[Die Meister der Weisheit.]
Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
With this number begins the fourth semester of “Lotusblüten” and the unexpected success which our company has had in Germany encourages us to take a step forward and mention facts which we have hitherto ignored, for the following reasons:
When the theosophical movement came into being in America, India and England, it owed its rapid prominence chiefly to the great stir caused by the news that these new teachings were being taught by certain mysterious beings living in Thibet, who were called adepts or mahātmas (great souls), and were first revealed to the world by H. P. Blavatsky, who was schooled by these Masters of Wisdom. These adepts have been described by some as human, but nevertheless as a sort of demigod, who found it a trifle to free themselves from the habitation of their physical body, to roam the universe, or at least our solar system, in their astral body, here and there at will there to appear in tangible form to their disciples, to instruct them orally or in writing, and to produce phenomena of all kinds to convince the world of the existence of mysterious forces.
These descriptions, which were sometimes exaggerated and emanating from unqualified persons, aroused general interest in the matter, but also gave rise to various errors. A certain Mahatma and Blavatsky cult was thereby brought into being, quite opposed to that taught by both the Mahatmas and H. P. Blavatsky. In the place of a personal Savior, of whom religious instruction teaches, half a dozen Christs were placed by certain people, accustomed to outward worship, whose persons it was thought ought to be worshiped divinely, and of whom it was thought that a blind adhering to their teachings is equivalent to true knowledge. Thus, in some places, a new superstition took the place of the old one. On the other hand, these revelations aroused great excitement and exasperation among those who had not been able to penetrate the spirit of the teachings promulgated by the Adepts through H. P. Blavatsky, and whose megalomania would not at all admit that there was anything in the world which they knew nothing about. The consequence of this was the well-known persecution and hostility which H. P. Blavatsky had to endure; the names of the adepts, sacred to every Indian and Buddhist, have been dragged down into the filth of the European daily press, and mysteries of religion, which in earlier times were revealed only to the noblest men, have been discussed by newspaper reporters, alehouse philosophers, and news mongers in a manner which would confuse any sensitive thinker had to arouse with disgust.
In order to avoid as much as possible a repetition of this evil in Germany, we preferred to touch upon the origin of theosophical teachings as little as possible. We wished to acquaint our readers first with the doctrines concerned, and only then with those from which they proceed; that these teachings might be accepted based on their own merit, and not by the stamp which authority gives them. To this end, from the very beginning in the “Lotusblüten” we have kept a certain doctrinal order, in order to gradually pass from what is easy to understand to what is more difficult, to penetrate from the surface to the depths of the sea of knowledge.
Now, after the teachings promulgated by the Adepts of the seven principles in the constitution of the macrocosm and microcosm, which form the key to occult science, and without the knowledge of which European science will vainly strive for centuries to penetrate into the mysteries of nature, as well as the doctrine of reincarnation and karma have found their way into Germany, it may be appropriate to make a few observations about the origin of the same.
The Secret Doctrine is older than the Bible and older than the Vedas; the holy scriptures of all peoples have come from it; it is in fact as old as the generation of people on earth who were capable of knowing the truth. It is not the result of the observation, research and speculation of the sons of earth, but, as allegorically depicted in the fable of Prometheus, was made accessible to earthlings by the sons of light from heaven calling themselves the “daughters of the earth” were ripe for this, connected with them, that is, the spiritually enlightened man overshadowed the soul of earthly man and took up residence in him. From the spiritual knowledge of this truth hidden from man of the earth and communicated to him by his indwelling God, came the Vedas, the Bible and all other holy scriptures, all of which contain and are the same eternal truth, though expressed in different forms all more or less inspired by the divine spirit, according as the “vessel” receiving them was able to receive them and render them in their purity.
