Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl^[1]

Motto: “True wisdom comes from God, rests in God and leads to God.”

It is an age-old rule that he who aspires to a high goal should not look back along the way. The shooter looking for other things while aiming will have a hard time hitting the center point. Whoever strives for perfection must keep the highest in mind. When it is achieved, the imperfect will correct itself. Nor is there much use in pointing out the world’s flaws unless something better can be offered. Nothing is achieved by mere scolding, but only arouses the resistance of evil. Those in whom these evils are embodied do not recognize them as evil, and each thing grows by the resistance it is offered. Actual improvement in an evil occurs only when one comes to realize for oneself that an evil is an evil, and one attains his own insight through the knowledge of the good. One renounces the worse when one recognizes the better. One’s own insight and self-knowledge of the highest good, and its exercise and realization in life, is practical theosophy or divine wisdom, which does not consist in lifeless theories, idle contemplation, fruitless contemplation, utopian ideas, idealistic fantasies, etc., but only through actual progress of mankind, can be attained on the way to the highest perfection.

If we stand still for a moment and consider our present surroundings, it is not for the purpose of subjecting present conditions to useless criticism, but to see what progress mankind has made in recent years on the way to divine perfection, and maybe learn something from it. So let’s look down into the depths and take a look at the great tragicomedy in which we, as earth-born people, are forced to play, willy-nilly.

Some things have changed for the better in recent years; but also some old evils have grown and new ones have germinated. The struggle for existence is still raging among the constantly changing forms; personal and party interests vie for supremacy, and the principle of justice looms as a shadow in the background. Every day people are born who, just like their ancestors, will make life miserable for one another until they, too, disappear from the scene of life. High ideals still shine like stars in the sky before the eyes of mankind; but they are just as unattainable as ever. The call for unity and peace is pervading the world, and everyone is ready to heed it, provided their own interests are not harmed. Each would like to unite with the others, provided that the others follow him and do his will.

In politics, violence still prevails, and the self-interest of the parties dictates the laws. Justice and law are opposed to each other. Church interests are at odds with the interests of religion. In some places, the military and civil forces are hostile to each other; in others denunciation flourished. In the north men are preparing for war, and from the battlefields in the south the cries of the wounded sound. Everyone is getting ready for a fight, and the tax press is working with increased pressure. Prisons are overcrowded and anarchism lurks in the background under the guise of philanthropy. It is dark in the prayer houses and the moonlight shines in the halls of the academies. From the torture chambers of the Scientific Inquisition the howls of their victims ring out; the hospitals are full, and the cemeteries, teeming with corpses, proclaim the achievements of medicine.

Greed, selfishness, envy, self-conceit, lust for power, megalomania, and cruelty invade every room, although the doors are locked. Modesty still hungers while impudence feasts. Capital and labor fight each other; the rich steal from the poor and the poor cheat from the rich. The nationalities are at each other’s hair. The truth is persecuted and monuments are erected towards falsehood. This is how the world looks in general.

There might well be occasion for intoning a De Profundis and exclaiming: “How long, O Lord, will this condition last! When will the new Redeemer appear? When will it be perfect on earth?” — But the earth is already perfect enough; people themselves make it hell for each other. For this there is no other means of salvation other than that they should stop doing this. For this we lack nothing else other than the knowledge of the true and the good, and this knowledge we call theosophy.

Indeed, our vaunted civilization has already taken a step towards the better. People have become more polite than they used to be. As a rule, one no longer kills oneself with coarse clubs, but uses long-range artillery and smokeless powder for this purpose. Heretics are no longer flayed and burned, but their position and protection are taken away from them. No more armored robber barons roam the country to forcibly collect toll and tribute from traveling merchants; a painless operation is used for this purpose. No papal court of inquisition claims dominion over souls; but a medical college of cardinals is in the making, which strives for dominion over the body and will prevent people from being masters of their own health. The mind is no longer forcibly stuffed with ecclesiastical dogma; on the other hand, the body is infected with disgusting disease substances; thinking is no longer forbidden, but it is made superfluous.

The world has become more polite, more inventive and perceptive; but whether it has also become wiser and better, we dare not answer this question in the affirmative. Perhaps there were more independent, strong, noble and self-sacrificing people in the rough Middle Ages than in our current weak generation. Where have those gone who, like Bruno and Savonarola, sacrificed their lives for a high and noble principle, and to whom this principle gave their spiritual greatness? Even in our age there are some martyrs for a good cause; but, on examining them closely, many of them have a foul smell. Ambition and vanity also have their sacrificial priests, and one can also die for great stupidity. Glory-seeking and sacrificial selfless love are two different things. There is also no lack of doctors who have invented artificially compounded remedies to cure the world; but these remedies serve at most to cover up suppurating ulcers and to withdraw them from the beneficial action of air and light. Under the protective cover, the ulcer continues to eat away until the whole organism is poisoned.

No disease can be thoroughly cured unless its cause is removed; the external suppression of the symptoms is of little use. The root and cause of all evils, spiritual as well as material, is, as the Buddha taught, ignorance, i.e., the ignorance of the higher human nature, which stands above the realm of appearances and belongs to the immortal. Against this ignorance there is no other remedy than knowledge. This is the panacea that drives away all evil. The knowledge of the truth is the ultimate goal of all education, all religion and science. It is the highest goal of human existence on earth; it and nothing else is “Theosophy.”

What means does humanity use to attain this knowledge and salvation? Nature shows us in examples:

          A fly falls into the water and makes desperate efforts to save itself; but their swimming movements carry them further away from the shore instead of bringing them nearer to it. Already she has almost reached a passing branch; then, foolishly, she turns back and drowns.

          An ant carrying a heavy load finds a blade of grass in its path. But instead of avoiding the obstacle, she climbs up to the top with her load and down the other side. Then it’s roughly where it was before.

          It was so thousands of years ago, and it is so today; not only with flies and ants, but also with man. The human spirit that has fallen into earthly life is in an element alien to its higher nature and has got lost in the multitude of phenomena. He eagerly seeks the truth; but he looks for her where she cannot be found. He searches in great detours for what he can only find within himself, and instead of going the straight way, he keeps turning in circles. This circle is the ever-turning wheel of delusion, which the Buddhist calls “samsāra”; it is the realm of perpetual change of appearances, the perpetual succession of birth and death. Within ourselves is the center, the nirvāna, in which the spirit finds its true self-awareness, its rest and the realization of its divine existence.

This is not the tenet of some domineering theocracy which wants men to draw their need for wisdom not from God, but from the pulpit, that thereby they may attain power, wealth, and prestige. Many enlightened people, such as Molinos and H. P. Blavatsky, have also been persecuted because of this teaching, or burned like [Michael] Servetus. This is not only the teaching of Buddha, Plato, Socrates and Pythagoras, but also that of Christianity, if properly understood. This teaching is the basis of any truth-based religion. It is taught throughout the Bible and is also found symbolically in Christian churches, although not everyone understands the meaning of these symbols. So e.g., in the Dome in Milan, near the high altar, is a stone tablet with the following drawing and inscription:

 

 

CIRULUS HIC SUMMI CONTINET NOMINA REGIS, QUEM SINE PRINCIPIO ET SINE FINE VIDES. PRINCIPIUM CUM FINE TIBI DENOTAT A  Ω.

[This circle contains the sum of the names (revelations) of the king whom you behold without beginning and without end. Alpha and Omega describe the beginning to the end.]

This is the ever turning wheel of time; the misunderstood “prayer wheel” of the Buddhists, the swastika of the Indians. The alpha and omega is eternity, absolute consciousness in the spiritual, omnipresent space in the material. The radii signify the divine forces in nature, which are revealed to us in circles as the realm of phenomena; the P indicates the turning of the wheel caused by the deviation from the straight line towards the center (in the heart). There are eight spokes because eight is the number of the “house,” i.e., of the material; the center is the unapproachable deity in which there is full knowledge and complete rest. Anyone can convince himself of the correctness of this representation if he sees in himself the center of his existence, i.e., God finds in whom is unshakable rest.

But being restless spirits, it is much easier for us to seek God and truth in outward things than to reach the still point in the depths of our own existence. The Jews are still standing at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and weeping over the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. They wet the stone with their tears, not knowing that the outer temple is but a type of the true temple of wisdom within man; that they themselves have destroyed this temple, and that it is in their power at any moment to rebuild it again, without money, and more glorious than the previous one. Many a devout Christian longs to make a pilgrimage to the Promised Land, and cannot grasp the fact that the true, holy, and promised land requires only one step to get there, that the “City of Jerusalem” and “Mecca” Symbols are of the holy place within, where the Christian can see the tomb of the Redeemer and the Mohammedan the coffin of the Prophet, if he looks into his soul with a spiritual gaze. Few succeed in coming to this Jerusalem, preferring to dwell in their beloved Babylon and carry it with them constantly.

The believer in miracles is still looking with the theological telescope for a God who dwells above the stars and cannot find him, because he speaks of the God in his heart who speaks: “I am the truth!” don’t want to know anything. He has probably read the Bible a hundred times, which says: “Do you not know that you are temples of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you; you are.” Since he does not recognize God in his heart, he cannot find him with his head either. The Bible does tell him that Christ in us is our hope and the mystery of our redemption; but these words have no meaning for him. He sees in Christ nothing but an external historical appearance; he does not recognize his being as the deity in all mankind, and therefore his words remain an incomprehensible mystery to him. Some rack their brains about how to go to heaven, not realizing that heaven (as the Bible also teaches) is within themselves; but that he does not go in only because he prefers staying in the temple of Venus. He wants to come to the Father who dwells above the stars, and yet he does not want to leave the stars that have arisen from his earthly desires and sensual desires. So he wriggles about in the murky waters of error. The voice of his reason is the saving branch that could bring him to safe shore; but he turns away from it and looks for an external herald of wisdom, or an intermediary between himself and the divine consciousness slumbering within him, and since no one can prove wisdom to him and there is no such intermediary, he is content with fantasies and fantasies and perishes in the process. This is the fly drowning in water.

Now let’s look at science and its achievements. A great heap of chaff was gathered by the ants, and is of real value to them too, because they are no better than ants. Let’s hope not, once a whirlwind sweeps the pile of chaff apart. Great inventions were made. We have railroads, steamships, cannon, and innumerable other things pertaining to the conveniences and pleasures of mortal life, and if the whole purpose of man’s existence on earth were the gratification of his lust for pleasure, we could only regret that with these improvements the needs have also grown, and the procurement of these takes up all the time and all the energy for many people, so that one has no more time and energy left to calm down. The minor matter has become the main thing; you own and know everything but your own true self. The body chases after its artificially exaggerated needs; the senses are amused, the mind revels in the realms of fantasy, precious time is wasted, the brain is fattened, and the soul starves in the process. Then comes the end, one dies without being aware of one’s true existence, and will not become so after death either.

Also, not everything that is carried into the anthill is food; there are also many poisonous seeds among them. As long as we are dealing with external forces of nature, the effects of which are known to us, we can make them useful to ourselves; but when we experiment with inner forces, of the nature of which we know nothing, and chief among which are man’s will, imagination, thought, and vitality, we run the risk of doing irreparable harm, which happens daily. There are now a lot of knowledge-thirsty people who boast and perhaps also imagine that they want to help people with new discoveries, but who basically only care about satisfying their ambition. Carried away by megalomania, some have lost the sense of the sanctity of life; they regard it as a function of the body and do not perceive it as an outpouring of deity. Obsessed with self-conceit, they do not know love, and therefore know nothing of that spirit which is the source of life in all creatures; they play with the lives of men and animals, rob people of their freedom of will, fill the world with idiots, and in the process, perish morally and spiritually themselves. Love without understanding breeds passion, but understanding without love leads to cruelty, meanness, bestiality and villainy. A man without understanding in love is a fool, but a scholar without humanity is a devil in human form, as indeed there are many who will not shrink from impiety for supposedly scientific purposes, so long as they are safe from the prosecutor or protected by their diplomas. Through their experiments and observations, which, however, lack spiritual knowledge, they arrive at fallacious conclusions and then introduce their theories into practical life, to the great detriment of human health. It is a matter of getting a name, a professorship, a medal, and for this a sensational theory must be put into the world, even if it is based on error. The more it then lacks the inner convincing power of truth and vitality, the more it has to be pampered. The more fate threatens her to disintegrate, the more she needs the protection of state power to keep her alive artificially and to naturalize her. So every year thousands perish from these new achievements of ignorance, and hundreds of thousands drag sick bodies through life as a result.

Incomprehension still reigns as a great power in medicine, because “science” does not know the origin of life in God and his divine laws. It seeks this origin in the broad stream and not at the source. Fantastic dreams appear, only to happily disappear again soon. Thus, the words of Theophrastus Paracelsus, who says:

“What is considered the pinnacle of all knowledge in one century is considered nonsense in the next, and what is considered superstition in this century may perhaps be the pinnacle of all science in the next.”

          In this way, human knowledge climbs over all mountains and ends up where it was at the beginning. This is the ant that laboriously makes useless paths with its burden.

But it is futile to scold about things that cannot be changed, and it would be cruel to condemn these aberrations of the scientific community if there were no better and more direct way to attain higher knowledge. Reason shows us this way, and where its voice is heard, there is no need for further arguments and proofs. It tells us that there can be no true religion without the true knowledge of God, which can only be attained in the sanctuary e of one’s inner being, and it also tells us that there can be no true science without reason, and no perfect knowledge, which is not based on the inner knowledge of the cause of one’s own existence and of the essence of man. This knowledge is the knowledge of truth, and it is identical with the knowledge of God, since God is the truth, the source of all existence and essence in all appearances. Divine love resides in the heart, reason in the head. Love and understanding should complement each other, love of the Divine in all creatures elevating the mind, and understanding infused with the spirit of knowledge enlightening the same; then the truth would be revealed in man. A science without noble feeling is lifeless and without the divine spirit; to an ungodly scholar, in spite of all outward investigations and cruel vivisections, the vital force will forever be an insoluble enigma, and his knowledge a curse to himself and mankind.

It goes without saying that science can only be perfect when it recognizes the basis of nature. The ancient sages teach, and one’s own insight can confirm it, that the basis of nature is a unity for which we have no name, but which reveals itself to us as an inseparable trinity of what we call “matter,” “force,” and “consciousness.” Neither of these three exists without the other, although one or the other is not evident. Just as the coldest thing contains latent warmth, so also, in every thing there is contained a reflection of the eternal essence from which all things came. But where could we come to this being, i.e., come to realize the omnipresence of the one divine Spirit in the universe other than in our hearts, which are great enough to contain infinite love? When we come to feel the primal force from which the whole of nature has emerged with all its powers, its spirit will reveal itself to us and the book of nature will no longer hold any secrets for us. Then we will be masters over still undiscovered and self-confident forces of nature; then science will chain the creative will to its triumphal chariot; then the time of great inventions will come, and their previous achievements will be useless and forgotten children’s toys.

It goes without saying that any science relating to man cannot be perfect and inerrant unless it is based on a true knowledge of the essential nature of man. Occult science teaches us, and our own discernment and sensibility can confirm it, that the body we carry with us on earth is not the real me. It is not ourselves, but only the house that we inhabit during the time of our earth life. It is the garment which man wears, and he is not even wholly in it, but his soul is in and above him, as Plato taught. His mind uses the body as a tool when it is fit for the job and leaves it when it is useless. The visible body is not regarded by the ancient sages as belonging to the constitution of real man, and in fact belongs no more to man than the soil in which a plant is rooted and from which it draws its nourishment belongs to the essence of the plant. His powers do not belong to him, but he is only an instrument in which the forces of nature are at work, and when the invisible man leaves the visible body their unitary activity ceases. These forces belong partly to the great organism of nature and partly to the divine man.

However, this house is the only thing that official science knows, at least superficially, because basically it doesn’t even know the nature of the material body, because it doesn’t know what “matter” is at all. She knows the composition of its visible parts and the sensible functions of its organs. In fact, she has already achieved great things in it, but she knows neither the “spiritual” human being, nor the only “spiritually” perceptible organs through which the invisible human being is connected to the visible body, and their forces as the condition of the activity of the visible organs. The human corpse is the god before whom rationalism kneels, and whose well-being is its supreme concern. Therefore, she cannot recognize the true human being. She made the minor matter the main thing and forgot the main thing about it.

But how could a human being recognize the true nature of the human being other than by recognizing his true nature in himself and becoming aware of his true existence. Knowledge of external phenomena is gained by observing such phenomena; it is a knowledge of appearances and probability, and therefore a pseudo-science. True knowledge is attained only through self-knowledge. Thus we see that science too strives in vain to seek in external things what can only be found within oneself. It seeks the truth by long detours and cannot find it, because man cannot recognize the true nature of things unless he has found his own true nature, the nature of the deity, for only in this is the knowledge of the truth contained.

None of this is taught in universities. There, the belief in authority sits on the lectern, and reason is chased out of the lecture hall. As a rule, one’s own insight counts for nothing; it is only a matter of knowing what is in the authenticated books. If you know what this and that author said or meant, then the examiner is satisfied. A mountain of other people’s opinions accumulates in the student’s head. He himself only believes what others claim, i.e., the semblance captures the semblance; the lights which others have kindled are reflected in his brain; in truth he himself knows nothing, and cannot know anything; for as long as he has not attained real self-awareness, no real individuality has awakened in him at all, and he cannot know anything himself; it is like a bag that holds together many nice coins, but has no value itself.

The inner value and content of a man does not consist in his wealth of theories, but in what he himself has become through his own experience. If his mind is rough, he can show roughness; if it is animal, he is an animal and can only appreciate the animal. If his mind is ennobled, he is noble and can feel noble things. If the divine in him has come to revelation, then his being is divine and he can think, feel, want and act in a divine manner. The mysteries of God become clear to man not through mindless brooding, but through the ray of light of knowledge of God, which penetrates into the soul of man. They are the keys to knowing the mysteries of nature, while these are only pointers to the mysteries of the God-man.

This is not to be taken to mean that belief in authorities and teachings is of no value to anyone. Not everyone is able to think for themselves. Spiritual anarchism is just as reprehensible as spiritual tyranny. In order to help us on the way to attaining self-knowledge, acquaintance with the experiences of others should serve, but not prevent one’s own knowledge. Propositions and the like are a means to an end, but not the end itself. They are signposts to the goal, but not the goal itself. Whoever wants to reach the high goal of self-knowledge, which is the knowledge of God and the knowledge of the truth, must keep this goal in mind on his way, i.e., he must have God in his heart, and honor the truth, that by the power of God his mind may be ennobled, and truth in him revealed. This will probably only be doubted by a few, but also only a few notice it; most only after authority and articles of faith; they make the minor matter the main thing, and the main thing remains unknown to them. True religion should come to the aid of science, and true knowledge permeate religious doctrine; then heart and head, mind and spirit would complement each other, and the way to perfection would be open. But by the “true religion” we do not mean a church that only knows the outer shell and deals in dead forms and letters, but that religion which has at its core that divine power that connects man with God, namely Divine Love.

Millions of people have lost their lives, instead of reaching for the truth themselves, arguing about whether this or that religious system is better; whether one should accept this or that theories and articles of faith, and still people cling to external forms, which yet are constantly changing, and they do not recognize the spirit exalted above all form. However, the best system and the best-founded theory is not yet a truth, but only a form to make the truth recognizable. She is not the wine but only the vessel. It is better to possess wisdom than to believe that it is possessed by this or that. It is better to recognize the presence of the Trinity within yourself than to have a theory as to what the Trinity is.

On the other hand, there is a certain class of people who reject all forms because they do not see the spirit therein. Good wine is served to them, but they only see the undrinkable bottle and throw it away. They fancy themselves freethinkers and despise the teachings of those who have more experience and freedom. They reject all authority, imagine that what they hold to be true is really absolute truth; they kneel before the idol of their own imagination and worship it. Their own ignorance is their supreme authority. They are like those who tread pearls in the dung because they do not see their worth. The religious symbols are particularly troubling to them because they don’t understand their meaning. In a painting you don’t see what it represents, only the frame and a piece of painted paper.

Being a real freethinker is a different thing altogether. No one can think freely so long as he is bound by prejudice and error. Only knowledge of the truth makes thinking free. The power of spiritual faith, selfless hope and all-encompassing love lead to her. A real freethinker is a saint, an exalted one, an enlightened one, who neither rejects nor is subject to forms, but recognizes in them the spirit of truth. He himself no longer needs them. Such a person is seldom found. Free from selfishness, self-conceit, vanity, greed, and self-interest, he discerns truth both in the forms in which it appears and in the unmanifested. In itself, considered as form or person, it is nothing; on the other hand, it is the light of truth that shines in him and gives him his spiritual greatness. The conceited freethinker regards his transitory ego as a god, his own will-o’-the-wisp as the light of truth, and he believes that truth is his personal property and that he can dispose of it. He places himself above truth, yet lives only in the light of deception and leads others to error. Such people may destroy, but they do not build. They destroy the forms and with the form the spirit disappears.

The spirit that has outgrown forms and has come to self-knowledge no longer needs forms, but the formless is difficult to recognize. No one can surpass a thing until he is equal to it. The chick needs the egg for its development; but once it has become a hen, it no longer needs the shell. The shell is secondary, the bird is the main thing. The lame needs crutches so long as they cannot stand on their own two feet; but when he is healed, the crutches are a hindrance to him. In the forms we get to know the spirit. But if we look at the form alone, it prevents us from seeing the spirit. A literal belief in fairy tales prevents us from understanding their meaning. A superficial interpretation of religious allegories opens the way to the greatest aberrations of the human mind. It’s like judging a person’s spirit from the mask the person wears. The more one holds on to the form, the more the principle disappears. The more we concern ourselves with the personality of a world redeemer, the more the high ideal which is realized in his person disappears before our eyes. The personality is the mask, the individuality is the human being. Many masks are born, live and die without an individuality emerging in them. The wisdom of many consists in believing that they can save themselves from thinking and go to sleep in the certainty that this or that theory is correct.

