7.1 Introduction
1The theological and philosophical idiologies waged an unceasing war against each other ever since, during the Renaissance, the treasures of Greek literature were uncovered. As scientific research advanced, also the idiologies pertaining to it started to wage war against both theology and philosophy. The social revolution introduced a new kind of political idiology and has brought about an aggravation of the conflict between political idiologies. Man gropes his way slowly forward, being ignorant of reality and the laws of life.
2In all this, the consciousness aspect has been considered very little or not at all, although it is the one to solve the problem of idiologies. All the categories of human thought have been taken from the matter aspect, and the fact that these categories always involve conflict has been disregarded. Only when the consciousness aspect becomes the essential one, will the other problems be solved by themselves. That does not mean that the matter aspect will be neglected, as it was during the darkest phase of the Middle Ages, to the benefit of hell and heaven, those theological constructions hostile to life. The teachers of esoterics maintain with vigour that we should as far as possible pay the most attention to the consciousness aspect, since the matter aspect has been granted an all too dominant position. Add to this the facts that consciousness reinforces everything it considers and that anyone who wills for development should concentrate on (particularly attend to) that aspect.
3New revolutionary discoveries are always rejected, for they do not agree with what people know, and precisely this, what they believe they know, is the basis of their judgement.
4The knowledge of the stages of development does not agree with the fiction that all people are equal and therefore it is rejected. But the truth always forces its way at last, even if it takes a long time.
5What is lacking in all religions is the knowledge of the meaning of life: conscious ness development. Christianity knows of nothing but eternal bliss in heaven. The yoga philosophy thinks that evolution has reached its final goal with man and what remains for man is to become god, to enter the “absolute”. It knows nothing of higher kingdoms, that man’s next goal is to attain the fifth natural kingdom.
6Human love is attraction to all, and man acquires this at the higher emotional stage, the stage of the mystic.
7Man acquires common sense at the stage of humanity. At this stage, the individual has liberated himself from his dependence on feeling and imagination and judges everything matter-of-factly on the basis of definitively established facts.
8Man at the stage of civilization possesses neither general emotional attraction nor common sense. Only when you see this can you have the right perspective on the problem of upbringing. Children must be taught to respect the equal right of others, since otherwise life will be a war of all against all. It is first and foremost a matter of teaching them to live a life without friction in the physical world, not to bring them up for “heaven”, which most of them will soon learn to view as a dubitable hypothesis. The most important thing is to teach them how to be “nice” people. Soon enough they will have a deeper view upon life. But they should be allowed to acquire that view by themselves. It should not be forced upon them. They must be allowed to choose the one that corresponds to their conception. This will develop their power of reflection and make them independent people. Those who are incapable of doing this should be allowed to follow the choice of their feeling.
7.2 Consciousness Development
1There are, in all, 49 totally different kinds of atomic consciousness (fundamental consciousness) in the cosmos. It is quite impossible for any lower kind to grasp any higher kind. Consciousness must be experienced to be understood. To acquire a higher kind of consciousness is the most difficult work of all, and so it is in all worlds. The very penetration occurs imperceptibly. It presupposes that attention is purposively directed and searches in all respects, heeding even the seemingly least significant possibilities. The last record in this respect is held by a 43-self who in two thousand years acquired four successively higher kinds of atomic consciousness (via a total of 24 ever higher kinds of molecular consciousness).
2Such phenomenal achievements are exceedingly rare. Nowadays, all members of the planetary hierarchy are individuals who formerly belonged to our mankind. Nobody would have deemed this possible only a thousand years ago. But then basic tendency of these individuals has been an unshakably firm purposiveness through all their incarnations.
3Consciousness development involves the acquisition of new faculties. The individual knows nothing of them but he must divine them, step by step, and intuitively, as it were. In the very intuition lies prevision not just of future events but also of constantly widening perspectives and of what is to be mastered in this process. By entering into unity, the individual becomes aware of what is to be realized. He has an increasing insight into the ongoing processes of manifestation and the results that are obtained or at least are to be expected in them, what he must be able to perform himself, being a “cog in the machinery”. The perspective into the future is one of the necessary conditions of acquiring new faculties. By living along in the process of the future (the “living plan”) he sees how it is to be done, what is needed to be able to do it. In the very collective consciousness and its energies there are potential faculties as well, and a successive understanding of how these are to be acquired, like “ways prepared to be walked”, prepared by those who have walked them before.
4We all have similar problems to solve (conditioned by our departmental types), and the degree of difficulty is equally great for all. It is a mistake to imagine, as many do in their selfimportance, that someone has greater difficulties than the others. The work for consciousness development is always a tour de force demanding all the resources of the individual up to the verge of the seemingly unsurpassable. However, no one has yet deemed the “sacrifice” too costly when he has reached the goal. Without the aid of the imagination it will not be successful. The individual must act “as if” he had already reached the higher he is striving for. The planetary hierarchy emphasizes that the individual is such as he thinks, hopes, and desires in his heart of hearts.
5It is not enough to have had experiences in past lives. They must be worked up into insight and understanding. Most people have the same experiences in life upon life without learning anything from them.
6It is typical of superficialne ss that most people must be forced to learn through painful experiences. Thus for example people do not learn to see the worthlessness of glory in any other way than by experiencing the iniquities of disgrace. Only then will their eyes be opened to the hypocrisy of convention and the almost total absence of humanity and understanding. They are made to see that the planetary hierarchy is correct in its view of “public opinion as the most flippantly cruel, prejudiced and unjust of all tribunals.” (That quotation is from PhS, but they have forgotten it as quickly at they glanced through it, like most things in that book. They have learnt the art of reading fast, a page in a few seconds. Those reading in that way may well leave the book unread. It is a book of aphorisms, you see. In the long run it is tedious to have to tell the readers what it says in the book when they say they have never seen it. There are exceptions, to be sure; those who say they “have never done with it”. They are right.)
7Anyone who has understood the evolution of the monads through ever higher natural kingdoms within the solar system and ever higher divine kingdoms in the cosmos, who has grasped the very idea of consciousness development and of constantly increasing consciousness expansion (through ever greater inclusivity, ever more monad consciousnesses contained in one’s own monad consciousness), need not occupy himself with problems that in all cases are beyond his own understanding. The monad in the first triad cannot understand the monad consciousness in the second, let alone that in the third triad. There is rather a risk that if such processes are painted, the individual fancies that he understands them and so doing will end up in the self-deception of imagination.
8Anyone who has realized that development is a continuous identification of the monad consciousness with higher kinds of consciousness and liberation from lower kinds does not need any circumstantial elucidation of the concepts of dualism (higher – lower).
9Our planet (Terra) is the only planet in the solar system where organic life is possible. On other planets, man’s lowest envelope (49:5-7) is an aggregate envelope and not an organic one. As a rule there is only one such planet in each solar system. That planet is in fact given a special task. Organic life is the life that is the most unsuitable to consciousness development. The organism is an envelope of suffering with its potentials for disease, disablement, and general helplessness. It is to such planets that monads are transferred from other planets, monads that have a repulsive basic tendency and thus instinctive hatred, which renders evolution so enormously difficult. Those monads lack the right instinct of life, which almost automatically obeys the Law without self-assertion and self-aggrandizement, without the tendency to parasitism, predatory instinct, thirst for power, greed, vengefulness and all the other distinctive marks of hatred. It is such tendencies, however, that distinguish monads having a repulsive basic instinct. There is only one way to teach those monads to finally acquire the tendency to unity, and that is through painful experiences. Those monads must be hammered out step by step through suffering. And organic life is suitable to that purpose. Thus our planet is the meeting-place for monads with repulsive basic instinct in our solar system. To judge from hints made, also monads from other solar systems have been transferred here, monads that have proved to be particularly impossible, and so our planet may to some extent be regarded as unique in our seven-globe of solar systems. It must be said, too, that our mankind lives up to its reputation. Anything more perverse in life is probably nowhere to be found. And so the entire history of our planet from Lemuria has been a history of insanity.
