Note: ^[1]

 

Αll the greatly religious teachers, sages, philosophers and mystics agree that the personalities of men and women are in themselves nothing but illusions, and that God is the only Reality in the universe. Almost every church-going Christian knows the old hymn:

“This world is but an empty show,

For man’s delusion given,” etc.

          But perhaps few only of those who join in the singing would be willing to count their own dear “ self” as one of the delusions that go to make up that empty show. The Bible (Psalm 103, v. 14) says that “we are dust,” and adds: “As for man, his days [reincarnations] are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” The Hindoo philosophy teaches that all creation, ourselves, as created beings, included, is only a Maija [Māyā], or “illusion,” and a Persian poet expresses this still more forcibly in the following words:

“For in and out, above, about, below,

’Tis nothing but a magic shadow-show,

Play’d in a box, whose candle is the sun,

Round which we phantom figures come and go.

“And if the wine you drink, the lip you press

End in the Nothing all things end in,—yes—

Then fancy while thou art, thou art but what Thou shalt be—Nothing;

—thou shalt not be less.”

          All this is poor comfort to those who know of nothing better than that thing which they call their own person, and of no higher state of existence than that which belongs to the evanescent personality. To identify ourselves with the personality we represent on this earth and then to persuade ourselves that we are nothing but a bundle of illusions is not an elevating or ennobling thought. In fact it is the doctrine of the worst kind of materialism, unspiritual, debasing and inviting to suicide; for if we have to end sooner or later in nothing, then the quickest way for those who are dissatisfied with life is to make an end to all misery by entering into nothing without further delay, by means of a rope or a pistol shot. To believe that we are nothing and that no one is immortal but God, and at the same time to imagine that this God is somebody outside of us, unknown to us and separated from us, but capable to save our nothingness from destruction by some special favor or miraculous intervention, is to open the way to the most debasing kind of superstition, selfishness and hypocrisy born from fear and cowardice; for those who hold such a belief do not actually believe in their own personal nothingness; they only pretend to that belief, while they are really still expecting that their personality may be protected from destruction by worming themselves into the favor of God by making a show of humility. And there is still another class of those who misunderstand this doctrine of nothingness—namely, those who believe that they are something now, but will be nothing in the future, and who therefore live after the rule which says: “Let us eat and drink and be merry to-day and obtain all the pleasures we can, for to-morrow we die.”

          Fortunately such a doctrine of nothingness is actually believed in only by a few; for a merely intellectual persuasion or mental consent to logical inferences does not constitute true belief. Moreover, philosophical reasoning teaches that if there is something in us which understands that the thing we call “we” is nothing, this something must be superior to that “we” and superior to nothing; for it is impossible that a nothing should realize its own nothingness; because in nothing there can be nothing to comprehend or realize itself. It only contains itself, and that is nothing. It is therefore not the “we” which is nothing, that can realize its own nothingness; but the “I” which is free and not bound to any personality, which realizes the nothingness of everything that is not itself. In other words, that which is real and eternal in man, and not bound to or enclosed by any mortal form, realizes its own immortal presence and also the nothingness or illusiveness of those images which are not that “I,” but merely modes of its manifestation. We cannot know light unless we know darkness, nor darkness without knowing light. We cannot truly know the nothingness of our own personality unless we feel and realize the presence in us and above and around us of that which is immortal, eternal and real and independent of that mask which we call our “personality.” Only the real in us recognizes the eternal reality, and we can know nothing of that until that recognition comes to our personal consciousness. For this reason the great sage Sankaracharya teaches in his “Tattva Bodha” that the first requisite for the attainment of real self-knowledge is the possession of the power to distinguish between the permanent and the impermanent. This power does not arise out of the ever-changing and mortal personality; but it belongs to the higher and immortal part of man; it is the light of his divine spirit, reflected in the personal mind, and therefore rightly called the spiritual consciousness of man.

