Popular Lectures

II. Death, Reincarnation and Transmigration of Souls

Franz Hartmann, M.D.^{[1] [2]}

Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl

The reincarnation or re-embodiment of the human soul means the reappearance on the stage of life, the spiritual individuality of man in a new physical and personal appearance on this earth or another planet, after the previous human organism in which the soul inhabited has become useless for its purposes. The most perverse views prevail about the doctrine of reincarnation, because some of our modern scholars and orientalists who write about it misunderstand it, and confuse it with what is called “transmigration of the soul,” imagining that the soul of a man (and heaven knows what they mean by that) into another human or animal. This would at most be called “obsession” but not reincarnation.

          If we want to understand the reincarnation of man, we must first of all recognize what sort of things the human organism is composed of; for though man is a unitary being, yet his physical and psychic organism is a compound thing, in which various elements, not separated locally, exist as units in a unity. If we ask the chemist, he tells us that the human body consists mainly of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. Of these the first three are in the normal state gaseous in nature, and we may therefore regard man as we see him as composed of gases condensed or incarnated in him. The anatomist views man as a composite thing made up of bones, muscles, tendons, blood vessels, nerves, and various other organs. None of them is in itself a human being, but all together make up the human organism, and none of them is dispensable.

          The occultist stands at a higher standpoint, he sees man not only as a material but as a spiritual being, and he distinguishes the following elements in him:

1. 1. 1. Material nature or the visible body made up of sensible substances. It corresponds to the realm of matter in the visible world.

1. 1. 2. The life energy [prāṇa], which expresses itself as vital activity in the various organs.

1. 1. 3. The etheric or invisible “astral body” of man [liṅga śarīra], which is the basis of the visible body. There is such an invisible foundation in every thing.

1. 1. 4. The human animal nature from which spring instincts, desires and passions. This is the “animal soul.” [kāma rūpa]

1. 1. 5. The intellectual nature, the seat of intellectual activity, speculation, research and imagination. This is the “human soul.” [Buddhi manas]

1. 1. 6. The human-divine nature, which is the seat of intuition, direct knowledge of truth, and higher enlightenment. This is the “heavenly soul.” [Buddhi]

1. 1. 7. The divine spirit [Ātma], i.e., the true self-consciousness, which knows no egoism and embraces the whole world and all creatures in unselfish love.

          Whether this division is correct, everyone can convince himself if he investigates himself and recognize themselves, but I do not mean to say that it is easy for everyone to awaken and recognize the divine nature that is dormant in them, because otherwise it would not be said in the Bible: “Do you not know that you are temples of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you. You are.”

          The four first principles belong to the mortal nature of man, in other words to the “flesh,” the two highest to the divine life, the spirit. Through the fifth, which in Indian is called manas (mind), the immortal is connected with the mortal, i.e., higher and lower soul forces exist in the human soul; true knowledge of the eternal and ephemeral dreaming and research are connected with one another in the soul. Goethe expresses this in his Faust in the well-known verses:

“Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast, one wants to separate from the other.” etc.

          They are, as it were, the two poles of the soul, each gravitating towards its origin; the heavenly after the eternal, the perishable after destruction. Every thing seeks stillness and finds it in the source from which it flowed; the divine spirit in God, the earthly and ephemeral in the material and in ephemerality.

          The inclinations, talents, desires, traits of character, etc., pertaining to the mortal nature of man are called Skandhas by the Buddhists, “the flesh” by the Christian mystics. When the Christian says in his creed: “I believe in the resurrection of [from] the flesh,” provided he understands the meaning of these words correctly, he expresses his belief in reincarnation just as the Buddhist does, who says: “I believe in a reconvening of the skandhas; for it is not the physical or psychic organism of man which migrates into a new-born body, but the spiritual elements which represented man’s former personality as an individual character naturally build up a new personality, a new house, which they inhabit again. Thus the spirit and soul forces of man appear in a new appearance, like an actor who is always the same man, even if he appears on the stage on different evenings under different masks and plays different roles, one after the other.