7.3 The Natural Kingdoms of Evolution
1The process of consciousness evolution is the last one of the many processes of cosmic manifestation. The primordial atoms of quaternary matter (which have gone through the processes as primary, secondary, and tertiary matter) have finally acquired the prerequisites of self-activity. They begin their consciousness development in the mineral kingdom and continue through the vegatable, animal, and human kingdoms.
2 In each natural kingdom, the number of incarnations is unlimited until the individual will have acquired the qualities and abilities requisite in that particular kingdom, and an envelope of his own in the next higher world. It should be noted that all qualities acquired remain latent in a new incarnation if they are not developed, a thing that becomes increasingly easier, however. Usually only understanding is actual.
3During incarnation, the normal individual at mankind’s present stage of development is as a rule objectively conscious in his organism only, subjectively conscious in his etheric, emotional, and mental envelopes, and unconscious in his causal envelope. “Visible” physical reality, comprising the three lowest physical states of aggregation (solid, liquid, gaseous), is the only one man knows anything about and that which he considers to be the only one existing. He apprehends his desires and feelings in his emotional envelope and his thinking in his mental envelope as subjective only, not understanding that these phenomena objectively correspond to vibrations in the kinds of matter of the respective worlds.
4Before the monad has acquired the ability of permanent causal activity, it must at the end of an incarnation await a new rebirth, asleep in its causal envelope. Thereby its continuity of consciousness is lost and its memory of the past becomes latent until it is able to be causally conscious.
5When the individual has acquired objective consciousness in all his incarnation envelopes together with causal intuition and thus consciousness in his causal envelope, he passes as a causal self to the fifth natural kingdom, the essential kingdom, the kingdom of unity, the lowest kingdom of the consciousness of community.This marks the beginning of the last phase of the active consciousness process (the process of expansion).
6In the human kingdom, the individual has acquired self-consciousness, individual consciousness. This is a necessary condition of unlosable self-identity in collective consciousness. Consciousness expansion implies that the individual incorporates the consciousness of ever more individuals with his own monad consciousness, eventually has an ever greater share in the common consciousness of all.
7Since higher consciousness embraces lower, he can, whenever he wishes, experience the individuals in lower kingdoms as his own consciousness. (“Nothing is hidden that shall not be revealed”.)
8Thereby the monad consciousness embarks on a process of expansion that involves an ever increasing participation in the cosmic total consciousness.
9Alongside of this subjective consciousness expansion goes a corresponding widening of objective consciousness of the matter and motion aspects until omniscience of and omnipotence in the entire cosmos have been acquired.
10The following tabulation shows the ever increasing participation in universal consciousness and thereby in all the three aspects of reality:
atomic kinds divine kingdoms apprehension (in per cent) of the cosmic total consciousness
43–49 first 14
36–42 second 28
29–35 third 42
22–28 fourth 56
15–21 fifth 70
8–14 sixth 85
1–7 seventh 100
11Classes are the natural order of things. The natural classes indicate different age classes, in the human kingdom as well as in all other na tural kingdoms, both lower and higher ones.
12During his sojourn in the human kingdom, the individual passes through five stages of development: the stage of barbarism (as a lower emotional self), the stage of civilization (as a lower mental self), the stage of culture (a higher emotional self), the stage of humanity (a higher mental self), and the stage of ideality (a causal self).
13The monad develops through learning from its experiences and reaping what it has sown in previous incarnations. Everything good and evil that the individual meets with is his own doing. Nothing can befall him that he has not deserved. Injustice in any respect whatsoever is absolutely precluded; the talk about it being a manner of speech of the ignorant of life and envious.
14Development in monads of repulsive basic tendency can take a wrong course, this manifesting itself already in parasitism of plants and in predacity of animals. In the lower kingdoms the monads by and large counteract development, disarranging the order of things, everything on their own responsibility. Unconscious and, to a still higher degree, conscious encroachment upon the monad’s inalienable, inviolable divine freedom, limited by the equal right of all living beings, results in the struggle for existence and the cruelty of life.
15The vegetable monads develop through the plants being devoured by animals and men and in this being subjected to the forceful emotional vibrations in these animal bodies.
16The fault is not with life that the individual at lower stages of development in his almost total ignorance of life makes mistakes as to all but every one of the laws of nature and laws of life.
17According to the fundamental axiom of esoterics, there are laws in everything and everything is expressive of law. Anyone who possesses knowledge of all laws in all worlds is omniscient. Omnipotence and freedom are possible only through absolutely faultless application of all the laws.
18The esoteric world view can never, of course, be anything else for mankind but a working hypothesis. The further mankind develops, however, the more evident the incomparable superiority of this hypothesis will become. The causal self is able to ascertain its accordance with facts in the five worlds of man (47–49).
7.4 The Human Kingdom
1All the twelve natural kingdoms in the cosmos are totally different from each other in all respects. What is common to them all are the three aspects of existence. Man in his incarnation and in his organism appears related to the animal kingdom. True man, however, is the individual conscious in his causal envelope, and then there is not the slightest similarity to the animal, but then man is the animal’s ”god” whom it obeys unconditionally and worships. Man worships no gods because he has seen the fact that all life makes up a universal brotherhood despite the immense distances in developmental respect. He does not worship, but he has a sense of reverence and respect for all in higher kingdoms, for all at a higher stage of development. Irreverence and disrespect are always evidence of a real ignorance of life, emotional crudity, and barbarism.
2An individual, who through causalization moves from the animal to the human kingdom, to begin with is at a lower point in respect of consciousness than he was as the highest animal species. He has received a ”soul” of his own, but this envelope of consciousness is void of all experience, whereas the animal had access to the highest kind of group-soul with its experience of life, enormous in its kind.
3In the human kingdom, the monad learns, without the aid of any group-soul, to acquire by itself the qualities and abilities that are necessary for the next higher kingdom. It learns to control its envelopes of incarnation, using them as tools to master the problems existing in the worlds of the envelopes. It learns to control the physical envelopes at the stage of barbarism, lower emotionality and lower mentality at the stage of civilization, and higher emotionality at the stage of culture, higher mentality at the stage of humanity, and finally causal consciousness at the stage of ideality.
4In this process, there is to be seen another difficulty at the stages of barbarism and civilization. The inner support that the animal received from its group-soul was substituted by the outer support given by the tribal collective in its manners, customs, taboos, and primitive conceptions. At the stage of civilization, the speculative systems of religion were the substitutes and, considerably later, those of philosophy and science. No real independence is achieved in that way.
5The causal envelope is the seat of egoism, the envelope in which the monad becomes selfconscious, becomes conscious of itself as an individuality. The pertaining qualities are acquired in the human kingdom, in which the monad acquires self-reliance and selfdetermination, qualities that are important at the different stages of development from the stage of barbarism to the stage of ideality. When these qualities have been acquired and incorporated in the general fund of experiences of life, the time is up for the dissolution of the causal envelope, this envelope of isolation that has shut the monad off from both the lower kinds of group-souls and the higher kinds of collective beings. Probably this was the reason why causalization was called individualization, otherwise an improper term, since each primordial atom, or monad, is an individual. The envelope of isolation has served its purpose and is dissolved when the monad has passed from the first triad mental molecule to the second triad mental atom and an essential envelope has been formed at the monad’s transition from the fourth to the fifth natural kingdom.