This may also be applicable in everyday appearances and familiar things. We believe in the existence of lands which we have not seen ourselves, and in the workings of some machines which we have not examined; but assuming it is true is not self-knowledge. Of what use is it to me to believe in the correctness of certain opinions and theories of philosophers about immortality as long as the consciousness of immortality has not awakened in me. Belief in the correctness of a theory about immortality is not belief in immortality itself. Belief in the veracity of the biblical story relating to Jesus of Nazareth is not belief in Christ himself. Belief in a story cannot make us redeem; the narrative is meant to lead us through form to the knowledge of truth. A picture is not the object it represents; it only serves to give a testimony of what can really be there. The best theories about life are of no use to a dead person because he himself has no life, and the most beautiful dreams, no matter how “real” they may appear to the sleeping person, are not reality for the waking person. Images are nothing more than representations. Likewise, the religious symbols and allegories are nothing other than external signs of inner truths, which everyone can find within themselves if they are not too lazy to do so. These symbols should not be discarded because their meaning is not readily apparent; nor should one be satisfied with a spiritless contemplation of them and a belief in the representation. Because we ourselves find the secret hidden in them, this is awakened in us. We ourselves should become living testimonies of the divine.

There is no other means of knowing the truth than the revelation of the truth within ourselves. This revelation is not to be confused with a so-called “revelation” by others. No man can reveal the truth to another; because then he would have to be higher than the truth. What one person can reveal to another is nothing more than probability, because everything on the outside is only appearance. The teachings of another may serve to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of our own knowledge within ourselves, but our knowledge comes only when the truth is revealed within ourselves. It cannot be attained through alienation or ecstasy. No entreaties or threats bring them down to us. Clear insight and understanding cannot be funneled or created artificially. He who is wrong himself sees everything wrong, but to those who love truth for its own sake and avoid error, it reveals its face.

Many think they love the truth and yet they love only themselves. They want the truth to glorify themselves, they love not the truth but the benefits it brings. But the truth is a jealous woman, she does not tolerate rivals beside her; she reveals herself only where she can rule alone as queen; it only surrenders to those who surrender to it completely and without ulterior motives. No one is master of them, and therefore no one can express them, one can only point to them; it expresses itself in the heart of man. No one can prove it, it proves itself by its existence, and where it is not recognized there is no proof of its existence; for even the best proof is worthless if the truth contained in it is not recognized. All proof is useless and no proof unless it is based on a truth that is self-evident and needs no proof. Proofs are for the blind and the ignorant; they are means by which one infers the existence of truth which one cannot see; Whoever sees, feels and recognizes does not need further proof. The truth is always self-evident. That in man which has no truth within cannot recognize any truth. The truth recognizes itself in him as in a mirror, and in this way alone does he become acquainted with the truth. Arguments and teachings only serve to wipe the dust off the mirror of the soul; every theory and dogma has value only when the truth itself appears and reveals itself. Without this confirmation, all church life and all know-it-all is just a pseudo-religion and pseudo-science.

The revelation of the truth within is the only true initiation, which cannot be replaced by any mumbo-jumbo. Through her grace, she instills in man real nobility which needs no artificial markings. Through her revelation she stamps man into a living testimony of herself. She is the bride who needs no embellishment and who cannot connect with lies. She is the soul of souls in all things, pervading everything, the reality and essence of everything. When everything that is not true is removed, only what is true remains.

Truth is patient and grows in silence; the lie is domineering and makes much noise. From lying springs the delusion of selfishness, selfishness and vanity, with their attendants of greed and curiosity, lust for power, intolerance and cruelty. The truth in religion and science needs no defense, it conquers as soon as it appears; error and delusion are always concerned for their lives and fight for their existence. The truth is the essence, the form is an illusion. Where a form is born, its struggle for existence begins; there, their self-interests appear and become enemies of the truth. The truth has no interests of its own; she does not ask to take, but gives. She strives for nothing but the revelation of herself; but forms, churches, and systems have their own interests, and these are as different from truth as the shell of the egg is from the egg, though not everyone knows how to distinguish between the two. In every religious system there can be truth; it’s just a matter of finding them. It is therefore not necessary for anyone to convert from his religion to another system, provided he can discover the truth in his own system.

From all this it is sufficiently evident that the attainment of the self-knowledge of truth, the true wisdom of God, or theosophy, is no easy matter, for it is less a matter of learning theories than of spiritual growth and refinement of the mind. In order to thrive, spiritual growth requires other nourishment than theories and opinions, suppositions, beliefs and delusions. Just as the plant needs sunlight, so the soul needs the light of wisdom, the Holy Spirit of knowledge, of whose existence science can know nothing, because it is just as infinite and omnipresent as the light of the sun in cosmic space, but science is limited. “The truth makes you free,” says the Bible. “In the knowledge of truth lies freedom; but it is a fruit that ripens high on the tree of life, and not everyone is tall enough to attain it. External scientific achievements, however valuable they may otherwise be, are not of much use to us, nor is self-conceited morality. Great learning is not always free from great meanness, rudeness, lovelessness and villainy, and among the greatest criminals one can often find much shrewdness and knowledge. But as far as morality is concerned, the Bible says that there is no one good but God. Whoever recognizes God in his heart, God’s goodness is revealed in him; whoever thinks he is good without God is wrong. It is not about intellectual knowledge of an external God, but about that knowledge of God which is love and without which there is no goodness. Even the most ungodly man can become a scholar; but in the wisdom of God, knowledge is conditioned by becoming. One cannot truly know oneself as something, what you are not really yourself.

Each level of existence has its own state of consciousness, sensations and perceptions. For an ox only the sensual exists, the realm of the intellectual has no existence for him. For a man who lives only in his brain, there is nothing higher than logic; he knows nothing of the kingdom of knowledge, which is the kingdom of God. The mole lives in the earth and knows nothing of the stars; the eagle swarms in the air; he sees the stars above and the earth below; the man who has come to the knowledge of God recognizes heaven and earth in himself as a part of his being; his existence encompasses the universe.

This divine self-knowledge is an unknown thing to rationalism, because the limited cannot grasp the limitless, and it cannot rise above the realm of objective research. Theology asserts that no one but God can fathom the divine mysteries, and that therefore they are inscrutable to man, and it conceives of God as a divine being separate from man. She would be right if man had nothing higher than his earth-born spirit of inquiry and if God were a separate being from man and remote from him. But since the divine nature in man is connected with the earthly nature, this higher divine nature can be revealed in man, and through this man attains that power of knowledge, by means of which he himself becomes a spiritual participant in the divine life and the mysteries of God’s nature experienced in the universe in oneself (in God). This power of higher divine knowledge is called “faith” in the language of Christendom, a word so often misunderstood because no one can comprehend true spiritual faith unless he has this power within himself.

This belief in the power of wisdom is all that mankind needs for salvation from the depths of ignorance and the hell of error. It has nothing to do with attachment to external forms and the empty acceptance of dogma; he is the elevating power of higher knowledge itself, through which we attain a higher level of existence where that knowledge takes place of its own accord; it is, as the Bible also teaches us, the divine life within ourselves.

How can man attain eternal life and the knowledge of God? The Christian religion, if rightly understood, gives the direction. But we don’t want to expose ourselves to the suspicion that we want to meddle in the work of the Christian pastoral workers. Those who find the truth in the Christian systems need no further instruction. Those who are not satisfied with its teachings may find better success in the study of the Bhagavad Gita and in contemplating the teaching of the seven principles in the constitution of man which are clearly and distinctly described by H. P. Blavatsky.

If we want to come to an understanding about man’s relationship to divine existence and its higher abilities, we must first of all determine what we mean by the term “man” and whether we are referring to the divine, seeing and self-aware, inner, or the mortal, personal, inquiring, seeking, desiring, intellectual, and animal part of man, for the faculties of divine man are vastly different from those of the personalities which he overshadows, and what the one already is and has himself is for unattainable to others. The reason for most misunderstandings lies in the fact that people have different concepts of one and the same thing, whereby everyone then judges what he sees from his point of view from that point of view. Man is a composite creature. The consideration of a part of his nature gives us no insight into the whole. It can only be considered as a whole when it has become a whole, i.e., when the personal man has been imbued with the nature of the divine man, has come into full agreement with him, and has thereby become one with him. The individual may already achieve this now; there is still a long time to go for the large crowd to do so. But everyone is free to make a start.

The first condition for the absolute knowledge of truth is the ability to distinguish between the eternal and the transitory. Sage Sankaracharya [Śaṅkarācārya] taught this more than two thousand years ago. The God-man dwells in the light of knowledge, the animal man in the darkness of ignorance; the God-man lives in truth, and the true is himself. The man of the earth dwells in the realms of sense, conception, and dreams. The ephemeral achievements of this ephemeral world belong to ephemeral man. God in man has nothing to do with animal sentiments, political interests, ecclesiastical affairs, and science so long as men remain alien to their indwelling divine nature and unwilling to awaken to true consciousness, and man cannot set divine forces in motion until they are have come to consciousness in himself. Those who do not have God within them will never recognize him. God is unity, and in nothing other than the knowledge of God, i.e., in knowing the truth men can find their lasting union. In the knowledge of the higher human nature in ourselves and in everything lies the cessation of all strife and happiness in heaven and on earth.

“Ekam sat virapa [viprāha] bahudhā vedanti”^[2] says the Indian sage, i.e.: “That which really exists is One; The wise have different names for it,” and the Christian mystics teach us: “He who knows God the One, knows all things. He who thinks he knows many things really knows nothing.” This means that in true self-consciousness all things are revealed because God is the true self of all things and the origin of everything, while things are in themselves and without them underlying divine beings are nothing but deceptive appearances.

The only thing that can awaken man to true self-awareness is the divine spirit of wisdom. Whoever wants to grasp this holy spirit, which cannot be attained through brooding and research, nor through dreaming and raving, nor through blind faith in authorities and dogmas, must renounce self-conceit and selfishness, because these qualities are forces that Prevent the influence of the spirit of self-knowledge and stand in the way of spiritual development. He must learn to dominate his lower nature through the higher, to subdue his petty ego, so that the true self can be revealed in him. The Spirit of God in the universe is one and indivisible. In this spirit man becomes one with the power that permeates the whole world and knows the whole, not as a man in earthly terms, but in God.

I believe in the law of gravity. Although the greatest scientific authorities have not yet given me satisfactory information as to its real nature, although it has not been isolated and exhibited in the museum, and has not yet been seen by anyone, I am convinced of its existence. I recognize them in their effects on external things and feel them in the weight of my body. I believe, without argument or evidence, that it is she who binds my body to the earth. There is no scientific evidence that it might not one day cease to work, in which case we would all be hurled into the infinite depths of space; yet I am not frightened at the sight of the bottomless abyss that stretches over us. The safety of our lives depends on gravity, and we all, without even thinking about it, take refuge in the law of gravity.

What gravity is in matter, the power of the spirit of God is in the universe for the soul. This force is the love that holds all worlds together, and I regard gravity as the outward effect of it in matter. No academic has yet scientifically and evidently demonstrated to us the nature of love. It has never been isolated, for it permeates everything; nevertheless we recognize its existence by its effects, and whoever is able to feel it feels it within himself. It is that which elevates the soul to higher existence, draws it to its divine origin and unites it with it. In this return to its origin, which is love, the soul finds rest. Just as the body is attracted to the earth and finds rest in it, so the soul finds rest in the Spirit of God even while it is in the body. It is drawn up to divinity because it is born of the divine will, and the divine will is the ground of its own being. The divine will is the all-unifying divine love, which could not be divine if it were not infinite and embracing all creatures. It is the awakening self-awareness of God in man, from which the true knowledge of God and inner peace spring.

Selfless love unites everything. Knowledge that is thoughtful of itself leads to error and strife, and in this strife victory, i.e., the overcoming of error and the knowledge of truth. Everything is contained in the inner awakening of the soul to the consciousness of its true divine nature, everything external is only a means to achieve this end.

Anything spoken or written about these things has value only if it serves to stimulate us to absorb the spirit of love and wisdom and to enable us to be awakened. Just as the light of the sun penetrates into all open spaces, so too, the light of knowledge and the warmth of love penetrate into all hearts that open themselves to this influence. Through this light we gain the ability to discern principle from form, spirit from matter, truth from illusion, imperishable from perishable, permanent from impermanent. In this light we see that the evils which oppress the world are but temporary phenomena of our own making, that all so-called reality is a delusion, and that real life is found only in the knowledge of God in man. In this light we take refuge, that it may shatter the mists of error, and before we bid farewell to this life, through this light we may come to the true knowledge of the higher existence in the light.

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Popular Lectures. II. Death, Reincarnation and Transmigration of Souls by Franz Hartmann, M.D.^[3],.^[4]], ^[5]

The reincarnation or re-embodiment of the human soul means the reappearance on the stage of life, the spiritual individuality of man in a new physical and personal appearance on this earth or another planet, after the previous human organism in which the soul inhabited has become useless for its purposes. The most perverse views prevail about the doctrine of reincarnation, because some of our modern scholars and orientalists who write about it misunderstand it, and confuse it with what is called “transmigration of the soul,” imagining that the soul of a man (and heaven knows what they mean by that) into another human or animal. This would at most be called “obsession” but not reincarnation.

If we want to understand the reincarnation of man, we must first of all recognize what sort of things the human organism is composed of; for though man is a unitary being, yet his physical and psychic organism is a compound thing, in which various elements, not separated locally, exist as units in a unity. If we ask the chemist, he tells us that the human body consists mainly of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. Of these the first three are in the normal state gaseous in nature, and we may therefore regard man as we see him as composed of gases condensed or incarnated in him. The anatomist views man as a composite thing made up of bones, muscles, tendons, blood vessels, nerves, and various other organs. None of them is in itself a human being, but all together make up the human organism, and none of them is dispensable.

The occultist stands at a higher standpoint, he sees man not only as a material but as a spiritual being, and he distinguishes the following elements in him:

1. 1. 1. Material nature or the visible body made up of sensible substances. It corresponds to the realm of matter in the visible world.

1. 1. 2. The life energy [prāṇa], which expresses itself as vital activity in the various organs.

1. 1. 3. The etheric or invisible “astral body” of man [liṅga śarīra], which is the basis of the visible body. There is such an invisible foundation in every thing.

1. 1. 4. The human animal nature from which spring instincts, desires and passions. This is the “animal soul.” [kāma rūpa]

1. 1. 5. The intellectual nature, the seat of intellectual activity, speculation, research and imagination. This is the “human soul.” [Buddhi manas]

1. 1. 6. The human-divine nature, which is the seat of intuition, direct knowledge of truth, and higher enlightenment. This is the “heavenly soul.” [Buddhi]

1. 1. 7. The divine spirit [Ātma], i.e., the true self-consciousness, which knows no egoism and embraces the whole world and all creatures in unselfish love.

Whether this division is correct, everyone can convince himself if he investigates himself and recognize themselves, but I do not mean to say that it is easy for everyone to awaken and recognize the divine nature that is dormant in them, because otherwise it would not be said in the Bible: “Do you not know that you are temples of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you. You are.”

The four first principles belong to the mortal nature of man, in other words to the “flesh,” the two highest to the divine life, the spirit. Through the fifth, which in Indian is called manas (mind), the immortal is connected with the mortal, i.e., higher and lower soul forces exist in the human soul; true knowledge of the eternal and ephemeral dreaming and research are connected with one another in the soul. Goethe expresses this in his Faust in the well-known verses:

“Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast, one wants to separate from the other.” etc.

          They are, as it were, the two poles of the soul, each gravitating towards its origin; the heavenly after the eternal, the perishable after destruction. Every thing seeks stillness and finds it in the source from which it flowed; the divine spirit in God, the earthly and ephemeral in the material and in ephemerality.

The inclinations, talents, desires, traits of character, etc., pertaining to the mortal nature of man are called Skandhas by the Buddhists, “the flesh” by the Christian mystics. When the Christian says in his creed: “I believe in the resurrection of [from] the flesh,” provided he understands the meaning of these words correctly, he expresses his belief in reincarnation just as the Buddhist does, who says: “I believe in a reconvening of the skandhas; for it is not the physical or psychic organism of man which migrates into a new-born body, but the spiritual elements which represented man’s former personality as an individual character naturally build up a new personality, a new house, which they inhabit again. Thus the spirit and soul forces of man appear in a new appearance, like an actor who is always the same man, even if he appears on the stage on different evenings under different masks and plays different roles, one after the other.

In order to form a correct idea of ​​what is happening during reincarnation, we must be able to distinguish between the general invisible principles or forces, and the forms in which they are manifested. Every development of a form is a re-embodiment of liberated forces. A block of ice melts and turns into water, the water evaporates and becomes invisible; the water vapor in the air becomes fog again, the fog gathers in clouds, forms rain, falls to the ground, gathers in puddles, and freezes back into ice. It is similar with the higher principles, forces or substances which we call “immaterial” because they are not visible and tangible to our external material senses. Just as the water in a block of ice was not created by the block of ice, so life in a living form is not created by that form, but the unified life energy or life force common throughout the universe manifests itself in a suitable organism, which it builds itself as its vital activity and thereby makes it alive. So it is with the higher principles. Matter is built up by the realm of material elements in nature; in other words, the realm of matter embodies itself in an evolving form that is nourished by the material in nature; the ether nourishes the ethereal, the life force in nature nourishes the living; the forces which represent instincts and passions, and are termed “Elementals,” enter the minds of man and beast, and nourish and augment their desires and passions; the intellect of man gathers its thoughts from the realm of ideas and is nourished by them; ideas large and small are thereby embodied or “reincarnated” in him. Likewise, his immortal soul is nourished by the knowledge of truth, his divine spirit by the holy spirit of wisdom in the whole divine nature.

We need not believe blindly in reincarnation, nor look to “authorities” who claimed it; all we have to do is open our eyes and look at what is going on around us and within ourselves at any given hour, and we have before us all the evidence we can think of. We just have to free ourselves from the delusion that a dead form can generate living forces from itself. We must take the standpoint of the great sage Sankaracharya [Śaṅkarācarya], who taught more than two thousand years ago that the first condition for realizing the truth is the possession of the ability to distinguish the permanent from the non-permanent, i.e., to distinguish the invisible force or principle from the ephemeral form in which it is manifested or embodied. We must take the opposite view of that modern ignorance which imagines that the human body creates life, intelligence and spirit, and learn to see that it is the spirit which creates the human body, in which life, consciousness, intelligence and knowledge are revealed.

To avoid any misunderstandings, we must note that when we speak of “matter,” “force,” and “spirit,” or “consciousness,” we do not mean by this the separate and self-existing things, but these three names are only designations for three forms of ideas or intuitions which we form of the eternal unity for which there is no name and which is the essence of all things. One might perhaps refer to this all-encompassing and all-pervading entity as “God”; but even this designation is imperfect; for apart from the fact that there is no human conception of “God” because the limited intellect cannot comprehend the limitless, and a God that a man could comprehend would be inferior to a mortal man, is also a unity of matter, force and latent consciousness is not yet a god, any more than space itself is a deity. Only that being can represent a God in which the consciousness of God has become alive.

Modern material science has come to recognize a truth preached by the sages thousands of years ago, that there is no matter without energy, and no force without matter. But the occult science taught by the sages also tells us that there is no force or matter without consciousness (spirit) and there is no consciousness without force and matter. Just as latent heat is contained and can be developed even in a block of ice, and steam-power in a drop of water, so too is consciousness contained in everything and is manifested by its being awakened.

In the same way, a spark of God consciousness is contained in every human heart and is revealed in the human being when it is awakened. Were this not the case, the deity could not incarnate in him; the Spirit of God could not nourish him, and he could not become the image of God or a symbol of Godhead, which is the supreme purpose of his existence on earth.

Let us now look at the process of human reincarnation as it unfolds before us in everyday life:

1. 1. 1. The material principle. When conception has taken place in the mother’s organism, a center of attraction for material forces is created. The life elements of nature act upon it through the mother’s organism, nourishing and developing the nucleus, and material nature embodies itself in it, forming a new human form. The child’s parents are the mediators of this reincarnation, and it depends on their state of health whether the child brings a healthy or a sick body into the world. This process has nothing to do with the spirit of the child. When children develop character traits resembling those of their parents, the cause of this, as we shall see in what follows, is quite different.

1. 1. 2. The life force. As long as the child is contained in the womb or is nourished by the mother’s body through the umbilical cord, it has, so to speak, no life of its own; but as soon as it begins to breathe, it also begins to live for itself, i.e., the uniform life force spread through the whole of nature is partially absorbed by him and reveals itself in him as his own life force and vital activity. If the child’s organism did not contain a point of attraction for the life force, it could not absorb life either. But this attraction or seed of life is the spirit of life itself, which springs from the source of all life. The spirit of God in the universe or the spiritual life force is called “Jīva” by the Indians; the material life is its reflection or mirror image and is called “Prana.” By having a spark of ‘Jīva,’ ‘Prāṇa’ comes into action and life and consciousness are manifested in man. Man’s spiritual individuality consists in this spiritual-divine spark of life, even if it is still dormant. This spiritual life is also contained in all things; for all things are formed of the Word of God (1 John 1:1); but not every organism is suitable for the Spirit of God to be revealed in it.

1. 1. 3. The etheric body. Simultaneously with the development of the material, visible body, the etheric develops; for without the latter the former would not exist, because the visible body is but the material appearance [densification] or larva of the etheric body. There is thus an invisible incarnation of ether atoms at the same time as the incarnation of the material atoms. This is not the place to go into the properties of this so-called “etheric” body or “double.” The Indians call it Linga sharira [liṅga śarīra] and it plays a major role in the spiritualist phenomena. Since this etheric body can, under certain circumstances, emerge from the material body and appear objectively, even become externally visible and tangible, many people think they are dealing with ghosts or “spirits” of the deceased, while it is only their own etheric reflection which is the cause of such phenomena during mediumship.

1. 1. 4. The animal nature. [Kāma] No sooner has life, and with it sensation and perception, entered the body of the newborn child than the animal nature embodies and grows in it. Hunger and thirst and the craving for shiny things set in; the animal in man longs for this and that; the struggle for existence and pleasure begins and increases with age. Every awakening passion feeds on its like elements, and these become its own essence through the actions of men; they embody in him and form the many ever-changing “I’s” or forms of false self-consciousness of which egoistic and bestial man are composed. Many a human-like creature leads an animal or a beastly existence, is born, marries, fathers children and dies without the actual human soul ever being embodied in it. Such idiots are not uncommon even among the “educated.”

