[Die Geheimnisse des Todes]
Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
I.
Like any other thing, death appears to us as what we imagine it to be, and our idea depends on the state in which we find ourselves. For some, death is a specter and the greatest of all evils, for others it is a saving angel, leading them out of the bondage of the flesh and its sufferings to eternal freedom and bliss. Each of them is right from their point of view. Anyone who clings with every fiber to the external and sensual, only knows life in matter and does not feel any higher existence within, who believes that the death of the body is also the annihilation of the soul, or who has reason to accept the torments of the To fear hell after the death of the body, there is something dreadful about the thought of death, and even if, like the ostrich, which hides its head in the sand when pursued, it hides itself from this thought or the same in the When the frenzy of life is pushed back, it emerges all the more clearly in quiet moments, and the ghost points with its bony fingers to the Mene Tekel Upharsin,[2] to the flaming writing on the wall that won’t go out.
Those who take the death of the material body to mean the annihilation of all existence will find themselves as deluded as those who imagine that by dying they will reach a heaven of joys to which they have no right. It is something different with that person who, on the path of spiritual rebirth, reaches a higher consciousness, that is, he has become conscious of his immortal self and has thereby come to know that life which is independent of gross matter and the existence of the physical body. One who has put on what is imperishable may well exclaim with the apostle Paul: “O death, where is your sting; oh hell, where is thy victory?” But not everyone is ready for that.
In any case, death means the loss of the physical body, and the question arises whether and under what circumstances this loss is desirable. The material body is not only a tool given to us to fulfill the purpose of our life, but it is also the gathering point of all the forces that we need for our material, psychological, intellectual and spiritual development and without which there can be no new intake of forces and no further development. If, as individual beings, we were already perfect and no longer in need of development, we could certainly dispense with this body as soon as we no longer needed it as a tool for carrying out our purposes, and then death would be a liberation; but so long as we have not yet reached that level, dying is at best only a pause in the journey, which must then be continued again, and this intermission can be pleasant, but it can also be very unpleasant. A rose branch that has been severed from the stem will continue to flower for a while if you put it in a glass of water, but in order to produce new flowers the seed has to get back into the ground. The spiritual powers which man has awakened during life continue to vibrate after the death of the body; but in order to gather new strength, the soul must re-enter earthly life and clothe itself anew in a material body. This occurs by way of repeated “incarnation,” reincorporation, or reincarnation.
To know the nature of death, its purpose and cause, we must first know the origin of life, life itself, and the ultimate purpose of our existence, and not everyone is ready for this either. The vast majority still lead a dream life. One seeks to know everything but one’s own immortal self. You live without knowing why you came into this world, and you die without seeing where the dark path of death leads. Goethe does not say wrongly in “Faust”:
“The hereafter can concern me little; If you first smash this world to pieces, the other may arise from it.”
But only those who are certain of going the right way in “this world” have the right to make such a statement; for everyone prepares his own “hereafter” in “this world.” It is foolish to indulge in daydreams and musings about life beyond the grave and fail to make the best use of this life; but if a man must undertake a journey to a foreign country, it is at any rate useful for him to know how to equip himself for the journey, what is the nature of the population of that country, and what dangers he may encounter there. All existence is relative. The realms into which the soul enters after leaving the material body are as real and perceptible to it as our earthly world is to us earthly humans. Each realm has its own inhabitants, although these are invisible to the inhabitants of other worlds or realms. In man, however, all the forces that are at work in the macrocosm are united in a microcosm, and therefore he can also recognize the inhabitants of other worlds, provided that the forces necessary for this knowledge have been developed in him.
The perfect man is destined to be a ruler over all realms and worlds. The purpose of human existence is the development of an individuality capable of attaining immortality and dominion over matter. Of what use would all his possessions, all his learning be, in the end, if he himself had no permanent individuality, but only a plaything of nature, like a soap bubble, in which the spiritual forces of the universe are reflected for a while, to die at the death of the body to disappear again? It is true that for some people the highest concept they can form of immortality is that a man’s name survives in history and is spoken of after his death; but fame or notoriety is not immortality; Even the meanest criminals without any intellectual stature have acquired historical memories, and in the end this also disappears. A person without spiritual individuality, without spiritual greatness is nothing. But in every human being there is a viable, individual, spiritual core hidden within the shell which is his personality, and in order to fix and grow this core man needs a personality, a material organism, just as much as the seed needs one tree requires soil to become a tree. The kernel of a nut would not ripen without the protective shell. The real “I” is the core, the personality is the shell. In man, this shell has its own consciousness, its own intelligence, which is different from the consciousness and intelligence of the core. Man only attains the path to perfection when his personality is penetrated and enlightened by the intelligence of his spiritual core. Then the shell becomes one with the core; Only then can one speak of an immortality of the personality; then the personality can live on even if the outward, visible image of it, the material physical body, perishes. Man thus has an external, personal, and perishable self and an immortal, internal, and individual “I,” which most men do not know, and the immortality of his personality depends on the presence of his immortal “I,” that is, the presence of his God, comes to his personal consciousness. This consciousness is what “ties” man back to God, his origin. that is, “religion” in the true sense of that word. The realization of this true self, which can only be attained through its development, is true self-knowledge, the attainment of which is proclaimed by all great philosophers and theosophists as the supreme purpose of life. It is the knowledge of the God-man in our own hearts, and only through this can we come to the knowledge of the “Father,” the “Only One” (in whom all gather and unite).