6During life in the physical world, emotional consciousness is activated in the child by impulses from physical consciousness, and mental consciousness is activated by emotional impulses. Hence the dependence of thought on emotion. Most people think only under the influence of emotional impulses, and in their thinking they remain influenced by emotionality (”wishful and emotional thinking”). Man is a slave to his emotionality until he has learnt to control emotional consciousness by mental consciousness. Most people do not suspect that their so-called will is the expression of the attractive or repulsive energies of the emotional urge.
7Until man has learnt to analyse the content of his thought and feeling himself, he is by and large only a memory genius that constantly thinks and feels what he has learnt from others and imitates everything like a robot of reproduction. The learned are largely learned by knowing what others have thought, said, and written. The more they know about this, the more learned they are. But the true knowledge is part of what people will think some time in the future. To think new ideas is to lead mankind forward.
8The individual’s “intuitive” conception of things is from the beginning determined by the system of thought existing in his subconscious, a synthesis of the experiences that he had in the different natural kingdoms (and, of course, particularly in the human kingdom): the individual’s instinct of life.
9The individual’s conception of everything is from the beginning thoroughly subjective and individual. In the higher animal species (those at the verge of causalization), the faculty of objective perception of objective material reality develops in ever more domains, a typical tendency also in primitive tribal peoples.
10This changes as the individual begins to activate his emotional consciousness the nature of which is utterly subjective. When this kind of consciousness eventually becomes dominant, the faculty of objective perception weakens, until, when mental consciousness increases, the demand for objectivity (objective facts) becomes stronger.
11Many people who are at this peculiar transitory stage find it difficult to keep imagination and reality apart. In such a company all the people present can make totally different statements about an experience they have shared.
12Man is reborn tens of thousands of times until he has by himself acquired subjective and objective self-consciousness in the five material envelopes of his three atomic worlds, become fully conscious in his permanent causal envelope.
13During this time in the human kingdom he has incarnated in all the 343 “races” that develop during a planetary period. He has been as many times a man and a woman, belonged to all religions, committed all the misdeeds, incomprehensible stupidities, mistakes, etc. that man can commit, shared in all kinds of civilizations, cultures, philosophies, and religions that mankind has been able to construct.
14If a human individual becomes a causal self in a foreseeable period of time, this is due to the fact that he has causalized on another planet and then has been transferred to our planet.
7.5 The Age Classes of Mankind
1There are classes. In order to comprehend what is taught in a higher class the comprehension gained in lower classes is required. There is a great difference between those who have 150 000 incarnations behind them and those who have only 30 000. That is the real ground for the diversity in people’s understanding of life.
2Man is an individual (monad) who has passed from the animal kingdom to the human kingdom. Those who have sojourned in the kingdom the longest time causalized seven eons ago. The youngest ones are only 18 million years old. The older ones have cultivated the most reckless selfishness during eons. And then moralists in their stupidity believe that you only need to fob off some theories about unselfishness on them, and so they are transformed as if by magic into altruistic beings and saints.
3In all natural kingdoms there are different age classes, determined by the time of the monads’ entry into the natural kingdom. In mankind, four different classes or stages of development can be clearly distinguished. That was the real ground for the introduction by the Manu of the caste system in India. However, the law of destiny and the law of reaping thwarted the attempt. Abuse of opportunities of development and abuse of power (freedom) had the effect that individuals were not allowed to incarnate in the caste intended for them. And so the whole thing degenerated. Men have always failed in the tasks assigned to them, have always frustrated the hopes of the planetary hierarchy. And still they unsuspectingly sacrifice their common sense to their imagined interests and to the satisfaction of their hatred.
4In fact, mankind consists of eight main classes: those who causalized in the four last eons of the sixth seven-globe and those who causalized in the four eons of our seven-globe.
5This division can be misleading. Mankind develops. Individuals develop more or less rapidly, however, depending on their individual characters. Division according to true capacity thus can be different. There are those who have experiences and learn nothing from them, since they do not bother to work these experiences up. And so what they could learn is lost. For experience alone is not sufficient. Those who lack the will or ability to work the ir experiences up can have the same experiences thousands of times. Those who do not reflect on them are as little wise as before. Many are too indolent to make the effort of reflection and prefer to vegetate.
7.6 Consciousness Development in Mankind
1The real history of mankind is the history of the development of human consciousness. Man must learn to activate by himself the passive consciousness in the different molecular kinds of his five envelopes. Up to now this development has been going on in the unconscious. Ever since the stage of barbarism, man has had to develop physical, emotional, and mental consciousness in his envelopes by being forced to solve his problems in physical life: the problem of nutrition, the problem of clothing, the problem of housing, the problem of protection, the problem of communal life, etc. Ethnology shows how this is done at the stage of barbarism. Political history shows how man has learnt to build societies and states. The history of culture shows how mankind has learnt to activate emotional consciousness through art in the largest sense. The history of speculation shows how men have tried to solve the problem of reality and the problem of life (the meaning of existence). The posing of these problems starts from man’s contribution to development.
2Esoteric history, such as it can be studied in the causal world (the world of Platonic ideas), affords us the true facts about this development. But it gives us something quite different as well. It shows us the planetary hierarchy’s supervising work and insight in both biological and psychological evolution. It shows us what kinds of cosmic energies that, according to the law of development, act upon every living creature in a purposive manner. It is among the future tasks of psychology to study consciousness in the different life-forms of the natural kingdoms. In so doing it will gain a greater understanding of the nature of consciousness, the gradual development of consciousness, and the central purpose of the entire evolution.
3General consciousness development is a very slow process in the course of millions of years. Thus it is calculated that it will take at least ten million years until approximately 60 per cent of mankind have reached the stage of ideality. Anyone who moves with the developmental tempo of public opinion, directed by the religious, philosophic, and scientific authorities of the day, will acquire higher kinds of emotional and mental molecular consciousness very slowly. People’s interests are almost exclusively oriented to physical life with its technical niceties and in such a manner that they can lead pleasant physical lives free from cares and worries. The relief work put in by “idealists” is mainly of the physical kind. “Spiritual” relief work consists in imparting to people the traditional emotional illusions and mental fictions so that they adapt more easily to a well-arranged society and are liberated from troublesome emotional and mental needs.
4The general conceptions of races, nations, cultures, religions, etc. are the fictions of ignorance. The meaning of the different races was to provide for different ways in which to develop consciousness; the task of the nations was to develop particular qualities and abilities. Culture was intended to arouse understanding of reality and life. Religion was meant to arouse feelings of community, good will, and right human relations. All of this has been completely thwarted by mankind in its idiotic faith in its own power of judgement and in its lack of affection and benevolence.
5Anyone who knows and understands nothing of the significance of the levels of human development, of the fact that people are found at different stages of development due to the time of the individuals’ transition from the third to the fourth natural kingdom, is totally unable to rationally judge things and events in mankind. The fact mentioned is the key that solves thousands of previously insoluble or wrongly solved problems
6Nations and races do not necessarily mean stages of development. A race, a nation reaches the stage of culture when clans at the stage of culture incarnate in it. A race, a nation goes down from a top level to the stage of barbarism, if clans at the stage of barbarism incarnate into it. The boasting about the great geniuses of some nation is idiotic. The geniuses chose to incarnate in this or that nation. Those geniuses probably have had reasons to regret their choice such as they were treated by their “colleagues”. At long last some people have realized that geniuses were misunderstood by their contemporaries. And then wiseacreness, being quite unable to judge the matter, makes all bunglers geniuses.
