[Das “Ich” und die Persönlichkeit. (Eine Betrachtung.)]
Translation from the German by Robert Hütwohl[1]
“The soul (the “I”) is nobler than all corporeal things. It is a simple (spiritual force which guides life into all limbs, through the intimate union in which it stands with the body.” — (Meister Eckhart.)
In all theosophical writings there is much talk of a “higher” and a “lower self,” the “true I” or individuality and the “assumed peculiarity” or “personality.” Again and again the need for self-denial, self-sacrifice and self-giving up is pointed out if man wants to attain true self-awareness and life in the spirit. But how could a man control himself or renounce himself when nothing higher lives in him than the consciousness of his transitory personality? Self-sacrifice would be tantamount to spiritual suicide and annihilation. The well-known mystic Angelos Silesius says in his Knittelverse:
“If the devil could go out of his unity,
You would see him standing right before God’s throne.”
But the “devil,” i.e., the godless, brutish, rational man, with all his intellectual faculties, cannot go out of his “oneness” because he is conscious of no other being than his assumed being. If he were to give up himself as a devil, since he is a complete devil, there would be nothing left of him at all. Without the knowledge of the higher, leaving the lower is an impossibility and all so-called “humility” is just hypocrisy.
The Indian sage Śaṅkarāchārya says: “The first condition for attaining true knowledge is the possession of the ability to discern the permanent (the immortal real self) from the impermanent (the mortal personality).
Anyone who has come to this distinction can rightly say of himself (even without being taught it by anyone): “I am not the dress which I wear. I am not my body that I inhabit; I am not my mind which I use, not my mind which is my tool for thinking and feeling; I am who I am, nameless, all-encompassing, eternal; a spirit possessing a soul which has constructed a material body for its dwelling place, but in which it is not confined; for my soul is much larger than my body, and only a small part of its qualities can be expressed through it at once.” Just as the contents of a book cannot be expressed in a single word, or an opera cannot be expressed in a single note, likewise, the richness of the soul and the content of a man’s knowledge can only be partially and partly revealed through the body. Everyone basically knows more than what they are remembering; personal consciousness is constantly changing, according to the impressions one receives and the sensations arising from them; the self-consciousness of the personal man is only, as it were, the reflection of a ray of light which comes from the true, spiritual self, the “Oversoul,” the “Father in heaven.” This divine ray of light is a part of our heavenly soul that penetrates into material existence and is intimately connected with it during our earthly life. From this connection of the spiritual with the material and sensual arises the concept of “ego” or “ownness,” self-delusion, egoism and self-conceit, which in one’s own personality is an independently existing, separated from the big whole, in its interests from the general independent; yes, perhaps with all other creatures sees lying in battle.
This is the so-called “little I,” in itself an illusion or deception, which disappears when man has come to the consciousness of his true existence. Friedrich Rückert says the following about this in his “Wisdom of the Brahman”:
“My changeable self, that is and will and was,
Take hold of yourself, that is unchangeable.
Because you are who you were and are who will be, you!
My being flows from your being to yours.
I would have lost who I was every night.
And would be born on every day that wasn’t,
If I hadn’t realized that I’m the same
Because in you who is, I am eternally included.”
Here, as in all religious writings, there is talk of an “I” and “Thou,” and one is inclined to believe that the great and the small “I” (God and man) are two separate beings; but philosophy teaches us that God is all in all and the essence of all, and apart from Him nothing. “In Him we live” and He is our life. Man without God is nothing; everything that is not God is deception (Maya) and that is why the “little I” is also called “not-I” in Indian philosophy. God is the indivisible unity, the all one essence of all appearances; for all things came into being from God (the Logos). Man in himself (without God) is insubstantial; the zero without the one is nothing; the little I only acquires value when it is permeated with God-consciousness and thus the zero is connected to the one. Such a God-imbued man recognizes the presence of God in all things; For him, all creatures are revelations of the one life of God in the universe, even if they are misshapen and imperfect, and above all he recognizes the effect of the divine life in himself. For him, there is no more “I and you”; he sees in all creatures the sole divinity, his true self. This is why the brahmin, looking at heaven or earth, says, Tatwam asi [tat tvam asi] (that is you) to remind himself that in his union with Brahma he is all in all.