1. 1. 5. The rational nature. When man has reached a certain maturity, the intellectual principle, called “Manas” by the Indians, begins to develop and embody in him. It is this principle which enables him to think through his brain, to collect ideas, to connect them, to analyze them and to store them in memory. This principle in itself does not inhere any true cognitive ability; for this is a power which belongs to the next higher principle, called “Buddhi,” and is the property of the inner, immortal human being, the divine soul. There are many people in whom the rational principle is highly developed and yet have no spirit. The rational nature in them is overfed, fattened and diseased, like a goose’s liver hypertrophied while their souls starve. It is not uncommon to find soulless scholars with little reason but many fantasies, theories and opinions. Their heads are full of learned stuff, but their hearts are empty. From such develop devils in human form who know no pity or mercy and no true love. They would ruin the whole world if they could just to satisfy their scientific curiosity. Such people are born, live and die without the principle of true human nature ever being reincarnated in them.

1. 1. 6. The divine nature. This principle, called “buddhi,” from “ātma-bodh” (Ātma = mind, bodh = the light) signifies the spiritual light of truth; it is the “Christ-principle” in man, which enlightens Manas and of which it is said in the Bible: “The light shines eternally into the darkness, and the darkness (the bewildered, earthly human mind) cannot comprehend it. If this principle were already fully embodied in us, as it was said to be embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, we would be perfect and born again in spirit. Therefore also a person in whom this divine light has found entrance and who is enlightened by it becomes a Buddha, i.e., called an Enlightened One.

This spiritual light belongs to the upper trinity in the universe, Ātma-Buddhi-Manas, i.e., the indivisible universal spirit, its light and substance, in other words, the holy trinity. It can enlighten man, but cannot be separated from divinity. If this divine light of knowledge of God is to dawn in man, man himself must abandon the delusion of his [lower] selfhood; his soul, filled with this light, rises up in this light and participates in its all-consciousness, omnipresence and omniscience. This is the state of enlightenment, which Buddhists call “Samādhi.”

We see, then, that the fifth principle, Manas, belongs partly to the indivisible Eternal and Infinite, and partly to the Temporal and Transient, i.e., the lower soul forces of the mind strive for the earthly and its promises and achievements, while the higher soul forces, where such are in action, strive for the divine, take root in the divine, and find their rest therein. Man is comparable to a ray of light coming from the divine life Sun of Wisdom, the source of all existence. The personal appearance of man on earth, with his feelings and thoughts, is the darkness into which this ray of light shines. The sun is not embodied in man; the limited cannot absorb the infinite; but the form is illuminated by the light of the sun, and that sun is the divine essence of man himself. The nearer man draws to the divine sun, which is the source of his existence, the more he is illuminated by its light; the more this light shines in him, the more the sun of wisdom rises in him, the more the divinity approaches him and draws him closer to himself. The more he distances himself from this source of spiritual life, walling himself up in his own individuality and allowing himself to be captivated by his imagination and sensuality, the more he distances himself from his divine existence and consciousness, loses himself in the darkness of ignorance of the true and in the fog of deception, and loses his freedom, for only the knowledge of the true truly frees us from error and from the bonds of self-delusion and egoism with the desires and passions that arise from them.

Everything that has been said up to this point is useless unless it is made clear that the inner spiritual man is a god and in his innermost being is divinity itself; even if he personally knows nothing about it; while the personality of man with all its achievements is only a sum of forces combined into one organism, which serves as a tool and also partly as a dwelling place or temple for the divine man who is both in us and outside us and above us a tree in the ground like the celestial man in the material, but the root is not the tree that rises above the ground and whose branches and leaves enjoy the air and the light. A Christian mystic, Archbishop Ekhart of Cologne, says: “It is much more correct to say that man is in the soul than that the soul is in man.” Man himself is soul; the personality only a shadow, mask or larva. The soul of a real man is much larger than his personality, but there are also humanoid larvae that are very clever and always want to be right, but in which there is no soul to be found.

If you want to convince yourself that the physical body is only an appearance, you don’t need any external proof. He has but to turn the spiritual gaze inward and look within himself, and he finds infinity within himself. Just as, looking up to the heavens, he can find no limit where infinite space ends, so he finds no reason in the depths of his mind, and just as space appears dark and insubstantial without the light, so the soul within us is empty without the light of knowledge. God is the infinite unity, the knowledge of God is the light. Man is nothing or zero. Only when one meets zero does zero acquire its value as ten. Heavenly man is born out of light, earthly man out of darkness. Darkness cannot unite with light; but when it is penetrated by the light, the darkness disappears. When man is penetrated by God-consciousness, he recognizes his own true God-nature. But then he is no longer what rational “science” understands by the word “man,” but a being that is elevated above those states which are called “death” and “life.”

Not only man’s divine soul, but also his spirit or intellect (manas) is much greater than his body; because the spirit is not locked in the skull either, but uses the brain as a tool for thinking. No man is conscious in a single moment of all that he has learned and knows. The collected ideas flow from the treasury of the spirit and are formed into thoughts and ideas by means of the brain. Knowledge is also not lost in the process, but what has become apparent in thinking recedes back into the non-manifestable. The unmanifest is called the “unconscious” by some. This is to be understood as being unconscious of the personality; the mind is not unconscious; for spirit is consciousness itself. Our knowledge resides in our spiritual consciousness; but it is only a little at a time that we become aware of our personality. When the brain is paralyzed, the consciousness of the personality ceases, but the spirit and what is of its essence is not thereby annihilated. If the spirit then appears in another personality in the course of reincarnation, it can bring its knowledge back to the consciousness of this personality. Thus inner knowledge flows to outer knowledge by way of intuition; we are taught by our own spirit, and the more the personality of man unites with the indwelling higher spirit, the more it shares in its knowledge. As a result, the human being as a personality learns again what he experienced and learned in a previous life as another personality.

Anyone who understands this will answer the question why we as persons cannot remember our earlier forms of existence on earth. The person I am presenting now was not there before and therefore cannot remember any previous existence. My spirit, which was present at the time of the creation of the world, can recall any existence or appearance in which it has appeared on this earth or on other planets, and if the consciousness of my spirit were fully manifested in my present personality so my person would take part in this remembrance. If a house could think, it would not remember what kind of house it was before it was a house; but the master builder would know what kind of houses he had built and lived in before.

In fact, there are people who are sufficiently imbued with the higher spiritual consciousness to know what bodies they inhabited in previous incarnations and what experiences they had in them. For example, Gautama Buddha said the following: “When the light of knowledge dawned in me and the mind’s eye opened, I knew who I was in my previous life. I looked back at one, at ten, at hundreds and thousands of my beings. There I was this or that, had this and that name, lived and died and was reborn. I looked back at the origins of the world and the passing away of the world” etc. The eternal in man is eternal and immortal. Worlds and forms come and go, the Eternal is never born and does not perish.

There are certainly some who, in their vanity, imagine that they were this or that great personality in a previous life; but we have nothing to do with such games of the imagination. On the other hand, one often finds in children whose minds have not yet been darkened by false teachings and dogmatics, a reflection of that higher consciousness which contains memories of a former existence. From the light which belongs to the immortal spirit of man, as a result of the desire for individual existence inherent in him, a new light is kindled, the consciousness of the newly appearing personal man, as it were a reflection of the former on the plane of sensual existence.

We are therefore not talking about a “transmigration of souls” but about a reunion of the psychic elements that represented the sum of forces that belonged to the previous phenomenon. In order to understand this process better, it will be useful to consider these elements in their dissolution after the death of the body and to follow their path:

When spirit and life have left the body, the elements of the corpse go back to the source from which they came; no matter whether this occurs by the slow path of putrefaction or the rapid path of combustion, the body redissolves into its chemical elements, which consist mostly of gases, and these return to the great store-room of nature, and out of this new ones are formed organisms and new human bodies formed. It is questionable whether there is an atom of plant material on our earth that has not already passed through a human or animal body. Life as a unitary force leaves the dying body and gives life to other newly appearing organisms, just as the air we have exhaled serves to breathe other organisms. The etheric body dissolves into its etheric constituents, and from these arise new compounds which condense into visible material organisms in nature’s alchemical laboratory. The instincts and passions which belonged to the animal soul of man are still attached to it even after the death of the body and are no longer ruled by reason, since reason has disappeared from the scene with the spirit, but its activity has also been exhausted themselves because they can no longer find any food there. They are the forces which are instinctively attracted to their own kind in order to work and strengthen in other organisms. The intellectual achievements of man, i.e., his accumulated theories and opinions are also among the treasures which the Bible says rust eats up and moths consume. They do not belong to the essence of man, but to the world of thought, the realm of imagination. The essence of man does not include accumulated opinions from others, but only what he has absorbed into his soul, i.e., what he himself experienced and recognized inwardly. If that were not the case, we would still have to struggle in our next incarnation to get rid of all the errors that we are forced to acquire externally in this life, in the schools.

What is inherent in the nature of man does not consist in accumulated scholarly stuff, but in what has passed into “flesh and blood” and has become his own nature. So remains, for example, the musician is a musician even when all the music has died away, and the thief is a thief even when there is nothing left to steal. In the qualities of man which have become his own essence is man’s individuality, which persists even after the death of the body, and when that individuality appears in a new life as a new personality, these qualities also reappear. This explains why children are often born with talents of which there is no trace to be found in their parents. There are musical prodigies or mathematical geniuses whose parents have no aptitude for music or mathematics. But when it happens that children and their parents have the same dispositions and tendencies, this is not proof that the children have inherited the same from their parents, but rather the cause is that the reincarnating individuality becomes a family which is attracted in whom similar tendencies are found, so far as other attractions do not determine otherwise; for everywhere in nature there is a law that like loves like, attracts like, and unites with like. If we take a large vessel of water and pour in a drop of common salt solution, and in another place a drop of a solution of nitrate of silver, the chlorine of the common salt finds the silver and combines with it. So it is in the spiritual; for the material is only the outward expression of the spiritual; Every material process is based on a spiritually moving force, a consciousness.

The material parts of the human body remain in the material, the passionate elements of the animal-man on the astral plane [kāma], the intellectual conceptions in the world of the gods (Devachan). When the soul has cast off everything that does not belong to its true nature, it re-enters divinity, in order, until the lust for personal existence stirs in it again, to plunge anew into the sea of ​​life, whereupon it again attracts those elements to which it feels attracted by its own nature. This process could be compared to the formation of a cloud. The sun is the spirit; a ray of sunshine individuality. The attractive power of the sun’s rays creates a haze in the previously clear atmosphere. A fog forms, which gathers into clouds that grow thicker and thicker until they emit thunder and lightning. The rain falls and, mixed with the smoke and dust of the air, forms murky water which freezes to ice in winter. This is brought back to its origin by the heat. Thus, the constant cycle which takes place continually; but the ray of light which comes from the sun does not change; it always remains the same and is not defiled. In the spiritual ray of light that shines into our soul we find our spiritual individuality, and in the sun from which it springs our infinite, indivisible, divine self; the deity in everything.

Such an entrance into God and exit, as it were a re-embodiment, takes place not only at death and being reborn, but at every falling asleep and waking up; for even when falling asleep the spirit withdraws into itself; Reason and imagination fade away, but return on awakening. The “Brhad Aranyaka Upanishad” [Bṛhad Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad] says the following about this:

“What is the soul? It is the consciousness under the forces of life. It is the inner light in the heart; and this spirit moves from one world to another, but in itself remains unchangeable. It seems to have only ideas; it only appears to enter states of joy and delight.

“And when sleep comes, this spirit rises above this world and above perishable forms. When the spirit descends to be born and enters a body, it finds itself in the midst of evils of various kinds; but if it rises again at death, it overcomes evil.

“The spirit of man has two dwellings; this world and the other (heavenly), and the third is the land in between, the land of dreams and imagination. As long as the mind dwells on the border of the two worlds, it sees the two worlds, both this and the other. It rests in that power which he has accumulated in the other world, and sees both the glorious and the terrible.

“And when it falls asleep again, taking with it what he has gathered from this world that contains everything, cutting down the timber itself and building its own dwelling, it dreams. The soul is its clarity, its light. Thus the soul of man is light.

“It now knows that ignorance (of its own true nature) was the cause of all the terrors it saw in the waking world, and like a god it knows: I am the universe, this is the highest world.

“This is the supreme bliss. It is clothed in fearlessness and has destroyed the darkness. Just as one who rests in the arms of the beloved no longer thinks of anything that is within or without, so too is the human spirit embraced and permeated by the great soul; it cares for nothing that is within it or without, for it has attained its goal. It has gone beyond the limit of suffering.

“Encompassed by the great soul, the father is no longer a father, the mother is no longer a mother, nor is the world a world. There, the gods are no longer gods, the murderer no longer a murderer, nor the thief a thief. There, the outcast no longer exists as an outcast, nor the barbarian as barbarian, nor the priest as priest, nor the saint as a saint. Neither good nor bad works follow them there; the mind is above all cares of the heart.

“This is the world of the Eternal. This is the highest way. This is the noblest treasure and the highest lust. All creatures live only from the essence of this bliss.”

          This is the state of the soul when, after the death of the body, it has shed all material and sensual things, left behind its animal instincts and passions in the middle region (kama loca) [kāma loka] and also exhausted its spiritual powers in the world of the gods (devachan), through which she created the ideal world around her through will and imagination. And here it should be noted that the spiritual power of will and of imagination or fantasy, even if it is unconscious to the personal human being, is much greater than most people even suspect, for this magical power conjures up magic from the impressions that the mind receives, produces images that leave nothing to be desired in terms of clarity, even without our being involved intellectually, so that the objects in the subjective dream world appear to us just as real as the material bodies that surrounded us in the objective sensory world. The only difference is that in this sensual world we receive impressions of things that are alien and also unpleasant to us, while in the subjective world the objects spring from our own being and are appropriate to it.

Even during deep sleep, the divine soul withdraws into its innermost sanctuary, to the deity, and only the body with its vegetative life remains on the visible plane of existence. Even the soul of the greatest criminal, if such a divine spirit spark is still present in him, will go into eternity. Then the murderer is no longer a murderer, the thief is no longer a thief and the saint is no longer a saint. But when he awakens, the spirit and relative consciousness also return; the irrational organism becomes a thinking man again, resuming his previous qualities, and upon awakening he is again what he was, a murderer, a thief, a saint. His earthly nature consists in his human-animal characteristics, which he creates through his feeling and thinking, willing and acting. That is why the greatest punishment that man has to experience for his sins is that he himself becomes the being that he creates for himself through his actions.

In this entering of the soul into the divinity we must not think of retention of individuality according to human concepts. The soul is one with the universal spirit, just as a ray of light is one with the light of the sun. However, the reincarnations and the experiences of individual existence have the purpose of developing the consciousness of individuality in the soul, whereby it no longer represents a self-conscious force in the universal spirit, but rather a form that harmoniously agrees with the universal spirit. When all-consciousness and all-knowledge arise in the soul, then it is one with the deity, omnipresent and self-confident. This state is called Nirvāna by Buddhists. It is not a merging into nothingness, as some “Orientalists” think, but a merging into God, not a disappearance into nothingness, but an entering into a higher state of existence, an entering from a limited state into all-being and omniscience; it is comparable to the raising of a spark in a flame, whereby the spark ceases to exist as funky, but instead becomes light itself.

That which seduces the human spirit to assume a personal form is the will to personal existence, egoism. From the desire for one’s own existence arises the individual consciousness, which shows the human being that he is not only in form, but also in his being is a thing fundamentally different from other creatures. But when he has come to the knowledge of his true divine nature through experience, when he has completely overcome self-delusion and when the light of wisdom has dawned in him, then he also knows that he is one with the sun of wisdom, which gives light and life to all forms. Then he sees in each being only an embodiment of his own highest self; then he does not have to submit to the incarnation again, unless this is done for the instruction and betterment of mankind. Such God-men who undergo reincarnation for the benefit of mankind are called “saviors of mankind.” It is their destiny to be misjudged by stupidity and pursued and “crucified” by egoists.

All this is difficult to comprehend as long as we regard men and gods as separate beings, unconnected; but it becomes easily understandable if we bear in mind the unity of the whole. Just as there are innumerable forms and bodies in space, and yet space is one and indivisible, and every form in space is an embodied space, so too is the Deity an indivisible whole; everything is contained in God, who encompasses the whole universe in his essence; in him we are born, live and die and are reborn; “in him we live and have this existence.” All processes in the universe are processes in the body of God. Men, gods and demons represent only intelligent or self-aware forces moving within this body, formed of this unitary substance and therefore identical in essence. Nothing comes out of God; for God is everything, and nothing goes into him either; for nothing exists outside of it; but the human and therefore limited intellect cannot comprehend the One, Infinite, and we therefore form conceptions and distinctions where in reality these do not exist. We see a separateness of the appearances and imagine that the beings are also without inner connection. All men, gods and demons, all things in general are one in God; and the many forms in which this one being manifests are only appearances. Each of these phenomena is essentially one with God, and the knowledge of this oneness of one’s nature with the nature of all things is the key to understanding the mysteries of God; it is the knowledge of God or “Theosophy.”

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Popular Lectures. III. Rāja-yoga by Franz Hartmann, M.D.^[6]

Rāja-Yoga is the royal art of self-mastery, which can be attained through self-realization of one’s divine nature. In other words: It is the union with God through which man attains knowledge and thus also the possession of the divine powers which are dwelling in him. It is also the art of living; because only those who are in full possession of all their powers can enjoy life to the fullest. The perfect life, however, is that existence in which the soul is raised above everything, encompasses and penetrates everything and dominates everything.

Wherever there are people we find that spirit power dominates nature. The experiences of science give us the means to control the forces of nature lying outside our body and to make them our service; religion asks us to use our inner powers, i.e., to control our thoughts, desires and passions; Yoga is the teaching and also the practice of this art. Every man who practices the art of self-control is in a way a yogi, and every one practices it more or less daily; because a person who could not or did not want to control himself and who always and everywhere gave free rein to his animal nature would constantly come into conflict with all state laws and rules of decency; he would be a fool and would not be tolerated in any decent company. Without the ability to control at least some of the functions of his body, such as walking, standing, etc., he would also be a helpless and useless creature, physically. Self-mastery is something that every man is compelled to do, partly by his own nature and partly by external circumstances, even if he knows nothing of yoga or the philosophy of yoga. Even the higher animal species exercise a certain self-control which experience has taught them to be necessary or useful.

But the word “yoga” signifies something much higher than the ordinary domination of the animal instincts by the will guided by the intellect. It is a Sanskrit word and, just like the Latin word “religion,” means neither the empty practice of church rites nor attachment to any theory, but the reunion of man with God. Only when man regains the lost consciousness of his innermost divine being and existence can he return to that spiritual state in which he regains full possession of his divine powers, through which he can regain his own nature, as well as being able to control all the forces of nature.

The Indian teaching agrees with the Christian teaching, among other things, in that it says that man was originally a spiritual, heavenly creature provided with an etheric body, an “angel,” before he was seduced by desire after personal experience and sensual enjoyment, entangled in the web of materiality and sensuality and built up and lived in a monkey-like body, thereby losing the consciousness of his originally divine existence. His soul is now bound to this body with its animal instincts and semi-animal conceptions, and there can be no salvation for it other than to rise again above the material and sensual realms to the self-awareness of its indwelling divine nature. Through this awakening she then regains consciousness of the divine powers belonging to her divine nature and possesses the ability to use them. The path to this self-knowledge is yoga, or the practice of true religion.

Yoga is thus an art, i.e., a practice of religion based on skill, and that skill is conditioned by the development of the inner and spiritual strength necessary for it. The teaching of how this power develops and how it is to be used is the philosophy of yoga, or in other words the science or doctrine of religion for the rational practice of religion, which does not concern itself with the narration of alleged historical events, or with the teaching content in external forms and ceremonies, but teaches nature, the effect and the use of the spiritual, psychic and physical forces ruling within us. The yogi who, through his own experience and practice, has become acquainted with the divine and magical powers awakened in his organism actually becomes a “superman” or a divine being. He attains full consciousness of the immortality of his soul; he is one with the creative will and with the law that governs all; he knows that in his true being he is above all phenomena in nature, that he stands higher than the states which are called “life” and “death” or “transformation”; his body and mind is no longer his “I” for him, but only a tool that he uses and that he can rebuild when it has become useless. He is more than what is usually understood by a “man”; he can say with Paul: “I live, and yet not ‘I’ live, but Christ (the God-man) lives in me.” He is one with the ‘Father,’ i.e., with his true divine self, the product of which is his personal appearance. One with God, above time and space, good and evil, he participates in God’s omnilove, omnipotence and omniscience; for God is no longer something alien or external to him, but his soul, his own, all-encompassing self.

There is no doubt that not every human being can immediately soar to the heights of this conception, and that some people feel dizzy at this thought. Goethe says: “If you don’t feel it, you won’t achieve it,” and therefore not everyone is ripe for an understanding of the yoga philosophy. The foolish, who have no understanding of the meaning of the word “religion” or have a completely wrong understanding of it because they do not know the truth, will also have a completely wrong picture of “yoga” and rightly about that of them, unwittingly scoff at the self-produced product of their own ignorance. For them there is no religion other than that of death, and for them the philosophy of Yoga is not meant. On the other hand, there is a certain and extraordinarily large class of people for whom the study of this doctrine, and still more the practice of it, is a dangerous thing: knowledge is power. Anyone who correctly recognizes a power, gains possession of it, just as he can only gain correct knowledge of it through possession, because theory and practice are mutually dependent. But those who have come into self-confident possession of magical powers can use them for both evil and laudable purposes. Were men, until they were freed from selfishness and passions, to come into possession of divine powers, as is often the case with physical powers today, they would use them for devilish purposes, harming themselves and those around them, and make the world an even bigger hell than it already has. For this reason the works which deal with the mysteries of religion, such as the “Bhagavad Gita,” “Patañjali’s Yoga-Philosophy,” the Vedas, the Bible, etc. are only written for the initiated and only understandable for them. If, for example, the Bible teaches: “You should love God with all your heart, with your whole mind” etc., then all this is “occult” and meaningless for those who do not recognize God, and no one can recognize him unless he, by carrying the love and spirit of God in his heart, has entered the great mystery, but to those who have attained this light of self-knowledge, the meaning of the Holy Scriptures is also clearly enlightened by it.

True religion, then, is the awakening of God-consciousness, not in the imagination, but in the heart of man himself. When man comes to the consciousness of the divine nature dormant within him, all his good thoughts and actions spring of themselves and stand upon one much higher level than those that are only the result of mindless moral teaching, ethical training or unknowing emotional strivings; for in the first case man no longer acts out of self-delusion or self-conceit, but the Spirit of God, i.e., the knowledge that belongs to his higher self fills his consciousness, determines his feelings, thoughts and actions; the will of God is then occurs in him and through him.