          In this spiritual consciousness in its pure state there exists no sense of “Ego” or separateness, no “I” and “Thou” or “we” and “they.” There are in that state no brothers and sisters nor husbands and wives; for in it the soul recognizes its omnipresence and its oneness with the essence of all things; it sees in other creatures not its brothers and sisters; but everywhere its own divine and universal Self, manifested in an innumerable variety of existences and forms. Not that the soul “imagines” itself to be “as one” with everything; but it realizes the presence of God as the one indivisible reality in everything, and that God as its own real Self. Brotherly and parental and connubial affections, estimable as they may be, are only higher animal attributes, and are shared alike by animals and human beings; but true divine love has no special object to prefer to another; it arises from the realization of its divine state of being, it loves itself alike in everything.

          In that state the soul loves nothing but its own universal Self and beholds its manifestations, the sum of which is called the universe. It sees and knows and realizes that there is nothing real in the universe except its own divine Self, just as a man may know that the thought images arising from his mind are not his own Self, but merely images, whose play he enjoys, yet which in themselves are nothing but images and have no permanent existence. Let us suppose that a man were in possession of such a magical creative power that every picture which he imagines would arise before him in a corporeal, visible and tangible physical form, he would nevertheless know that these forms were nothing real and self-existent in themselves, but only shapes formed by his own imagination, shadows created by his own will and thought.

          By the magic power of this divine imagination the personality of man is created by his own immortal spirit and by means of the elements furnished by material nature. The desire for experiences to be obtained in material life, arising in the disembodied soul, causes the projection of a new thought-image, which becomes reincarnated as a new personality. Those who do not know the laws of reincarnation usually do not believe in it, because they have formed a false conception of it; they rightly reject their own misconception. Those who know what takes place in reincarnation naturally believe in it, and they know, moreover, that we all are only partly incarnated at present, and that the best part of our essence has not yet become flesh. If the Christian catechism says: “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh,” and if the meaning of this is rightly understood, it will be seen to mean the same thing as the assertion of the Buddhist, when he says: “I believe in a reconstitution of the Skandhas”; because the “Skandhas” and the “flesh” both mean the same thing, namely, the mortal elements and attributes that go to make up the new image, called the personality of man. Let us throw a glance at this process of reincarnation or reorganization of the “flesh”:

1. When conception has taken place, a centre of force is created in the maternal organism to which material elements are attracted, and the child’s body grows. The maternal organism does not create matter out of nothing; but the universally existing element of “matter” acting through the instrumentality of the mother’s organism incorporates or incarnates itself in the foetus and builds up the child’s body; and as the growth goes on we have a “reincarnation” of the material principle.
2. The air is the carrier of the life principle. While the child is in the womb it is supplied with life energy by the mother, it lives of the mother’s life. After it is born it begins to breathe, and with the first breath which it draws it has a life of its own. Thus takes place the incarnation of the universal life principle in the body of the child. It does not create life, but the life principle becomes incarnated and manifested in it.
3. The “astral image.” This is the thought image, upon which the physical body of the child is built, and which serves as its pattern. The physical body is merely the outward and visible expression of that ethereal image. If there were no such astral germ no physical form could become developed. This is a process that goes on invisibly, but it is known to every occultist and stands to reason for the rest. If the child were now to die it would have been an incarnation of only these three lower principles.
4. It will not be long after the child is born until the fourth principle, the animal soul, begins to manifest itself and to grow. The child desires food, which is an expression of the animal soul, just as eating is an animal function. In proportion as it grows and becomes a man other desires and passions spring up and grow; neither could they grow if they were not fed by corresponding principles attracted from the astral light. Each germ of a principle in man attracts its corresponding principle from the macrocosm, is fed by it, and returns to it after the separation called “death.” Thus we have now a reincarnation of the animal soul of the world in the body of the child. If the child grows to be an idiot, knowing nothing better than the gratification of its animal desires, and dies, it cannot be said to have been a man, for there has been in it no incarnation or development of mind.
5. As the child grows up, an incarnation development and manifestation of the next higher principle, called the “mind” takes place. Intelligence manifests itself. The child does not create its own thoughts out of nothing; but by means of its mind it grasps, gathers, combines and analyses ideas collected from the universal storehouse of the region of thought. Ideas come to its brain through reading, teaching or intuitively, even if it does not know their origin, and it assimilates those which are suitable to its nature. It is fed by ideas, which is the same as to say, already existing ideas become incarnated in its mind. But there is nothing everlasting about such collections; they belong to the “flesh” and to the “treasures that will be eaten up by the moths.” Opinions and aspects change; they are not the lights of truth, even if they may be relatively true. There is no realization of truth in sticking to an adopted opinion. No true self-consciousness is contained in an external belief in the veracity of what somebody whom we regard as an “authority” has said, or in a credulous adherence to an idea which we have gathered somewhere. A real man is not built up of theories; a person may be very learned and still a fool. Thousands of people grow up, live, marry and die, without ever having attained true manhood, that is, without the higher principle, the light of the spirit (Ātma Buddhi), ever become incarnated and manifested in them. In fact, these higher principles do not become incarnated in us at all; the light of truth cannot be separated from its source; it can only illumine our mind and we will have to rise up to it in our consciousness, if we wish to attain it. But if the light of truth fully penetrates the personal consciousness of man, then we may say that God has become incarnated in man and that man has become that which he is destined to be: the image of God and the son of his Heavenly Father.