But even if this high level of knowledge is not for everyone, especially today, there have always been people who have attained it. One of them says: “The Holy Spirit (the spirit of self-knowledge) led my eternal spirit, which was separated both from my earthly body and from my sinful soul, up into quiet eternity. There I stood with my Eternal Spirit as a mere, simple (individual) spirit in the midst of innumerable simple spirits that are in the Holy of Holies, and there I saw, heard, tasted and felt what I wrote of the first primordial world, or of the principle of quiet eternity.
In this transfer I recognized two people in myself, one in the other, namely an external man and an internal man. The internal man lives in the external in an invisible way. My outward man (the personality) was mortal, but my inward man was an eternal man. And I further learned that the outward[3] had for his body the outward visible body of flesh, as well as his mortal soul,[4] which could taste death. But the inward eternal man had an eternal soul,[5] distinct from the mortal soul, and unable to die. These two souls dwell one in the other as one soul, and yet are in themselves two distinct souls, of which the outer does not know the inner. Then I further realized that the outward mortal man also had an outward mortal spirit[6] peculiar to him, which is born of the spirit of this world, and born for this world alone, is also mortal in his appointed time and after course of the starry sky dies away. Further, I saw clearly that the eternal soul of my inner man has an eternal immortal spirit[7] which is born in and descended from eternity[8] and must therefore also live forever. Then I clearly understood that this eternal spirit is hidden and dwells in the mortal spirit of time, just as if both were one spirit, though distinct from each other. And the mortal neither knows nor understands the immortal, although the latter lives and works in the mortal.”
“Two souls dwell, alas! in my chest!”
says Goethe in Faust. One is from the Eternal and aspires to Heaven, the other is a product of the spirit of this world and gravitates to Earth. Both are connected to each other during life and form the two poles of a magnet, so to speak. A distinction is consequently made between the higher and lighter region of the soul, the realm of knowledge, and the lower, darker region, the realm of blind speculation, which receives its light from the upper.
Death is not, as some think, a transformation from something inferior to something superior; he brings us nothing new that we have not already acquired; it is a separation of the higher from the lower and an entry of the higher into freedom. Death is the separation of the soul from the body and the spiritual from the material; but, as has already been pointed out, not all that is called “soul” or “spirit” belongs to the immortal. Man is a composite creature, and certain elements of which he is formed live on after the body has died without being immortal. Many mystical processes, apparitions of ghosts and spiritistic phenomena also find their natural explanation in this circumstance. The study of such things has just as much justification as that of other natural phenomena, which were also held to be “supernatural” before their cause was known. They belong in the realm of science, although their causes are more difficult to research, since one is dealing here with invisible intellectual forces seemingly endowed with free will. But true wisdom or “theosophy” embraces the whole universe with all its powers, and without a knowledge of all the forces contained in human nature, even if they are still hidden, there can be no talk of perfect self-knowledge. This is not to say the word for dealing with “spiritualism”, insofar as it is a gimmick and only serves to satisfy curiosity. Appearances only have value insofar as they are useful for investigating the laws of nature that govern them, which is why some prior knowledge is necessary, and without it, playing with powers whose nature one does not know is often a dangerous undertaking. In order to become acquainted with the mysteries of the outer phenomenal world, one needs suitable instruments, microscope, telescope and the like. In order to explore the so-called “supernatural” world, the inner senses must be opened; in order to get to know the mysteries of God, the spirit of God must have become alive in man; for it is not the spirit of beast-man, but the spirit of God that searches all things, even the depths of divinity,[9] and that spirit we can find within ourselves.[10]
Death brings us nothing essentially new; he doesn’t give, he takes. He appears to some as a robber, to others as a liberator. He separates the higher from the lower. If we are connected with the higher, he frees us from the lower; if we are bound to the lower by our will, he takes away the higher from us. There is not just one death, but multiple deaths. When the physical body dies, the soul comes out with what belongs to it. Then comes the separation of the soul from the “etheric body”[11] and the formation of the “desire body”[12] (kāma-rūpa), then comes that death by which the divine separates from the animal (kāma-manas from buddhi-manas) and finally that worst death of all, leaving the heavenly life and sinking into the material through reincarnation.
At the first death the soul leaves behind a decaying [physical] corpse; but even this can in certain, fortunately only in rare cases, have a longer period of vegetative life, as the history of vampirism proves. When the soul separates from the astral body [etheric body], an astral corpse remains, and when the heavenly departs from the body of desire [kāma rūpa], a larva, an animal or a devil remains.
The finer elements are connected to the coarser ones by a bridge, as it were; if this bridge breaks, the connection is terminated. Just as the child is still connected to the mother’s organism by the umbilical cord at birth, so also is the astral body still connected to the material body by an astral or magnetic bond after it has left, and also between the lower and upper soul region, that is, between the animal-intellectual and the “angel in man” there is such a bridge, which the Indians call the “Antahkarana” [Antaḥkaraṇa].[13] When this bridge is broken, there is no connection between the spiritual and the animal; then we have the “unbridgeable chasm” between heaven and hell, the “spiritual death,” which can occur both during life on earth and after death of the body; because when man separates himself from everything that is in his inner being of a heavenly nature, holy and immortal and rejects it, he is also abandoned by this, and only the animal man remains behind, whose end sooner or later is annihilation, while the cultivation of the higher and the refinement of the mind means the way to perfection and entry into eternal life.
II.
