[Theosophie]
Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
“I dwell in the hearts of all.
From me comes thought and knowledge”
(Bhagavad Gita. XV. 15.)
The first question we encounter in our endeavor is, “What is Theosophy?” The answer is simple, yet difficult for most to grasp. The word “theosophy” comes from theos, god, and sophia, wisdom, and means divine wisdom, or in other words, the self-knowledge of God in the universe. In order to know what divine wisdom is, we must first of all answer the question: “What is God?” for even if we could form some concept or opinion about the nature of God, we would still not know whether this concept was the right one. In order to have self-knowledge of God, we would have to be God and know ourselves as God, and then human knowledge would have ceased and the wisdom of God would have taken its place.
The Bhagavad Gita says, depicting God (Brahmā) speaking through His Word (Krishna, the Logos): “The whole universe has been spread out by me; it has arisen from my intangible material nature (Prakriti). I am the father, the mother, the sustainer, the source of all being. I am the way, the Lord, the witness, the dwelling place, the refuge, the friend, the source of life, and the destroyer of forms” (chap. IX, 4, 17). The Bible says something similar in Psalms, and if we look around among the German mystics we find the same teaching, though in different words. Meister Eckhart the Mystic says for example: “God (Parabrahm) cannot be described. All predicates are alien additions to mere divine essence. Its nature is to be without nature. A single predicate attached to the essence cancels the concept of the essence.” (160, 30.) “Everything separated, striped and peeled off; that nothing remains but a single “is”, that is its real name.” (108, 31.) But in God’s material nature, the “prime stuff of the universe” (Mulaprakriti) [Mūlaprakṛti], all things are contained. Plato already recognized this, and Eckhart says: “God has hidden all things within himself. All things are in God, insofar as they have been in God forever, not in gross materiality as we are now, but as skill in the Master. God looked at himself and saw all things.” (502, 22.) “God speaks only one word, his Son; but in this he speaks to all creatures without beginning and without end.” (76, 28.) “Omit God this speaking even for a moment, heaven and earth would have to pass away.” (100, 29.) “In the clear mirror of the Father’s eternal self-knowledge, it is there he fashions an image of himself, his Son. All creatures are reflected in this mirror and one recognizes them in it; certainly not as creatures, but as God in God.” (378, 36.)
Eckhart describes God as the highest reason; Jakob Böhme describes it as the spirit or will, and wisdom as the virgin or God’s nature[2]:
“Now the virgin is before God, and appropriates herself to the spirit from which power emanates, from which she becomes the chaste virgin of wisdom; she is now God’s playmate, to the glory and joy of God; she sees herself in the eternal miracle of God, and in seeing her she longs for the miracle of eternal wisdom, which is herself, and so longs within herself, and her longing is the eternal eaters who draw to herself the holy power, [and the harsh fiat manages to stand in essence], and she is a virgin, and has never given birth, nor takes anything in to herself.”
(“Of the Three Principles of Divine Essence.” XIV, 87. )
[Dr. Hartmann evidently was using a different edition or version of Böhme’s chapter. What follows, is the similar or same paragraph, at least based on the paragraph marking, slightly different and therefore from a different edition of Böhme’s:]
14.87. So ist nun die Jungfrau vor Gott und eignet sich dem Geist an, von dem die Kraft ausgeht, aus der sie die züchtige Jungfrau der Weisheit wird. Diese ist nun Gottes Gespielin, zur Ehre und Freude Gottes, die sich im ewigen Wunder Gottes erblickt, und im Erblicken wird sie sehnend nach dem Wunder in der ewigen Weisheit, welche sie doch selber ist, und so sehnt sie sich in sich selbst. Und ihr Sehnen sind die ewigen Essenzen, welche die heilige Kraft an sich ziehen, und das herbe Schöpfungswort erschafft es, so daß es im Wesen steht. Aber sie bleibt eine Jungfrau und hat noch nie etwas geboren und nimmt auch nichts in sich. . .
[Translated:]
14.87. This is how the virgin is before God and appropriates the spirit from which emanates the power from which she becomes the chaste virgin of wisdom. This is now God’s playmate, for the glory and joy of God, who sees herself in the eternal miracle of God, and in seeing it she longs for the miracle in the eternal wisdom, which she is, and so she longs in herself. And her longings are the eternal essences, who draw to themselves the holy power, and the harsh word of creation creates it, so that it stands in essence. But she remains a virgin and has never given birth to anything, nor does she take anything into herself.