7The majority of mankind is still found at the emotional stage. The bulk of those people have acquired the faculty of inference thinking (47:7). Large parts of them are principle thinkers (47:6). Then there are those at the stage of culture, or the stage of the mystic, who have acquired the lowest attractive emotional consciousness (48:3), and finally those who are in the process of concluding their emotional development by having an incarnation as a saint (48:2). Thereupon the latter pass to the mental stage, acquire perspective consciousness (47:5), control mentally the vibrations of their emotional envelope and thereby become what the esoterician calls “personalities”. It is to be noted here that each of these developmental stages exhibits a number of developmental levels. Anyone who methodically and systematically with one-pointed purposiveness strives to reach higher levels is considered to be able to cover one level during one incarnation.
8In true cultural societies, which we have not had since Atlantis, the individuals at the stage of barbarism have no possibility of self-activity, necessary to consciousness development. During the last twelve thousand years, however, they have for long periods had opportunities to incarnate. This is particularly the case during the periods of transition between the different zodiacal epochs of 2500 years each. In these periods of transition, before the old zodiacal energies have ceased functioning and the new ones have been able to make their impact, the prevalent dominant tendencies to culture dissolve, the barbarians perform the work of demolition necessary to make room for new, entirely different tendencies. We are experiencing such an epoch and witnessing how those at the barbarian stage destroy everything we have been accustomed to considering as culture and this in most spheres of life: most manifest to everybody in literature, art, and music. How long this barbarism will endure depends on which clans incarnate. When clans that have reached the stage of culture incarnate to such an extent that they are able to set the tone, the barbarians will no longer have any opportunities of activity, and then those clans will cease incarnating and the new culture will blossom forth.
9In Lemuria, the human organism was perfected so that it obtained its largely final shape. In Atlantis, emotional life developed, and on the present continents mentalization has progressed slowly, so that the lowest mental consciousness has been activated (47:7). Mankind has developed so that even those at the stage of barbarism are susceptible to mental vibrations within the lowest mentality (47:7). True, the masses cannot think by themselves, are nevertheless able to apprehend mental conceptions and to a certain extent also mental “arguments” and thus not only emotionalized ones. The present zodiacal epoch of Aquarius (the years 1950-4550) will entail the activation of principle thinking (47:6). The result will be that people start thinking independently; they will think their own thoughts and not just parrot others. The rule of authorities in the old sense will be definitively over and done with. There will always be pioneers who lead the way. There will never more be any uncritical acceptance, however, but only acceptance after everybody has been able to convince himself of the truth of the matter.
10Atlantis was submerged in four different periods. The last remnant, the island of Poseidonis, went down in 9564 BC. Satanism had triumphed and, using the masses of ignorant and impotent people, had rendered any social communal life impossible. Men were given what they always want: a “new heaven and a new earth”. And of the traces that mankind has left in the desert of barbarism called history it may well be said that they are terrifying. We are on the eve of a new revolution of insanity which will probably take several hundred years to overcome. Europe, which has never been able to overcome its division, is played out as a “leader of culture”.
7.7 The Stages of Human Development
1The stages of development are determined by the material composition of the envelopes. The higher emotional stage signifies that the emotional envelope consists of 48:2 and 48:3 molecules fifty per cent. Ideality is the result of the fact that the monad is able to apprehend the 47:3 molecular consciousness and the pertaining molecules can be activated in the brain.
2The stage of development appears in the individual’s understanding as well as in his hierarchy of values. Understanding is innate and cannot be mentally comprehended until the experience is had. It is nothing that you reach by studying. It is matter of the level of development you have reached, of emotional and mental capacity of consciousness you have self-acquired in the past.
3We incarnate in series, one series for each level.
4The self’s level of emotional and mental development is determined by the molecular consciousness layers where it normally stays. It can momentarily go up or down the consciousness material layers of its envelopes.
5Where human beings are concerned, a distinction must be made between those who in developmental respect are at a certain stage and those who remain at a lower stage than their latent capacity indicates, those who have never come in contact with the ideas corresponding to their latent stage and, therefore, have never had any opportunity of reattaining it. In dictatorships, for instance, where nobody is allowed to think in other ways than those decreed by the powers that be, or have any chance of contacting “latent” ideas, there are of course many people who in fact belong at the stages of culture and humanity.
6It is important to distinguish between consciousness in a kind of matter or in an envelope and self-consciousness in the same. It is only when you have acquired self-consciousness that you are really able to understand the pertaining problems, identify the different kinds of consciousness, and master the different energies.
7The stages of human development clarify how important it is that consciousness acquires experiences in the human kingdom and so gains an understanding of the meaning of the incarnation. These stages are the “class division of na ture”, the basis of the original caste system in India, which of course has degenerated and will always be misinterpreted until mankind has reached the insight that all life makes up a universal brotherhood and that it is the task of higher castes to serve the lower castes. Just as we receive help from higher kingdoms we must unburden that debt by helping others. People pray to god for help, not understanding that such help entails duties. Why should god help when men do not?
8Mankind makes up a unitary collective in which all exist for all. Anyone who does not want to help forfeits the right to be helped. To be born into a cultural nation, a cultural class, a cultural family, is a benefit that must be earned by serving all mankind, not a chosen part of it. The higher the individual stands, the more he must contribute to the good of the whole. It is perhaps seen from this how the caste system has become the opposite of what it was intended to be. But as long as egoism rules mankind, all benefits strengthen this egoism and degeneration is unavoidable. A caste system cannot fulfil its true purpose until the service of everybody without exception becomes the basic attitude to life. We are first and foremost brothers. Everything else is of secondary importance. Priding oneself on having reached a higher stage of development would be as childish as elder brothers or sisters priding themselves on being older.
9To this should be added another fact. We have all in past incarnations committed such a lot of misdeeds, recklessly abused any kind of power, lined our pocket at the expense of others that the debt we have incurred will never be paid until we have reached so far that we can pass into the next higher kingdom. The causal self feels dizzy when studying his past incarnations and discovering how much there still remains for him to make good.
7.8 The Emotional Stage: General
1The emotional stage is divided into two main stages: the lower, repulsive stage of hatred (48:4-7) and the higher, attractive stage of brotherhood (48:1-3). The lower stages are the stages of barbarism and civilization, the higher stage is the stage of culture with its two substages: the stage of the mystic (48:3) and the stage of the saint (48:2).
2At the stages of civilization and culture, feeling and imagination are the factors determining action and will. At the stage of civilization, the repulsive vibrations are the stronger ones; at the stage of culture, the attractive vibrations are the stronger ones. The repulsive feelings can be assigned to three main groups: fear, anger, contempt; the attractive ones, to the three main groups of admiration, affection, sympathy.
3Anyone who in his thinking and acting is determined by emotional motives is an emotionalist. The egoist must be influenced by his feelings, needs to be “warmed up” to “be good”, to be able to agree, take part, take a stand, sacrifice something for the cause, etc.
4The difference between civilizational and cultural man is only whether emotional motives belong to higher or lower emotionality: egoism, the individual’s own interest, or is an unselfish, impersonal interest, a noble motive.
5The example of humility shall be cited. True humility is the realization of your inability to come up to the higher ideals you have set up – how long way you still have to go – ultimately the realization of the distance that separates you from the individuals in the next higher (the fifth) natural kingdom or still higher kingdoms.
6False humility has many aspects: cowardice, yieldingness, inability to assume responsibility and to stand by one’s ideas, the desire to endear oneself, the wish to appear modest, noble, etc., the wish to be something different from what one is.