          In order to form a correct idea of ​​what is happening during reincarnation, we must be able to distinguish between the general invisible principles or forces, and the forms in which they are manifested. Every development of a form is a re-embodiment of liberated forces. A block of ice melts and turns into water, the water evaporates and becomes invisible; the water vapor in the air becomes fog again, the fog gathers in clouds, forms rain, falls to the ground, gathers in puddles, and freezes back into ice. It is similar with the higher principles, forces or substances which we call “immaterial” because they are not visible and tangible to our external material senses. Just as the water in a block of ice was not created by the block of ice, so life in a living form is not created by that form, but the unified life energy or life force common throughout the universe manifests itself in a suitable organism, which it builds itself as its vital activity and thereby makes it alive. So it is with the higher principles. Matter is built up by the realm of material elements in nature; in other words, the realm of matter embodies itself in an evolving form that is nourished by the material in nature; the ether nourishes the ethereal, the life force in nature nourishes the living; the forces which represent instincts and passions, and are termed “Elementals,” enter the minds of man and beast, and nourish and augment their desires and passions; the intellect of man gathers its thoughts from the realm of ideas and is nourished by them; ideas large and small are thereby embodied or “reincarnated” in him. Likewise, his immortal soul is nourished by the knowledge of truth, his divine spirit by the holy spirit of wisdom in the whole divine nature.

          We need not believe blindly in reincarnation, nor look to “authorities” who claimed it; all we have to do is open our eyes and look at what is going on around us and within ourselves at any given hour, and we have before us all the evidence we can think of. We just have to free ourselves from the delusion that a dead form can generate living forces from itself. We must take the standpoint of the great sage Sankaracharya [Śaṅkarācarya], who taught more than two thousand years ago that the first condition for realizing the truth is the possession of the ability to distinguish the permanent from the non-permanent, i.e., to distinguish the invisible force or principle from the ephemeral form in which it is manifested or embodied. We must take the opposite view of that modern ignorance which imagines that the human body creates life, intelligence and spirit, and learn to see that it is the spirit which creates the human body, in which life, consciousness, intelligence and knowledge are revealed.

          To avoid any misunderstandings, we must note that when we speak of “matter,” “force,” and “spirit,” or “consciousness,” we do not mean by this the separate and self-existing things, but these three names are only designations for three forms of ideas or intuitions which we form of the eternal unity for which there is no name and which is the essence of all things. One might perhaps refer to this all-encompassing and all-pervading entity as “God”; but even this designation is imperfect; for apart from the fact that there is no human conception of “God” because the limited intellect cannot comprehend the limitless, and a God that a man could comprehend would be inferior to a mortal man, is also a unity of matter, force and latent consciousness is not yet a god, any more than space itself is a deity. Only that being can represent a God in which the consciousness of God has become alive.

          Modern material science has come to recognize a truth preached by the sages thousands of years ago, that there is no matter without energy, and no force without matter. But the occult science taught by the sages also tells us that there is no force or matter without consciousness (spirit) and there is no consciousness without force and matter. Just as latent heat is contained and can be developed even in a block of ice, and steam-power in a drop of water, so too is consciousness contained in everything and is manifested by its being awakened.

          In the same way, a spark of God consciousness is contained in every human heart and is revealed in the human being when it is awakened. Were this not the case, the deity could not incarnate in him; the Spirit of God could not nourish him, and he could not become the image of God or a symbol of Godhead, which is the supreme purpose of his existence on earth.

          Let us now look at the process of human reincarnation as it unfolds before us in everyday life:

1. The material principle. When conception has taken place in the mother’s organism, a center of attraction for material forces is created. The life elements of nature act upon it through the mother’s organism, nourishing and developing the nucleus, and material nature embodies itself in it, forming a new human form. The child’s parents are the mediators of this reincarnation, and it depends on their state of health whether the child brings a healthy or a sick body into the world. This process has nothing to do with the spirit of the child. When children develop character traits resembling those of their parents, the cause of this, as we shall see in what follows, is quite different.