This awakening to a higher consciousness no man can accomplish by his own personal self-will or obstinacy, any more than a dead man can bring himself to life, or a sleeping man awaken himself; but there are certain laws in the spiritual as well as in the material nature, which determine that this or that state occurs when the necessary conditions are present. We cannot manufacture sunshine, and in the absence of natural light we must be content with an artificial one; but when the sun shines, we need only open the windows to get light without further effort. Likewise, no man can produce divine wisdom for himself or attain true self-knowledge through the play of his imagination; but when he stops clinging to error and loves the truth, it reveals itself to him. Patañjali shows us the way and how to do it, to become free from error, so that the truth (God) may be revealed in us can be. This way, in short, is the bringing about of tranquility of mind through the control of the mental activity, and the inward purification of the heart from all desires springing from selfishness or self-delusion. When the mind has become calm and pure, it is like a clear crystal in which the light of the soul is revealed without spot. From this springs the direct knowledge of truth, which has nothing to do with outward observation, speculation, or inference, but is the self-revelation of eternal wisdom in man’s soul.

Man’s whole life on earth, with all his innumerable reincarnations, is nothing other than a school of experience in which man learns to attain knowledge of his own true nature by overcoming error. In vain, people seek God within and without. They cannot find him because they imagine him, the Infinite, as something objective, distinct from themselves and limited in time and space, and do not understand that he is all in all and therefore also their own being. It is as if someone wanted to undertake a journey of discovery in space with a balloon in order to find space. He wanders in vain until he finally comes to see that all space, even himself is a part of embodied space, and that his journey was superfluous because when he knows himself in truth, he knows all truth and everything.

Regarded as an illusion, man loves appearances and is deceived by the appearance of form. He imagines that he is something special, that he is essentially different from other creatures. He is in love with his “self,” the product of his self-deception, sees only his imagined self, does not want to know about reality and therefore cannot recognize it. Whenever he tries to look at the truth objectively, he separates from it, rejects it and it becomes invisible to him. He cannot find her because he does not want to let go of the error that blinds him. Error holds man captive only as long as man holds onto it and is attached to it. Those who let go of deception need not search long for the truth; where the darkness disappears, the light of knowledge enters of its own accord. But most people love the darkness of ignorance and the moonlight of imagination more than the still hidden sun of wisdom. We first have to get to know the unreal of earthly existence through bitter experiences and disappointments before we turn our backs on the material and turn our eyes to the dawn of the spiritual light in the east. The heart, which has left unity and lost itself in the multiplicity, after recognizing every external support as unreliable, finally returns to itself, to unity. The Unity is God, the true self of all beings. Anyone who understands this return to unity is on the way to finding himself and knows what is meant by “yoga”; the much-learned dreamer, who puts his imaginary “self” and self-knowledge above all else, will never understand it.

Yoga is not, as certain “scholars” believe, “a product of the oriental imagination”; neither is it empty theory, fanaticism, or daydreaming, but the entering of the soul (of consciousness) into God, and the arising of the light of divinity in the soul. The blind materialist, the superstitious dreamer, and the greedy observer may need innumerable reincarnations and millions of years before they attain true self-consciousness through the slow progressive evolution of the whole human race; but the gate to this is already open to everyone; no one is prevented by anything but himself from entering and attaining salvation from “Self.” Yoga is the way. Union with God is the true essence of religion. A system of religion which was not founded on the knowledge of this law could contain no true religion, but would be a mishmash of selfishness, superstition, fanaticism, delusions of authority, blind dogmatism, formulae and hypocrisy; just as a science that is not a knowledge of the true nature of nature, but a sham science made up of imagination and a curse on mankind.

Theory precedes practice; but little is served with theoretical knowledge alone; the right understanding only comes through practice. We can spend our lives studying the Vedas, or memorizing the Bible with all the commentaries, accumulating a mountain of opinions and interpretations in our brains, concocting the most learned combinations in our skulls, and engaging in all sorts of philological, theological, and philosophical hair-splitting, without thereby becoming to attain that wisdom which can only be attained through the refinement of character. Every day we can listen to the most unctuous sermon and imagine that all that is said in it is true without our being being changed. The best teaching is useless if you don’t follow it; the study of the best menu or the best description of a dish is useless to one who has nothing to eat or does not eat. Many keep crying out for new instructions without following even the slightest of the teachings already given. Without inner sanctification, however, all lectures about it are idle chatter. Not what we see or hear on the outside, but what we take in within ourselves becomes a part of our being. Words may serve to rouse a drunk from sleep; but if you don’t want to be woken up, you’ll soon fall asleep again.

Man’s sensory life, compared to his spiritual life, is like that of a drunk man wallowing in his hallucinations. He doesn’t want to have his fantasies destroyed because he can’t understand that there is something higher. Nor is it a question of destroying them, rather we should get to a level where we look down on them, their real ones recognize value without overestimating it and understand that a hobby horse is nothing more than a hobby horse. However, this often requires a strong cure. In the Indian scriptures there is a parable in which it is said that Krishna, the god of heaven, once incarnated in a pig. During this embodiment he completely forgot his own divine nature. He took a sow as his wife and she gave birth to three piglets. Krishna reveled in this swine’s paradise and was completely satisfied. The gods mourned his fall and sought to persuade him to return to heaven; but he pushed her away: “What!” he exclaimed, “I should leave my beloved sow and my dear piglets, which are my happiness and bliss in life!” Then the gods knew of no other advice than to arrange it that one piglet died after the other and finally the sow too. Then they cut open the pig’s body, and the god, freed from his pig existence, returned to his divine existence.

There is no question of absolute right or wrong in contemplating the joys of mortal existence, but rather the purpose one is following. A pig who has no desire to attain a higher level of existence is doing right in enjoying his pig pleasures; a man who, through stupidity, fear, or greed, neglects the duties that life brings, and sinks into selfishness, will scarcely obtain the hoped-for ban in heaven; the misanthrope harms himself most; but the man who has outgrown his infancy no longer needs children’s toys. Yoga is a constant ascent from the low to the high, up to the highest. The closer man draws near to God, the more the omnipresence of God becomes apparent to him within and without.

God is referred to by the wise as the true self of all beings, as the soul of the universe, as the will or substance of eternal wisdom from which all phenomena proceed, and without which all things considered in themselves (if they exist at all could exist without God), are nothing but insubstantial appearances. But the wisdom of God is his own self-knowledge, which encompasses everything, and which does not belong to the earthly and transitory human mind, but belongs to God, and cannot be understood by the human intellect either. High above the realm of the inquiring and searching intellect stands the knowing soul; high above the speculation the realization; high above objective observation is the knowledge of one’s own self. A truth is only above all doubt when we realize that it is self-explanatory. The soul is God; she is the truth and reality, the life and light of all things. Just as the mind, through which man feels and thinks, is elevated above the body and controls its functions, so the soul is infinitely more elevated than mind and thinking, and the closer man approaches his immortal soul, the more so he can use their power to control his emotions, his feelings and thoughts, and ultimately all the functions of his body. This is the practice of yoga, an art that may take many years, if not many reincarnation periods, to learn.

The Indian generally distinguishes two main types of yoga namely hatha yoga and rāja yoga. Hatha Yoga (often incorrectly referred to as the “science of breathing”)^[7] aims to develop the psychic faculties, i.e., to develop the lower powers of the soul (clairvoyance and the like). However, since such a development takes place at the expense of the higher spiritual powers of the soul, this method is not to be recommended, and its practice is only based on the selfish purpose of acquiring “occult” powers, which are then often more harmful than useful to the possessor. Rāja Yoga, on the other hand, aims at the revelation of the divine essence in man, and where this takes place all the divine forces dormant in man develop of themselves. The life force in man is but one, and he can exercise it on a higher or on a lower use level of existence. If he is a glutton and uses it up entirely in the furtherance of his digestion, he will not have much left for the furtherance of his intellectual activity. If he uses them entirely for brooding and arguing, then nothing is left for the development of the higher soul forces. Some people fatten their brains and starve their souls in the process. We need not affirm that erudition and know-it-all are not identical with holiness and love.

The original source of all life and all movement is the will. This does not mean the human will, which is basically just a desire and wish, but the divine, creative substantial power from whose movement everything arose. He is the substance of the soul. When one says that God is love, what is meant is the will of God; for God, regarded as the Will of Eternal Wisdom, is Absolute Love, subject to no lust. When the will of God is revealed in the heart of man, all other powers are subject to him. While even the largest skull cannot comprehend the concept of infinity, even the smallest heart can feel eternity and rule the whole world when the will of God is revealed within it. By this soul power the yogi controls his mind and body.

What distinguishes man from other beings is the possession of a highly developed mind, i.e., that substance and power which enables him to feel and think, to take in impressions, to collect ideas, to combine them, to analyze them and to store them in memory. As Yoga philosophy teaches us, this substance is of an extremely plastic nature; it takes the form of that object by the perception of which an impression is made on it. Since we are constantly exposed to new impressions coming from outside, and also the impressions already received awaken again, we are constantly exposed to a series of emotions and filled with ever-changing ideas and thoughts. These keep the mind in constant turmoil, so that it can only come to rest in rare, solemn moments and the light of the soul can be revealed therein. Where man stops thinking and feeling, there, all emotional restlessness also stops.

Thus, one might think that a blow to the head with an ax would be the best means of quickly turning a man into a yogi; only this treatment method according to Dr. Eisenbart would be a mistake. Self-control does not consist in unconsciousness. Divine enlightenment is consciousness in its highest potency, and man needs full consciousness if he is to become master of his thoughts and feelings. There is no question of sleep, of daydreaming, of dull brooding, or blind ignorance of external things; but where the Spirit of God is revealed in the soul, there the truth is revealed in its clarity and glory. What comes from stupid is stupid; what comes from self-delusion is vain; but whoever acts in the spirit of God, which is the will and wisdom of the soul, acts in the name of God and in God’s power. The reason why not all men act and work in the power of God is because they do not know this Holy Spirit, and no one can know it unless it is manifested within themselves. He is the spirit of self-knowledge, which belongs to the true divine self.

A thought may well give way to another thought or take its place; but thinking can no more control itself than a piano can play itself, or a man can take himself by the forelock and pull himself out of a swamp. The mind cannot stop itself, just as a horse cannot restrain itself. But higher than the mind, which perceives and thinks, stands the elf-recognizing soul; the I that knows that it can both think and refrain from thinking. The soul is man’s true self-consciousness; in this “I” rests his individuality. A man without a soul would be nothing but a blind instrument in the play of the forces of nature, an empty house with storms roaring through its doors and windows. It is not the brain of man that thinks, but a man who is conscious of himself who thinks through his brain, just as he moves through his feet and sees through his eyes; but he himself is no more his brain, heart, foot or eye than he is his coat or trousers. His human organism is the garment he wears on the level of material existence; at a higher level he is clothed in a less clumsy body, and at the highest level of perfection the fully-lighted God-man no longer needs any clothing.

Through the will of the soul alone man can control his mind, calm it and force it to stand still, so that the light of the soul shines in it and the mysteries of the soul are revealed in it. In a river which is in great motion, little can be seen below the surface; but when the water is clear, every pebble appears at the bottom. When there is unrest in the mind, man can only see a faint glimmer of the light of the soul in it; but when complete rest sets in, he sees his soul in its clarity, and in it, all mysteries of the universe are contained, because the soul itself is of a divine nature and an emanation of divinity.

This is true self-knowledge or “theosophy,” not to be confused with objective introspection, nor with intellectual human knowledge and speculation. Human knowledge is a composite patchwork that springs from the observation of appearances; the wisdom of God is but one; it is the realization of reality in the consciousness of man who has left self-delusion and recognizes the soul as the essence of all things. Anything we experience externally or discover through philosophical speculation or logical deduction is only or respectively true and requires confirmation and evidence. The knowledge of God requires no proof, for otherwise the proof would stand higher than the truth; it is the knowledge of absolute truth through itself. Where it enters, there it is; where it does not enter, there it is not. She is natural. All logic, mathematics and reasoning ultimately rests on something that is self-evident and cannot be proved, but is based on one’s own insight. who e.g., could not see that the one is a unit and nothing else and in itself unchangeable, for him there would be no mathematical result to which he could attach unconditional credibility.

Also divine wisdom or self-knowledge is only one for all, because there is only one absolute reality. The whole world, with all its myriad appearances, is a manifestation of the one truth in many forms. In every thing truth is its essence; if there were no light, there would be no shine either. Nor does the light of truth need illumination, any more than a lantern is needed to discern sunlight. The light of truth is everywhere and is revealed in every heart which finds rest in God.

The whole image of the sun is reflected in every pond, and yet we have only one sun. In the same way, the whole splendor of the spiritual sun of the universe is reflected in the calm mind of the yogi. But the attainment of this quiet self-control of mind is not the work of a day or a year; it may take many reincarnations before the apprentice becomes a master of the art. Nor is it a work of the intellect, because only what is eternal in man can feel the eternal and only the spirit of God in him can fathom the depths of divinity.

In every religious system we find a piece of yoga philosophy; the life of Christ in the “New Testament” is a presentation of yoga, beginning with the spiritual rebirth to the mystical death on Calvary, whereby man renounces his mortal self and celebrates his resurrection in the divine existence. In every religious system there are rules for practicing yoga; all church ceremonies and symbols refer to it; Everywhere, we find instructions about what to do and what not to do, but generally without any rational reason being given. But most of the time man is made in such a way that before he does something he would like to know the purpose and the “how” and “why.” Without this rational protection he easily falls into superstition, and in blind obedience accomplishes useless and foolish things. The religious system or yoga philosophy of Patañjali differs from all other systems in that each of the teachings given in it has its scientific explanation. It is particularly easy to understand with the help of Sankaracharya’s [Śaṅkarācārya’s] Tattva Bodha, which describes the elements and principles that make up human nature.

Almost nothing is historically known about Patañjali’s personality. Legend says that his birthplace was Illavrita-Varsha. But this is not an earthly place, but a heavenly dwelling place. It is said that he was one of the sages who descend to earth from time to time to teach mankind or to bring to mind forgotten teachings.

The first condition is the external and internal cleansing, as is also symbolically represented in Christianity by baptism. In a dirty man, a glutton or a drunkard, whose juices are laden with decaying animal matter, or whose brain is numbed with alcohol fumes, the Holy Spirit will hardly find a suitable ground for its revelation in someone who is “infested” or poisoned according to the instructions of modern medicine. Likewise, the mind should be free from base desires, animal passions, hatred, envy, lust, cruelty, vanity, anger, greed, etc. Anyone can be sanctified through internal cleansing. What matters is not what a man has been, but what he is presently; but no man can forgive another’s sins. Such “forgiveness” could at most be a symbol and an external confirmation that the human being has thoroughly discarded his lower “ego” and thus also got rid of his sins. Few want to take that first step.

Next is rest. God within is stillness. Whoever finds true peace within himself will find God. The “Christian yogi” Michael de Molinos says about this: “You should know that your soul is the center, the dwelling place and the kingdom of God. In order that the supreme ruler may rest on this throne of your soul, you should strive to keep it calm, empty and peaceful, clean from guilt and defect, untroubled by fear, free from personal affections, desires and thoughts, peaceful in temptations and tribulations,” etc. There is a class of men who call themselves “quietists,” and consider themselves followers of Molinos; their religion consists in doing nothing, and they believe that they must leave the management of their affairs to God, whom they do not know. This is the opposite of what Molinos taught. If you don’t know God, you won’t be known by him either. God does not take care of strangers’ business. The calm which springs from stupidity and laziness, and shies away from action, is altogether different from the calm which rests on knowledge of the truth and governs unrest. One is the rest of the grave, the other heavenly rest and bliss.

The third is firmness “The yogi must have a firm seat,” i.e., he must be firm in faith, love, hope and patience, serious in his will and sure in his resolve. A drunk who stumbles back and forth, trying this way today and that way tomorrow, is slow to get there. Anyone who doubts the possession of his power renounces it. The doubter perishes. He must be firm in his conviction that in his inmost being he is one and inseparable from the self which is eternal, without beginning or end, that is not born and does not die, that is moved by nothing, immortal and higher than imaginable. No man needs to change his faith in order to come to the knowledge of the truth. If he finds the truth in the religious system to which he belongs, then he has the knowledge of the truth, the true religion and the right faith.

“Many are called, but few are chosen.” The sun shines evenly on all parts of the field, and all the plants thereon are called upon to grow; but only those who absorb the necessary power from the ground are the chosen ones. Likewise, many people are ripe for spiritual development, but only those who overcome are chosen and win. This includes a strong will for freedom and firmness of character, the distinction between what is advantageous for development and what is disadvantageous, and the keeping away from harmful influences. When the sun shines on a field and the rain falls on it, the seeds within it develops, and both wholesome and poisonous plants develop. When the spiritual life begins to stir in man, all the impulses contained in his soul begin to grow, the bad as well as the good. This is why yoga practices without prior purification are dangerous, and this is why firm determination and perseverance in self-control are necessary, otherwise instead of the image of God, a caricature of the devil will develop.

Now comes the inward concentration or concentration of mind, by which man learns to restrain his thoughts from wandering here and there, and governs the substance of his mind so that it cannot take now this form, now that, but must obey the will of the Spirit. How hard it is to hold on to a single thought for even a minute without someone else interfering, is something anyone can easily see if they try. But here love comes to our aid, because the mind likes to be with the object that it loves from the heart. Without love of the Divine, all yoga practices are useless; but from this love and the holding of the thought of it springs true devotion or concentration. This is the “prayer” in the true sense of the word, which has nothing to do with any selfish desires; it is the sacrifice of self-delusion in God’s omnipresence.

Yoga philosophy gives us certain tools to facilitate this concentration, such as: A calm and regular breathing, the inward utterance of the sacred syllable OM, or certain thoughts put into words. The whole Lord’s Prayer of the Christians is a collection of such phrases, each of which, when its meaning is spiritually grasped, represents an exercise in man’s union with God, and we need not travel across the sea in search of such “mantrams” to research. When, under the influence of the Holy Spirit of self-knowledge, the heart opens like a rose in the sunshine, when the power of love for the highest ideal exalts the soul to the highest, and the mind is enlightened by the revelation of truth within, then we have the proper practice of yoga, proper prayer, and proper religion, which cannot be learned from books unless one feels them, and to which all external customs and all religious teachings and meditations are but aids.

This state of mind is proper meditation or contemplation; but it is not yet complete while there is still something to behold or contemplate. As long as subject and object are distinct and separate, there is no perfect union. This only occurs when the recognizer has become completely one with the recognized in the power of recognition. In this state of samādhi, which one might perhaps call “rapture,” human consciousness and God consciousness are one; man, as a being considered separate from God, is then, as it were, no longer there; nothing else exists but God. A soul that has entered such a state is called a Mahātma (great soul). No human being is a personality in his Mahātma state any longer, and the error of those who imagine a “Mahātma” to be a personal human being from whom they hope to show personal favors naturally arises from this. Such a person who has entered the light has thereby become the light himself and is in no way different from the light that shines for everyone, even if not everyone has the necessary maturity to absorb it. Physically he exists as man, spiritually he is in God; he may possibly be a cripple physically, uneducated intellectually, and yet a sage and saint enlightened by the Spirit, because wisdom and holiness belong not to the body, nor to the mind of man, but to the soul, exalted above all these mortal things.

The supreme object of yoga, then, is not the attainment of occult powers for the use of the personal man, nor the gratification of his scientific curiosity; though all these treasures are given to those who find the kingdom of God within them, but it is the awakening of the human soul to the consciousness of its divine existence. There is nothing higher than the truth; he who loves her for her own sake is united with her; but if man only seeks his advantage in doing so, and wants to make the truth serve his purposes, then he puts his egoism higher than the truth and does not attain it; yea, the more he exalts his imagined “self,” the more he opposes the truth, and succumbs to megalomania, and folly. Thus, one who would like to “become a yogi himself” should strive to leave this “self” with his conceit and enter that self which is the true Self of all beings. Whoever looks at God with one eye and at the earth with the other eye does not have the right flight and does not reach his goal.

The whole of mankind, indeed the whole world with all its creatures, is slowly advancing on the path to knowledge of God, which is the goal of all existence. This self-knowledge of the soul is the purpose of all evolution. There is a constant swaying back and forth, a constant rising and falling, and it may take millions of ages before mankind finds its way out of the labyrinth of error and reaches perfection; but everyone is free to shorten the survey time. The light of truth is there for all. Everyone can breathe in the spirit of knowledge in his soul and exhale it as love. No church and no “theosophical society” can monopolize the Holy Spirit and feed it to their followers; God will not be locked in a box to serve as a showpiece for the church; neither can anyone go the way for another, which everyone must go himself in order to reach the goal. There are many ways to get on the right path, and they are different for everyone according to the point of development at which he stands; but whoever has found the right path knows that it is only one. He finds that he himself is that way, and that all the teaching he needs is summed up in the words of the Bible, where it says, “Love God above all things, and thy neighbor as thyself.” Who is God in all creatures loves, and meets all men he meets on the path of life with unselfish love, he is on the right path and in him, when he reaches maturity, the power and might and the glory of God will be revealed.

And finally, a few words regarding the spiritual guides on the path to perfection:

Every human being is destined to become a yogi and attain perfection at the end of his incarnations, and all that is needed is love from the heart. Where divine love is kindled in the heart, the light of true knowledge springs from the flame. Those who have this love in their hearts need no other guide; the star of the wise shines on him forever. But it may take thousands of years before the spark faintly smoldering in the heart becomes a living flame. Nor can it be awakened with difficulty by reading books and by intellectual activity alone. To this belongs the spiritual influence of a living soul, through the touch of which the disciple’s soul awakens from sleep like the slumbering princess in the fairy tale. A piece of wood can be exposed to sunlight for years and still not catch fire; but with the help of a magnifying glass it can be kindled when dry; only the glass must be burning glass and not an ordinary piece of window glass. A Master, whether embodied on earth or clothed in a more ethereal body, when possessed of the spirit of divine self-knowledge, is such a “lens” through which the soul of the disciple, who is able to receive this influence, spiritual life can be awakened.