7Pride often has its roots in overestimation of oneself or in contempt of those whom one has put on lower levels.
8At the stage of culture, the consciousness aspect begins to be the dominant one, everything belonging to consciousness development, especially refinement, ennoblement of emotionality.
9Emotional consciousness is illusory in nature, and also the individuals at the stage of culture are unable to liberate themselves from its power. All the idiologies existing in the world go to prove that fact, being products of formative imagination. It is only at the stage of humanity that the power of imagination is eventually broken and the individual comes to see the necessity of starting from a consummate system of facts in their correct contexts. As long as he lacks this system, he realizes that the only sure thing is the Sokratean realization. He also realizes that no human beings can ascertain the facts belonging to this system. He will not accept any system that does not furnish an all-round solution of the basic problems of life and about which he can say: this is how it must be and it cannot be otherwise.
10As long as the mental envelope is interwoven with the emotional envelope, mentality is dominated by emotionality, since in the emotional eon emotional will is stronger than mental will. That is why the normal individual’s learning is of no avail against strong emotional vibrations but he is carried away even against his own better judgement, falls victim to his illusions: his desire for sensations, all manner of hate expressions, and depressions.
11Illusions are false prospects of emotional consciousness, results of emotional activity. Emotionality is desire and desire prevents mentality from seeing through illusions. Also mental fictitiousness (belief in one’s ability to determine the truth) prevents us from seeing reality as it is. Only as causal selves shall we be able to comprehend reality, understand life, and judge rightly.
12The vibrations of the emotional world fill our life with illusions of all kinds. The illusions of fear (all misfortunes constructed by imagination) are among the most painful. D.K. gives us a mantra to use at such occasions: “Let reality determine all my thoughts and truth become the lord of my life.”
13It cannot be too efficiently emphasized that the word “illusion” has totally different meanings for a Westerner and an Oriental, for an exoterist and an esoterician. The most exact esoteric formulation of the concept of illusion would be “reality of lower matters, worlds,” etc. For individuals in higher kingdoms look upon such reality as unessential, insignificant to them. In their desire to make human beings see things as they see them, they use the improper and abortive term illusion. Illusions arise when we take the imaginative constructions of ignorance for reality.
14When, in the seventh root-race, mankind has developed so that nobody remains at the emotional stage, emotional involutionary matter will no more be vitalized by human consciousness. The emotional forms hitherto produced by the activity of human emotional consciousness will then be dissolved and the higher regions of the emotional world will be empty of emotional material forms. The lower regions, which penetrate the physical world and have their forms from it, will be populated by animals and plants at the utmost. This fact has misled esotericians to carelessly characterizing the material emotional world as an illusion. However, even a “dying” world exists until has been totally dissolved.
7.9 The Lower Emotional Stage
1At the stages of barbarism and civilization, repulsion preponderates and thereby fear in people’s lives. Then hatred is their elixir of life. In practice, this means that the “good” as well as well as the “evil” in them is conditioned by their egoism, what they consider advantageous. If they derive advantages from “loving”, they will do so. If they find it useful to hate their “friends”, they will do so. Everybody disdains everybody else. Man is neither good nor evil, he is both good and evil. He is at a certain level of development and does not know better. The whole moralist way of looking at things is radically false, being based on the illusions and fictions of total life ignorance.
2The spiteful individuals, the subhumans, who are quite unable to contact their causal being, could in a certain respect be characterized as bastards of devils and beasts, a union of subman and animal nature without any trace of aspiration to something higher.
3Children are found at the stage of barbarism, which they run through more or less quickly. In the cruelty, malicious joy, vandalism of children we see man in his primitive state.
4In times of revolution, clans at the stage of barbarism incarnate even in so-called cultural nations and assert themselves in many domains. Those who have hastened ahead of the rest of mankind generally become martyrs, since the subhuman barbarians hate everybody who “isn’t like us and the others in the valley” . They are hated by envious people who see that they are superior. They are hated by all who push themselves forward and are intrigued away if they stand in their way. What a lovable mankind!
5Schopenhauer observed correctly that if the mob (those at the stage of barbarism) find out that they can give other people trouble, annoy or hinder them, then they will try to demonstrate their power in all ways. It is surprising that those who have reached the stage of civilization injudiciously let themselves be carried away to display mob manners. The monkey instinct still makes itself felt.
6Those who are at the lower emotional stage (the stage of hatred) live in their feelings also after they have left the physical world. Their emotional life is enormously intensified, since the organism is no longer there to exert a subduing influence. If they hated in the physical, then they hate the more intensely in the emotional world. Without a physical occupation they do not know what to do. The only thing remaining for them is the interest in other people, never-ending gossip. They provide each other, as usual, with the old motives of hatred from physical life: a veritable pandemonium
7The population of the emotional world divides itself, just as that of the physical world, according to physical race, creed, caste, culture. All remain on the level of consciousness they have attained and go on living in their illusions and fictions, are as big idiots there as they were here. So you should not expect anything more rational. There is for them only one way in which to develop: to follow along with mankind in its general development and to try to make the best possible of their incarnations. Only in the physical world do we acquire qualities and abilities, do we come to know reality and life.
8At the stage of civilization, the four lower emotional molecular kinds (48:4-7) are mentalized; at the stage of humanity, the two higher (48:2,3). When primitive civilizational man had mentalized the lowest emotional molecules, he invented torture. The three lower kinds of emotional vibrations (48:5-7) are repulsive (vibrations of hatred, of isolation, with fear, anger, and contempt, including envy, the complexes of inferiority and superiority), and the majority of mankind is found at that stage.
9How far the intellect can be developed at the stage of civilization (to the verge of perspective consciousness) can be ascertained in so-called Nietzschean supermen, who are generally regarded as “geniuses”.
7.10 The Higher Emotional Stage
1By activating passive consciousness and so acquiring self-consciousness in the third emotional molecular kind (48:3), the individual attains the stage of culture, or of the mystic.
2Culture does not exist until mankind has understood what humanity means. All human beings are brothers, since all belong to the same natural kingdom. As long as hatred rules, man is not a man but a subman. Nietzsche fantasized about superman, and at once subman believed he was a superman. That is typical of total injudiciousness and conceit. Nietzsche could never keep superman and power-hungry man apart. Abuse of one’s superiority in one incarnation only means a marked inferiority in a subsequent one. Poor foolish things if they believe they know anything of reality and life, being victims of the brainwaves of their ignorance. It is proof of the omnipotence of imagination even at the lower emotional stage. Revelling in feelings of superiority just indicates inferiority.
3At the stage of civilization, there is a risk that the individual thinks one thing, feels another, says a third, and does a fourth. The life-ignorant moralist, who must judge everything he does not understand, thinks that he sees an eccentric, a unique phenomenon, which precisely demonstrates his lack of judgement.
4At the stage of culture, the individual begins to feel, say, and do one and the same; at the stage of humanity, to feel, say, do, and also think one and the same.
5At his transition from the stage of civilization to the stage of the mystic, the individual’s emotional life often is in conflict with his reason, a conflict between ideal and “reality”. Such tensions are experienced by man whenever the vibrations of the different envelopes or of the lower and higher molecular kinds bring about dissonance and disharmony. They continue until the higher wins, often only after several incarnations.
6When the monad is able to centre itself in 48:3, it has predominantly attractive tendencies and is able, in the course of its incarnations, to purify and ennoble these tendencies until the monad reaches 48:2 and so doing becomes a saint as a final product.
7What makes the mystic lose himself in states of rapture is the absence of me ntal control, since the corresponding mental consciousness (47:5) has not yet been activated. Without this control, the mystic drowns in the emotional “ocean of consciousness” or the divine. The higher emotionality cannot be mastered by the lower mentality (47:6,7), and therefore the individual is caught up in his emotional illusions. Imagination believes itself omniscient and omnipotent.