2. The life force. As long as the child is contained in the womb or is nourished by the mother’s body through the umbilical cord, it has, so to speak, no life of its own; but as soon as it begins to breathe, it also begins to live for itself, i.e., the uniform life force spread through the whole of nature is partially absorbed by him and reveals itself in him as his own life force and vital activity. If the child’s organism did not contain a point of attraction for the life force, it could not absorb life either. But this attraction or seed of life is the spirit of life itself, which springs from the source of all life. The spirit of God in the universe or the spiritual life force is called “Jīva” by the Indians; the material life is its reflection or mirror image and is called “Prana.” By having a spark of ‘Jīva,’ ‘Prāṇa’ comes into action and life and consciousness are manifested in man. Man’s spiritual individuality consists in this spiritual-divine spark of life, even if it is still dormant. This spiritual life is also contained in all things; for all things are formed of the Word of God (1 John 1:1); but not every organism is suitable for the Spirit of God to be revealed in it.

3. The etheric body. Simultaneously with the development of the material, visible body, the etheric develops; for without the latter the former would not exist, because the visible body is but the material appearance [densification] or larva of the etheric body. There is thus an invisible incarnation of ether atoms at the same time as the incarnation of the material atoms. This is not the place to go into the properties of this so-called “etheric” body or “double.” The Indians call it Linga sharira [liṅga śarīra] and it plays a major role in the spiritualist phenomena. Since this etheric body can, under certain circumstances, emerge from the material body and appear objectively, even become externally visible and tangible, many people think they are dealing with ghosts or “spirits” of the deceased, while it is only their own etheric reflection which is the cause of such phenomena during mediumship.

4. The animal nature. [Kāma] No sooner has life, and with it sensation and perception, entered the body of the newborn child than the animal nature embodies and grows in it. Hunger and thirst and the craving for shiny things set in; the animal in man longs for this and that; the struggle for existence and pleasure begins and increases with age. Every awakening passion feeds on its like elements, and these become its own essence through the actions of men; they embody in him and form the many ever-changing “I’s” or forms of false self-consciousness of which egoistic and bestial man are composed. Many a human-like creature leads an animal or a beastly existence, is born, marries, fathers children and dies without the actual human soul ever being embodied in it. Such idiots are not uncommon even among the “educated.”

5. The rational nature. When man has reached a certain maturity, the intellectual principle, called “Manas” by the Indians, begins to develop and embody in him. It is this principle which enables him to think through his brain, to collect ideas, to connect them, to analyze them and to store them in memory. This principle in itself does not inhere any true cognitive ability; for this is a power which belongs to the next higher principle, called “Buddhi,” and is the property of the inner, immortal human being, the divine soul. There are many people in whom the rational principle is highly developed and yet have no spirit. The rational nature in them is overfed, fattened and diseased, like a goose’s liver hypertrophied while their souls starve. It is not uncommon to find soulless scholars with little reason but many fantasies, theories and opinions. Their heads are full of learned stuff, but their hearts are empty. From such develop devils in human form who know no pity or mercy and no true love. They would ruin the whole world if they could just to satisfy their scientific curiosity. Such people are born, live and die without the principle of true human nature ever being reincarnated in them.

6. The divine nature. This principle, called “buddhi,” from “ātma-bodh” (Ātma = mind, bodh = the light) signifies the spiritual light of truth; it is the “Christ-principle” in man, which enlightens Manas and of which it is said in the Bible: “The light shines eternally into the darkness, and the darkness (the bewildered, earthly human mind) cannot comprehend it. If this principle were already fully embodied in us, as it was said to be embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, we would be perfect and born again in spirit. Therefore also a person in whom this divine light has found entrance and who is enlightened by it becomes a Buddha, i.e., called an Enlightened One.

          This spiritual light belongs to the upper trinity in the universe, Ātma-Buddhi-Manas, i.e., the indivisible universal spirit, its light and substance, in other words, the holy trinity. It can enlighten man, but cannot be separated from divinity. If this divine light of knowledge of God is to dawn in man, man himself must abandon the delusion of his [lower] selfhood; his soul, filled with this light, rises up in this light and participates in its all-consciousness, omnipresence and omniscience. This is the state of enlightenment, which Buddhists call “Samādhi.”