Perhaps it is worth looking at the relationships between the big and small me in a scientific way. All religion is founded, if not on an intellectual realization, at least on the feeling of this connection between the higher and the lower “I” and he who has the true religious feeling in his heart is aware of this connection and needs no other proof. Explanations can only serve to dispel errors; the truth needs no support; she is like the light; where ever it is revealed, there it is recognized. It does not harm the sun if the clouds obscure its sight from us; but then we don’t see them. In the same way, the spiritual sun of truth must penetrate the darkness of our material existence if we are to come to a knowledge of its light, and in order to scatter the errors and prejudices that oppose it, man has his intellect for that. When the clouds of error are dispelled and the figments of fancy are gone, truth can be revealed. There is no longer any supposition or delusion, no opinions, no more “taking things for granted,” but the enlightened person recognizes himself as the light.
“God dwells in a light to which the path breaks;
If you don’t become one yourself, you won’t beg him forever.”[2]
No one can make this light himself; but it is written: “Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God (the truth).” Therefore man has his free will and reason, so that with the help of the light he can purify his heart and mind and become able to come to the light of self-knowledge. This is the practice of religion and “occult science”; which is why the great sage, Gautama Buddha, also teaches: “To purify the heart, to refrain from doing evil and to strive for good; this is the religion of all enlightened ones.” But a correct world view and a correct understanding of the relationship between God and man is also beneficial for this.
What is the “I”? — If we designate the first cause of all existence, the source from which everything has sprung, with the name “God,” then basically everything is essentially God and the world of forms in itself is nothing but a mirror image, an appearance. Consequently, every human being is also God and his true self-consciousness is rooted in God; but there is still a long way to go before a person has come to this true self-consciousness or God-consciousness; for there he must overcome the illusion of peculiarity which reflects to him the individuality of the form in which he inhabits. This is the path of spiritual evolution. Man cannot recognize himself as a god until he has developed divine faculties and divine powers. Just as the human material organism evolved from the lower realms by way of evolution, so the spiritual individuality must develop by way of spiritual evolution. The germs for this are contained in every human being; Hidden divine powers slumber in every soul that are destined to awaken, which does not happen all at once in a single life on earth, but does so through repeated reincarnations. The great ego always remains the same, but the personality, as which it plays a temporary role on the stage of life, changes.
The spirit requires form for its manifestation. Absolute consciousness is not relative consciousness, it is not related to anything. Absolute self-consciousness is the consciousness of existence from which the feeling of “I” springs. Spirit without body is not manifest and therefore nothing for man; he needs the material form in order to communicate with the physical world; he needs a spiritual organism in order to think, to develop his intellectual faculties, to grasp ideas, to analyze them and to put them into new forms, and if he is to develop the divine powers dormant in him, he needs for this that heavenly and imperishable “body of resurrection,” obtained through spiritual rebirth, and spoken of in the writings of the Indian sages as well as in the Bible.[3] And as earthly forms need earthly nourishment, air, light and warmth, so the heavenly body needs spiritual nourishment; Freedom of will, the light of true knowledge and the warmth of divine love that embraces all beings.
Self-awareness is limitless; the consciousness of “I am” is not bound to any place or time and has nothing to do with anything but itself; it knows nothing but itself; for it is “God” and in Him are all things contained.
“You can doubt things, what and whether they are;
You certainly have no doubts about your ego.
That’s the starting point; be sure of yourself!
You can get to everything you want without any obstacles.”
“The thing is beside you because you separate yourself from it;
But it is also in you because you recognize it in you.