We are not talking here about a direct inspiration from God (Parabrahm), the infinite world spirit, which dwells unapproachably in everything created, but about the divine being indwelling every human being, which, standing higher than the so-called “transcendental I,” is the personal God of each and every human being.[2] We are all such gods, but we don’t realize it. Our godlike state has been lost for us because we have identified ourselves with the earthly human being in whom we have incarnated and adopted their characteristics, feelings and way of thinking as our own. All education, morality, science, religion and art strives to fight the earthly human with whom we are so intimately connected, to learn to overcome this low “self” and to soar up again to that bright height in which we as immortal gods who preserve a mortal, thinking and willing shell, but are not identical with it. It is the God within ourselves that we must become one with before we can think of becoming one with the God of the universe, and this union is not through an amalgamation of the impure with the pure, as many mistakenly think, but through one’s own deceptive ego becoming nothing, a disappearance of earthly willing and thinking, whereby the divine and free ego, which knows no limitations, is able to feel, want and think in us. Thus it is not the limited earthly ego that recognizes God, but rather God (the God-man) who recognizes himself in the earthly human being when the illusion of the ego disappears in the earthly human being. But this teaching is secret because it is only comprehensible to those who, as Sankaracharya teaches, have the ability to distinguish within themselves the permanent from the transitory.[3]
As this point is of supreme importance, and a misunderstanding of it continually gives rise to misunderstanding, we allow ourselves a slight digression:
During a lecture at the 66th Meeting of German Natural Scientists and Physicians in Vienna, Professor Dr. August Forel from Zurich gave the following:
“We take a stand against any forced idolatry of outdated, untenable, childish legends and dogmatized notions about anthropomorphic attributes and encroachments of an exteriorized deity supposedly endowed with human frailties. On the other hand, we worship in the deepest humility the eternal, unfathomable omnipotence of the infinite God, which reveals itself everywhere in every atom of the world, but nowhere appears as a personal deus ex machina [God from the machine] who is at the same time the universe, rules in the universe, represents the world consciousness, and never its tiny individual particles should have the audacity, even the megalomania, to have fathomed the essence, the primal laws and the intentions of the whole, or even to decree oneself more or less one with them.”
We fully agree with these fine words. Not that self which is the product of delusion can connect with the truth, the delusion has to become nothing for the truth in man to reveal itself. This is the ancient and always misunderstood teaching of the ancient Rosicrucians who said: “Ex Deo nascimur; in Jesu morimur; reviviscimus in Spiritum Sanctum”; i.e. That is: “We are born of God, our selfhood dies in the God-consciousness in us and thereby the self-knowledge of the divine spirit awakens in us.” [Literally from the Latin: “We are born from God; we die in Jesus; we revive in the Holy Spirit”] This is the teaching of all Indian adepts and Christian mystics, the sacrifice of selfhood and submission to God, and nature gives us the same example; for the seed cannot unite with the tree which grows from it and remain one seed; but as a tree grows from the seed, the seed disappears. If the personal human being wants to become one with God, he must renounce all personal wishes, wills and thoughts and let God want, think and rule in him; his personal consciousness has to disappear in order for his god in him to come to self-consciousness. Only when man’s self-conceit and megalomania disappear will the true greatness of his God be revealed in him.
This total merging of the illusion of self in Deity represented in the Christian allegory of Golgotha is called nirvāna by the Indians and Buddhists. But before man can be absorbed in Deity, in the Absolute, “as a spark arises in flame and becomes light,” he must first become one with his own personal “God,” i.e., he must know his self-dwelling and overshadowing Self (the true Christ, the God-man, the Redeemer), which is his true divine self; for only through this (the son) can he reach the original source of all existence (the Father). Man in his original pure and celestial state, before he conjoined and abased himself with matter, was a godlike being; man’s natural state before he surrendered himself to a being alien to his nature was godlikeness. Man must become natural again before he can become spiritual; i.e., he has to get to know the God-man who lives in him and overshadows him, to be absorbed in him, only then can he take the last step towards perfection, step out of the circle of death and rebirth (samsāra) and enter that state which is sat-chit-ananda (realization-bliss)[4] and in which the concept of “selfhood” no longer exists. As long as man still has body and form, whether it be a sensible (sthula-sharira) [sthūla-śarīra] or an astral body (sukshma-sharira) [sūkṣma-śarīra] or even a “thought-body” (karana-sharira) [ kāraṇa-śarīra], it is more or less bound to the properties of the same. He may temporarily enter the consciousness of heavenly selflessness (samādhi), but once he takes possession of his shell again, he is again more or less subject to the conditions under which this shell exists.
What we must first of all realize for an understanding of occult science is that each of us is a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in us, and that even in our natural state we are that Spirit of God, and ourselves as such recognizing spirits as soon as we rid ourselves of our personal egoism, megalomania and self-conceit, not wanting to make ourselves personal “superhumans,” but recognizing the oneness of the divine essence that is our true selves in all creatures. But if we come to recognize the spirit of God in us and if we let this spirit work in us, then our personal nature will also adopt the qualities of the heavenly man awakening in us to true consciousness, and whoever succeeds in this will become an Adept himself; i.e., a person in whom the lotus flower of God-realization has unfolded, who has overcome the delusion of “self” and lives only in the whole as the whole. Such a person can then say like the apostle: “I live, yet not I live, but the God-man lives in me.” But this state is not achieved by imagining that one is a higher being than other people, he is rather the slowly produced product of evolution, for nature does not leapfrog; but its attainment is promoted through unselfish willing and thinking, through unselfish activity for the benefit of mankind.