We are all “materialized spirits.” Knowing that we are materialized is secondary, and we don’t even need to think about this fact. We have internal organs, heart, lungs, kidneys, etc., that go about their work without our knowing it. If we feel that we have a stomach, that is already a sign that something is wrong with it. For a healthy person, the whole body is just a tool that he uses and with which he does not identify. For those who have found their true self, their soul, and thereby attained true spiritual self-awareness of their true self, their body is just a machine for thinking and acting; he can step out of it at will and repossess it without losing the consciousness that he is what he is. It can therefore also be indifferent to him what happens to this machine after he has finally left it after death, whether it is buried or burned; he asks for no funerary monument for his discarded robe, and, as Sankaracharya [Śaṅkarācārya] says, he does not care “whether he leaves his physical form in the holy city of Benares or in a kennel. He who has no desire to amuse himself in any of the three worlds and he is no longer bound by anything and attains the highest wisdom.”[14]
As with the material body, so with the other bodies or forms which man possesses; they are all but tools and dwellings that he temporarily occupies. Anyone can say to themselves, “I am not my earthly appearance; I am not my desire body; I am not my thought body. We are all gods at heart, but we don’t realize it because that fact hasn’t come to our consciousness yet; we still live a dream life, believing ourselves to be something we really are not; we neither feel nor see the real.”
“Absence of Mind” is a common occurrence in most people; Enthusiasts, dreamers, poets know how to tell about it. Even in ordinary sleep spirit and reason leave the body, but remain connected to it by a kind of etheric “umbilical cord”; for when this bond is broken, there is no return. Many will know from personal experience that the emergence of the astral body from the physical body is nothing extraordinary. So, e.g., the author once saw himself, while under the chloroform anaesthetic, standing beside the chair on which he was lying, and watched comfortably as a tooth was pulled out; he also heard what the bystanders were saying.
Countless books have been written about what happens when you die and what happens after death, but in the end everyone knows nothing but what they have experienced themselves. These things will be very different from each other depending on the circumstances. Some leave the body fully conscious, others lose it and may only regain consciousness after a longer period of time in the “beyond.” Messages from the “spirits” of dead people do not inspire confidence, since one does not know with certainty where they came from; the statements of clairvoyant people are not always to be believed either, since imagination often plays a role here. However, there are also reports of people who actually went through the gate of death and nevertheless came back to life; such people can speak from personal experience. A doctor, Dr. Wiltze of St Louis, died of typhus, that is, there was no longer any sign of vitality to be found in his body. The death knell announced his death, but during this state of apparent death his soul (his “I”) was fully alive and conscious. He writes:
“I fully understood my situation. I said to myself”: I am what is called “dead,” but still the same person. I will now leave the body.” I observed the interesting process of the soul’s separation from the body.
By some force, it seemed to me, which was not my own, my ego was rocked like a cradle, breaking its connection with the tissues of the body. Soon after this lateral movement ceased, and it seemed to me that I could feel and hear innumerable little strands loosening from toes to heels. Then I began to slowly pull myself back from my feet to my head, much like an elastic band tightens. I remember reaching the hips and saying to myself, “Now there’s no life below the hips.” I then rose through the abdomen and chest to the head, and when my whole self was gathered in the head, I thought, “I’m all clear now and I’ll be free soon.” I circled the brain as if I were hollow myself, trying to penetrate the sutures of the skull and feeling like a gelatinous medusa.
As I emerged from the skull, I initially floated back and forth like a bubble on a straw; then I completely broke free and sank to the floor, from which I slowly rose, resuming fully human form. My body was now translucent, with a bluish sheen, and completely naked. The latter circumstance caused me a feeling of embarrassment, and I withdrew hastily towards the half-open door, to avoid the looks of those present, among whom were two ladies; but when I got to the door I found that I was clothed again, and I tried to make people notice me, but I couldn’t. I marveled at my extraordinary sense of well-being; I walked out the door and flew through the air like a bird.”
In this case the astral bond was not yet broken; for he was brought back to life and reentered the body.[15]
All observations, as well as the reports of resurrected apparent dead indicate that dying under natural circumstances, such as, after a serious illness, is painless, even pleasant; Nor do religious scruples seem to have much influence; for even Louis XIV exclaimed on his deathbed: “I should have thought there was more to dying.” William Penn said before he died, “Oh, if only I could hold a pen and write how easy and pleasant it is to die,” and a young girl said a few moments before her departure, “If that means dying, so it is a most pleasant sensation.”
Also, at the moment of greatest danger of death, as a rule, no fear of death makes itself felt, as the author has already experienced several times on various occasions: falling, danger of drowning, etc. It seems that as the bodily consciousness wanes, the consciousness of the soul awakens all the more brightly, and while the organism seems to be in agony, the soul (the ego) may swim in indescribable bliss.
This separation from the body may be somewhat different in violent forms of death and may also be very painful. We also see that in a ripe fruit the pit comes off the skin easily, while in an unripe one it is difficult to remove. Mediumistic communications from suicides, the authenticity of which is guaranteed, confirm this. Thus says, for example, the report of a girl I know who poisoned herself, the following:
“I poisoned myself. I hoped to escape from myself, but I was the same person as before. I went to the grave with my body. Since certain rumors had spread about the cause of my death, a police investigation was made. I was dug up again on the third day and my body dissected. I had the same sensation as if I was being cut up alive. It was as if every nerve in the body was being violently torn loose,” etc. Other similar communications from suicides confirm this, and the prayer, “The Lord save us from sudden death!” therefore seems to have a scientific basis.
It is also probable that the departing soul, even before it has left the body, already has an insight into the state which awaits it, since it creates this state itself. One of my acquaintances who hanged himself with suicidal intent but was eventually brought back to life reports the following:
“I saw before me, before I lost my consciousness, my entire life pass in all its details as in a panorama. Then I found myself in a place where there were all suicides and I was in the midst of them. It was a horrifying sight and I never want to see it again.”