You are not the only mirror to the world; It is
A mirror too, in which you are yourself looking.”[4]
The great “I” of the universe and the true I of each individual is but one, immortal and indivisible; is the deity (the Logos) itself. The word Brahma basically means the self-pronouncing word: “I am!”[5] Sat-chit-ānandam: existence-knowledge-bliss. All-self-consciousness. The “all-I” is also the true self of each individual, but not everyone is aware of it. The consciousness of God is the light of the world, which shines in the darkness of the material; but the darkness does not contain it.[6] We are all God in our innermost being, but we recognize it does not, because the divine light must pass through various sheaths before it can reach our personal consciousness. These sheaths are: 1. the soul (the “causal body” or “Kāraṇa śarīra”), 2. the astral body (Sūkṣma śarīra) and [3.] the physical body (Sthūla śarīra) T. Subba Row in his Discourses on the Bhagavad Gita says:
“If we catch the sun’s rays in a mirror and let them fall on a metal plate, so that they can be reflected from it on another object, for example, if a wall is reflected, we get three images, the first of which is brighter than the second and the second brighter than the third. We can compare the first to the causal body, the second to the astral body, the third to the physical body. The four light surfaces are not of equal strength. The splendor of the first can be likened to the highest human cognition, and grows fainter and fainter the more often the light is transmitted from a clear upadhi (vehicle) to a less clear or dimmed one. Our self-awareness and cognition depend on the enlightenment capacity of our upadhis (soul and body), and just as the image of the sun on a surface of water can become obscure when the water is murky or agitated, so too does the image of the true self in the Man’s soul is clouded or distorted when he is carried away by passions, and these can even blur the picture so much that he is no longer able to perceive its light.”[7]
In God there is no separation, in the all-self-consciousness everything is one and divine wisdom encompasses everything in itself. God is the Unity from which all numbers spring and which is contained in each; and no matter how many numbers have their source in it, the one does not become less and loses nothing in the process. The light of the sun illuminates the world and gives life to all things and color to every flower; it appears in the forms, as it were, embodied and in an individualized state, without therefore changing itself; for the phenomena which the light produces are the products of its activity, but the light is not. Likewise, every thought which a man sends out is not the man himself; however, a part of his strength that cannot be separated from him and consequently also of his nature. Likewise, the All-I is eternally unchanging, but forming a force center, a soul, it appears as an individual manifestation; i.e., in this embodied part the feeling or the concept of an individual existence is formed, without it thereby losing its essential identity or connection with the All-I. In other words; the soul is, as it were, a divine thought which has surrounded itself with a spiritual shell (kāraṇa śarīra) and as such has its own position in the universe; but the “I” (God) in it does not change.
The famous mystic, Meister Eckhart, says: “Everything that God ‘created,’ i.e., in which the eternal Word spoke, he created without changing himself. He is the pure ideality in which no change occurs.” But man is subject to change at every moment. It is like an organism in which a divine ray of light has embodied itself, and after the death of the body this ray of light withdraws back to its origin with the achievements it has acquired during its earthly existence. But its direct origin is the celestial soul, its “Father in Heaven,” indwelling the causal body (kāraṇa śarīra).
To make this clear to us, the following is to be noted: Through the formation of the causal body, as said above, the concept of separate I-ness, the peculiarity and the idea of “mine” and “thine” has arisen in the All-I, and with it the enduring individuality of the soul is established, which lasts until perhaps in the course of millions of years the human spirit also overcomes this illusion and enters Nirvana, by attaining that degree of highest perfection in which it sees itself as the “all-self” which recognizes deity.
It is from this individual entity, which we want to call the “human oversoul,” that the personalities it has produced successively emerge by means of ever-repeated reincarnations. Just as it itself is, so to speak, an embodied thought of God, the personality of the earthly human being that has emerged from it is like a feeler horn, which the heavenly butterfly stretches out into the material realm in order to seek nourishment for the soul there. The heavenly soul is like the tree; the part of it embedded in the earthly, a branch, which, when its appointed time is over, unites again with its trunk. Even the lower kingdoms, the plant and animal forms, each have their common oversoul as classes or genera, from which the same classes and genera spring again and again and are therefore “immortal” as such; such class souls are like trees with many thousands of branches; but the man who has attained individual self-consciousness has his own oversoul, from which he started and to which he returns, having shed all which is useless.
The Oversoul of a spiritually evolved man may thus be conceived of as incomparably greater than that part embodied in the personality, though the latter constantly receives intuition from the former. We must distinguish between the manifest and the non-manifest. The unmanifest is there; even if we do not know it because it is not evident. Everyone knows that the content of his knowledge is far greater than the small part of it which he is aware of or can remember at any given moment; the oversoul is what E. von Hartmann calls “the unconscious”; it is not in itself unconscious and does not sleep, but the action of the brain is limited. A pitcher cannot hold the contents of a sea at once, nor can the content of a long speech be expressed in a single word, or a piece of music in a single note. We can figuratively imagine the eternal spirit as the heavens flooded with sunlight, and the Oversoul as the moon, whose light is but a reflection of the light of the sun, from whose reflection the night side of the earth (the personality of man) receives its light.