          Where is such a master to be found? He’s always ready. Anyone who has matured for this guidance will find it, and everyone is mature who has the necessary insight and loves the truth without selfish motives. He who opens his heart to the Redeemer will come to him; for there is an occult law in nature which says: “As it is above, so it is below, and there is nothing on earth that is so inferior that, when it moves, something higher does not correspond to it rises towards it in heaven.” The reason for this, like the reason for all existence, is the power of love; for like is loved by like, and love of the highest brings all together.

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Popular Lectures IV. The States of the Soul After Death by Franz Hartmann, M.D.^[8]

There is little doubt that mankind, as long as it has even begun to think on our planet, has attempted to solve the riddle of death. There is an extraordinarily large body of literature on the question of what happens to the human soul after the death of the body, and it is partly based on alleged revelations by initiates and seers, partly on more or less dubious reports from the dead, partly on philosophical speculations, of which one does not know to what extent they are correct. But the great riddle for mankind in general has still not been solved and will hardly be solved anytime soon, because man can only know with certainty what he experiences in himself, and even if a man could take a walk in heaven or hell and return again, he would not know whether such a state is of indefinite duration, or whether by some kind of death or change one returns there passes over to another. Certainty can only come about when man recognizes that which is eternal, immortal and unchangeable in him, i.e., has found his own immortal soul (the immortality consciousness). Only then can he make his observations from the point of view of the eternal, and consider the changes to which the changeable, with which the unchangeable is connected, is subjected on the path of evolution and on the various stages of existence. If we identify our ego with the changeable elements of which our nature (mind and body) is composed, we are indeed subject to a constant change of state, to a constant life and death; but if we unite our true self with God, then there is no death for us, but only eternal existence, without beginning and without end, and we recognize that which lives and dies and changes as mere manifestations or “illusory egos” that only cling to us, with which we are only connected, and whose fate we only share, participate as long as, because we do not recognize our true selves, we identify with them and take them for ourselves.

The well-known mystic Meister Eckhart says: “Put away everything that is not God, then only God remains.” Nor do we need to believe this teaching to be true and adhere with blind trust in Archbishop Eckhart’s authority; everyone can convince himself of the truth of it if he follows the advice given; but of course it may take more or less time depending on the stage at which he is positioned.

All the sages of the world who have found the Spirit of God in their hearts and thereby come to true self-knowledge agree that God is the soul and essence of all, eternal and unchanging, that outside of him nothing exists, and that everything what appears to be outside of it is in itself nothing but insubstantial form and appearance. Now if the essence of all things is immortal, there is no death at all of anything essential, but only changes in the states in which it is revealed or appears to us. Death, then, is not the annihilation of anything essential, but only a transition from one state to another. God, the one essence of all things, cannot be destroyed; he is the origin and supreme of everything.

We can safely leave the investigation of what God is in himself to the inquisitive theologians. Apart from the fact that no limited human mind can comprehend the greatness of God beyond human comprehension, and that a God which mortal man could comprehend would be less than man and therefore not God, the examination of a thing is an inquiry into it Properties by which the same thing is distinguished from other things. But since God is not a thing, but the essence of all things, and without him nothing exists, so it cannot have any properties through which it essentially differs from something else essential that does not exist at all.

All concepts that man makes of God are, like us, of a relative nature and relate only to his way of looking at things. We cannot grasp the Absolute, we fragment it in our imagination and make distinctions where in reality there are none. We speak of “force” and “matter” and “spirit” as if these were three distinct things existing in their own right, and yet none of the three exist without the other two; they are all three but different modes of revelation of the nameless One, which is neither matter, nor force, nor spirit, but all in all; the noblest and finest substance, the power of all powers, the highest consciousness, the highest spirit. We can only say what God is not but not what he is. What is not God is in itself insubstantial and nothing.

All this requires no proof, but only explanation; it is not a matter of proving this teaching, but of understanding it. If it is understood, then it is already proven, for the truth is self-evident and brings with it the proof of its existence. Any knowledge based solely on hearsay or belief in authority is not true knowledge. If ten thousand angels came down from heaven and gave us testimonies of an afterlife, it would at most make the possibility of our own survival appear probable, but would not give us the true knowledge of it, which can only be attained by the fact that the consciousness of immortal existence awakens in ourselves, but once we have recognized what is immortal in us, it will not be difficult to see through our inner being through its power and to see what states the soul is in its connection with subject to the material. For this we need no authorities at all and no play of the imagination; we can get to know these states by observing our own nature, because we can enter them now without first leaving our bodies. Where there is no personal experience, the logical conclusion is of dubious value; but once we have really recognized a law, we can also draw conclusions about its effects with certainty. A rational judgment cannot replace one’s own experience, but it can supplement the results of it by inferring the unknown from the known.

There are two kinds of observation. One relates to being and its appearances and changes; the other ignores the essence and sees only the appearances. One is thorough, the other superficial. Taking as an analogy a lake in which various pieces of ice are floating, such a superficial observer would look at each piece of ice without regard to the lake; he would see that the pieces differed from one another in size, shape, colour, purity, etc., and perhaps after innumerable experiments he would come up with the idea that they are all made of water. The knower, on the other hand, sees the essential in every piece of ice, namely frozen water; the properties of individual things are secondary to him; the main thing is the lake, and because he knows the properties of water, he is not surprised that, without changing its nature, it can become solid, liquid, even vaporous and invisible. Superficial science knows only bodies in space; although she is surrounded by space, she knows next to nothing of its nature; the wise see in all appearances incarnations of that Nameless One which presents itself to us as what we call “space,” and as the natural scientist would seek in vain for space in a solid body, so observational science seeks in vain for God in creatures or “soul.” She does not know that all that is essential is the soul, and that everything we see externally is only an appearance in the mirror of the soul; but our own religious knowledge teaches us something more, in that the soul itself speaks to us: “I am the one, eternal self of all things, which reveals itself in a multiplicity of changing appearances. I am that I am, the only I; everything else is just a play of forces in my nature. I am the self-existing one who dwells in everyone’s heart; no being has an existence of its own without me. Everything lives and works in me; I penetrate, embrace, enliven and enlighten everything that has life and light. Just as there can be no body without space, so there is no self-awareness that does not have its source in me. An ‘I’ without me is just a self-deception.”

The whole world is full of such self-deceptions, who walk about in human forms and conceit themselves to be without God and beings existing alone. Such apparitions are continually being born, living, struggling, and propagating, and when their time is up, like that of the mayfly, they disappear from the scene again, and yet there is a spark of true consciousness in each one when even slumbering, through the awakening of which man attains the knowledge of his higher existence and his divine nature. Where this spark shines, even faintly, it spreads a light that penetrates matter and reveals to us the hidden mysteries of our own being. Without this light man would be without reason and without intelligence, an idiot, or at best a scientifically trained animal. This light is accessible to every reasonable person; in this light, and not in the moonlight of deluded fancy which springs from external observation, let us consider the states of the soul in its various stages of existence. We don’t want to concern ourselves with theories, but look at self-evident truths and draw our logical conclusions from them.

I am who I am. — This is a self-evident truth that is recognized spiritually, and the mind bears witness to it because it knows that a thing cannot be anything other than what it is, otherwise it would not be what it is. But that doesn’t mean that my intellect recognizes this “I”; that he cannot mistake something that is not my real self, or mistake my self for something other than what it is. In fact, upon closer self-examination, I find within myself that I cannot intellectually comprehend or objectively know my own ego, because it is beyond my comprehension and is not objective. No man will be so unreasonable as to mistake his body for himself. Also, my mind, my thinking, my feeling, my reason, my spirit, etc., is not “I myself,” as the language already describes these forces as something belonging to me. Once true self-awareness has awakened in me, I also recognize these things as forces or tools belonging to my being, without first asking the authorities about them. In my innermost self, however, I do not perceive any change. I can walk or stand, feel or not feel objects, think or stop thinking without my ego being destroyed as a result. I look down on my body and its functions as something to which I am connected, as something that nature has lent me for my use. No sophistry of any kind can make a person who has awakened to true self-awareness believe that he himself is the body and that the ego is at an end when it decays. Personality consciousness may cease, as it does in sleep; but the ego remains the same, because otherwise one would be a different person every time one wakes up. The true self, the individuality in its innermost being does not change.

And the same relationship also exists between the ego and the higher forces. The vital activity in my body, my power of thought, my powers of soul are not I. I can think all this away, and then there is still the eternal, God, left, and when my consciousness rests in this I, I am one with it; Existence or non-existence, sorrow or joy, heaven or hell are then irrelevant to me; they do not touch my real self, but only the things that belong to me, and I only take an interest in them insofar as I am connected to them by my will. In this consciousness of God lies true freedom and salvation. Everything depends on this awareness. It is not a question of our imaginary selfhood, which is the result of our personal feelings, coming to a God who is alien and external to us, but that our divine soul becomes conscious of its highest divine existence. Then she is one with God and herself the lord and soul of the world.

Anything that isn’t true isn’t real. This is another self-evident truth which no man can dispute, and reason adds: if something is not true, it must necessarily be false. If there is but one true I, all other states of consciousness which do not contain a glimpse of the consciousness of the true I are mere delusions. Where there is no real self, there is at most an apparent self. If man’s true self-awareness consists in his God-awareness, then all people who do not have the same within them are only illusory beings and like dreamers without true awareness. A human being is only a real human being insofar as the true divine-human ego is revealed in him. Without this I he cannot find the Redeemer. Without this I he is but a shadow, an embodiment of natural forces, and his self-confidence, however intellectual and learned, is but a temporary illusion, like a reflection of sunlight bouncing off a wall Reflection that disappears when the sun goes down or the mirror breaks.

Death is nothing other than such a withdrawal of the consciousness, which belongs to the true ego, from the illusory self, which was illuminated by it. A person in whom this true consciousness is fully awakened also has the power to separate from and rejoin his body at will; for when he is one with the higher self, he himself is the light by which his personality is illuminated. Such a man no longer needs any external proof of immortality; he has the true knowledge, which is always based on his own experience.

As long as we lack this experience of our own, we are dependent on external observations, and one of the best teachers is nature, which gives us evidence of the truth through its symbols and analogies; for since in the whole of nature the outside is the expression of the inside, and everything is subject to a single law and proceeds from a single will, we can also recognize symbols of inner processes wherever nature reigns in its purity. We see that when the sun sets, its light first disappears from the surface of our continent. Perhaps long after it is no longer visible to us, the mountain tops still enjoy its light; then, it is only reflected in the clouds, finally in the highest regions of the air, and twilight is followed by night. The light of the sun is the life of the earth; the light of the spirit the life of men on earth. When it withdraws from the body to its source, it will not be sudden; it first leaves the lower regions and shines on for a long time in the higher ones.

Now, to understand this, it is necessary that we learn not only the visible human body, but also the higher elements of the constitution of man, and here we need no classification of principles of good faith derived from anyone to accept, but merely to contemplate our own nature. The book of nature teaches us everything; it’s just a matter of reading it properly.

It takes no supernatural wisdom to see that there are forces at work in our material body other than purely mechanical and chemical forces, and that these forces cannot have been created by the body; for a self-evident truth teaches us and says: “Nothing can come out of nothing,” i.e., nothing can produce of itself anything for which the cause is not contained within itself. An inanimate corpse cannot generate life, emotion, passion, thought, spirit. Life, feeling, thought, etc., are forces that work in the body, increase in it, and become manifest, but not its products; just as the sunlight, which produces colors in a plant, is a product of the plant. The One Life, the One Spirit works and manifests itself in any form according to the ability of that form to use and express the power at work within it. A violin does not play itself or create music; but the artist can play it and use it as a tool to create music. A brain that would always think for itself could not be prevented from making the wildest leaps; but man more or less has his thoughts in his power through mental power. If he loses his spiritual power, he is a fool and his control over his mind is over. To believe that unconsciousness produces consciousness, or that movements of the brain matter can produce thought, is as foolish as to believe that a cow can come out of a stall where there is no cow.

Also, there is no power without substance. Where movement, consciousness, sensation, etc. are revealed, there must be something that moves, is conscious, can be felt, etc., which does not mean, however, that the material in motion has to be so coarse that one can touch it with one’s hands and can grasp or weigh it on the scale. When a passion stirs in man, there is a psychic substance in him that vibrates, stimulates his nerves and can also make his blood boil. When a man thinks, thinking can be nothing but a movement of his mind; but by “mind” we mean the seat of intelligence and inner feeling, and if that seat were not substantial, it would be nothing, and one could neither think nor feel with it, neither collect ideas nor combine and analyze them.

No organic activity can take place unless there is a corresponding organism. This is what our reason tells us. Neither the eye sees nor the brain; but the sense impressions reach the consciousness of the human being by means of the sense organs. Not the body, nor the brain, but the human mind becomes aware of these impressions. Where there is mental activity there must also be a mental, but nonetheless substantial, organization to carry it on; the body is not capable of this; it serves only as a tool of the mind. Scientific experiments show that by stimulating certain parts of the brain, you can evoke certain emotional states, for example, reverent, angry, gentle, vain, humble, etc.; but it is not the brain that is brought into such states by the brain, but rather the mind. Everything indicates that the gross organization visible to us is based on a finer etheric organization. This is also the teaching of those who have had experience in these things, and the observation of phenomena commonly known nowadays casts great doubt on the existence of a so-called “astral body,” In fact, without this astral body the physical body would not exist either, because the latter represents the model, so to speak, on which the latter is built. The spiritual organization of the mind is even higher than the astral body.

All of this may seem like an “unprovable theory” to those who have no self-knowledge and are only looking for external evidence as to what is within themselves, and in fact there is no absolute proof of truth but that, that you can experience it yourself. But anyone who has reached a certain level of spiritual development no longer needs any external proof of their own nature, they can experience a lot by “contemplating themselves” and self-examination that remains hidden forever to those who seek in external appearances. What is a self-evident fact for the experienced is always only a theory for the inexperienced.

Every man capable of self-examination finds himself possessed of at least a threefold organization, namely, that of his physical body, which is the seat of his physiological activity, and that of his “astral body,” the sphere of instincts and passions in which still no intelligence governs, and which is wrongly called the “soul” because it is at most a “desire body,” and thirdly, the spiritual organization of the mind, or the “thought body,” which is as different from the desire body as thought is from the animal feelings. Although all three organizations in man are connected to form a unit and mutually influence one another, each has its own functions and can carry out its activities independently of those of the others, as every human being can easily observe in himself. But beyond these three, higher still than thought, lies another realm, the realm of revelation or enlightenment, where direct spiritual cognition takes place, exalted above all rational work, and precisely because it is higher than intellect, cannot be grasped intellectually. This is the very realm of the soul, in which it rests, free from all conceptions, free from all delusions, through its connection with the material, sensual and intellectual realms, in the infinity of its being, in the blissful consciousness of its divine existence, like an uninvolved spectator who watches the play of natural forces in the worlds without being touched by it himself.

If we are to get any approximate idea of ​​the states of the soul after its separation from the visible body, we must learn about these three realms, and the best way to do this is through experience. For this we need neither die nor go out of ourselves; man himself is a small world in which everything is contained. Heaven, purgatory, and hell are within ourselves. When we find heaven within us, we also find our Father who dwells in heaven; when we find the kingdom of God within us, all the rest is given to us. We don’t have to look far for the “beasts” within us; they express themselves through their instincts and passions, and as for the devil, his appearance requires no summons; sometimes a look in the mirror is enough. It’s easier to let him come than to keep him away. So long as the soul inhabits the material body, or, to put it more correctly, so long as that ray of light of the divine soul which represents man’s individuality is connected with man’s consciousness, the mind can rise to the highest ideal in devotion, or in the burn up the fires of passion, or sink into the night of folly. There is no need for scientific proof of this, because every sensible person knows it from experience.

Nothing can be essentially different from the source from which it arose. All phenomena in all of nature testify to this. A cow cannot give birth to a bird, death cannot give birth to life, matter cannot create a spirit. From light comes light, from fire heat, etc. Man could not have a material body if there were not a material kingdom from which he is born and from which he receives his sustenance; the desire body would not exist if there were no influences from which passions spring; without the realm of ideas there would be no collecting of them, without the eternal there would be no feeling of the same in man. Any force that makes itself felt in man can be nothing other than the expression of an energy that is generally present in the universe, just as a dynamo machine could not produce electricity if there were no electricity in the world, or nobody could breathe if there was no air. Every power comes from a source similar to its nature and returns to its origin. We thus distinguish three realms from which come the three bodies of man, from which they draw their nourishment, and to which they return, viz.: The material world, to which man’s material body belongs, the “astral world,” from from which the astral body originates, and the realm of ideas from which man’s “thought body” (mind) feeds. These three kingdoms, as well as these three bodies, belong to perishable nature; but beyond that lies that whose revelation is nature with all its products, namely the kingdom of God, from which man directly receives his higher soul powers, knowledge, etc. The constitution of man viewed as a microcosm corresponds exactly to that of the universe as a macrocosm. Anyone who denies this because he does not understand it will hardly understand the state of the soul after death; for the understanding of this doctrine gives us the key to this mystery.

Death is the detachment of the soul from everything that does not belong to its own being. Only when the soul has become free of everything that is not “soul” has it been completely purified and is completely free. Such a death may take thousands of years to fully occur; for neither the physical body, nor the body of desires, nor the organism for thinking belong to the essence of the soul; only her divine nature leaves the realm of transience with her and enters eternity with her.

But before we consider these various separations or “deaths,” let us try to get an idea of ​​what “soul” is. Considered as the Absolute, we cannot comprehend her essence, but we can form a conception of her essence in one of the many appearances in which she reveals herself. What God is in his own essence will only become clear to us when his essence is revealed in the depths of our hearts, in the sanctuary of our innermost and highest consciousness. The soul of all things is the highest, innermost and source of everything; consequently also the origin of all external and internal, vegetative, intellectual and spiritual vital activity; it is itself the life principle, the effects of which are revealed in the various stages of existence, just as a ray of light which comes from the sun, although it is reflected one after the other by different mirror surfaces, nevertheless has its origin in the sun and is identical with the nature of the sun. In the same way we can regard the life of man as a ray of light coming from the source of all life, manifesting itself in those forms which are closest to the deity as spiritual life, in those forms which are more distant as intellectual activity, and in those most distant as animal, vegetative Life and finally expressed as a chemical and mechanical force, gravitation, etc. The soul in man is the spark of God within him, his spiritual-divine life. Where this spark is absent, there is no true and enduring individuality. A person without this divine-spiritual life is nothing other than a constantly changing natural phenomenon, a sum of lower forces, a tool in which and through which not the deity but nature works, lives, desires, thinks and acts. As God is omnipresent, though his Spirit is not everywhere manifest to us, so is the life of nature in all things, whether latent or active; and as heat can pass from one body to another, so vital energy can travel from one organism to another, leaving the unfit forms and vivifying those fit, as heat warms bodies. The sea of ​​life always remains the same, just as the forms that grow in it change.

The world of appearances in which we live is the mirror image of reality and is therefore wrong, i.e., those who only look at the surface see the truth wrongly and take appearances for reality. They confuse life itself with the expression of its activity, and believe it to be a product of much lower organic activity, and because they thus confuse cause and effect, they do not know what the state of being alive actually consists of, either what causes death to occur The number of people who are buried each year, although they only appear to be dead, and then wake up again in their coffins and die, is still terrifyingly large, despite all modern precautionary measures.^[9]

The first death to which man is subjected on earth takes place when the “astral body” finally separates from the physical body. A cessation of vital activity is by no means a reliable sign that this separation has taken place and that life has escaped. No one will throw away a clock because it has stopped for some unknown reason, but rather see if some temporary disturbance is not the cause. Anyone who does not see the soul, which is the light and life of the body, cannot know whether it has left the body if it does not express itself. Only decomposition alone is a sure sign of this separation, because a living soul does not inhabit a decaying corpse.

During life on earth the astral body is the seat of the life force and the agent of its activity in the physical body. Even during ordinary sleep, as well as in various morbid or abnormal states (drunkenness, seasickness, somnambulism, delirium, mediumship, hypnotism, etc.), a partial emergence of the astral body from the physical body takes place, as does everyone who has the gift of possesses clairvoyance, can perceive. At death there is a complete separation of the soul and astral body from the corpse. The soul, as it were, takes off the coarsest of its robes; their nature is not changed; their essence is God. Nor can it in its essence ever separate itself from God, who is its essence, and has no more separated itself from him than a ray of light coming from the sun can be separated from the sun. Even during her earthly existence she rests in God, who is the innermost reason of her existence; she has never separated from God, but has only forgotten her divine origin. Not the soul itself, but its consciousness, has alienated itself from its own nature; in the reawakening of their true knowledge is their reunion with God.

All description in words is imperfect and easily misleading, because the absolute cannot be expressed, and we must resort to relative terms when we speak of things for which there are no terms. We can therefore only speak in parables here, and when we speak of a separation of the soul, this means a withdrawal of the sunlight, i.e., of consciousness meant. The true consciousness can withdraw, and yet a reflection of it remain in the part that has been left, like a diamond exposed to sunlight, which continues to shine even when night has fallen.

We can already see this in the visible carcass; for even if the spiritual life has disappeared from it, a vegetative and chemically active force still remains in it, which initiates its decomposition and serves to form destructive microorganisms. Similarly, in the astral corpse, after the soul has withdrawn from it, the senseless instincts and dreamlike combinations of ideas remain active for a while.

Consciousness is soul power; there is nothing absolutely dead in the world; Power, matter and consciousness are inseparable. Without some kind of consciousness there would be no chemical affinities, no attraction, no magnetism, no gravity, no rotation of the planets in the solar system. Each form serves as a tool for the working of the mind, i.e., of consciousness in matter; matter has no consciousness except through its association with spirit. Also in man there are many things, each of which has its own consciousness and will; but the individual consciousness in man can rule them all; without this man would be an automaton in which the prevailing feeling would be the master of his world. There are indeed many men in whom the stomach, liver, or some other organ is “their god,” or who are ruled by this or that habit, are subject to this or that passion; but in all of these the consciousness of their true individuality is either not yet awakened or not strong enough to be master in their own realm. In an astral body deserted by reason, that habit which was predominant in man during life is the dominating and guiding force. Therefore we see that the ghosts and “ghosts” of dead people instinctively repeat the actions that they have become accustomed to in life. All higher and lower forces are present in the living human being, and just as his reason can be master over his animal instincts, so the spiritual consciousness can also be master over his intellectual activity.