8The individual achieves a contact with essentiality (46) and in the moment of ecstasy believes himself to be god. He is religious, even though like Schiller he cannot for that reason approve of dogmas.
9In his idealism, he strives after self-effacement for noble ends, “divine insanity”, until his mentality is more and more vitalized through the action of emotional vibratio ns upon his causal envelope as he attains the 47:5 kind of mentality and the stage of humanity.
7.11 The Mental and Causal Stages
1In exceptional cases, the emotional self (the first triad with the monad centred in the emotional atom) can achieve a contact with the essential consciousness of the second triad via the unity centre of the causal envelope. The mental self (47:5) activates the intelligence centre of the causal envelope. By means of this activation, the self comes in contact with Augoeides. It remains an unconscious contact, however. And in ordinary cases, the self cannot expect any interest on the part of Augoeides until the self’s activation of the unity centre becomes considerably more than momentary. Exceptions from this occur only if the mental self endeavours to make a contribution to development that benefits all. Augoeides takes no interest in the individual as an individual, but only in the individual as part of a group or collective soul, as a “potential” causal self, a synthesis of me ntal and essential consciousness.
2There is a great difference between the mystic’s incarnation as a saint (48:2), and that of the humanist (47:4). The ideals realized by the emotional saint are bereft of that rational and reality content which is found in the humanist. An outsider cannot discover any difference, but the qualities of attraction acquired by the mystic have been penetrated by the humanist’s intellect and their expedience has been clearly seen.
3Mysticism belongs to the emotional stage; esoterics, to the mental stage.
4A characteristic of our times is the conflict between emotionalists and mentalists.
5The monad in its envelopes identifies itself with these individual consciousnesses and always thinks it is some one of them. It is only at the stage of humanity that the individual can seriously begin to liberate himself from these identifications, since he is preparing his transition from the first to the second triad and so doing becomes aware of or, in any case, begins to divine the opposition between them.
6At the stage of civilization, the individual sees the opposition between barbarism and civilization. Later, he is able to distinguish between barbarism, civilization, and culture (or mysticism); and at the stage of humanity, between all four. Everywhere he sees oppositions between lower and higher, whenever he has reached higher, until he has entered into essential unity, where opposition disappears even though differentiation remains. Opposition remains, however, as long as liberation means inner struggle, brings about crises and birth-pangs, times of darkness and forsakenness.
7It is the mission of man to become a causal self, from being a mental self (often only potentially). Characteristics of the causal self are knowledge, sense of unity, and service (called “will to sacrifice” by the ancient esotericians). The mental self has the stage of the saint (emotional sovereignty) behind him and possesses the qualities of attraction latently. He is still “self-centred” (selfish), however.
8Those who misjudge themselves and want to imitate the “saints”, make the ordinary mistake of believing in the possibility of becoming saints through copying. They sacrifice themselves and their belongings and believe they will be able to attain the stage of the saint in that way. That is a serious mistake, which fortunately they will eventually see, to their great disappointment and often with deplorable consequences. You become a saint by acquiring the pertaining qualities and not through outer works. The understanding of this found expression in the misleading expression about “being saved through one’s own works”. When “sacrifice” is the outcome of “constraint”, of an inner “demand”, it is abortive. If the term “sacrifice” is to be used at all in this connection, it should be kept in mind that what is an action that is done automatically, spontaneously, without any thought of sacrifice. Besides, the mere “desire to help” is not enough. Helping requires common sense, judgement, and experience of the fact that the desire to help is exploited by cynical recklessness.
9Common sense is the highest reason of the individual at all his stages of development. But only at the stage of humanity will it be true reason, since man has then acquired such a capacity for thought that he thinks in accord with reality. He has acquired mental systems in which facts have been put in their correct contexts.
10As a rule, to be able to help individuals at the mental stage, you must demonstrate ideas that afford them greater clarity, caus al ideas via mental ideas, for it is the causal ideas that are reality ideas (agree with reality).
11Consciousness in any world (in the causal world, for instance) is only a potential at the making of that world. However, as more and more individuals enter that world, it is filled up with the results of the causal consciousness activity of those individuals. The causal world, the world of Platonic ideas, contains the collected experiences of mankind in an “processed” state. The longer our planet remains, the more that world is enriched with fresh experiences. More and more causal molecules represent knowledge within a new subject-area. All the knowledge that mankind collects during millions of years is incorporated with the collective causal consciousness and is synthesized by those who have acquired active causal consciousness. All different schools of thought exist in it to the extent they have had some content of reality. Mental fictitiousness and emotional illusoriness dissolve when contacting causal consciousness. Causal selves of the future will have immensely more systematized knowledge at their disposal than their predecessors.
7.12 The Stage of Unity
1Consciousness is by nature collective consciousness, and it will be the individual’s business during his consciousness development to incorporate as much of the collective consciousness as he can apprehend. Causal consciousness represents a transition from individual consciousness to collective consciousness.
2After man has become a causal self and has acquired the idea thinking of causal intuition, the goal of his further consciousness development is the acquisition of essential consciousness, group consciousness, collective consciousness, that consciousness which has been the condition of individual consciousness. He ceases to be a separate self in order to become a group self, a collective self, whose task it is to make the contribution of his actualized individual character to the common consciousness. The cosmic total consciousness is the basis of the universal brotherhood of all monads, independent of the natural kingdom attained or the stage of development in a certain kingdom.
3The meaning of the esoteric saying, “only he knows himself who has become conscious of his godhood” is that the “self has entered into unity”, has acquired essential consciousness, has become aware of the fact that “consciousness is one”, that all monads share in the cosmic total consciousness.
4The cosmic total consciousness is acquired step by step through ever higher kingdoms. The start is made with group consciousness (nine individuals) and continuous group amalgamation to an ever increasing extent.
5As the individual acquires essential unity consciousness, he can identify his consciousness with individuals in lower natural kingdoms, experience the consciousness of a man, an animal, a plant, a mineral as though he were that being. Thereby he gains an understanding of the nature of consciousness, its gradual development and expansion (increasing share in the total consciousness).
7.13 The Importance of Latency
1During his enormously long consciousness development from the stage of barbarism, man has acquired all bad qualities to many per cents, and later he has begun to develop the good ones. The bad qualities exist in his subconscious and make themselves felt on the slightest provocation. Upbringing consists in fostering the good ones and never paying attention to the bad ones (thus in opposition to the theologians who by insisting on a “confession of sin” reinforce the bad ones).
2In times when hatred rules the qualities of hatred are resuscitated. The last twelve thousand years, hatred has ruled with results that we know. And life-ignorant philosophers and, above all, theologians decree: “Man is evil. Man is incorrigible ”; decrees that bear witness to their lack of insight.
3The serious consequences of the idiotization of people through emotional illusions and mental fictions are best seen in the fact that individuals who easily could become saints and mental selves if they had been given real knowledge still remain at the lower emotional stage.
4Add to this the fact that many people who have acquired emotional as well as mental qualities remain at a lower stage out of sheer indolence, whereas with a firm resolution they could achieve surprising results. The stages of development with their levels are certainly correct in rough outline. This does not mean, however, that those who appear to be at a certain stage truly are there. People are unable to determine by themselves what has already been acquired and remained latent.