From the above it follows that two types of Adepts are conceivable, namely:
- Such Sons of Light, who at the time of the third human race, as the Sons of Wisdom overshadowed the soulless shells of the earth-born,[5] incarnated in human bodies, but nevertheless did not participate in the humiliation that followed, but remained in possession of wisdom. To this we count the old Rishis and Munis.
- Those who, although fallen into error and sin, yet through the divine power of self-control and obedience to the Law rose again from darkness to light, and through the path of spiritual rebirth became Sons of Light again.
A saint or a person who leads a moral life is by no means an adept; To this belongs not merely pious, objective contemplation, but an identification of subject and object, a becoming of the knower with the known in divine knowledge; the Trinity, where there can maintain no question of duality and therefore of no “self-knowledge” and self-conceit. Where the sun of divine self-knowledge rises in the heart, delusion disappears. Nor is it a question of mere erudition or literacy, but a penetration of the lower principles (manas, etc.) by Ātma Buddhi, the light of wisdom which emanates from the deity.
Occult science asserts that mankind is far from having reached the peak of its spiritual development, and that in a later round all men will enter this godlike state and inhabit transfigured bodies on earth. In Europe it might be difficult to find such a Master of Wisdom, but beyond the Himalayas there are said to be such Adepts, such are said to be those who taught H. P. Blavatsky and who initiated the founding of the Theosophical Society; Such are the ones who still today teach those of their pupils in all parts of the world, who are accessible to their intellectual influence. But that an exchange of ideas and the transmission of ideas over the longest distances, even between Europe and Asia, between two harmoniously tuned minds is possible, anyone can see for himself if he does not want to be weary of the trouble of making experiments aimed at this. There is nothing “supernatural” about it either. The spiritual man is not locked up in his body, he is everywhere, and his thoughts are effective where he puts himself through his will.
The spiritual man is everywhere, but he needs matter in order to lean on and draw his strength from; Therefore no man becomes an Adept by raving about the ideal outside of himself and devoting himself to the play of his imagination. Such a man does not live, but dreams. Nor is Adeptship obtained by one who is withdrawn in his selfhood, shy, pessimistic, or head-hanging; but it unfolds in those who want the good with selfless intention and also do it.
When the daily press condescends to speak of H. P. Blavatsky and occult things, it never tires of assuring its faithful that the Adepts are people who are said to be in possession of supernatural powers. But no theosophist has ever claimed this. The so-called “supernatural” powers of the Masters of Wisdom consist only in the fact that certain mystical powers, which are latent in the constitution of every human being, reached a high degree of development through exercise, unknown in Europe, and which therefore appears “supernatural” to a newspaper writer. It is not surprising that a man in his delusions of grandeur should deny the existence of forces he does not know. It is also almost self-evident that, when he is referred, he resorts to the simplest explanation of the phenomena presented, namely that of cheating. Still today Apollonius of Tyana, Cagliostro, Paracelsus, yes even Jesus are declared by certain people as impostors because they knew more than their contemporaries and possessed powers that the everyday man still does not know.
The mystical powers dormant in man have already been described elsewhere[6]; There is much of interest in Sinnett’s “Occult World” and in H. P. Blavatsky’s “In the caves and jungles of Hindostan” [From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan] about phenomena produced by the Adepts. But if, as is described, an Adept kills a tiger by his mere willpower (mantrasakti) [mantra-śakti], can produce a drinking vessel by the creative power of his imagination (kriyasakti) [kriyā-śakti] from the unseen; this is not for the trifling purpose of convincing the unbelieving skeptic, or astonishing onlookers, but the Adept exerts his power when he thinks it necessary or useful; we are not entitled to criticize his motives.
An Adept is a person who has found himself in his true nature and has reached “divine” self-knowledge, whose teachings are therefore not based on mere hearsay, assumptions and conclusions, traditions, opinions, hypotheses and theories, but on their own experience and knowledge, and as such they deserve more notice and attention than those of our speculative philosophers, whose “occult science” is an artificial edifice erected on an uncertain basis, which any new theory may collapse overnight like a house of cards. On the other hand, it is completely wrong to think that true knowledge consists in blindly and understanding the teachings of the Adepts as a dogma of the church and swearing by it without recognizing it. All the teachings proclaimed by the Adepts (gurus) or their disciples (chelās) are not intended to be considered dogmas to be believed in without understanding them, but rather to serve only as guides on the path to perfection, a path which everyone has to walk if they want to reach their goal.
Here, the question naturally arises: what is required to become a disciple of these Adepts and to get in touch with the Masters of Wisdom? As we are not dealing with the physical bodies of the adepts, and as distance is no bar to the exchange of ideas, there is no need to make the arduous journey to Thibet [Tibet] to personally meet the adepts; we find them everywhere as soon as we are able to rise spiritually to their sphere.