By H. P. Blavatsky and others in the know confirm this past life review and say that in doing so the departing soul lays its foundation for its future. The teaching of the Bhagavad-Gita also points to this; for it is written: “Whoever departs from the world thinking only of Me enters into Me. But if, when leaving his body, his whole thoughts are directed towards another being, then he enters into its likeness; for its nature becomes like the nature of that being. If he dies when sattva (knowledge) has matured in him, he enters the regions of good; if he dies, if rajas (lust) is predominant in his soul, he remains bound to his works; but if tamas (folly) reigns in him, he is born among fools.”[16] What is heavenly in man enters heaven, and what is devilish in him enters the kingdom of demons.
Not only does the state of mind and concentration of the dying person have a great influence in determining his condition after death, which is easily understood, but it also arranges the elements for his next incarnation, and it is therefore highly recommended that at these solemn moments near the dying there should be a reverent calm, and this natural process should not to be disturbed by the shouting or wailing of bystanders. Under such circumstances, the soul that is becoming free is also particularly receptive to spiritual influences, and even the thoughts of those present who wish to hold the soul back can make it difficult for it to leave, while sympathetic, uplifting feelings make it easier for it. The purpose of the prescribed church ceremonies is to make things easier.[17]
The more the soul is separated from the body, the less it cares about what happens to the body because it does not identify itself with it. We can observe this in ourselves in dream life. Apparently dead, who were buried in a state of spirituality and woke again, testified that they knew very well what was happening to their bodies, but that they were all so indifferent as if it were none of their business; others, on the other hand, who experienced the same thing in a state of catalepsy, without being able to give any sign of life, suffered terribly; for in such cases only the motor nerves are paralyzed, but the soul is still firmly attached to the body.
Even during earthly life, as every human being can observe in himself, every part of the human constitution strives back to its origin. The body formed from the material gravitates towards the earth; the intellect seeks satisfaction in the realm of knowledge; That which is of divine nature in man is of God and longs for its divine origin. In the material body all the principles of the composition of man in physical, spiritual, intellectual and spiritual relation are combined into a whole; after the death of the body these qualities sooner or later dissolve into their component parts, and man’s ego follows that direction towards which it is most naturally drawn. If the heavenly predominates in the soul, then this leads it upwards; if the material governs it, it pulls it down. After death, a person who has become holy sheds the earthly, sensual desires, instincts and thoughts and becomes free; a man who finds his ideal in the material and sensuous separates himself from the higher elements in his nature, loses his heavenly qualities and is left in the material as an animal or devil.
Philosophy teaches such a separation of the material from the spiritual; common sense and the religious teachings of all peoples agree with this. In an ancient fragment of the Hadokht-Nask[18] that has been found, this separation is symbolically described as follows: “When the time appointed for life on earth is over, the soul of the righteous man stays three days and three nights in the vicinity of the body, from which she escaped, and then meets her heavenly image in the form of a wonderfully beautiful virgin, who leads her over the bridge of judgment into paradise and into eternal light (knowledge and bliss); but the soul of the unrighteous stays with the corpse for three days and three nights, breathing the stench of putrefaction, and then enters a state of unhappiness, until finally it comes from the spirit of evil into the region of darkness, to live there until the time to remain of salvation and restoration.”[19]
If a person were already perfect when dying, he would enter the heavenly state (Sat-cit-ānanda) immediately after death, or go to hell as a perfect devil immediately after leaving the body; But since there are few perfect saints today and complete devils are relatively rare, there must naturally still be an intermediate state after death in which, after a short or long time, this separation of the suitable and unsuitable elements of the soul occurs, be it consciously or unconsciously. This middle region is called the “astral world” because in it the forces of the “stars” (astra), i.e., sensations and thoughts, rule. The Buddhists call it “Kāma-Loka,” that is, the region in which the soul is still bound by its desires and passions, and is known to Catholics as the “Place of Purification” or “Purgatory.”
But in this chapter we are not dealing with the states called “heaven, purgatory and hell,” and we return to a consideration of the processes involved in dying, with apparent death in particular worthy of discussion.
It is a well-known fact that even in civilized countries, and despite all the usual precautions, people who appear to be dead are very often taken for dead and buried alive, only to wake up in the grave and perish miserably, is a well-known fact that only the ignorant and from now on can be denied to physicians suffering from scientific megalomania. The daily papers sometimes contain reports of such occurrences, and as the instances in which such an event is discovered are evidently very few in relation to those which the earth forever conceals, no idea of the number can be formed make discovered. Sometimes the apparently dead person wakes up at the last moment, before the coffin is closed, or at the funeral; then such cases are often covered up or denied. It is often only after a long time, e.g., in moving cemeteries, evidence of such occurrences; but there have also been cases in which someone who has already been buried has been rescued. The following serves as an example:
“A horrible discovery was made by a farmer in the cemetery at Sartagon (in the Landes department) when he passed the row of graves late in the evening. He heard knocking and calls for help from a half-closed grave. When the farmer had uncovered the coffin, a thirty-year-old Mrs. Jascoubet, who had been buried the day before, got out of it, fainted and died soon after. The linen cloth that had wrapped the body of the dead man showed signs that the woman in the coffin had made desperate efforts to free herself.”[20]
But cases in which the “mourners” heard the knocking in the coffin and ignored it, be it out of superstition, fear or stupidity, are common.[21]
The reason why many people who appear to be dead are still buried alive is that apart from the decomposition of the corpse there is no absolutely certain sign that death has actually occurred. In fact, one can only speak of an impossibility of reawakening where organs necessary for life are destroyed. A cessation of vital activity in the body is not yet a sure sign of death. Death is the separation of the soul from the body, and how could a “science” recognize this separation if it is ignorant of the soul and does not know it or denies of its existence?