If we wish to know what states our soul can enter after separation from the body, we need only study the states into which it can enter even now, considering it detached from all external sense stimuli. As long as we live externally, the invading sensory stimuli bring about ever-changing states of consciousness. When these cease, we shall probably be left to our own devices. In sleep we depend on our own dream life and have no control over the sensations and ideas that arise in our mind; yes, they do not come to the consciousness of our true individuality at all, because the light of our soul withdraws to its original source while the body lies asleep, and reason also disappears with it. A sleeping body is not a man in the true sense of the word, but rather resembles a most unreasonable animal whose brain is a playground for ideas it cannot control.

In the waking man all principles are together; but if he has not yet found his true self, i.e., if he has not yet come to true self-consciousness, and is removed from the external senses, and now left to his own devices, he will soon feel most miserable and forlorn. His imagination may drive away his boredom for a while, but it is not long enough for him. An adept or saint, on the other hand, would not be bored even if he had to spend his life in a lonely dungeon. He has found his true self and his soul is in God. What better company could he ask for? Living in eternity, breathing love, recognizing the highest, there is no time for him and consequently no more boredom.

The soul only participates in the states of consciousness of the material as long as it is connected with the material forms. The forms without the soul can still have their own forms of consciousness, but these are only a reflection or reflection of the spirit, and consequently those beings who have no true light are only illusory beings. These include the astral beings abandoned by the divine spirit, which is why they are also called “larvae” or “shadows,” even if their lower instincts have not completely died out.

A creature, however closely resembling a human being, cannot be a real human being in the image of God unless it has the divine spirit within it, because a complete human being includes possession of all the known seven principles. It can happen that a human being is so debased and degenerate that he is abandoned by the divine spirit on earth because he drives it out of himself. Such people are the spiritually dead, others in whom this spirit is present but not awakened are the spiritually asleep. All of these can be outwardly very lively, awake, sharp-witted and erudite; but they are soulless. The same can be the case with the inhabitants of the astral plane, for the fact that man sheds the material body does not change his psychic nature. There is no reason known to us to suppose that the shedding of the earthly sheath could have any other consequence for the astral man, than that the cessation of those functions to which the physical body belongs, and that, in consequence of the cessation of the external sense-activities, the internal ones senses develop more.

Those people who have the ability to observe with clairvoyant vision the process of separating the astral body from the corpse unanimously state that the departing soul leaves behind two corpses, namely the visible corpse and a finer one magnetically connected to it.^[10] “Etheric” or “odic’ body, which is not to be confused with the actual astral body, and forms the link between this and the externally visible body. As long as part of the physical carcass remains, the same piece of astral carcass remains. Incidentally, it may be noted that this astral corpse can be used for magical purposes and that for this and other reasons cremation of the corpse is preferable to burial. Much could be said of this “etheric-magnetic” body, but it would divert us too much from the subject of our present consideration, and it may only be remarked, therefore, that this etheric body is used in the so-called “spirit materializations,” well known to spiritualists, and also plays a role in apparitions of ghosts and the like. In an ordinary man he is soulless and without intelligence; in those who are called “spiritually reborn,” after death it takes the place of the physical body. More about this can be found in the works of H. P. Blavatsky, Theophrastus Paracelsus and other mystics.

Death is a shedding of these two earthly sheaths and a birth of the astral body from them. This birth is described by Andrew Jackson Davis and other seers, by their own observation, roughly as follows:

“First a beautiful bluish tinge, in which a transparent ovoid substance was visible, appeared at a distance of about a meter above the dying man’s head. It waved back and forth like a balloon, gradually lengthened, and finally became as big as the human body. The whole was shrouded in a mist-like fragrance. Then I saw in it a face whose features were like those of the dying, but more beautiful and as if rejuvenated, but yet unfinished, like those of a newborn child. With every breath taken by the dying man, this astral body, hovering horizontally above him, became denser and more developed; but without sign of consciousness, similar to a person sleeping. When the dying man had exhaled his last breath, the etheric cord which connected the astral body to the corpse was severed, and the birth was complete.”

          Whether this separation is easy or difficult will depend on whether the person is ripe or immature to die. Nature gives us answers to such questions by examples. We see that in a ripe fruit the pit separates easily from the surrounding skin, while in an unripe fruit this separation can only be accomplished by force. A man whose time is up and who is no longer attached to life will have an easy death; in the case of those who commit suicide, those who have been executed or murdered, and those whose souls cling to earthly existence, the separation may be hard and difficult. Spiritistic messages from the dead bear witness to this. There is a large amount of literature, both old and new, on these things. If certain people who are supposed to be “official scientists” are ignorant of such facts, that is their own affair; for us their official ignorance has no value. In addition, however, there are a number of testimonies from people who were apparently dead and were brought back to life, from which it emerges that they were aware of their separation from the body, saw it objectively in front of them and that returning to it was extremely repugnant to them. Also, the number of people who have the ability to transfer their consciousness into their astral body and to leave their physical body temporarily seems to be steadily increasing, and whoever denies such facts, in spite of everything, cannot help but be helped that he waits until he comes to a better understanding through his own experience.

Regarding the inner processes at the moment of death, a certain Adept writes: “No man dies in a state of unconsciousness. Even a lunatic, or a man dying of drunken insanity, has a moment of inner enlightenment at death, though he cannot proclaim it. His brain thinks and he himself relives his past life in a few seconds. Its events emerge from its memory chamber and, with all their details, pass like a panorama before the eye of the soul. The work of the past casts its reflection on the veil of the future” This is, as it were, “the day of judgment”^[11] or the reckoning of karma, because the deeds of the past form the image for the coming incarnation. At this solemn moment the dying person should be allowed to enjoy undisturbed rest. The lamentations of those present can only trouble the departing soul. This revival of the past has often been confirmed by the apparent dead who have come back to life.

The letter in question also states: “Consciousness leaves the body as suddenly as the dying flame leaves the wick. The impression or thought that was the strongest naturally appears most vividly before the soul and, to a certain extent, outlives all the others, which now disappear for the time being and only later reappear. As a rule, the deceased only becomes dreamily aware of his departure from physical life after a considerable period of time. Exceptions to this rule are very vicious people who are passionate about their delusions of self, and these are a danger to the living. These very material larvae, whose last thought was their “I” and the urgent desire to live, often instinctively feel the disconnection from their higher consciousness. This also happens with some suicides. Then something terrible can take place. Desperate to survive at all costs, the astral larva seeks refuge in and possesses the nearest living organism. If it cannot find a human organism to which it can cling, it will possess an animal, a dog, a hyena, or the like.” Such cases of human possession are commonly found in insane asylums. The patient then pretends to be a completely different person than he actually appears to be, and “science” stands there at a loss because it does not know these laws of nature.

But we do not want to rely on the testimonies of others, no matter how well authenticated they may be, but see what our own observation and reason have to say about it. Whoever has the ability to look at himself knows that he is not his physical body, nor his astral body, nor his mental organization or “mind body” itself, but that all these things belong to his I, the soul, and there, as this ego is raised above these three bodies, it can also observe them separately and study their sensations and functions, just as one can observe the functions of the individual organs in oneself in the physical body, although all these organs belong together and as whole are one unit.

Now we see that the physical body in itself, apart from the life force working in it, possesses only one power proper to it, and that is resistance. He does not move, but is moved by the will; he does not live by his own power, but is quickened by the spirit; he thinks nothing and does nothing, but only serves as an instrument for thought and action; he has no intelligence per se; he only carries out the orders given to him, habitually or mechanically.

If we look at our own astral body, we do not find any intelligence belonging to it, but we recognize that it is the seat of dreamlike sensations and instincts, and that it has the property that the actions that have become habitual to it to repeat instinctively, that is, the impressions he has received always evoke the same movements in him, and the stronger such an impression was, the more it will dominate him. In material life the astral body moves the physical, and through it performs the habitual actions, in dreams it performs these actions without the aid of the physical body, and there is no reason why it should not then retain this quality, when he is completely separated from the physical body after death. That this is the case is not only testified to by those who have experienced these things, but also a large number of spiritistic phenomena, apparitions of “earthbound spirits,” ghost stories and the like find their explanation through this law. The astral body of a deceased person is in itself no more a person than the corpse is; but he has a vital activity different from the body and does not lie still like a corpse, but is moved by the forces working instinctively in him. Without the spirit, the astral body is not a “spirit,” but only a mindless larva, in which, however, there can appear apparitions sometimes deceptively similar to the actions of an intelligent being, which, as is well known, leads to much misguidance in those engaged in spiritualism, without knowing the related laws of nature.

As a rule, at death there is a complete separation of the astral body from the physical body. But it is also conceivable that in certain cases a magnetic connection between the two can still exist for a while, namely by means of the odic-magnetic body. This circumstance explains a number of so-called “occult phenomena,” for example, vampirism, the facts of which are established, though a certain class of scholars know nothing of them, and deny them, like so many other things of which these people know nothing. In general, it is not correct to say that science does not know these things. Real science knows them; only the semi-learned, who know absolutely nothing but what they have been taught, do not know anything about them. They can only say “bah!” to everything that is beyond their horizon. A sheep can do this too.

It is quite a different matter when the astral body, after its separation from the corpse, is still connected with the spirit and illuminated with intelligence. However, this can apparently only be the case with those people in whom this enlightenment already occurred during life on earth. Everyone can now judge for themselves whether this is the case with them, whether their astral body has been penetrated by the divine spirit and whether that higher divine consciousness has awakened in them, through which they can control all their animal instincts and habits. A purely intellectual activity, a mechanical absorption, assembly and processing of ideas and thoughts, as it were, does not give self-control and is just as little a sign of the existence of self-confident mental power just as the digestion by the stomach is. Fools sometimes think very logically; ideas also develop in an orderly sequence in a state of delirium or in dreams. One can be a good logician, a keen brooder, a subtle advocate, and yet be dull and lacking in true self-confidence. Most people are caught up in a dream life here on earth, why should it be any different after death?

But higher than the deceptive and shifting consciousness of personality produced by the sense stimuli, higher still than the dream consciousness of the inhabitant of the astral plane, and higher still than the mechanics of thought, is the consciousness of the soul, of the true “Self,” i.e., of that eternal “I” which the intellect does not comprehend because the “Self,” is unlimited and eternal. This “Self,” of all things is God, and its consciousness is God-consciousness. Those enlightened beings who have come to this consciousness know this higher self as their “I,” which is neither born nor dies, for they are conscious of their union with that self, and need not concern themselves with the fate of their astral body left behind, other than to take care of that of the material corpse; but in most people this true self-awareness exists only as a faint glimmer; only a few know what is eternal in them, feels and thinks eternal. Is it probable that a force which has remained latent and unnoticed in everyday man all his life, and which many do not even want to recognize, will immediately awaken in full consciousness in the former after the separation of the astral body from the material body? Can a man be so simple as to believe that after he has not created a heaven in his soul during life, he will at once enter heaven as a result of this separation?

The higher consciousness leaves the human organism not only at death, but even during ordinary sleep; the consciousness of personality arising from the sensory stimuli ceases as soon as such stimuli are no longer felt; the dream-consciousness may continue even while the body is asleep. Were man united in the personality with his true divine self, he would be spiritually conscious even while the body is asleep; for the spirit of God in man does not immediately need the body to sleep for its recuperation.

The Bible says that nothing can enter the kingdom of God “unless it is born again of water and of the Spirit.” The “water” is the symbol of the mind, the “spirit” the knowledge of the truth Without this knowledge there is also none other than a transitory pseudo-existence. If spiritual rebirth has not occurred during life, it must take place after physical death; without it there can be no immortality, because immortality lies in the self-knowledge of that which is no longer subject to change.

The statements of the enlightened, which teach us that the separated individuality soon after separation from the body enters into a state comparable to pregnancy, agree with these views justified by reasoning. The divine spark dormant in the astral body is attracted to its divine source, just as the north pole determines the direction of the magnetic needle; for every being returns in the end to its origin. In order to bring about this return, he must free himself from everything that is not of his divine nature. Above all, the lower instincts, animal passions, and everything that belongs to the lower soul forces belong here. Thus the heavenly body is born from the desire body, leaving behind the desire body with its lower elements. This is the “second (mystical) death,” the change that the enlightened experience in this very life, thereby transcending death and becoming conscious of their immortal existence. This spiritual rebirth could hardly take place, however, if the soul were still bothered and disturbed by lower instincts and ideas during this process even after it had separated from the body, and this prevented its expansion and its ascent to the highest ideal. How about, for example, it is conceivable that a soul could enter into rest and undisturbed bliss if on its way earthly cares about family affairs attracted it to earthly existence; if she had to return to move tables and answer prying questions by knocking and the like, if she might find her relatives in dire misery without being able to intervene to help, or would have to be “quoted” by every fool and necromancer for pastime and amusement. A state of unconsciousness, or rather forgetfulness of all earthly affairs, during this gestational period, as described by the adepts, is therefore a scientifically established necessity.

But if at the same time the memory of the earthly dream life with its trifles, which seem so big to us, as long as we stand before them, and become so small when seen from afar, disappear, the higher ideals of the soul are not lost in the process. Common, low impressions, and impressions arising from egoism, belong to man’s transient nature, higher ideals to his higher nature, and from these consists his heavenly world, which then, according to his nature, is just as really there for him as our material world is for us in our earthly existence.

All existence is relative. We know nothing of the world around us except what reaches our consciousness through sensory impressions. The world that we know consists of the ideas and sensations which the impressions which we receive from outside evoke in us. We live as it were in a fantasy, conjured up within us by the magical power of nature. In dream life, which can be compared to astral existence, the impressions coming from outside cease, and the world in which we move there consists in repetitions of ideas already taken place and in combinations of them, which, without the guidance of our reason, change mechanically line up and develop. Our own imagination plays a comedy that we take for reality. That is why most of the information we receive from the inhabitants of the astral world is usually only their dreams and games of imagination; a kernel of some insignificant truth and a multitude of lies associated with it. Communication with the souls of deceased people is usually only dealing with dreamers who are still tied to the earth; like everything else in the world, it has its light and dark sides. For the departed soul, however, unless it is already a spiritless larva, it can be to the greatest disadvantage, since it re-tightens the chains that it is trying to shake off and hinders its further development.

In the heavenly world there is the inverse relationship of the physical world, just as outer nature is generally the reverse mirror-image of the spiritual. While here the world that we see objectively arises in our consciousness through impressions coming from outside, there our objective world arises from the ideals stored up in our soul. Everything good and noble that the soul has absorbed in this world can now develop freely after all obstacles have been removed; all the germs of the beautiful and sublime that she carries within her can now develop, spread, bloom and bear fruit. Thus the soul lives amidst the glory which arises from itself, in a heavenly world which is its own creation, and into which nothing can enter that grieves it.

But even the heavenly powers of the soul are not inexhaustible and come to an end. Then the soul also sheds its last form, the thought body, and if the desire for being special is not completely overcome in it, it enters the cycle of birth and death anew on the path of “incarnation” or “reincarnation,” forgetting their heavenly nature and gaining experience again in the bitter school of life. This leaving the heavenly abode and forgetting the divine nature is the third death, the bitterest of all, because a return to the material is a sinking into the night of ignorance and into the fire of passion, from which the suffering soul then finds anew its way out to light of knowledge. This cycle will also be repeated until the soul has become fully aware of its unity with God and recognizes itself in God as the creator of the world and the lord of life and death.

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Popular Lectures V. Theosophy and Spiritism. Communication with the Deceased by Franz Hartmann, M.D.^[12]

It is often asked whether the “Theosophists” are adherents or opponents of Spiritism, and some even believe that Theosophy is, if not identical, at least intimately related to Spiritism. Before proceeding to the answer to these questions, it will be necessary first to establish what is meant by theosophy and spiritism; the answer then follows itself.

Theosophy is the self-knowledge of truth, which can be attained neither through external observation, nor through brooding, studying and speculating, nor through the play of the imagination, nor through dreams and enthusiasms, but only through the light of truth entering the heart and mind of the people enlightened and revealed in himself. In this knowledge of truth there can be no difference of opinion; for where true knowledge occurs, there, all supposition, delusion and belief, all belief in mere probability, all doubt and all uncertainty ceases. What still moves in the area of uncertainty is not theosophy. The wise and enlightened of all peoples and times, therefore, are altogether unanimous in the testimony they have given of the truth, and speculative philosophy labors laboriously toward the confirmation of that testimony.

Spiritism is destined to become a science; For even if the phenomena which it presents come from the “supernatural” and project into it, they none the less belong to the forces at work in nature, and finally the whole of visible nature also proceeds, fundamentally speaking, from the invisible. The emergence of any natural phenomenon, the growth of a tree from a core, the construction of a human body from a germ, etc., is in the end just as miraculous as the formation of a so-called “spirit materialization,” and in all of this the “miracle” ceases as soon as one recognizes the law according to which such processes take place.One only “wonders” about what seems incomprehensible to one because one does not understand it.

With all phenomena in nature, knowledge of the law is the main thing for understanding them, the phenomenon is secondary. If the law is recognized, the explanation follows of itself. But if one wants to draw conclusions from the observation of phenomena as to the law which underlies them, the way is slow and difficult, and one easily falls into regrettable errors. especially when dealing with things that defy the experimental methods applicable to the treatment of ordinary material things. A true materialist should know the nature of matter, the forces at work therein, and the phenomena which proceed from them, and likewise a true spiritualist should know what “spirit” is and the laws by which spirit operates works in matter and becomes apparent. No one will take it amiss if a practiced chemist experiments with chemical substances in his laboratory. He knows the properties of the materials he uses and the associated hazards. It is something quite different when an ignorant person plays with nitroglycerine or fulminating mercury, and if a chemist were to draw his attention to the dangers involved, this chemist would hardly be taken for an opponent of chemistry. It is similar with spiritualism, only its dangers are even greater. The ignition of explosives can cost a man his head; the misuse of occult powers leads to moral depravity and spiritual death, insanity and loss of individuality, such as is too often seen in “mediums.” In spiritism we are not dealing with well-known, mechanical forces that can be directed by anyone, but with living and intelligent beings who have their own will. If you don’t know the “spirits” you are calling or allowing entry, you will never get rid of them in the end; whoever associates with the “spirits” and wants to make them useful must know them; he must be a great spirit himself and have a will that can rule spirits; for every thing is governed by what is above it, and not by what is below and weaker. The Adept rules over the denizens of the lower regions; the ignorant experimenter in Spiritism is ruled, fooled and led by the nose by them.

The time when spiritistic phenomena were believed to be all based on medium deceit and sleight of hand, is over; only completely ignorant people still cling to this opinion; on the other hand, some philosophers and speculators try to prove the immortality of man from these phenomena and draw conclusions that lack the firm basis of all logic, the knowledge of truth. Phenomena whose cause is unknown prove nothing other than that such phenomena exist. No explanation follows from this. An artificially made thunder in the theater can sound just as real as if it had thundered in the sky; You can’t always see what’s behind a mask. The explanation lies only in recognizing the cause. But whoever wants to recognize spiritual causes must be able to perceive them spiritually. But spirit can only be known and understood through spirit. Intellectual speculation draws conclusions about probabilities, knowledge of God recognizes the truth. This spiritual knowledge is “theosophy.”

External natural science will only be perfect when man knows and masters all the forces at work in external nature, heat, light, electricity, sound, etc., in all their effects. Spiritism can only claim to be called a science when it knows the human soul, the soul of the universe, and the spiritual forces at work in them, as well as their connection, interaction and the way in which they are revealed. It will then be seen that the visible world in which we live is not the only one that surrounds us, and that we are not the only intelligent beings in nature. The inner contemplation teaches everyone in whom it takes place that outside of this world visible to us there are still different worlds which surround us, penetrate and affect us, and which, although invisible to us, are visible to their inhabitants and tangible, while our visible world is perhaps as invisible to them as their worlds are to us.

Indian philosophy describes seven such worlds or states of being, with their qualities and inhabitants, but which, for the sake of brevity, we can mention here only in part and in passing; namely:

1. 1. 1. The consciousness of the outer man. The material world with its visible bodies corresponds to this condition, the dwelling place of humans and animals.
      2. The consciousness of the inner man. Accordingly, the inner or “astral world.” the region of the astral light, dwelling place of the elemental beings, the “spirits” of the four elements, astral corpses of deceased people and animals, etc.
      3. The innermost consciousness and accordingly the heavenly world or world of the gods (Devachan) with its blissful inhabitants.

The other higher worlds or states need not be considered in this discussion of spiritism, and have nothing to do with its phenomena, which are largely the same in the “astral world” but also in the psychic activity of man himself consciously or unconsciously, have their origin. According to Indian philosophy, 70 million species of the inhabitants of the astral world are known, and even if only a small part of them can intervene in our existence under certain conditions, it goes without saying that one cannot attribute all such phenomena to the “spirits of deceased people,” and that for the spiritualist researcher there is still a wide, unknown field of discovery open to him. These inhabitants of the “soul of the world” are essentially divided into the following classes:

1. 1. 1. Bodiless deities (arūpa devas) which can be thought of as intelligent forces, “angels” and the like.
      2. Gods (Rūpa Devas). Higher, intelligent beings who have form or shape, i.e., have an “etheric” body, even if it is invisible to us.

          III. Elementals. Various denizens of the astral world, demons, goblins, lower “spirits” of low intelligence, and here it must be noted that the word “spirits” encompasses the most varied of terms, and is often applied to beings that are invisible, but nothing less than have spirit.

1. 1. 1. Larvae and Ghosts. The mindless astral remains of deceased humans; Apparent beings (Māra-Rūpas) imprinted with the character of the desire that produced them.
      2. Nature spirits. The “spirits” of the four elements: gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders.
      3. Animals. Astral beings whose animal qualities have found expression in their animal forms.

          VII. Devil. Astral bodies of degenerate people in which the divine spark has separated from the personality, leaving it afflicted with low intelligence.

          Whether this classification is correct, and whether these beings exist, must be left to anyone who is interested to judge for themselves. Nobody needs to believe it blindly, and we can’t prove it overtly. But if anyone wants to know what such creatures look like, a multitude of representations of them can be found among all nations. Also in the pictures of witches’ kitchens etc. of the Middle Ages one finds a lot of such depictions of astral beings, which certainly did not all spring from the empty imagination of the artist.