5In this is seen the difficulty of assessing individuals according to their opinions and ways of life. It has been seen that such people as have been deemed to be at the stage of civilization upon receiving esoteric knowledge have rapidly attained higher stages, and that they lived far below their latent level. Only 45-selves are in a position to rightly assess. There are drastic examples showing us that individuals whom disciples considered quite unsuitable for discipleship manifested a higher level than those assessing them.
6During a religious psychosis, the individual can reach hundreds of levels higher. If he is able to remain on the level he attained, this demonstrates that he previously lived below his true one.
7Esoterics brings about, in those who learn to comprehend it and use it as an explanatory ground, such a revolution that those at the stage of civilization are easily taken for people at the stage of humanity. And the question is whether esoterics can bring about a revolution in emotional respect, involving the acquisition of the qualities of attraction, so that the individual can succeed in covering an entire stage of development during one incarnation.
8How rapidly man develops in respect of consciousness depends on many different factors: his latent level of development, opportunities of education (family, friends, teachers), his mission in life, good or bad reaping, physical inheritance, etc. All generalizations are risky, since only causal selves can determine which factors have been decisive.
9The individual’s level of development appears from his understanding of life. He need not be clearly aware of this understanding, as only the part that has become the object of his reflection is clear in his consciousness. The latent part is instinctive, is often totally neglected and appears inexplicable.
10The ages of life of man are esoterically divided into seven-year periods. By and large, these periods can also be ascertained in physiological and psychological changes occurring at the approximate ages of 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, etc. years.
11During his first seven-year period (corresponding to the development of mankind in Lemuria), the child learns to control the physical by means of the emotional.
12In the second age of life (Atlantis), the individual lives in his emotionality. During the third seven-year period, his power of inference thinking develops; and during the fourth period, principle thinking.
13The fifth age of life often brings with it a critical examination of the prejudice, conception of right, conception of reality, etc. the individual has been fed with during his childhood and adolescence. However, most people have grown into their views so that these remain firmly rooted for that incarnation.
14The child grows out of his toys and then gladly gives them away to his younger brothers and sisters. That is no sacrifice. When in religiously coloured mysticism there is mention of sacrifice, it is not always clarified that it is never a matter of a real sacrifice. You leave with joy and gratitude all such things as you clearly see to be obstacles to your further development. Before you have clearly seen this, it may appear as a sacrifice, but this is not the case with anyone who has really understood. As long as the things life takes from us appear as losses we must in new lives go through it all again, until we have learnt that life will not deprive us of anything that we see as irretrievable. Whatever happens to us is according to the Law and is not dictated by envious powers.
15Each age of life brings with it other interests and makes us lose the taste of things that belong to earlier ages. This can be seen as symbolical of our human life through all our incarnations. Man sees only his own incarnation. To those who guide the evolution of consciousness, however, the individual’s life in each natural kingdom is a unit in itself persisting through all changes of form, which according to nature are inevitable.
16What is symbolical of ages of life corresponds in man’s life in the physical world to different stages of consciousness from the lowest stage of barbarism to the highest stage of ideality.
17Just as the foetus runs through the same process of biological evolution that mankind has done in physiological respect, so the different ages of the individual growing up are largely a repetition of his development through his previous incarnation. All life is a continuous repetition with very small steps forward in consciousness. The lower the individual’s stage of development, the slower is his progress. The great bulk of his incarnations are spent at the two lowest stages. The higher the newborn has reached in his development, the more rapidly he recapitulates, during childhood and adolescence, his previous stages of development until he has attained his true level. Then his true difficulties begin. And it depends on his own further striving to develop whether he will make any appreciable progress during that incarnation. Generally speaking, it is only when he has reached the stage of culture, the higher emotional stage, that the individual resolves to work one-pointedly to gain an ever increasing understanding of ever wider perspectives on existence.
18Unless the individual who has reached this stage has had the opportunity, according to the law of reaping, to grow up in a congenial environment, this deeper view with a radical reassessment of the life view and cultural values he has accepted so far will not be formed earlier than after the age of 35 years. He then subjects his conception of life, the dogmas and ruling views he has accepted, to a critical analysis with respect to their rationality and agreement with the ideals he knows. For many people their newly gained clarity involves a painful surprise. They see their own blindness, and they want to keep so many of the things they have cherished.
19A view so fixed that it has turned into dogmatic thinking paralyses consciousness activity and hampers consciousness initiative. The disciple remains in the conception of reality that belongs to consciousness on the level he has attained or in the molecular consciousness he has conquered. To force anyone to adopt a certain view (idiology) is to hamper the further development of the individual (often the entire nation). That the view is changed of course does not mean that objective, material reality in the cosmos is changed, but that the view of this same reality becomes more perspectivated according as new facts are flowing in. A new dimension, and everything appears different.
7.14 Rapid Development
1On lower levels, man learns so slowly from experience that he needs one hundred incarnations to learn what he could learn in one. He is then unable to work up his experiences in a rational way.
2The individual who has reached the stage of civilization can begin reflecting for himself and not just repeat automatically what he has heard or read. So doing, the individual begins his self-initiated consciousness activity, and so he starts to develop his faculty of perceiving ever higher vibrations in ever higher molecular kinds. By working upon the content of his consciousness and his experiences he acquires the qualities that are possible with these resources of his. With each series of incarnations that he goes through he attains a higher level of development, and so increases his consciousness capacity.
3The necessary condition of consciousness development is at first the desire, subsequently the resolution, to will for development. We need, at least to begin with, to clear away the obstacles that make it impossible for us to receive the zodiacal and planetary energies pouring through our envelopes. They are adapted to each individual’s capacity for realization. Which these are is evident from the “horoscope” when, some time in the future, it will be possible to interpret it correctly, which only causal selves are able to. It will always be the individual’s business to use the forces that are put at his disposal. No god is able to force anyone. Anyone who does not want to develop is free to abstain from development. Making that choice, however, he should not expect that in future incarnations anything special is done for him in that respect. He must remain on his level.
4In order to use the most expediently the energie s pouring through the centres of his envelopes, the individual must certainly have some knowledge of the pertaining processes. Fortunately, however, most of this activity goes on in the unconscious, provided the individual “desires what is good for all people and acts accordingly”.
5The prerequisite of consciousness development is self-initiated consciousness activity. The prerequisite of rapid development is the exact agreement of consciousness with objective reality, the ability to perceive the vibrations exactly and to reproduce them correctly. In respect of consciousness this means a correct perception of reality and activity in accord with laws of nature and laws of life.
6Where just general consciousness development is concerned, the agreement of the subjective consciousness content with reality is a side issue. That explains why the individuals can develop through illusions and fictions.
7Where rapid development is concerned, however, the individual’s liberation from illusions and fictions becomes the main issue.
8The individual has taken the first step towards this liberation through his realization that he knows nothing about existence worth knowing, that mankind at its present stage of development cannot acquire a knowledge of reality and life. The second step involves examining the illusions and fictions without prejudice and dissolving them. Doing this work he finally comes across the esoteric thought system and finds this to be the only tenable one. Thereby he liberates himself from the illusions and fictions and thinks in accord with reality.
9Until then one-pointed purposiveness has concerned consciousness development only. Now he is in a position to reach up to the consciousness of the causal world, apprehend and correctly interpret the vibrations in his causal envelope, acquire a knowledge of reality.
10Before the individual may count on “assistance” from the planetary hierarchy for the purpose of a more rapid development, he must pass a series of tests which the life-ignorant immature man fails in, complains about, and finds unjust, thereby proving his immaturity.
11The purpose of those tests is to bring up into the waking consciousness whatever remains of repulsive qualities, egoism and egocentricity (making it impossible for the self to enter into the collective consciousness of unity) as well as to ascertain the percentages of the twelve essential qualities (firmness, strength, staying power, loyalty, among others). Before the self is able to reach essential atomic consciousness (46:1), these essential qualities must have been acquired one hundred per cent.