          We see, then, that the fifth principle, Manas, belongs partly to the indivisible Eternal and Infinite, and partly to the Temporal and Transient, i.e., the lower soul forces of the mind strive for the earthly and its promises and achievements, while the higher soul forces, where such are in action, strive for the divine, take root in the divine, and find their rest therein. Man is comparable to a ray of light coming from the divine life Sun of Wisdom, the source of all existence. The personal appearance of man on earth, with his feelings and thoughts, is the darkness into which this ray of light shines. The sun is not embodied in man; the limited cannot absorb the infinite; but the form is illuminated by the light of the sun, and that sun is the divine essence of man himself. The nearer man draws to the divine sun, which is the source of his existence, the more he is illuminated by its light; the more this light shines in him, the more the sun of wisdom rises in him, the more the divinity approaches him and draws him closer to himself. The more he distances himself from this source of spiritual life, walling himself up in his own individuality and allowing himself to be captivated by his imagination and sensuality, the more he distances himself from his divine existence and consciousness, loses himself in the darkness of ignorance of the true and in the fog of deception, and loses his freedom, for only the knowledge of the true truly frees us from error and from the bonds of self-delusion and egoism with the desires and passions that arise from them.

          Everything that has been said up to this point is useless unless it is made clear that the inner spiritual man is a god and in his innermost being is divinity itself; even if he personally knows nothing about it; while the personality of man with all its achievements is only a sum of forces combined into one organism, which serves as a tool and also partly as a dwelling place or temple for the divine man who is both in us and outside us and above us a tree in the ground like the celestial man in the material, but the root is not the tree that rises above the ground and whose branches and leaves enjoy the air and the light. A Christian mystic, Archbishop Ekhart of Cologne, says: “It is much more correct to say that man is in the soul than that the soul is in man.” Man himself is soul; the personality only a shadow, mask or larva. The soul of a real man is much larger than his personality, but there are also humanoid larvae that are very clever and always want to be right, but in which there is no soul to be found.

          If you want to convince yourself that the physical body is only an appearance, you don’t need any external proof. He has but to turn the spiritual gaze inward and look within himself, and he finds infinity within himself. Just as, looking up to the heavens, he can find no limit where infinite space ends, so he finds no reason in the depths of his mind, and just as space appears dark and insubstantial without the light, so the soul within us is empty without the light of knowledge. God is the infinite unity, the knowledge of God is the light. Man is nothing or zero. Only when one meets zero does zero acquire its value as ten. Heavenly man is born out of light, earthly man out of darkness. Darkness cannot unite with light; but when it is penetrated by the light, the darkness disappears. When man is penetrated by God-consciousness, he recognizes his own true God-nature. But then he is no longer what rational “science” understands by the word “man,” but a being that is elevated above those states which are called “death” and “life.”

          Not only man’s divine soul, but also his spirit or intellect (manas) is much greater than his body; because the spirit is not locked in the skull either, but uses the brain as a tool for thinking. No man is conscious in a single moment of all that he has learned and knows. The collected ideas flow from the treasury of the spirit and are formed into thoughts and ideas by means of the brain. Knowledge is also not lost in the process, but what has become apparent in thinking recedes back into the non-manifestable. The unmanifest is called the “unconscious” by some. This is to be understood as being unconscious of the personality; the mind is not unconscious; for spirit is consciousness itself. Our knowledge resides in our spiritual consciousness; but it is only a little at a time that we become aware of our personality. When the brain is paralyzed, the consciousness of the personality ceases, but the spirit and what is of its essence is not thereby annihilated. If the spirit then appears in another personality in the course of reincarnation, it can bring its knowledge back to the consciousness of this personality. Thus inner knowledge flows to outer knowledge by way of intuition; we are taught by our own spirit, and the more the personality of man unites with the indwelling higher spirit, the more it shares in its knowledge. As a result, the human being as a personality learns again what he experienced and learned in a previous life as another personality.