Let us now assume, in the absence of our own experience, that the statement of the sages and seers in relation to the existence of these astral beings is correct, that there are malicious goblins, nature spirits, half-animal elementals, ghosts, devils, etc., and that the same can make themselves felt in spiritistic séances, it is clear that a great deal of so-called “spirit manifestations” which inexperienced people ascribe to the “spirits” of deceased people can come from beings who have no real spirit at all. In order to know how they produce these phenomena, one would first have to know the properties of these astral beings. Such an inquiry would lead us into the realm of occult science and magic, and we would not soon be finished with it. Besides, it is not at all desirable that the great multitude, whether learned or unlearned, should be made acquainted with mysteries of this kind, before men have matured to understand it and have acquired the necessary moral strength not to misuse such knowledge; for knowledge gives power because from it comes skill, and if certain learned men should gain power over the occult powers in nature, no one would be safe from being sickened or killed at a distance, or from an unknown’s craving for gratification to fall victim to his scientific curiosity as a “test subject.” Such people’s ignorance of such things is the guardian angel protecting them even from their own undoing. But the history of the Inquisition can tell us what mischief the misunderstood belief in witches has caused.

We therefore want to leave this dangerous field and deal only with the question of whether communication with the souls of deceased people is possible, and here it will be expedient to investigate whether dealings between soul and soul, without gross sensory perception, is also possible in the living; for in this case it could turn out that some of the apparitions or communications supposedly originating from the deceased originated through telepathy or other remote effects of the living.

Everyday experience teaches us that a person’s feelings, ideas and thoughts influence other people, and anyone is free to try and convince himself of this. Our thoughts and ideas come and go without us calling them. We do not know where they come from, nor where they are going. A man who is unable to grasp an idea without first being given a lengthy explanation would be more witless than a dog who, without many words, understands what his master wants of him. The more harmonious the sympathy or mood of feeling between two people, the easier it is for an exchange of ideas to take place between the two, and it can take place even if they are thousands of miles apart, while two people who dislike each other in spite of everything it’s easy to misunderstand words, no matter how close they get to each other. Everyday experience teaches us that a person’s feelings, ideas and thoughts influence other people, and anyone is free to try and convince himself of this. Our thoughts and ideas come and go without us calling them. We do not know where they come from, nor where they are going. A man who is unable to grasp an idea without first being given a lengthy explanation would be more witless than a dog who, without many words, understands what his master wants of him. The more harmonious the sympathy or mood of feeling between two people, the easier it is for an exchange of ideas to take place between the two, and it can take place even if they are thousands of miles apart, while two people who dislike each other in spite of everything It’s easy to misunderstand words, no matter how close they get to each other. The more receptive a person is, the easier it is for the influence of another to become apparent in him, and even if he is in the hypnotic, somnambulistic or dream state, in which the receptivity is greatest, because your own thinking and wanting is paralyzed, his is how amazing things come to light. Yes, even more! It is proved by numerous facts that while the body is asleep, a man’s “astral body” or “double” will step out of it, move away from it, appear to other people, can even possess “mediums” and make communications through them. All these are things well known to anyone who has engaged in the study of this science. Spiritualist literature gives innumerable examples of this; In Du Preis’ last work, “Death and the Hereafter,” such examples are cited, and there is no need to cite more. It has often happened that a man, while his body was asleep, has taken possession of another man’s body and spoken through his organism as if it were his own body. If this were to happen every day, no one would be surprised.

All this indicates that the inner individual man and the outer changing personality are two distinct beings; in other words, that the soul is not a “form of physiological action of the body,” but rather the body is a covering, mask, larva, and instrument of the soul, a fact which needs no further argument to reasonable men, and that the inner man is capable of sending not only his thoughts but even his astral body into the distance, a circumstance which need not be proved to those who are capable of doing this themselves. But this requires a certain degree of spiritual will power, and since every power works from a center, in order to make such an experiment one must have this inner spiritual power and firmness, which is not the case with everyone in our present age. A person of sufficient mental strength can send his astral body into the distance and appear there acting consciously as if he were physically present. We find examples of this in the lives of various saints and adepts, including the experiences of H. P. Blavatsky.

Even where this mental awareness is lacking, the astral body, or more correctly the “thought body” (Māyāvi rūpa), can wander into the distance; but then he does not do this consciously and of his own free will, but is rather instinctively drawn to where the sympathy of love drives him. Therefore we usually find that the so-called “double” when it appears as an apparition has neither reason nor understanding, but rather resembles a dream image or a sleepwalker. It often happens with the dying that the soul yearns for those dear to it, and its last thought goes to them and makes an apparition there; but as a rule consciousness is lacking in it; such a double is only dreamily aware of its existence, provided the dying person has not previously possessed the power to transfer his consciousness from one place to another.

A very common example of the long-distance effect of thought or mental perception is when, as happens every day, one suddenly has to think of a person whom one has perhaps not thought of for months, and then receive a letter from him in the next post. There will be few people who have not often guessed something in advance of what has happened afterwards. Such an intuition, if it does not have its origin in the imagination, is nothing else than a spiritual communication, conditioned by an inner psychic power of perception. Countless examples could be cited to show that animistic or spiritistic dealings between people on earth is possible as long as they are still walking in their material, visible body, and the question now arises as to whether this can still take place when the human being, as happens at death, has completely stripped off this body, as one strips off a winter coat, and is only clothed in a finer etheric body?

At first glance it seems as if this were a perfectly self-evident thing, and is taken to be so by many philosophers, saying that death changes nothing in the very essence of man. But on closer inspection the matter is not so simple, and the solution of this riddle is a knowledge of the various forces and principles of which man is composed as a physical, mental and spiritual being, and of the relationships in which the same, is related to the similar forces in the universe, so that we can get an idea of what happens after the separation of these elements at death, and what state the inner man falls into after this separation.

This question has been discussed so many times that it will not be necessary to touch on it more than briefly now. As the states of the dying differ from one another, so too do their states of mind differ, for death does not bring about an instantaneous change in the mood of the soul, and upon that mood depends its destiny.

In man there are higher and lower soul forces, animal instincts, passions, desires, sacred feelings and sublime powers of cognition. Each of these forces represents a form of consciousness, a life, a will spirit, and the more such a force has developed and possessed man during life, the more it fills him and forms his very nature. A human being filled with animal passions and transformed into animals remains an animal even in death; a man whose soul is filled with divine powers, faith, love, hope and patience has these powers in his being and they carry him up to the regions of light, while the man whose soul is dark because he is darkness who loves ignorance remains in darkness, and he, in whose soul burns the fire of passion is driven by that fire even after death.

Between these extremes are the innumerable different states by which people differ from one another; for it will be hard to find someone who is entirely without a sense of goodness, entirely without light, entirely without passion and entirely without darkness. If the soul now wants to enter the high state of consciousness, which is its original destiny and which is usually referred to as “heaven,” it must wrest itself out of the darkness of ignorance and the fire of passion through the power of its indwelling light of knowledge, to leave everything earthly and transient behind and to be lifted up to the light through the divine love for truth. This process is called “spiritual rebirth,” without which the Bible tells us no one can enter heaven, and if that rebirth has not already taken place during life, it must take place after death. In this way, no more immortal can be born than what has developed in man during life, and if nothing divine is contained in him, then nothing can be reborn from him either. Such a man has condemned himself for rejecting the divine spark entrusted to him at birth.

All this is not only taught by the wise, but is in accord with common sense, and anyone who has the ability to enter within himself, to search within himself, and to discern the forces at work within, can be convinced of it.

Thus, if the human soul is not already ready for heaven at the time of departure, it enters an intermediate state in which it can possibly still be exposed to the attraction of the lower soul forces and worldly desires and interests, which prevent it from entering into its true home of light and bliss. It may happen that when they die they are dominated by one last wish, one last thought, and the longing to fulfill this wish ties them to earth and drives them to where fulfillment awaits them. But even in these cases it is usually not the spirit of man thus manifesting itself, but the astral body filled with such desire and in a dreamlike state, the “irrational part of the soul”; for the divine spark withdraws at death to its origin, and remains in connection only by its light with that which is heavenly in the soul, until the spiritual rebirth is accomplished, and the separation of the immortal from the mortal is fully accomplished.

It is also taught that, as a rule, the astral human being falls into a state of unconsciousness immediately after separation from the physical body, from which it is often only after a long time that he awakens to a dreamlike consciousness of his existence. This is very fortunate for him, since otherwise, at this time when the lower soul forces are still in strong vibrations, he would have to be guided by base instincts, take part in earthly things or perhaps appear in the circles of curious spiritualists for the amusement, as indeed may often be the case with those who commit suicide, those who have been executed, or those who have been summarily recalled in the midst of their passionate lives; for in such cases the violently excited lower soul forces can keep the personal consciousness awake. There are all sorts of variations, and not everything can be explained according to a template; these indications can only serve as a hint for one’s own research.

During this dreamlike state, which follows unconsciousness and the entry into that state which precedes spiritual rebirth and which has been described as a kind of “pregnancy period,” communication with these astral beings is now possible. In much the same way that the corpse of a hanged man can be restored to a sort of semblance of life by the application of an electric current, and made to move and grimace while there is still some vitality in its muscles, so can it be done by mediumistic influence , i.e., by transplanting one’s own life force, one can awaken the sleeping or dreaming astral bodies of the deceased to a kind of illusory life, which is like shaking a fever patient out of a comatose state. Then one can also receive messages from him, which as a rule resemble those of a fever patient, are dreamlike, and in which a spark of truth is usually combined with a lot of error. Such a reawakening of a soul striving towards spiritual rebirth is of the greatest disadvantage for the deceased. It reawakens in her the vibrations of the lower soul forces, prevents her from resting, ties her anew to the farces of earthly life, and such attempts may be regarded as like watching a saint in ecstasy tears from his devotions through the ordeal. Herein lies the scientific justification of the law that says let the dead rest.

Many people, insofar as they still believe in heaven at all, imagine that the whole personality comes into it with all its qualities, that through prayers and promises, as if out of favour, one could be accepted into it by God, even if one had nothing for heaven suitable in itself. So it says e.g., in the well-known old hymn:

“Oh God, I’m a Ravennaas [bad lot],

A true cripple of sin

who devoured his sins,

Than like the horse the?

O Lord God, take me dog by the ear,

hold the heaven of mercy bone in front of me,

And throw me sin lout

Into your heaven of mercy.”

          But a sinful lout and a raven-ass cannot enter into a state different from his nature. He can only enter into that quality which belongs to him. Only that which is heavenly in man can enter the heaven of his soul; everything else must be sloughed off and left behind. The monkey love stays behind. Your own personality, insofar as it has not already been transfigured and become heavenly, disappears like a shadow, and with it all your earthly personal relationships also come to an end.

How could the soul’s process of purification even proceed, and the soul soar into the realms of rest and bliss, if it were still preoccupied with family affairs, troubled with cares for its loved ones, guided by personal likes and dislikes? Does not the saint, lifting up his soul in devotion to God, forget himself and all that is going on around him? Doesn’t he forget his own personality and everything connected with it: family, business, friends, church and state?

Once the spiritual rebirth is complete and the purified soul has entered the world of the gods (Devachan), then its own personality, as it appeared on earth, is only a past dream for it and its earthly life is forgotten. Only the highest and noblest impressions that she has received, her most beautiful feelings and ideas, live on in her, where they can unfold into glorious pictures; for the soul in heaven is holy, it is in the sanctuary of its divine self, into which nothing unholy can enter. Everything that belonged to earthly life she had to strip away and leave behind. Her life, her consciousness is, so to speak, the blossom that the tree of her earthly life produced and which is now unfolding there into flower and fruit. Just as the rose is a product of the rose bush and yet its properties are completely different from it, and just as the highest properties and the beauty of the plant are represented in the flower, so also the soul of man in heaven has nothing else to do with personality, which he represented on earth, than that in her the highest ideals, the germs of which were received in her during life, are now expressed and conceived in her. Anyone who understands this will find it downright ridiculous when someone thinks that the soul can still take part in earthly things, or descend from heaven and, to satisfy the curious, or, to drive away the boredom of the spiritualists, to move tables and to perform “spirit knocking.”

Here, however, the answer rings out to us from all places: “What! I shall give up the beatific belief that I associate with the spirits of my dear relatives; should I console myself with the fact that I won’t see them again after death?” And the believing spiritualist runs straight to his medium or to the little table and carries the “spirits” to see if they really are what they claim to be, and then these say “yes!” to his great satisfaction.

The fault is that these people do not know the heavenly life in man, and judge it from the outward material point of view, when that life too is inward, and like us inwardly not separated from what we love and possess so long as we do not separate ourselves from it, so also the soul in heaven is connected to its ideals, and the same are real and objective to it. A mother’s son may have become a great scoundrel, and yet he is present to her soul in heaven as the ideal she loved; She is also emotionally connected to him on earth through the love she has for him, but she knows nothing of his depravity, otherwise heaven would become hell for her. She does not take part in his adventures on earth. What she recognized in him, he is and was for her, in heaven and also on earth.

On the other hand, it is quite possible for a noble-minded, unselfish man to raise his soul to God, and consequently to heaven, and share in the life and feelings of a beloved soul; for what holy love unites is inseparable; in this love the lovers are one and cannot be separated, and from this unity also arises the equality of feeling and thinking, which, however, there can relate only to the noblest ideals.

When it is said that heaven is a dream world, it is only true from the point of view of the Eternal. Seen from the human point of view, it is reality, much truer, more alive and more enduring than this life on earth, which is only a shadow in comparison with it. With equal justification one might call “dreams” the highest ideals grasped and expressed by a poet, painter, musician, or sculptor. We take the external world to be real because we perceive the objects in it, and yet we know nothing of all persons and objects except the ideas which are formed in our own interior through the impressions we receive of them. Consequently, here too our inner world is the real one for us, and everything on the outside is only an illusion. In heaven we live in this inner world, and the ideals which the soul has within express themselves in its conceptions, and these form the world around it, which contains all that it loves. Thus the flower of heavenly bliss blooms from her, and the seed forms for her next reincarnation, until when her heavenly powers are exhausted, the seed falls again into a new soil, and she reincarnates as a new personality, and this round trip lasts until man has come to the full consciousness of his oneness with God and his exaltation above all external conceptions.

Let us now consider the rubbish which the soul has cast off in the astral world, i.e., which the astral corpse left there, which decays like the gross material corpse left behind on earth, we find that it is a mindless larva, comparable to the larva left behind by the butterfly that has emerged. But just as lungs and liver, brain and heart, etc., are still present in an ordinary corpse, so also in such a shell abandoned by the spirit, the instincts, passions, ideas, desires, inclinations, etc., of which it was composed during life, can still exist. Slumber and under certain circumstances, can be put back into a certain activity, so that in this way a kind of “proof of identity” can also come about in the case of so-called “ghost manifestations.” In the dreaming astral body of the deceased, or possibly also in the ghosts who have stayed behind, then old memories are mostly confused, and communications are received which sometimes have some truth in them.

From these astral remnants and present larvae certain spooky figures and apparitions are also recruited. Just as the magnet attracts iron without being intellectually aware of it, so these beings are instinctively attracted by their inherent desires to places where there is food for those instincts. The larva of the deceased miser, driven by the last thought of the deceased, wanders to the place where his money is hidden, the larva of the vindictive clinging to his victim, the larva of the lover can become a vampire, tormenting the object of his passion, and where mediumistic qualities are present, such manifestations can become visible and tangible. In antiquity blood sacrifices were brought to the demons in order to provide them with the means of nourishing themselves by their magnetic vapors and making themselves visible; nowadays the nervous power of sick persons provides the means to do so.

Very often the astral corpses of the deceased are used by certain “spirits” as automatons to represent this or that person. They are mindless larvae, the ethereal doubles of the decaying corpse in the grave, with which they are also magnetically connected, as evidenced by the disgusting stench of corpses that often occurs with such manifestations. But the “ghosts” that set these automatons in motion are to be sought among those inhabitants of the astral world who have already been mentioned. Among these, a certain class of ghosts is particularly noticeable, who delight in parading with great names. That is why you find a lot of “mediums” who fancy that they have as their “spiritual guides” all sorts of historical, deadbeat celebrities, Pythagoras, Napoleon, and the like. Nor is their communication lacking in high-pitched phrases, unctuous phrases, edifying admonitions, and alleged revelations from the hereafter, springing from the imagination and serving the amusement of this class of “spirits”; for it is their peculiarity to make fools of ignorant people. No one will doubt that there are comedians among men who can preach extremely touching and unctuous sermons, although they are scoundrels themselves; why shouldn’t such comedians also be found among the “spirits” of the spiritists?

Another class of these elementals has the power of lifting tables and benches and other objects, throwing stones, bringing things from afar, etc., others dealing with fire, others with the element of water. The feats performed by the fakirs, insofar as they are not based on the fakir’s art and skill, are performed by them with the help of these “spirits” with whom they have associated and are possessed.

If the spiritistic gimmicks were of a harmless nature, they might perhaps be recommended as a pastime; but we see daily how people who too frequently imbibe the spirit of brandy lose all nobler sentiments, all morality, and finally their intelligence, and sink to idiocy. Something similar can also happen through the ingestion of spirits other than that of liquor. In the end, man himself becomes what he absorbs and what fulfills him. He who gives his soul to the playground for lower beings whom he does not know is acting just as foolishly as a man who leaves his house to every vagabond who has come along. It can happen to him that when he returns, he finds everything spoiled and will not be allowed in himself. The madhouses are overflowing with persons who, though not exactly professional mediums, were of a sensitive nature, admitting alien spirits and entertaining them until at last they lost control of themselves. The real owner of the human organism is the Spirit of God, which dwells in it. In him alone is the truth to be found. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me!”

But not all spiritistic phenomena come from alien spirits; the psychic powers of the medium, especially the imagination, often play a major role. The art of magic which the unconsciously working imagination is able to perform is generally little known. Just as a whole story can develop from a single idea in the brain of a novelist, or even in a dream, even without one pondering and thinking, so too, the most adventurous stories often arise from the brain of a medium, which can even lead to objective representation. The imagination of a sensitive person is like a mirror that receives all sorts of impressions from which new images develop. If I go to a “fortune teller” I will hardly get anything else from him other than what I feel in my innermost being. This is reflected in his mind and I get it back with the resulting combinations, even if it contradicts my opinions. Countless examples could be given, but we won’t finish there.

Anyone who has dealt with these things knows that astral forms can be consolidated and made visible and tangible with the help of these elemental spirits. I myself have seen and interacted with these “materializations” dozens of times. It also seems to me that the time is not too far away when human art will succeed in condensing mental images and “materializing” them for a short time. The photography of mental images has already made the beginning of this. But as to the law by which these condensations take place, we may conceive of the universe as a series of octaves of etheric vibrations (Ākāśa), of which the lower octaves are visible and the higher are invisible. When the thought vibrations can be tuned down to a lower octave, they become visible and material; if the material vibrations are tuned up to a higher octave, the matter becomes invisible. All such things are quite natural; it is only a question of understanding the laws to which they are subject. It is not at all incredible that a man’s astral body can emerge from its gross shell and appear in some other form, visible and tangible. A knowledge of the psychic constitution of man enlightens the matter, and this was described by Sankaracharya [Śaṅkarācārya] more than two thousand years ago much better than by our modern psychologists in his Tattva Bodha or Theory of Existence.

But it is not my intention to convert anyone to spiritism, nor to give a detailed explanation of the laws of nature involved, but only to point out the errors and dangers involved in such experiments. Twenty years ago you couldn’t mention these things without being laughed at; nowadays everyone is talking about it, but few know what is behind it. Many let themselves be fooled by lying spirits and come back disappointed. Spiritism has served well in freeing the world from the vast embrace of mindless materialism and returning it to belief in afterlife. But if this belief is not to degenerate into a very dangerous superstition, it is necessary to recognize the laws on which these things are based, and since these are spiritual things about which external observation cannot give sufficient information, so whoever is interested in spirits should above all seek to obtain the highest of all spirits, the Spirit of Knowledge of Truth, to teach him. Without this spirit, all supposed knowledge is only an assumption, a belief in probabilities and possibilities and without certainty; for man can know nothing with certainty other than what he really experiences, learns and recognizes within himself.

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Popular Lectures VI. The Religion of the Future by  Franz Hartmann, M.D.^[13]

If the prophecies of the ancient philosophers come true, we are now on the eve of great events. With the beginning of the coming century, a new epoch in world history is beginning, according to the ancient chronology of the Brahmins. The Kali Yuga or “Dark Ages” has reached a turning point, and this turning point is said to be accompanied by significant changes not only in the soul of the world, from which humanity’s sentiment and way of thinking springs, but also with upheavals in the physical, political, social and religious direction, yes even with changes in geographical relation, by earthquakes and the like.

With these prophecies are described the social conditions of our present period. It is said in that about this time righteousness among men greatly diminishes and mutual deceit increases; nation will stand in arms against nation, groaning under the burden of taxes; ambitious men would lead the people and thousands would be driven to emigrate; that the sanctity of marriage will no longer be respected, that money will be honored, loquaciousness will be talent, hypocrisy will be piety, and that the ruin of the old world will take place.

Nor are these prophecies based on fanciful speculation, but on a clear intellectual intuition, unthinkable to those who have no idea of ​​its possibility, and they are further confirmed by an accurate knowledge of the astrological laws, which are the causes of all visible appearances and external conditions. As the astronomer, from his knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies, can predict the time of sunrise, or a lunar eclipse, or the reappearance of a comet, so can the spiritual seer and astrologer, knowing the higher laws of nature, foresee the circumstances under which certain changes in of the soul of the world must occur, and these inner changes result in outer changes, since everything without springs from within.

Goethe says: “Everything that is transitory is just a parable.” The wise men of antiquity knew this. They regarded all visible things in nature as temporary manifestations or symbols of inward working and driving spiritual forces, and recognized that behind everything that goes on mechanically there is an intelligence, a consciousness, albeit of a different kind from ours. The outwardly visible sun, for example, was to them only the embodied reflection, or, if we choose to call it the “astral body,” of a spiritual sun invisible to us; just as the human body is the material expression of man’s inner spiritual being, and they taught that just as at a certain season the earth approaches the sun and then summer comes, so also at certain periods of time the soul of the world of spirit sun turns its face to eternal wisdom and receives new light, love, life and knowledge from it.