We must distinguish between the life principle (Prana) [prāṇa] and the life activity at work in an organism. The real seat of life is not the material, visible body, but the “etheric” or “astral body”; From this the physical body receives its organized life force, and so long as the two are magnetically connected through the astral cord, the soul is still connected to the physical body and can even feel what is happening to the physical body in a state of apparent death, which is why hasty embalming, dissection, burning as well as premature burial should be avoided.
In man, as in all of nature, the lower is always connected with the higher. The ether permeates the air, the air permeates the water, the water permeates the earth. The child is connected to the maternal organism through the umbilical cord, the body through the astral body to the soul, the lower region of the soul to the upper, the intellect to the realm of knowledge through the light of intuition, and there are as many births as there are such unions, and as many deaths as there are such separations. First comes the death of the material body, which is the outermost covering of the soul, then the separation of the higher soul forces from the lower ones by the breaking of the bridge connecting the two (antahkarana) [antaḥkaraṇa], the separation of the heavenly part from the earthly, and finally the worst death of all, the return to material existence, beginning the cycle of birth and death anew. As the Bible teaches, no one is immortal but God. But since man carries the divinity himself in his innermost being, it is also in his power to awaken to his true self-consciousness through the power of the divine spirit within him, to cross the bridge that leads to the temple of immortality and all to overcome these deaths.[22]
Without this overcoming, which is most easily attained through love of the highest, the belief in immortality is only a pious delusion; for though the astral and mental remnants of the human constitution may survive the death of the material body for long periods, even millennia, they are eventually, albeit slowly, dissolving; for what is composed also disintegrates again; only eternal unity exists. Anyone who has come to self-knowledge in it need not worry either about the origin or the demise of the worlds; for him all this is only a preliminary spectacle; he is independent of all that is not himself, and he himself is the All; he finds his indestructible rest, knowledge and bliss within himself; he is god.
III.
There are probably only a few people who have not often asked themselves what kind of condition awaits them when their body has died; for no thinking man takes his material body for his real self. The use of language already forbids this; because one does not say “I head, I feet, I body, but my head, my body, my soul, my spirit” etc. An inner feeling that is innate in us tells the human being that in his innermost being he has something of his material appearance is different, and the conclusion suggests itself that this “I,” whose existence can be felt but not objectively perceived, is not subject to the death of the body, but that even after the body has decayed, something of us remains.
This inner conviction is so ingrained in consciousness that it cannot be entirely eradicated by the most artificial arguments of materialism, and though suppressed, it reasserts itself on certain thought-provoking occasions. So e.g., the anecdote of the soldier who did not want to believe in anything supernatural. But when the battle began and the bullets began to whistle, fear arose in him and he began to pray, “O God, if there is any, have mercy on my poor soul if I have any.” A professor who was a great atheist and had written books against the belief in immortality lost his daughter whom he loved dearly. But it seems that he himself was not convinced of the truth of the theories he defended; for he had the words written on the tombstone: “Goodbye!”
Is man immortal?—This is the ever-recurring question, which neither theology nor Spiritism can answer with complete conviction; for the books and communications can give us nothing but theories and opinions, which, credible as they may be, are just theories and hypotheses; for true knowledge of one’s own can only be attained through one’s own experience. The manifestations of spiritism, no matter how genuine they are, are nonetheless external manifestations, which can be due to the most varied of causes, and one is never safe from deception on the part of the invisible intelligences; for there the devil often appears in the form of an angel, and the most unctuous sermons are often only the work of a comedian. Death alone can solve the mystery of death by transporting us to another state of being.
Is man immortal?—It depends above all on what one understands by the word “man.” Man is a thing composed of many elements. Bodily, psychic, and spiritual organization is found in it, and all philosophers worthy of the name agree that there is something spiritual, immortal in it, or associated with it. But until this immortal has not come to the consciousness of the personal human being, this teaching is also only a theory; the possession of something that we feel and know nothing about is not a possession for us. All existence is relative, and what is impalpable and unknowable for us has no existence for us either. Consequently, the “belief” in personal immortality, or, more correctly, the belief in this theory, is only a pious delusion. But he who feels that the immortal in him is of a divine nature and is a part of his own being, has found the immortal; he needs no other proof for his belief in immortality; for every truth, once known, proves itself by its existence.
This immortality in man is a revelation of the divinity within him and consequently of God himself. The Bible teaches, “There is none immortal but God.” There is continuity after death for man, but no immortality save through union with God, i.e., with its immortal part. The god-man in man is immortal, provided there is such a thing, but the godless animal man is not. We must learn to distinguish between the spirit of God in man and the spirit of nature. The former is eternal, unchanging, the latter gives rise to ever-changing, transitory forms of consciousness. The former is the spirit of true self-knowledge, the latter the source of blind speculation; one belongs to the heavenly soul of man, the other to the human-animal soul. It may be correct to say that after death man leaves everything that is mortal about him. But it can also be correct to say that after death man is abandoned by everything that was immortal in him; for then God separates from man, and the godless part remains behind. It then depends on whether the human being is connected with the heavenly or only with his earthly being, that is, whether the eternal or only the transitory has reached his consciousness in him. In the first case he enters the world of the gods, in the other he remains subject to the influences of the astral. Everything gravitates back to its origin. The divine in man strives for the divine, the ephemeral in him clings to the ephemeral and perishes in it.