We find similar explanations in old and new scriptures, in all sorts of theologies, and the philosophers of all ages have struggled to describe God and to make that which is beyond human conception comprehensible to man. But that does little to serve our curiosity, and as long as we have no self-knowledge of God, all such things belong to the realm of moonlight of speculation. Whether we search the heavens with a telescope or seek to discover the atom with a microscope, we never find a trace of a God who is outside of ourselves.
Thus it would be a desperate undertaking to try to gain knowledge of God by way of scientific observation. But if we assume that God is omnipresent, what seemed so difficult to us suddenly becomes very easy; for if God is omnipresent, he is also within ourselves, and we need only come to know our own nature, in truth to know God.
The question, “What is God?” thus resolves to the question, “What am I?” When I look at myself, I find: that I am neither my body, nor my feeling, nor my thinking, just as little as my eating and drinking. One can certainly say that neither body, nor soul, nor spirit, but all three together make up the human being; but apart from these three there is something higher in me for which I have no concept and no name and which I do not know. This one thing that forms the ground of my self-awareness is my ego. This I is something that knows what I know and, if I don’t know anything, also knows that I don’t know anything. If I lose consciousness of this I when I fall asleep, the same consciousness of I is there again when I wake up; this ‘I’ appears to be quite independent of my personal consciousness, and I have no reason to assert that this ‘I’ is not eternal and does not continue to exist when my person has ceased to live or be engaged with it. True, there can be many people, each of whom believes that his person is his real and true “I”; even a small degree of reflection is enough to convince us of the error of this view; for we see that this person is subject to constant change in every respect, physically, emotionally and also in their mental activities; that today we are no longer the same person that we were as children, and that in a number of years we will look different, with different instincts, different opinions; also no reasonable person strives to remain what he is; but everyone seeks to become a “different” and better or happier person; only the idiot and the saint are satisfied with themselves But at the bottom of all these changes in consciousness is something that remains the same for us as long as we live and feel and think, in which we do not perceive any change, namely the self-consciousness: I am! This unknown something knows it is because it recognizes its own existence; this knowledge of his is not based on speculation, nor on the testimony of other people, nor on calculations, nor on belief in authority, but he knows that it is, for no other reason than because it is and knows its existence. This deeper ego, as we can see from our own introspection, is at the root of our ability to think, feel and act; but not our thinking, feeling and acting itself. It is the source of our being, and that is why it is called “God.”
The Bhagavad Gita says: “I am the soul that dwells in the heart of every creature; I am the beginning, the middle, and the end of every thing.” (X, 20.) The Bible says: “Do you not know that you are temples of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (I. Corinth. III, 16.) “Christ in us is the mystery of redemption, the hope of this glory” (Colossians I, 27.) Also, our reason and observation tell us that, though the appearances in which that Life expresses itself, constantly changing, but being is always the same and that we do not perceive any change in it.
But as long as we know nothing more about this, our I, which knows that it is, other than that it is, we cannot know anything about its properties and functions, and have no right to make claims about it. Though God possesses divine self-knowledge in us, it can do us no good unless we can share in that knowledge; Even if this I is immortal, this immortality cannot benefit our human nature as long as this nature is different from this I and mortal, and knows nothing of the immortality of God. Such divine knowledge and immortality is only conceivable when human nature has been permeated by and merged into the divine nature. An unconscious cognition is no cognition; an immortality without consciousness can do us no good. Only when we recognize not only our personality, but our true self, the God in us, do we have knowledge of God, true Theosophy.