Incidentally, looking back at history also teaches us that everything in the world happens according to a certain order. Forms are born, have their childhood, youth, manhood and old age, their rise, fall and death, regardless of whether it is the life of a mayfly, a human being, a people, a civilization, a globe, a solar system or universe acts. One law is enough for everyone. The spirit stays the same, the forms come and go, and when a form or system becomes useless, it dies. Then all the doctors in the world can do nothing more than delay death a little. They cannot rejuvenate anything; this occurs only through the birth of a new form which grows from the ashes of the old.

The religious systems of the world are no exception to this rule. The spirit of true religion is always one and the same, but the systems and forms in which it is clothed come and go. God is not subject to change, but the forms in which men worship him change, and as men’s religious beliefs change, so does the character of men and their beings change, for from the religious position what a people occupies, arises his sensation, way of thinking and way of acting. The disappearance of religious sentiment means the end of the world; the awakening of a higher religious feeling a resurrection. When the spirit of true religion disappears from a religious system, the sublime sinks to the point of ridicule and requires a new form for its revelation. The spirit of true religion cannot be restored in a corrupt form any more than an old herring barrel can be made fit for storing rosewater.

The Olympus of the Greeks and Romans experienced this, among others. At the time of the birth of Christianity such an end of the world took place, although the Roman doctors did everything they could to prevent it. Justinian tried in vain to revive the old faith in its original purity. He tried in vain to explain that the gods of Olympus were not personalities, but cosmic intelligences, spiritual forces of nature, reigning as universally as light and warmth, and that it would be far more sensible to turn to them than to seek salvation from a dead person expect. “It is fair,” he said, “to hate the wise among you, but to pity the simpler, who, as newcomers, have fallen so far into ruin that, forsaking the eternal gods, they have gone over to a dead Jew.” Proper spiritual knowledge these forces of nature, which were symbolically represented as personal gods, had disappeared from the consciousness of the people and had given way to superstition in a supernatural hierarchy. “In the gods of Plutarch and Plato,” says Strauss, “Homer and Hesiod would no more have recognized their Olympus than in Neander’s Christianity a Paul and John theirs.” Homer’s Olympus had become a gathering of autocrats, and indeed based on the model of the Roman Empire with its provincial administration by proconsuls and procurators. This degenerate world of gods had to perish because in a world ruled by foreign, heavenly autocrats, on whose favor everything depended, people became wire puppets and no free, individual development, no unfolding of individuality, which raises people above the gods, was possible. Also, at the heart of newborn Christianity was something deeper than the worship of a dead person, and if the multitude could not comprehend this mystery, they divined its existence. This notion of the redeeming principle was more powerful than the idea of ​​sacrificial gods, and therefore the gods had to give way.^[14]

When Christianity was in the process of flourishing, its spirit penetrated powerfully into the hearts of its followers, and filled them with an enthusiasm which even torture and martyrdom did not shrink from. At that time there were still enlightened people who recognized the true Redeemer, because otherwise Paul would not have been able to write that Christ is in us the mystery of redemption and the hope of glorification, a teaching that is understood by very few Christians today, because in modern Christianity, the sole God-man has become an outwardly ruling personality, a kind of anti-Semite and seminary leader. No man can call back this fleeing spirit of Christianity, any more than Julian could restore proper faith in the gods. Where religious sentiment disappears, no rational explanation can restore it.

That’s why it didn’t help when Justinian tried to make the mysteries of Olympus understandable to the rationalism of the time; his declarations could not stem the religious corruption and moral ruin of his age; no intellectual evidence of the truth could replace the spiritual knowledge of it in those who had no knowledge. Julian tried to help the old gods back on their feet by explaining the symbols of mythology. He pointed out, for example, that the myth of Cybele and Atys has a deep meaning, that when the mother of the gods has the beloved youth emasculated out of jealousy because he has been courting the nymph in a cave, this should mean nothing other than that the intelligible Cosmic cause, the supersensible creative power, stops the striving of the creative cause of the sensuous to continue to procreate in this into infinity, and turns it back to itself, “to the supersensible.” Such explanations certainly satisfy the intellect, but leave the heart empty; they don’t make anyone better. A form that has become spiritless is not ennobled by any dissection and confrontation. What has gone rotten in itself cannot be made fresh again by any philosophical ingredient, even if it remains edible for a while. This is also the case with regard to a Christianity that has become spiritless. Christianity that has become intolerant is no longer Christianity; a “Christian” whose only concern is to save his beloved “I” from destruction, even if the whole world should perish because of it, does not know the spirit of true Christianity, which embraces self-renunciation and the sacrifice of self-delusion teaches for the purpose of attaining the knowledge of God. A system which causes man to ask and beg for personal favors and gifts degrades man and is contrary to true religion. So it comes about that the “educated” who understand religion in this sense do not want to know anything about it and understand nothing about its symbols. Nor will an intellectual explanation of these symbols reawaken the lost power of faith any more than the explanations of Emperor Justinian could restore faith in Olympus.

“Nobody thinks so,” says Justinian, “I want to say that this or that, which is described in the doctrine of the gods, once happened or was done in this way. On the contrary, the ancients deliberately woven this unthinkable thing into their stories of the gods, following divine (inner) guidance, in order to use the absurdity of external history to induce the sensible to search for its inner meaning, while the simple-minded may be content with the external symbol.”

Much the same can be said of the Bible narratives today. A fairy tale is not a lie because what is told in it is not literally true. It is a robe in which truth is clothed, a shell serving as a covering for a kernel of truth; but this core only serves as spiritual nourishment for those who find themselves in it. Rational explanations of religious mysteries may satisfy scientific curiosity, but they will not create faith; but whoever has the true faith experiences these things within himself; through the power of faith, without any brooding, these holy mysteries become clear to him.

But there is very little left of this spiritual belief among the sects, indeed very few people know it and understand it as an intellectual belief in some tale. We are in the age of knowledge, but not in that of knowledge. Belief in authority is more important than anything. If one knows what this or that authority said or meant, then one is already learned. The term “self-knowledge” is beginning to become a word for which there is no longer a concept.

But this is precisely what true religion consists of, that man ennobles himself by practicing what he feels to be true in his inner being, and thereby makes himself capable of an ever higher inner enlightenment, whereby he grows out of all blind belief in authority and always getting closer to self-knowledge of truth. Religious systems and theories are far from being religion; they are only means showing the way to attain true religion; but those who have no religious knowledge in their hearts always take the unessential for the essential, and they do not know the essential. They only see the frame of the picture, but they know nothing of the picture itself. These picture frames change, the picture itself always remains the same. The picture is the truth, the frames are the systems. The systems are visible to everyone, but the truth is invisible to anyone who does not see it within themselves.

As is well known, the word “religion,” which is formed from the Latin re– and ligere (to bind back), as well as the Sanskrit word yog (to bind or to unite), refers to that which binds man to God, and in fact it is not about a theoretical knowledge of what can unite man with God, but about this union itself, and since God is not an external object remote from us, but the innermost and true being of everything, and consequently also our own innermost being, so can this union can also be no other than an inner one.

Well, every human being should probably feel in himself what connects him to the higher self, and need no scientific explanation about it; nor will such an explanation be of little use to those who do not feel it, and will not replace the true knowledge that springs from one’s own consciousness. But if the human intellect, which cannot grasp the eternal and is always looking in external things for what can only be found inwardly, has formed wrong ideas about religious things, then these prevent the awakening of true knowledge. Then it is good that this disease is cured again by the same intellectual means, and that scientific enlightenment comes to the aid of religious feeling. Nor are these scientific explanations about fantastic claims or unprovable theories, but about facts of the truth of which anyone can convince himself, provided he has the necessary powers of observation and insight.

That which connects man with God is the inner light. It is that ray of light which penetrates from the immortal, celestial self into the consciousness of the personality, illuminates, warns, instructs, and guides the outward man. In this inner, spiritual self resides the individuality of man, which survives the death of personality; an unscrupulous person who does not know this light also has no consciousness of his immortality, and is nothing more than a toy of lower natural forces, animal instincts and fantasies. He can be very learned, very clever and scientifically educated, but still has no spiritual life and no true knowledge; because this light is the light of truth and the spiritual life in the human soul, the belief in the higher self, without which no knowledge of the true self is possible. In Indian the inner spiritual body is called “Karana sharira,” [kāraṇa śarīra] i.e., “Cause-Body” and the spiritual light emanating from it called “Antaḥkarana” [antaḥkaraṇa]; in Latin it is called “pons,” the bridge, from which the designation of the pope as “pontifex maximus” or “supreme bridge builder” comes. Everyone must find this bridge within themselves and cross it if they want to reach real life. It is that which connects the personal mortal human being with his immortal heavenly self, and through this with God. It is not a matter of explaining theories, but of the awakening of the higher consciousness, which is the entrance of the soul which arises into higher spiritual existence. It’s theory, sitting by the study lamp behind the stove and reading the description of a sunrise in the Alps and imagining it; It is practice when one stands on a high mountain peak and, surrounded by the splendor of the rising sun, sees the sunrise for oneself, feels the warmth of the sun for oneself. Theory is studying a religious system by which one might be saved if one practiced it; Practice is when the soul awakens to the consciousness of its higher existence.

The antahkarana [antaḥkaraṇa] represents the mediator between the divine and the human, Christ crucified between the “two thieves” (Kāma Manas and Buddhi Manas). It is also the light of the Buddhists that enlightens the soul, the light of truth that shines out of the darkness of the unknown into the darkness of the material. It has as little to do with religious systems and theological speculation as the way has to do with the signpost, and the two should not be confused. The sun is the father, the light is the son, the man of the earth is the earth. None can come to the Father but through the Son [Buddhi, Christos]; the earth cannot be illuminated by the sun without the sunlight.

This is not the place to engage in long-distance discussions of trifling matters which could only confuse the beginner, and for a clear picture of the path which leads man to God it will suffice if he considers the represents the upper heavenly region of the soul separated from the lower animal region, but connected by a bridge.

The upper dotted circle represents the spiritual sphere (aura), the lower dotted square represents the personal mortal man with his four lower principles (the physical body, etheric body, vitality and desires). The two triangles connected by a bridge represent the mind (manas), specifically the upper triangle marked A, the illuminated higher consciousness permeated by the heavenly spirit, the lower triangle M, sunk in the material, the lower earthly mind. The bridge U means the connection between the higher and the lower, the path that leads from transience to immortality. The light of wisdom shines down into the human mind from above, and man is free to open his heart and mind to the influence of this light, or to close himself to it. Anyone who absorbs this light of spiritual knowledge is walking the right path and has religion; he who only ponders and dogmatizes this path without walking it is like a man who sits by the way and studies the map without taking a step forward on the journey which he must necessarily undertake. He can read all the secret sciences and be a great scholar and yet he has no religion. However, without this own inner experience he cannot have any clear knowledge either, but only creates ideas in his imagination. The best instructions of religion only become clear and understandable when one follows them oneself.

All this has been taught for millennia, but understood by few to this day, because the great multitude, lacking in independence, are accustomed to expecting all that is good from things external and alien, rather than seeking within themselves and to achieve it through inner strength. No one is so foolish as to imagine their physical life, strength and health as existing somewhere else than within themselves. In the same way, spiritual life only has value for us when it awakens within us. We cannot become immortal in any other way than by coming inwardly to the consciousness of our eternal being. There is no minister, no adept, no savior who can conjure into that higher existence anything unfit for the higher existence; but man is already a higher being at heart, it is only a question of recognizing himself as such, and this can only happen by overcoming his animal nature and revealing his higher nature in him.

In the lower part of the mind (kāma-manas), which is influenced by personal desires, tendencies, desires and passions, resides his earthly personal existence, in the higher noble spiritual part exists his spiritual individuality. This difference has so far received very little or no attention from many, and hence the still very widespread view among scholars that the Buddhist religion means giving up individuality and entering into the bliss of Nirvana means dissolving into nothingness. Nothing could be more wrong. Buddhist philosophy teaches us to distinguish between what is permanent in us and what is impermanent in us. She teaches us not to be fooled by the delusion that our ever-changing and transient personality is our true selves, and far from claiming that we should give up our individuality, she instructs us to be our true selves to seek, find and fix. Therefore it is called “Buddhism,” i.e., the religion of light, so-called because it does not look for true being in the realm of shadows, but in the light. Whoever wanted to give up his “I” before finding it in truth would not find it either, and would never get beyond the realm of illusion; but once he has crossed the bridge and found his true self, then he finally finds in it that blissful agreement with the deity that animates the whole, which in the end eliminates every difference between this self-consciousness and the consciousness of God. No one has yet asserted that a man who becomes wholly in love with any object is thereby destroyed; why should this be through his love of the Most High? There is only one supreme consciousness of God, and when he is completely filled with it, he lives in it, he is one with God and yet he is himself. Christianity also teaches all this, if it is understood correctly and it could through the numerous biblical passages which are cited be testimony to this.^[15] But this is not necessary, because it teaches us all this, with unbiased reflection, our own intuition, our own insight and our own mind. Without this we would not know if it were true, even if an apostle proclaimed it from the clouds with a thunderous voice.

What the world needs now is not new proclamations, new systems, new articles of faith and theories, nor belief in their correctness, but belief in truth itself, inward revelation of truth and adherence to it. What we need now is not some credible and reliable external authority on which one can absolutely depend, not a certified and sealed testimony with which one can sleep soundly, in the sure conviction that what is written there is true, but the help we need is the spirit of self-knowledge, “the spirit of truth within us, to which the world is not sensitive, because it does not see it and does not know it.”^[16] All religions, occult sciences, theologies, scriptures, ceremonies, customs and all church life can only have the purpose of preparing people for their own heart enlightenment and to remove the errors that stand in the way of attaining self-knowledge. When the spirit of truth is revealed in man, then the purpose has been achieved, then all the means to achieve the purpose are no longer necessary. Where the church and sects end, that’s where the right religion begins, there are no more “religions” but only the one religion of self-knowledge, the religion of truth and light that unites all people.

Anyone who has no idea of ​​a higher spiritual existence also has no religion. For those for whom this material life with its pleasures is the highest, there is nothing other than death. A contempt for sensual pleasures and scholarly stuff appears to him as foolish flight from the world and pessimism; but the discerning sees this life in the flesh as an illness which he has contracted through his own fault, and strives to attain the true healthy spiritual life again. The “beast man,” if we may call him that in distinction from the heavenly man, is well on this world as long as he has nothing to suffer personally; even the draft animal in the stall and the bird in the cage that has forgotten its former freedom are doing well because they know nothing better; but he who knows mankind feels its sufferings as his own, and he who has recognized true freedom does not long to dwell in a dungeon again, even if it is not made of iron bars but of a skeleton and flesh, and you can walk with him in this madhouse called the “world.”

In order to enter this life of freedom, into this higher existence, we don’t need to wait for death and no “hereafter,” in this world is the right way to do it. After the death of the body there is a separation of light from darkness; the thread that binds the mortal part of man to the flower of immortality breaks, and what was lightless before death remains after death only as a shadow and insubstantial dream image in which nothing essential can develop anymore, because it contains nothing essential.

But how can man bring about this awakening to a high existence? He doesn’t need to worry about it, it will happen of its own accord once the conditions under which it can happen are created. No one can manufacture the light of the sun; but he need only go outside on a sunny day or open the windows, then he will have enough sunshine. The obstacles that stand in the way of the entry of the spiritual light are personal inclinations, sensual desires and passions, egoism and greed in every form, thirst for knowledge, vanity, megalomania, envy, sadness, stinginess, etc. Whoever wants to enjoy freedom climbs into the height. The higher he climbs, the more his horizon expands. Nobody will want to carry superfluous ballast with them that weighs them down, and therefore one can only give the advice to the soul striving spiritually upwards towards the light:

“Throw away everything that binds you inwardly to the material and sensual, leave every childish games, hobbies, and follies; rise within yourself to your true greatness of spirit; reveal yourself as a human being in your true form! Give space to the light and there will be light in your soul. The earthly intellect always presses down and rummages in the dark; but the light of wisdom comes from above and strives upwards again.”

          Nothing goes up to heaven that has not come down from heaven. Artificial flying machines may be able to move in the air for a short time, but they are only safe again on earth. So it is with philosophical and theological speculation, the products of the brain’s activity. They indulge in all sorts of possibilities and probabilities, and the end result is always that nothing can be known with certainty. But where the truth reveals itself within, there it is, and a moment of inner enlightenment is worth more than a thousand years of speculation.

The now passing world was crammed with theories, dogmas, and articles of faith which divided men; the new era beginning now shall be a world of enlightenment. The tree of true knowledge and freedom will grow from the light that rises in the hearts of men, and its fruits will be true enlightenment and contentment. As humanity ascends a stage, the realization will spread more and more that we appear as separate creatures only owing to the difference in our personal qualities, but that the essence of our being is one mind, one indivisible life, one divine true self, and then everyone will also understand that he cannot oppress or harm anyone else without harming himself the most. Then it will no longer say: “Here is Christ” or “There is Christ,” but everyone will feel and recognize in his heart the presence of the only God-man in whom we are all one being. Then we have crossed the bridge, attained true religion, true self-awareness, and in the light of our great I, which encompasses the whole world, the delusion of self-delusion, the mother of selfishness, which tempts the personal man to recognize himself as the to look at the self-contained center of the whole and to long for possession of the whole, although he himself is only a limited part of the whole and does not want to emerge from the snail shell of his narrow-mindedness.

In every human being, the divine contained within strives for freedom. In each one the divine spark contained within seeks to become the light, but until the flame of love for the highest melts the rigid crust of egoism, this light cannot enlighten the mind. This light is higher than that of the earth-born intellect, higher than all logic and mind speculation, but few know it because they cannot get beyond the realm of mind speculation. The spirit’s unconscious struggle for dominance over matter is the cause of unrest unknown to the unthinking animal. Everyone feels within themselves the longing for something higher, let’s call it knowledge, light, truth, perfection, God; but since he does not know this goal of his existence, his striving turns to the ephemeral. This desire keeps him uneasy and prevents him from real knowledge, and yet without it he would be little more than an animal, and even worse off than the animal, because the animal finds full satisfaction in the sensual, but the sensual does not open to man the duration can satisfy.

At all times people have searched for the eternal and immortal, for God; but they sought it in outward places, in temples of stone, or above the clouds, and the divine stayed away from them because they separated from it, and therefore it could not be revealed within themselves. They waited for God to descend or be brought to them; but God neither comes nor goes, he is everywhere; he does not change his dwelling place, and does not approach us; but we come closer to him by recognizing him in his revelation, and he can only be revealed in our hearts when dispassionate calm reigns in it.

Religion teaches that from time immemorial we were all in God and united with him; but we looked down into the darkness of material existence, and there, the soul saw its own reflection. Like Narcissus seeing his image reflected in the water, she was captivated by the enchantment of her own beauty. She wanted to separate herself from divinity and be god herself. But in spite of his descent into matter, man could not entirely separate himself from his divine origin; he is still connected to his divine being by a divine ray of light; his body is on earth, his spirit rests in the light; in him during life light is conjoined with darkness, spirit with matter, heaven with earth, and his salvation consists in his receiving into himself this divine light, the knowledge of which overcomes the delusion of his separateness from the One, and returns to his divine existence.

In this practical knowledge and practice is true religion; everything else is religious gimmick. Whoever attains that knowledge of God which can only be attained through union with the Divine within ourselves, and by the power of that union attains dominion over his mortal nature, has true self-knowledge, true knowledge, true light, and true true religion.

Notes:

^[1] Popular Lectures. From the Depths. A Lecture on Practical Theosophy. [Populäre Vorträge. De Profundis. Ein Vortrag über die praktische Theosophie. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 13, no. 76 (January 1899), 1-47] {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] {R.H.—Ṛgveda 1.164.46 [ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanty]  Ekam (accus., sing., neuter) = one; Sat (accus. sing.) = Be, exist, truth; Viprāha (nom., pl., masculine) = The enlightened; bahudhā (adv.) = repeatedly; vadanti (pres. ind., plural) = describe, teach.}

^[3] Popular Lectures. II. Death, Reincarnation and Transmigration of Souls [Populäre Vorträge. II. Tod, Reïnkarnation und Seelenwanderung. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 13, no. 78 (March 1899), 153-189] {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}

^[4] Ein Vortrag vom Verfasser der „Lotusblüthen,” gehalten in Wien am 6. Dezember 1898 im Saale des Ingenieur- und Architekten-Vereines auf Veranlassung des „Theosophischen Vereines.” (Aus dem „Wiener Journal.”)

^[5] A lecture by the author of the “Lotusblüthen,” held in Vienna on December 6, 1898 in the hall of the Engineering and Architects Association on the initiative of the “Theosophical Society.” (From the “Wiener Journal.”)

^[6] Popular Lectures. III. Rāja-yoga [Populäre Vorträge. III. Radscha-Yoga. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 13, no. 81 (June 1899), 369-406] 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

^[7] {R.H.— Hatha Yoga, properly is from the Sanskrit and may have originated with Buddhism and Gorakhnath of the 11th century but is also found very early in the famous commentary on the Buddhist Kālacakra Tantra, the Vimalaprabhā. This compound: Ha ṭha, meaning sun, moon, because it relates to the polarity left and right channels at the etheric levels, outside of the central canal or suṣumnā. The practice is, as the Yoga-sūtras of Patañjali details, is to be used as part of the graded path practices and not as a solitary practice, otherwise the siddhis or powers gained, would be misused for selfish purposes, as Dr. Hartmann states here.}

^[8] Popular Lectures. IV. The States of the Soul After Death [Populäre Vorträge. IV. Die Zustände der Seele nach dem Tode. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 14, no. 83 (August 1899), 513-562] 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}

^[9] Compare, F. Hartmann, “Buried Alive.”

^[10] {R.H.—The etheric body or etheric double, the liṅga-śarīra.}

^[11] {R.H.—This is the traditionally described: Three days of retrospection after the immediate death state.}

^[12] Popular Lectures. V. Theosophy and Spiritism. Communication with the Deceased [Populäre Vorträge. V. Theosophie und Spiritismus. Der Verkehr mit Verstorbenen. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 14, no. 86 (November 1899), 727-762] 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

^[13] Popular Lectures. VI. The Religion of the Future. [Populäre Vorträge. VI. Die Religion der Zukunft. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 14, no. 87 (December 1899), 799-828] {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}

^[14] Compare Wiener Rundschau III. No. 15.

^[15] Galatians II, 20-2 — Corinthians IV, 11. — Philippians III, 21. — Colossians I, 27. — John XIV, 20 and following.

^[16] John XIV, 17.