In the attached figure, the two intertwined triangles represent the union of spirit and matter; the circle signifies the heavenly soul, the pentagram the earthly man; both are connected by the “bridge” (antaḥkaraṇa). Through this bridge the light of the heavenly soul (buddhi-manas) penetrates into the realm of the earthly part (kāma-manas) of man,[8] and through this bridge of light the human spirit returns to the heavenly spirit, its “father.”
“Two souls dwell, alas, in my breast”
says Goethe in Faust. In fact, these are not two essentially different souls, but only, as it were, the two poles of an offspring of the soul, of which one pole “holds to the world with clinging organs in a rough lust for love,” while the other to the “realms of high ancestors raises.” The lower part is surrounded by, and can fall prey to, the realm of animal instincts and passions; the higher part receives knowledge and strength from above.
In all religious systems the restoration of harmony between the heavenly and earthly parts of the soul is taught, and as long as man has a “conscience” and has religious feeling in his heart, such a return and reunion is possible. But there are two kinds of human depravity which make this return impossible for him by robbing him of the consciousness of his higher nature. The cause of one is a sinking into the swamp of the sensual and immoral; especially sexual perversity, whereby man drains powers from his higher self and mutilates his soul,[9] because he sins against his own (spiritual) body, and thereby commits the “sin against the holy spirit.” The other kind of spiritual depravity is total entanglement in the realm of the intellectual. There are “men of science” in whom the soul has died, who will not shy away from cruelty to satisfy their scientific curiosity or ambition, and there are also those who are absorbed in thought and have no time to feel. They waste the God-given powers feeding the brain and the heart remains empty. After death there remains a soulless astral larva, if not a vampyre or devil. The latter case can occur as a result; that a part of the soul’s spiritual life has become intimately associated with the mortal personality and separated from the Divine. This is the result of the practice of “black magic,” and therefore the possession of “occult powers” without the moral purity to guard against their misuse is not at all desirable.
True self-consciousness, when it has awakened in man, always remains the same; but personal consciousness, the delusion of individuality, vanishes, whether at or after the body’s death. The great I is one; but the small “I” is composed of many “illusory I,” elements and elementals. As Goethe says, personality is:
“The little world of fools,
“Who usually thinks of itself as a whole.”
In it, the believer, the doubter, the fool or the wise come to the fore, and man appears as one or the other, depending on how his mood and thus his state of consciousness changes. But the true I is “the Lord” and Redeemer in us; through our union with him we attain liberty; without him we are prisoners and ruled by our desires and prejudices.
But how can we find the “Lord”, our true self, our “Father in heaven?” There is no other way than that we submit to the influence of His divine; open up light and surrender to it. The Bhagavad Gītā says:[10]
“Behold, I will teach you the great secret; The Lord, who dwells in the heart of all, continually brings forth all things by His omnipotence, according to eternal, immutable laws. take refuge in him; then by his grace you will attain supreme peace and heavenly existence. Put aside all outward appearances and come to me as your sole refuge.”
But what is the “great secret” contained in these words which seems to be understandable to everyone? — It consists in the fact that those who cannot distinguish between the “I” and the “not-I” do not understand the meaning of this teaching. We are not to give up our true Self, the humanity within us, but only that self which we are not in reality and sacrifice it to the true self. Rückert says:
“Say”: I am I! and as you say, feel it too:
In your little me of the big me breath.”
This is the right feeling, and from right feeling comes right thinking and right doing.
Notes:
[1] The “I” and the Personality. (A Reflection.) [Das “Ich” und die Persönlichkeit. (Eine Betrachtung.) Franz Hartmann, M.D. Neue Lotusblüten 2, no. 9-10 (September-October 1909), 257-277] {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] Angelus Silesius.
[3] Śaṅkarācharya “Tattva Bodha” und St. Paul. 1 Corinthians 15. 40. and following.
[4] F. Rückert. „Die Weisheit des Brahmanen“ 8.140 —
[5] Ibid. Page 348.
[6] John I. 5.
[7] “Lotusblüten” Vol. 1 (1893) Page 54[-56].
[8] With reference to this bridge, the Roman Pope is called “bridge builder” (Pontifex maximus). —
[9] 1 Corinthians. 6. 18.
[10] Chapter 18.