          Plato says that the soul of man is much greater than the body, and “Eckhart,” formerly Archbishop of Cologne, says that it is more correct to say the body of man is in his soul, than to assert that his soul is in the body. Our soul is in us and outside, above and around us, and thus we are only partly incarnated. That part of us which is visible is only a manifestation of the soul, a shadow created by the true self, in itself a nothing, an illusion, whose nothingness we cannot realize unless we realize our real existence as a spiritual being.

          Theophrastus Paracelsus says: “Mortal man is set into the three principles, called Sal, Sulphur and Mercury”—(they correspond to what the Eastern philosophy calls Tamas, Rajas and Sattva). “From these arise his material constitution, his selfish desires and his intellectual powers. They form the man of flesh; but besides this is the invisible man in and above it, who is beyond the action of these three principles. This is the celestial man, our Father in heaven. Both are united here upon this earth, in a manner comparable to two persons who are united in marriage, and the higher man is to be the master of the lower one, while the lower and mortal man ought to be obedient to the master, so that the knowledge of the father may become manifest in the son.” There is no “going together into heaven” after the death of the body between the true self and that illusion of personality, which is a product of our own misconception. The two have to separate. We cannot pray an illusion into the kingdom of truth; but if the light of truth arises within man’s consciousness, all illusions, his own self-conceit included, are dispersed by it, as the clouds disappear, when the sun arises in his glory. When the true divine consciousness of the real self arises within the spirit of man, then will the new-born god in his human body behold his own terrestrial personality as a marriage on the sky of his external existence, or as one of the many dreams which he has dreamed in the past and in each of which he really believed himself to be the person which he dreamed to be. Thus, having awakened to the realization of being himself one with the external creator, he will, beyond the possibility of a doubt, realize the nothingness of his created images, which appear to be real but have no reality of their own. Let us therefore always live in the recognition of the truth, that God is the one real unity, and man without God the naught, and that the naught can have no other real value as a number except in its union with the one. Nothing can be gained by putting the naught first and the one afterward; this only renders the illusion that self, which is nothing, is apparently greater than God; but if we recognize the One as the all and add to it the naught, then will the value of the naught appear, because the greatness of the one will be manifested in this union with naught and form the perfection of Ten. in which all the numbers in the whole universe are contained.

Franz Hartmann, M. D.

 

Note

^[1] The Realization of Nothingness. Franz Hartmann, M.D. The Metaphysical Magazine 9,  no. 2 (February 1899), 65-71. {This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos, by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}