          Anyone who understands this will answer the question why we as persons cannot remember our earlier forms of existence on earth. The person I am presenting now was not there before and therefore cannot remember any previous existence. My spirit, which was present at the time of the creation of the world, can recall any existence or appearance in which it has appeared on this earth or on other planets, and if the consciousness of my spirit were fully manifested in my present personality so my person would take part in this remembrance. If a house could think, it would not remember what kind of house it was before it was a house; but the master builder would know what kind of houses he had built and lived in before.

          In fact, there are people who are sufficiently imbued with the higher spiritual consciousness to know what bodies they inhabited in previous incarnations and what experiences they had in them. For example, Gautama Buddha said the following: “When the light of knowledge dawned in me and the mind’s eye opened, I knew who I was in my previous life. I looked back at one, at ten, at hundreds and thousands of my beings. There I was this or that, had this and that name, lived and died and was reborn. I looked back at the origins of the world and the passing away of the world” etc. The eternal in man is eternal and immortal. Worlds and forms come and go, the Eternal is never born and does not perish.

          There are certainly some who, in their vanity, imagine that they were this or that great personality in a previous life; but we have nothing to do with such games of the imagination. On the other hand, one often finds in children whose minds have not yet been darkened by false teachings and dogmatics, a reflection of that higher consciousness which contains memories of a former existence. From the light which belongs to the immortal spirit of man, as a result of the desire for individual existence inherent in him, a new light is kindled, the consciousness of the newly appearing personal man, as it were a reflection of the former on the plane of sensual existence.

          We are therefore not talking about a “transmigration of souls” but about a reunion of the psychic elements that represented the sum of forces that belonged to the previous phenomenon. In order to understand this process better, it will be useful to consider these elements in their dissolution after the death of the body and to follow their path:

          When spirit and life have left the body, the elements of the corpse go back to the source from which they came; no matter whether this occurs by the slow path of putrefaction or the rapid path of combustion, the body redissolves into its chemical elements, which consist mostly of gases, and these return to the great store-room of nature, and out of this new ones are formed organisms and new human bodies formed. It is questionable whether there is an atom of plant material on our earth that has not already passed through a human or animal body. Life as a unitary force leaves the dying body and gives life to other newly appearing organisms, just as the air we have exhaled serves to breathe other organisms. The etheric body dissolves into its etheric constituents, and from these arise new compounds which condense into visible material organisms in nature’s alchemical laboratory. The instincts and passions which belonged to the animal soul of man are still attached to it even after the death of the body and are no longer ruled by reason, since reason has disappeared from the scene with the spirit, but its activity has also been exhausted themselves because they can no longer find any food there. They are the forces which are instinctively attracted to their own kind in order to work and strengthen in other organisms. The intellectual achievements of man, i.e., his accumulated theories and opinions are also among the treasures which the Bible says rust eats up and moths consume. They do not belong to the essence of man, but to the world of thought, the realm of imagination. The essence of man does not include accumulated opinions from others, but only what he has absorbed into his soul, i.e., what he himself experienced and recognized inwardly. If that were not the case, we would still have to struggle in our next incarnation to get rid of all the errors that we are forced to acquire externally in this life, in the schools.

          What is inherent in the nature of man does not consist in accumulated scholarly stuff, but in what has passed into “flesh and blood” and has become his own nature. So remains, for example, the musician is a musician even when all the music has died away, and the thief is a thief even when there is nothing left to steal. In the qualities of man which have become his own essence is man’s individuality, which persists even after the death of the body, and when that individuality appears in a new life as a new personality, these qualities also reappear. This explains why children are often born with talents of which there is no trace to be found in their parents. There are musical prodigies or mathematical geniuses whose parents have no aptitude for music or mathematics. But when it happens that children and their parents have the same dispositions and tendencies, this is not proof that the children have inherited the same from their parents, but rather the cause is that the reincarnating individuality becomes a family which is attracted in whom similar tendencies are found, so far as other attractions do not determine otherwise; for everywhere in nature there is a law that like loves like, attracts like, and unites with like. If we take a large vessel of water and pour in a drop of common salt solution, and in another place a drop of a solution of nitrate of silver, the chlorine of the common salt finds the silver and combines with it. So it is in the spiritual; for the material is only the outward expression of the spiritual; Every material process is based on a spiritually moving force, a consciousness.