H. P. Blavatsky says the following in a private letter:
“In itself, the soul is not immortal. It only lasts after the death of the body until it has shed everything that is earthly about it and belongs to the “flesh”; then, through its gradual purification, it gradually comes nearer to union with the spirit, which alone is immortal, and its connection with it becomes more and more indissoluble. When the last atom of the earthly is gone, duality becomes unity, and the ego of the former man becomes immortal forever. But if man, while in the flesh, neglected to prepare himself joyfully to take leave of his perishable body; if he has lived only an earthly life, and earthly thoughts have smothered every vestige of spiritual life in him, he will not be born again spiritually; he will not see God (his origin). (John III, 3.) Like a stillborn child he will leave his mother, natural life, and after the death of the flesh he will not be born in a better world, but in the kingdom of death, because his soul is itself corrupted forever by breaking its connection with the (divine) spirit. Then the flesh has conquered, and the soul is brought down instead of up.”
Now how is this contrast between spirit and matter, between the spirit of God in man and the world spirit, this struggle between “good” and “evil” to be explained?
Occult science teaches that there is a twofold development in the universe, a descent of the spirit into the material, that is, a materialization of spirit, and an ascension of the material to spirit or spiritualization of matter, as symbolically indicated in the sign of the double triangle ✡. The wave of life moves downwards and the spirit of the world strives to produce forms in which the ascension of the material can then take place. He first produces the mineral kingdom, from which the plant kingdom develops, and from this the animal kingdom, in which the sensual human being occupies the highest level and can attain the ability to spiritualize and approach the divine. For its downward development the world spirit needs the coarsest vibrations of substance, and therefore the realm of sensuality and bestiality is the goal of its striving; it is the instinct to mate in humans and animals and the root cause of all passionate impulses. He himself is unreasonable and incapable of any instruction, and when he unites himself with man’s intelligence, he drives him to the greatest degeneracy of cruelty and folly. In this way personal devils are born in man; for a man possessed by such passions may be called a “devil.” He is a personification of intelligent natural forces that have become apparent in him, but because they do not spring from the eternal, they eventually disintegrate again. The stone, the plant, the animal have no struggle with themselves, they follow the laws of their nature and are governed by their properties. In man, on the other hand, as soon as the feeling of his higher nature begins to stir in him, this struggle between the eternal and the transitory begins, and the more he spiritualizes himself, the more he opposes the opposite, the spirit of the world, until he finally gets through it conquered the power of the divine spirit, the light of true self-knowledge.
It is now up to man whether he wants to take part in this downward evolution, which leads to annihilation, or in the upward evolution, which aims at the development of his spiritual individuality. In the one case the self-created selfness falls prey to decomposition and dissolution, which will be all the longer and more painful the more self-consciousness and life energy have been generated in this thought-image; for every selfish thought and the fulfillment of every selfish desire strengthens that apparent “I,” which stands in the way of the awakening of true self-consciousness. In the other case the spirit finds its rest, knowledge and bliss in God, that is, he enters the heavenly state (God’s world).
What this state is like and what it is like in heaven (devachan) to speculate on is useless, because these things are beyond the intellectual comprehension and do not fit into the human brain; For, as the Bible says, “As yet no human eye has seen, nor human ear heard the glory which God has prepared for those who love him.” Therefore, what is said and written by modern writers about Devachan and Nirvana is largely based on fantasy and hearsay, but not on personal experience, and has no real value. The soul which has thrown off its last earthly garments has nothing more to do with the earthly things which it has left, and our investigations can therefore only extend to those states in which the soul finds itself while it still is somehow tied to the earthly. But these states will be very different from each other, depending on the circumstances. They depend on the degree of development or spiritualization attained by the deceased during his life on earth and what he loves most of all; for the soul is drawn to what it loves; the ego identifies with it and is united with it. A person who is completely immersed in the material can still be connected to his cadaver to such a degree after death that he leads a kind of dream life as a vampire with it in the grave, and a completely spiritualized person in which even the physical body is completely of the spirit penetrated and transmuted would not die at all. (I Corinthians XV, 39-45.) Between these two extremes, which are very rare nowadays, there will be all sorts of gradations. Death does not suddenly change man’s character; he only enters into different relationships with his external environment. So anyone who wants to know how things will be with him after death need only examine himself to see how things are with him now, apart from all external circumstances.
Such self-inquiry from time to time is a useful thing, if in doing so we regard our selfhood as a thing of our creation and belonging to which we must be concerned to cultivate and ennoble. On the other hand, he who identifies with his mortal personality and always thinks of “himself” and his personal progress or well-being does himself great harm; for in this way he continually strengthens the illusion of selfhood, which he should overcome in order to learn to think and feel “impersonally.” The same is the case with those twisted heads, “healers” and the like, who in their selfhood think they can raise themselves above their selfness and through their artificially generated “self-consciousness” affirm that very thing whose existence they try to deny, confirm and strengthen. The Self cannot rise above itself. There is no other way to spiritualization and immortality than through the Spirit of God in man, the spiritual light of the higher intelligence, which is not generated by mortal man, but comes from above. In order to attain this light, however, all that is required is love for God, and this love is nothing other than love for our own higher self, which embraces the whole world, dwells in the heart of all beings and is life, love and the light is in all creatures.
IV.
