a higher knowledge of his own light nature by getting to know the opposite of darkness; the son of the earth spirit learns nothing; for since he has no light within himself, he cannot see any either. The Son of Light is associated with truth; the son of the earth spirit is a delusion, a nothingness; he has no true self-consciousness; it is only a form in which nature becomes conscious, feels, wills, acts and thinks through it.
The son of earth is earth; the son of light the plant which draws its nourishment from him. Both natures can never be united; only because the one becomes nothing does the other become everything. Just as an animal can never ennoble itself in such a way that it becomes a human being, so the wrong “I” in man, no matter how clever it may be, can never ennoble itself in such a way that it becomes a true I. Its perversity must cease before truth can be born in him, and when truth is born in him the perversity ceases. The truth, the light, must overcome the deception, the darkness, before it can reveal itself in it, and if the light reveals itself, then the darkness is at an end. If the light is to develop out of the darkness, it must in principle be contained therein; if it were not there, it could not appear or become manifest in it. If a human being is to develop from a human-like animal, then the knowledge of human dignity must be contained in him and revealed in him; if a god is to be born out of a human being, then the divinity must come into being in him and attain self-knowledge.
Who would not like to rise to a godlike existence without renouncing the sensual air? The human being born into animal life wants to be born into divine existence. Since, however, an animal’s god can be seen, we are concerned primarily not with spiritual rebirth but with the evolution of a natural human being. Man is only “natural,” i.e., constituted according to his human nature, when the qualities by which mankind differs from the animal kingdom are revealed in him. Humanity in man is nothing for him and for everyone; as long as she does not become self-conscious in him; but this principle, comparable to a seed dormant in the earth, is contained in every human being and can be brought to development with the right care. When it unfolds, an unnatural human being becomes a natural human being, and the more this consciousness unfolds and spreads, the more it becomes one with the one humanity as a whole, until finally in its feeling and willing and perception embraces all of humanity. In this way man steps out of the sphere of egoism, and what is in the interest of all mankind is then his own.
Cultivating this sense of the whole in detail until it becomes true knowledge should be the goal of our world betterment; since only in this way can permanent and general happiness be created. Instead, only the egoism of individuals, classes and peoples is appealed to. But since egoism is a delusion, a peace made in mutual self-interest will last just as long as the interest of one does not outweigh that of the other; a calm based on fear of the consequences of unrest is a stagnation in which there is no progress; a morality based on hypocrisy is an ulcer which festers inward all the more because the pus is prevented from escaping to the outside.
As in the small, so it is in the great, and as in the great, so it is in the small. Greed wants this and that, but avarice prevents purchase, fear of discovery prevents theft; anger flares up, but cowardice restrains it; envy writhes in pain over what another has, but vanity covers it up so no one can see; avarice refuses to give alms, but boastfulness compels him to waste; folly would like to become reasonable, but fashion forces it to remain what it is.
All of these qualities are not human, but animal natural forces which come to consciousness or perception in the human being, on a small as well as on a large scale, it is a fight between different animals that are together in a cage, there is no progress, no development takes place. One passion can transform another, just as heat can be transformed into mechanical power, electricity into light phenomena, but nothing new and better comes out of it, reason cannot be generated from unreason, but reason is contained in a being, then it can be revealed in it, and it is revealed by the fact that unreason disappears. But reason is nothing for everything that is unreasonable; it only exists for us when it emerges from non-being into being, from the non-revealing into revelation, from what is unconscious into our consciousness. In herself she is what she is and eternally was and eternally will be; a state that cannot be produced or developed by something that has no reason, but it only comes into existence when it comes to itself in us, i.e. to knowledge.
There is no other redeemer by which man can come from animality to mankind than knowledge, no other way to come from unreason to reason than reason. A fool who thinks he is wise only becomes a bigger fool and prevents himself from becoming wise. None can create or develop wisdom in the fool, reason in the irrational; one can only remove the obstacles which prevent their revelation. You cannot make a human out of an animal by making the animal believe that it is a human. Only when man becomes conscious of his humanity, he is in truth a man and can redeem himself from the animal; only to the degree that true humanity is revealed in him can he feel belief in humanity. He must become a man before he can really consciously become a man. Only then can the knowledge of God reveal itself in the human being who has become natural. Only then does he come into possession of the spiritual powers, without which there can be no self-conscious magical influence, and without which all study of occult science is fruitless.
No one can know what it means to be a natural human being except someone who has felt, even for a moment, the feeling of true human dignity. In such a moment he is no longer a person restricted by the delusion of special interest, but a being whose body is humanity, who has the interest of the whole at heart and who forgets his own petty existence as an individual phenomenon. Rückert says:
“Eternity embraces eternity alone;
What ever thinks in you must be infinite.
man’s sense of immortality was awakened,
Once only his god immortal he thought.
May he call himself mortal in contrast to God,
He could not separate his own divine from God.
But when he gave form and body to the gods,
Made them into people who just live much longer;
There was a sense of immortality, gone from him,
Only felt clearly again with a disembodied God.”
Every “human being” is a being who is destined primarily for mankind to reveal itself in him. If it were manifest in people, they would all recognize themselves as a single whole without special interests. There would then be no liars and deceivers, no hypocrites and hypocrites, no big and small thieves, no anarchist fools and “anti-Semites” and whatever the vermin may be called, with which the garment of mankind is polluted. One would then no longer use the names “love, justice, altruism, truth, God, faith” etc. abusively, but one would learn to understand the true meaning of these words and act accordingly. As long as this does not happen, external means can have nothing but external apparent effects as a result; the revelation of humanity in man himself is the only force that redeems him from being inhuman.[4]
And just as is the relationship between animals and man, so it is between man and God. There is no gradual transformation of a personality into an impersonal God, nor such generation or development without God. A million godless men in ten thousand years could not create a god that was anything but a product of their own imagination. But when the germ of God-consciousness is in man, the divine in him manifests itself automatically as soon as the ungodly is overcome, and the ungodly disappears as soon as God is revealed in him. As the human appearance is a thing in which the true nature of humanity is to be expressed and revealed, so the true man is a being in which divinity is to be manifested and the ideal to be realized. For this there is no other means than knowledge of God; God only recognizes himself in man when man recognizes himself in him. In this way the human being passes over from the human consciousness to the consciousness of God. Only then does he recognize himself. But then he is also no longer a human being in his consciousness, but is elevated above “himself” and everything, the world of deception no longer exists for him, he “lives” no longer, he is, what he is. There are no words to describe what no one can comprehend other than the infinite itself.
Notes:
[1] Creation out of Nothing. [Die Schöpfung aus nichts. Dr. Franz Hartmann. Sphinx 20, no. 107 (January 1895) 11-21] {This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos. Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}
[2] In order to avoid ever-recurring misunderstandings, it may be permitted to remark that when the author uses the editorial “we,” he is not speaking on behalf of any company, but only on behalf of himself and those associated with him stand on the same point of view.
[3] See: Bhagavad Gita. XV. 1.
[4] This acknowledgment of the unity of humanity in humans is the basis and purpose of the “Theosophical Society” founded by H.P. Blavatsky, and to which access is open to everyone, since everyone can believe what he liked.