But nobody can attain this divine self-knowledge through their own chasing and searching; rather, it is a spiritual awakening that comes through the power of the spirit when the conditions are right. Just as sunlight penetrates the heart of a bud when, obeying the stimulus of light, its calyx opens to the sun’s rays, so too does divine love penetrate into the heart of man, and becomes the cause of his enlightenment when the obstacles to its effect are removed. These hindrances are chiefly selfishness, with the lusts and passions that spring from it, and also all the errors, prejudices, and opinions that spring from ignorance of the eternal truth. In order to remove these obstacles, the theosophical teachings come to our aid, i.e., the teachings of those people (Adepts) who have attained to self-knowledge. These theosophical teachings are by no means Theosophy, but they are suitable for helping us to get a correct world view and thereby leading us on the way on which we can reach the knowledge of God through the victory over our illusory “I.” The Theosophical teachings point out to us that God is all in all and supreme in all, and that when we have come to know ourselves in God, we shall know everything in Him, he will attain God and in God everything that he can only desire. But whoever does not want to walk this path himself, because for him the theosophical teachings served nothing more than theoretical value, then for him they are mere speculations of their truth and no one can bring to him convincing proof if he does not find proof of it in his own perception by his own efforts.
This view can only be when our own view, through the elevation to our true Self, through our union with the divine being in us, the self-observation of God has become our own self-observation, and since God encompasses the whole and carries it in himself, it encompasses his self-perception is also the whole and nothing which has its essence can be hidden from us, since he himself is the essence in everything. Since he himself is the truth, the knowledge of the truth in its entirety lays in the self-knowledge of him; he needs no conclusions or calculations to get to the bottom of the truth; he knows what is for no other reason than because it is, and he knows it because he is himself, and he knows himself as everything. God cares not for scientific theories and opinions, He is the truth in all, and it is a fruitless endeavor when, as often happens, some seek to reconcile Theosophy with the theories of the learned; on the contrary, scholars should endeavor to reconcile their theories with the truth, which, however, would require first knowing the truth, and in order to know it one must leave outer appearances and absorb the truth within himself and grasp them.
“If you don’t feel it, you won’t hunt it down.” (Goethe.)
The feeling of truth is the first thing, and occurs when truth becomes a force in man that inspires and permeates him. But feeling alone is not comprehension, full knowledge; it also includes the opening of the inner senses, which take place on the path of spiritual “rebirth.” Through this rebirth, the inner man, which unites the outer man with God, acquires essence and organization. Only when the inner spiritual human being is born, and has become conscious, and has reached maturity through the spiritual nourishment which it receives through the spirit of truth, can one speak of a self-knowledge of the mysterious I, which people do not know. Without this self-knowledge, however, man is only an illusory being, a nothing that considers itself to be something it is not, and thus prevents itself from recognizing what it is or can become. Without this inner awakening one can be a dreamer and enthusiast, but not a real theosophist.
But this inner awakening, this attainment of a higher spiritual self-consciousness can be achieved by recognizing the futility of all outward appearances, by throwing away the toys, like a grown-up person, which interested him vividly in his youth, of his own free will and with renouncing and breaking away from all false knowledge with a joyful heart all illusions of life, all transitory things, all lusts for what is mortal, and seeking refuge in God alone, his Guide who lives in him. Whoever finds in his heart this divine I, which is one with the God of the universe and has its root in him, like a ray of sunshine in the sun, attains dominion over himself, and he who is master of himself is subject to no one. He enters the light, into freedom, and since he is one with the law, he himself is the law. Human joys and sorrows no longer have power over him, for “he” has ceased to be. He lives, but not he, but God (Iswara [Iśvara] — the Lord) lives in him. He distinguishes between himself and his nature, and whatever his nature suffers, he behaves as an unconcerned spectator; for he is no longer identified with his nature, but is elevated above it; he is one with God, in whom eternal rest and bliss and being (sat chit anandam) [sat cit ānanda] is contained in the One who is self-existent and independent of external things, for whom also nothing external exists, since he himself is all in all, and everything that seems to be outside of him and is visible to us is nothing but a world of forms, which he himself has brought forth through his will in his wisdom, as a product of his own introspection. This self-perception and self-knowledge of God, which only the human being united with God, but not the human being without God, no matter how learned, can comprehend, is divine wisdom or Theosophy.
Notes
[1] Theosophy [Theosophie. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 1, no. 4 (January 1893), 1-15] {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.—Dr. Hartmann evidently was using a different edition or version of this book, a part of which I was not able to translate. As it stands, it does not make sense. It is possible the German was copied in error, in parts or Dr. Hartmann did not proof check Böhme’s text, because I referred to a copy of the original book and did not find the exact German text. Thus, I have inserted a variant German text, which now makes sense when translating into English.]