Everything in the universe is a revelation of life; there is no death of something that is essential, but only a change of appearances, metamorphoses of forms in which all life reveals itself; in all transformations, neither matter, nor strength, nor spirit is lost in the universe. The essence of all things (God) is eternal and immortal. It is never born and never dies; it has never been and will never cease to be; it is the life, the love, the light (consciousness) in all things, and the manner of its manifestation depends on the conditions present in them. What is called “death” is not an annihilation of life, but a cessation of life activity in one form or another. life is consciousness, cognition; Death is unconsciousness, ignorance, and it can be said, “A man is dead to that which he is unable to know.” One can be very alive physically and yet be a complete idiot, i. that is, to be intellectually unconscious; Likewise one can be intellectually very lively, erudite, shrewd, and perceptive, an excellent advocate, preacher, and the like, and yet have no spark of the spiritual-divine life in one, that is, to be spiritually dead and unconscious (godless). But the spiritual-divine life is the true life in man, because man is of divine nature in his innermost being, and whoever does not feel this true life in his inner being, that is, anyone who has not yet become conscious of this feeling of his higher nature, who has not yet awakened to the knowledge of his true self, can be said to lead only an apparent life or a dream life, like a plant or an animal.
There are different “spheres” or states of being in the universe, such as, the visible physical world, the realm of sensation and feeling (astral world), the region of the intellectual, the world of thought, the realm of ideals (heavenly world), etc. They are not spatially separated from each other, but they are different, and everyone lives in that world which affects him and whose effects reach his consciousness. The sensuous lives in sensibility, the thinker in the realm of ideas; in a saint, in a religious ecstasy, the spiritual life may be manifest in the highest degree, and his body dead and impervious to all sensual impressions. “Where the carrion lies, there, the vultures gather.” What a man loves with all his soul, that attracts him. Where his consciousness, his will, his thinking is, there he is. Whatever comes to his consciousness, his feeling, perception or knowledge forms the world around him, everything else is not there for him and does not exist for him.
A stone, like any other thing, is also immortal, not in form but in essence, but it knows nothing of it; its composition is not fit for the manifestation of intelligence; its life expresses itself only through the connection of its atoms and through its other properties, gravity, chemical affinity, etc. When it decomposes and moss and other plants arise from its elements, they enter into a higher existence than before; his death as “stone” is a rebirth as “plant.” Thus the mineral kingdom rises to the plant kingdom, and this to the animal kingdom, the highest stage of which is man, and in this we find the conditions for the awakening of individual self-consciousness, without which the word “immortality” has no significance and meaning. Man is not concerned with making himself immortal; for in the inmost part of his being is already the immortal; it is rather a question of attaining true self-knowledge and thereby the consciousness of possessing this immortality.
Every death is a birth into “another world”; that is, a transition to a different state of being with different abilities, perceptions, and memories. An artist or a poet sees the world with very different eyes than a greedy businessman or an inquisitive scholar. In London a servant was sent to a house with a valuable package. He came back drunk and when he sobered up he didn’t know where he had left the package. All inquiries for the same were in vain. Then they had the happy idea of getting him drunk again, and in this state he took the package back. Depending on the mood in which we are, the world appears dim or rosy to us, and our happiness does not depend on external circumstances but on internal conditions. Those who have a rich inner life can also feel comfortable in solitude; those who do not have this will be plagued by boredom if there is no distraction. Therefore the egoist is also the unhappiest of all people; for he withdraws into his self-created selfhood and is there in the company of — nothing. If a man lives entirely through external sensory stimuli, what kind of existence could he lead after the death of the body, when these stimuli no longer affect him?
We don’t need to look beyond the grave to study the various states of existence; we find the same here too. We encounter daily among the living spirits who are locked in their material body as in a tomb and do not know freedom, animals in human form, walking half-corpses and material ghosts, as well as angels in disguise, from whose human exterior shines the light of divinity, visible to those who can perceive it. The sensualist is completely immersed in his sensuality, the cold intellectual is caught up in his ideas, the enthusiast lives outside of himself and finds no support or resting point in himself, the fool is obsessed with his madness, etc. The mindless body does not know these states; a corpse has no consciousness; all these states belong to the inner man and can also belong to him after he has left his material shell, the physical body. A man’s character is not essentially changed by his going out of his home. The phenomena of spiritism, with their communications from the dead, seem to prove this sufficiently.
Every death is a birth into a different state of being, but not a sudden change of character. The Bhagavad-Gita says something like this: “As a man takes off his clothes (one by one) when he goes to bed at night, so when man’s life on earth is over, the spirit puts off the bodies it has formed and attracts such again upon re-entry into life.” It is not altogether improper if we compare man to an onion, composed of concentric layers, the outermost being the coarsest, and gradually becoming finer towards the inside. At the core is the heavenly soul, which, when all other coverings are stripped away, can reunite with its divine source. But when the “onion” is rotten or wormy at its core, when the heart of man has shriveled and the sense of the higher has disappeared from his consciousness, then only the outer shells are there. For such a man there is a longer or shorter persistence of his mortal parts, but no immortality. Of course, a new being will arise from these remnants, just as new growth springs from manure. The god who created this organism and planted in it the germ of immortality creates another form; but this is of no use to the deceased. If he has not acquired his own character, he has no lasting individuality either, but is like a cloud that flies away in the wind.
From this consideration it follows that man’s highest goal is to acquire a lasting individuality, that is, to acquire an immortal existence, and since he can only attain this through the renunciation of his imagined selfhood (self-sufficiency) and union of the soul with the divine, it is in his own supreme interest to strive for this goal, which he cannot obtain by any hypocrisy, begging, promises, and the like, but only by his own progress and the power of God. The fact that man can progress is not his personal work, the means for this are given to him by the fact that he came into the world as a man; but his merit is that he uses these resources to the best of his ability for his advancement. There are various other forms of existence in which this progression is not possible, and it is therefore very fortunate to be born a human being. The Buddhist teaching says the following on this subject:
- “A person who is born into hell and suffers long and indescribable torments there cannot acquire merit (to attain perfection).”