          The material parts of the human body remain in the material, the passionate elements of the animal-man on the astral plane [kāma], the intellectual conceptions in the world of the gods (Devachan). When the soul has cast off everything that does not belong to its true nature, it re-enters divinity, in order, until the lust for personal existence stirs in it again, to plunge anew into the sea of ​​life, whereupon it again attracts those elements to which it feels attracted by its own nature. This process could be compared to the formation of a cloud. The sun is the spirit; a ray of sunshine individuality. The attractive power of the sun’s rays creates a haze in the previously clear atmosphere. A fog forms, which gathers into clouds that grow thicker and thicker until they emit thunder and lightning. The rain falls and, mixed with the smoke and dust of the air, forms murky water which freezes to ice in winter. This is brought back to its origin by the heat. Thus, the constant cycle which takes place continually; but the ray of light which comes from the sun does not change; it always remains the same and is not defiled. In the spiritual ray of light that shines into our soul we find our spiritual individuality, and in the sun from which it springs our infinite, indivisible, divine self; the deity in everything.

          Such an entrance into God and exit, as it were a re-embodiment, takes place not only at death and being reborn, but at every falling asleep and waking up; for even when falling asleep the spirit withdraws into itself; Reason and imagination fade away, but return on awakening. The “Brhad Aranyaka Upanishad” [Bṛhad Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad] says the following about this:

“What is the soul? It is the consciousness under the forces of life. It is the inner light in the heart; and this spirit moves from one world to another, but in itself remains unchangeable. It seems to have only ideas; it only appears to enter states of joy and delight.

“And when sleep comes, this spirit rises above this world and above perishable forms. When the spirit descends to be born and enters a body, it finds itself in the midst of evils of various kinds; but if it rises again at death, it overcomes evil.

“The spirit of man has two dwellings; this world and the other (heavenly), and the third is the land in between, the land of dreams and imagination. As long as the mind dwells on the border of the two worlds, it sees the two worlds, both this and the other. It rests in that power which he has accumulated in the other world, and sees both the glorious and the terrible.

“And when it falls asleep again, taking with it what he has gathered from this world that contains everything, cutting down the timber itself and building its own dwelling, it dreams. The soul is its clarity, its light. Thus the soul of man is light.

“It now knows that ignorance (of its own true nature) was the cause of all the terrors it saw in the waking world, and like a god it knows: I am the universe, this is the highest world.

“This is the supreme bliss. It is clothed in fearlessness and has destroyed the darkness. Just as one who rests in the arms of the beloved no longer thinks of anything that is within or without, so too is the human spirit embraced and permeated by the great soul; it cares for nothing that is within it or without, for it has attained its goal. It has gone beyond the limit of suffering.

“Encompassed by the great soul, the father is no longer a father, the mother is no longer a mother, nor is the world a world. There, the gods are no longer gods, the murderer no longer a murderer, nor the thief a thief. There, the outcast no longer exists as an outcast, nor the barbarian as barbarian, nor the priest as priest, nor the saint as a saint. Neither good nor bad works follow them there; the mind is above all cares of the heart.

“This is the world of the Eternal. This is the highest way. This is the noblest treasure and the highest lust. All creatures live only from the essence of this bliss.”

          This is the state of the soul when, after the death of the body, it has shed all material and sensual things, left behind its animal instincts and passions in the middle region (kama loca) [kāma loka] and also exhausted its spiritual powers in the world of the gods (devachan), through which she created the ideal world around her through will and imagination. And here it should be noted that the spiritual power of will and of imagination or fantasy, even if it is unconscious to the personal human being, is much greater than most people even suspect, for this magical power conjures up magic from the impressions that the mind receives, produces images that leave nothing to be desired in terms of clarity, even without our being involved intellectually, so that the objects in the subjective dream world appear to us just as real as the material bodies that surrounded us in the objective sensory world. The only difference is that in this sensual world we receive impressions of things that are alien and also unpleasant to us, while in the subjective world the objects spring from our own being and are appropriate to it.