But the qualities which are required of the student have already been explained in the first three volumes of the “Lotusblüten.”[7] They are, in brief, the following:
- Love of truth and a constant willingness to sacrifice oneself to it.
- Purity of thought, speech and body.
- Constantly striving to be useful to those around you.
- Constant self-sacrifice for the good of the whole.
- Upholding justice and obeying its law.
Whoever follows these five points opens up the path of light without even looking at it, and above all he finds the master who is within himself. But he is foolish who undertakes what he does for his own self-glorification; for it is precisely this supposed “self,” which he wants to glorify, which must perish in order for the master to be revealed. The true disciple of wisdom does nothing for the glory of his deceitful self, but does everything for the glory of God; i.e., of his god, the immortal soul within him, which is his master and the connecting bridge between him and the god of the universe. All self-torment, all good works that spring from egoism and are undertaken for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, serve no purpose; not what earthly man does, but what his God works in him and accomplishes through him, is good; the earthly man can do nothing better than to be obedient to his inner master.
This master is man’s immortal Self and his “god”; the personality of man is only the bodily product which this “god” produces and ensouls every time he reincarnates on a planet. The spiritual powers which manifest themselves in the outward man belong to this master within man, and they manifest themselves in him when the outward man is completely permeated by the power of the God-man, whose temple he is. However, this master is by no means an adept, but only becomes an adept when he acquires the necessary knowledge, and the attainment of the knowledge of everything, by overcoming the material, which is the purpose of his reincarnations. Thus, the school of the disciple of occult science has many classes, the instruction lasts through many thousands of years and only eternity completes it.
But what do the Indian Adepts want in order to achieve? Certainly not to amaze the world by occult phenomena, or to teach some minions magical feats. The purpose they have in mind for their emergence in the present period is stated by an Adept himself in these words:
“Man consists of ideas and is guided by ideas. His own subjective world is the only reality for him even on this physical plane. For the occultist, the field of vision of this inner world expands, and for him it always comes into reality, all the more so as he recognizes the objective world of appearances for what it is. Its ultimate goal is self-knowledge in the Absolute (Parabrahm). Therefore, the one who aspires to higher knowledge should direct all his desires to the one highest ideal, and seeks to attain it through utter self-sacrifice, charity, kindness of heart, and all the highest virtues attainable on earth. The harder he strives to attain this ideal, the more he moves his volition in this direction, which becomes a greater power within him. Once it has become (inwardly) strong, the inclination also arises in the material organism to only do that which is consistent with the high aspiration he pursues, and his (noble) actions then double his inner power according to the well-known law of effect and reaction.
“But what are the practical successes and how do they come about? Observation and experience teach us that progress is a law of nature. From this it follows that mankind is still in an imperfect state of development and is moving towards perfection. This perfection will only come about when higher powers of perception unfold in human beings and they become aware of the point of view they take in relation to their place in nature. But the highest perfection is only conceivable when the force that animates the individual works in harmony with the one life that moves the whole to this end, and the best means of achieving this is knowledge and science.
“It will also be clear to those who understand this that the end of the law in nature is to make man perfect through the union of the human spirit with the spirit that animates the whole. Keeping this high purpose constantly in view, an intellectual association should be formed in which all (whatever opinions the individual may have) unite for this purpose. In order to achieve this practical success, unification, we must uphold the highest ideal, which is the true man; we must refer others to this ideal and act according to this ideal ourselves. Everyone should strive with complete self-sacrifice to walk the right path and show it to others. If we as a whole exert our forces to achieve this ideal, great things can be achieved through this cooperation on the spiritual level. As this is the most important work in which an occultist can be engaged, every aspirant to higher knowledge should endeavor to promote this work. This creates a spiritual tidal wave that will uplift the whole and enable the intellectual and spiritual faculties of our generation to expand. To this end the dissemination of philosophical knowledge contributes, and it is this dissemination that we expect of our students.”
Notes
[1] The Master of Wisdom. [Die Meister der Weisheit. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 5, no. 28 (January 1895), 1-26] {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] See, Subba Row, “Vorträge über die Bhagavad Gita,” Lotusblüten, Vol. I.
[3] See, Sankaracharya, “Tattwa Bodha,” Lotusblüten, Vol. III, page 379.
[4] See Sankaracharya, “Tattva Bodha,” Lotusblüten, Vol. III, page 411.
[5] See, “Auszüge aus dem Buche Dzyan,” Lotusblüten, Vol. II, page 590.
[6] F. Hartmann. “White and Black Magic.” Page 25.
[7] H. P. Blavatsky. (The basis of Indian mysticism.) “The Voice of the Silence. The Two Paths. The Seven Portals.” {The Book of the Golden Precepts}