- “A person who is born into a low animal existence and is consequently unable to understand the Law (Dharma) but lives in constant fear cannot acquire merit.”
- “A person who is born a preta (in the realm of ghosts [i.e., Hungry Ghost]), tormented by heat or cold, hunger and thirst, cannot acquire merit.”
- “A person in the state of the formless (arupa or ashaunya [aśūnya]) in the world of Brahma, being carefree but unaware of the law (dharma), cannot acquire merit.”
- “A person who is born in an environment where only lawlessness reigns and the light of wisdom cannot penetrate, cannot acquire merit.”
- “A person who is born an idiot, deaf, dumb, blind and uncomprehending, unable to be taught, cannot earn merit.”
- “A person who has the quality of stubbornly clinging to his own prejudices, and thereby being nailed to the wheel of reincarnation, cannot acquire merit.”
- “A person who is born during a non-Buddhist time period (i.e., during a non-enlightened age), and consequently ignorant of the radiance of the spiritual sun of the universe, cannot earn any merit to walk on the path of infinite bliss, in Nirvana, to walk.”
A human existence like ours is, on the whole, is a great rarity and difficult to attain. It can only benefit us if we make proper use of it, and it depends on our karma, that is, our course of action will determine whether such a favorable opportunity arises again.
The doctrine of reincarnation is very often misunderstood. Some people think to themselves: “Even if I waste this life, I will make up for it in the next life.” This error arises from the failure to distinguish between “God” and “man” that is, between the higher self and the imaginary particularity. The higher self is the tree; the personalities it produces are the leaves. The trunk always produces new leaves, but these fall off in autumn and are blown away by the wind. Of what use would it be to the leaf to know that the tree exists while it itself perishes. In other words: the spirit of God in man, after it has left the human organism, again builds up new, similar organisms from the accumulated material; but the same person does not come back.
The master builder builds a new house from the material of the fallen human ruins, but the new house is not the ruin. There can only be talk of a reincarnation of the personality when the consciousness of its immortal part awakens in it and it has become one with the master builder. The soul sheds its coverings; but this is of no use to me if I am connected to the shell and do not know the soul. Without the spirit of God, the human organism with all its intellectual faculties is just a mindless larva. There are plenty of such larvae, not only in this world but also among the deceased, and just as some think and act under the influence of someone else’s will, can be hypnotized and have no self-knowledge of their own, so the larvae of deceased are possessed by other beings and thereby develop an apparent life and an apparent intelligence which, to a certain extent, corresponds to that of the deceased.
Anyone who has no true self-knowledge is also not master of himself. He who only acts according to the influences that affect him and by which he is driven is not his own master, but whoever is his own master and his willing, thinking and one who can control feeling through the power of consciousness of his higher nature need not serve anyone else; he is above life and death; he recognizes himself as that entity which is never born and never dies. He sees that the shells in which he has clothed himself are of his own making, that his material, psychic (astral) and intellectual organizations are not himself but only his tools, and that their existence is his, not his existence but depends on them. Then heaven and earth can perish for him; he himself remains unaffected. But as long as man is still bound to one of the shells that surround him, he also takes part in its relationships. Therefore, if you want to know how it will be after the death of the body, you have only to examine yourself and see what binds you.
Notes
[1] The Mysteries of Death. [Die Geheimnisse des Todes. Von Dr. Franz Hartmann. Theosophischer Wegweiser 9, no. 7 (April 1908), 218-223; no. 8 (May 1908), 252-257; no. 9 (June 1908), 265-278; no. 11 (August 1908), 321-329; no. 12 (September 1908), 345-354] {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.—Daniel 5, 25}
[3] The Astral man.
[4] Kāma.
[5] Buddhi-Manas.
[6] Kāma-Manas.
[7] Buddhi.
[8] Ātmā.
[9] I Corinthians II, 10.
[10] II Corinthians XIII, 5.
[11] The “etheric” or, more correctly, the “astral body” (because it is formed from the influences of the astral world) is called “Linga-Sarira” [Liṅga-Śarīra] in Sanskrit, meaning the body produced by procreation. It is also called the ‘luminous body” and the “double.” [etheric double]
[12] The “desire body” or “sentient body,” also called the “body of suffering,” is formed only after the death of the physical body.
[13] It is to this “bridge” (pons) that the expression “pontificate” and the title of the pope as “pontifex maximus,” “supreme bridge builder,” refer.
[14] Sankaracharya [Śaṅkarācārya], “Tattva Bodha.”
[15] “St Louis Medical Journal.” — A similar description is contained in W. Stead’s “Letters from Juliet.”
[16] Ch. VIII, 5 and following—Ch. XIV, 14 and 16.
[17] {R.H.—Thus, the Catholic practice of administering extreme unction is beneficial to the individual who is proceeding to die, by directing the energies at the top and out of the head, except in the more vile cases where the soul must pass out through the liver or spleen.}
[18] {R.H.—Hadhoxt Nask. A Zoroastrian text, which describes the fate of the soul after death.}
[19] The “period of restoration” means the next Manvantara in millions of years.
[20] “Neues Wiener Journal.”
[21] Compare F. Hartmann, “Buried Alive.”
[22] Antahkarana is the bridge (Latin “pons”) connecting Kāma-Manas (the speculative intellect) with Buddhi-Manas (the knowing mind). This is indicated by the word “pontificate” and the title of the pope as an alleged “bridge builder” (Pontifex maximus).