          Even during deep sleep, the divine soul withdraws into its innermost sanctuary, to the deity, and only the body with its vegetative life remains on the visible plane of existence. Even the soul of the greatest criminal, if such a divine spirit spark is still present in him, will go into eternity. Then the murderer is no longer a murderer, the thief is no longer a thief and the saint is no longer a saint. But when he awakens, the spirit and relative consciousness also return; the irrational organism becomes a thinking man again, resuming his previous qualities, and upon awakening he is again what he was, a murderer, a thief, a saint. His earthly nature consists in his human-animal characteristics, which he creates through his feeling and thinking, willing and acting. That is why the greatest punishment that man has to experience for his sins is that he himself becomes the being that he creates for himself through his actions.

          In this entering of the soul into the divinity we must not think of retention of individuality according to human concepts. The soul is one with the universal spirit, just as a ray of light is one with the light of the sun. However, the reincarnations and the experiences of individual existence have the purpose of developing the consciousness of individuality in the soul, whereby it no longer represents a self-conscious force in the universal spirit, but rather a form that harmoniously agrees with the universal spirit. When all-consciousness and all-knowledge arise in the soul, then it is one with the deity, omnipresent and self-confident. This state is called Nirvāna by Buddhists. It is not a merging into nothingness, as some “Orientalists” think, but a merging into God, not a disappearance into nothingness, but an entering into a higher state of existence, an entering from a limited state into all-being and omniscience; it is comparable to the raising of a spark in a flame, whereby the spark ceases to exist as funky, but instead becomes light itself.

          That which seduces the human spirit to assume a personal form is the will to personal existence, egoism. From the desire for one’s own existence arises the individual consciousness, which shows the human being that he is not only in form, but also in his being is a thing fundamentally different from other creatures. But when he has come to the knowledge of his true divine nature through experience, when he has completely overcome self-delusion and when the light of wisdom has dawned in him, then he also knows that he is one with the sun of wisdom, which gives light and life to all forms. Then he sees in each being only an embodiment of his own highest self; then he does not have to submit to the incarnation again, unless this is done for the instruction and betterment of mankind. Such God-men who undergo reincarnation for the benefit of mankind are called “saviors of mankind.” It is their destiny to be misjudged by stupidity and pursued and “crucified” by egoists.

          All this is difficult to comprehend as long as we regard men and gods as separate beings, unconnected; but it becomes easily understandable if we bear in mind the unity of the whole. Just as there are innumerable forms and bodies in space, and yet space is one and indivisible, and every form in space is an embodied space, so too is the Deity an indivisible whole; everything is contained in God, who encompasses the whole universe in his essence; in him we are born, live and die and are reborn; “in him we live and have this existence.” All processes in the universe are processes in the body of God. Men, gods and demons represent only intelligent or self-aware forces moving within this body, formed of this unitary substance and therefore identical in essence. Nothing comes out of God; for God is everything, and nothing goes into him either; for nothing exists outside of it; but the human and therefore limited intellect cannot comprehend the One, Infinite, and we therefore form conceptions and distinctions where in reality these do not exist. We see a separateness of the appearances and imagine that the beings are also without inner connection. All men, gods and demons, all things in general are one in God; and the many forms in which this one being manifests are only appearances. Each of these phenomena is essentially one with God, and the knowledge of this oneness of one’s nature with the nature of all things is the key to understanding the mysteries of God; it is the knowledge of God or “Theosophy.”

Notes:

^[1] Popular Lectures. II. Death, Reincarnation and Transmigration of Souls [Populäre Vorträge. II. Tod, Reïnkarnation und Seelenwanderung. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 13, no. 78 (March 1899), 153-189] {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] A lecture by the author of the “Lotusblüthen,” held in Vienna on December 6, 1898 in the hall of the Engineering and Architects Association on the initiative of the “Theosophical Society.” (From: Death, Reincarnation and Transmigration of Souls. Part 1. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Wiener Rundschau 3, no. 3 (December 1898), 73–76 Death, Reincarnation and Transmigration of Souls. Part 2. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Wiener Rundschau 3, no. 4 (January 1899), 90-97)