12Anyone who wants to develop more rapidly than the masses must resort to special methods. It is a matter of special training like that of the athlete in physical respect. Add to this a special emotional and mental training which is even more exacting. Higher emotional consciousness is attractive consciousness, and nobody will reach that who does not strive to acquire attraction and simultaneously to eliminate all the expressions of repulsion. The acquisition of higher mental consciousness requires an individual method of meditation. (A good guidance can be had from the Indian raja yoga method.) You must be alive to the fact that results strived for are seldom achieved in the incarnation in which the training starts. But all work put in is done ready for the future. No effort is wasted. Moreover, without an experienced guide from the planetary hierarchy the individual cannot solve all the problems coming up as his training goes on. This is proved by the fact that Indian raja yogis do not succeed with their methods. They do not get in touch with the fifth natural kingdom.
13The risk involved in esoteric studies is that they afford such a sovereign perspective on existence, such an undreamt-of clarity, such a liberation from imprisonment and darkness, that the emancipated individual settles down to a passive life. However, development is “without end” until you have reached the highest divine stage. After you have become a mental self, your goal is to become a causal self, etc. There are worlds to be conquered by the monad consciousness: planetary worlds, solar systemic worlds, cosmic worlds. If you want to reach the goal you must travel the path and not stop at some resting-place. The more energy the individual uses for helping, the greater will his possibilities of development be in his next incarnation. Knowledge entails responsibility for the right use of the knowledge, and omission is abuse as well.
7.15 Methodical Activation
1Those who, having acquired common sense and a knowledge of reality, want to reach higher levels of development must be alive to the fact that this is impossible without purposive work. It is no easy thing to hasten ahead of emotional and mental consciousness development. It is not sufficient merely to acquire esoteric learning and to rejoice at your emancipation from universal illusoriness and fictitiousness. Such an attitude may even bring about a retrogression. Higher kinds of emotional and mental molecules contain energies that must be purposively directed if the self’s prospects of learning from them will not decrease, quite apart from the fact that all knowledge entails responsibility according to the law of reaping as well as the law of destiny. Anyone who does not gratefully and willingly use the opportunities of life will miss such ones in the future. Each new incarnation is a new chance to develop (unless exceptionally it is only an “instalment incarnation” of bad reaping) and the powers of destiny, who have arranged the matter, consider carefully how the individual has used his opportunities: what he has done to develop himself and to help others to develop.
2Consciousness development consists of a continuous identification with higher and liberation from lower consciousness in a process that is concluded only when the self has reached the highest cosmic consciousness. As long as the interests of lower levels can fascinate the self, the self remains on that level. Generally speaking, the qualities and abilities belonging to that level have not yet been acquired as long as the pertaining interests are deemed essential.
3Consciousness development is called the “path of liberation” by the planetary hierarchy, liberation from the lower to acquire the higher, the path of self-realization. If the individual having one-pointed purposefulness wants to develop in the most rapid way, then this implies hard work. That is the first thing inculcated on the aspirant to discipleship of the planetary hierarchy.
4The more knowledge, insight, and understanding the individual acquires by himself, the more he is able to further consciousness development, the greater is his prospect of becoming an impersonal instrument of the planetary hierarchy.
5To teach people how to think, to make problems the subject of debate, to make ideas come alive, is among the greatest contributions to mental consciousness activation that the individual can make.
6The self’s activation of consciousness in ever higher molecular kinds is a process that best occurs automatically and unconsciously. According to the law of development, development takes place in the safest way under the cover of the unconscious. Since the individual is ignorant of the pertaining methods and any attempt he makes to apply a fictitious method of his own is bound to fail, the self is wise in handing the matter over to the superconscious. What the self needs to do is to remove the obstacles. This the self does by forgetting itself, refining its envelopes and in meditation solving all problems that come up (directing its attention towards the superconscious). Gradually the self learns through experience how this shall be done. The speculations of ignorance at the wrong times most often result in mistakes. Collective consciousness, still unconscious, can make itself felt according as the self forgets itself in service.
7It is an esoteric axiom that “all expansion of consciousness is the result of a technique of meditation”. All evolution is conditioned by atomic consciousness energy pouring down from higher worlds, energies distributed according to a plan. The methodical development of the individuals (as soon as they have realized the importance of the matter) is dependent on their understanding of the ideas that are new to them, directed and sustained attention to the next superconscious, sooner or later resulting in contact with the energies in question.
8The different stages in the methodical activation of consciousness may be indicated as follows:
9The first stage is control of consciousness. The individual attends to the consciousness expressions in his envelopes of incarnation (physical, emotional, mental). Eventually, the individual learns to tell the different kinds of energies that awaken the various kinds of consciousness (within each molecular kind): the energies coming from the subconscious, from without, from the superconscious, and from the monad consciousness.
10The second stage is the constant activation of the highest kind of active consciousness attained: thus 47:6 or 48:3 or 48:2 or 47:5. The monad consciousness (attention) is constantly held at the highest point when external circumstances do not force attention outward. Subsequently attention returns to its subject field.
11The third stage is meditation on essential consciousness (46), which has been designated wisdom or love. The self ceases to be the centre of its circle and becomes a collective self having been an individual self. Only as a collective self does the individual grasp what has been symbolically intimated with such words as wisdom and love.
12Esoterically, the following different stages of consciousness in the aspirant are enumerated: instinct, emotional aspiration, intellect, one-pointed purposiveness, “essential will”, hierarchical work.
13As long as the interests of the individual are of the physical, lower emotional, or lower mental kinds, the individual cannot consider himself an aspirant to discipleship.
14The higher development of the individual begins with the realization that every consciousness expression is an energy expression that has an inevitable effect. The higher the kind of consciousness, the stronger the energy effect. (Good or bad sowing, hampering or furthering development, raising or lowering the activation of consciousness in higher or lower molecular kinds.)
15The three gunas of the Sankhya philosophy (sattva, rajas, tamas) have never been rightly interpreted. The individuals of the fifth natural kingdom express sattva; those of the fourth, rajas; and those of the third kingdom express tamas.
16The aspirant’s most important realization is that all instances of grief, pain, overwhelming joy, smug satisfaction are part of his emotionality and demonstrate the supremacy of emotionality, are part of the lower human. The question always is whether “this” benefits the higher development. (Then it is quite another matter that the organism does not stand constant high tension and that relaxation is necessary. But the choice of consciousness content when relaxing will then be essential. There is a long series of higher and lower things.)
17The monad in the lower causal envelope (the triad envelope) uses mental consciousness as the observer of the different kinds of consciousness, as the conveyer of causal consciousness to the brain, and as the window through which causal consciousness views the vast field of knowledge, unknown to the monad, the window that has made it possible for Augoeides to help the monad.
18It is much more difficult to learn from experience than most people seem to think. Then most people learn very little, actually only that which is learnt by everybody and so has been made part of general rules of living. All such things as the individual cannot apprehend since they are beyond his own level, such things as seem absurd or improbable to him, such things as cannot be fitted into matters and contexts already known to him, all of this he will reject, as a rule without thinking that it may contain lessons to be learnt. It is certain that anyone who does not work upon his experiences draws very little benefit from them. Most people have had the same experiences in tens of thousands of incarnations and have “learnt nothing”.
7.16 The Activation of Causal Consciousness
1It is only at the stage of culture that the individual comes in contact with causal superconsciousness and the self can begin to activate the causal envelope, while not being able for that reason to become conscious yet in that envelope. That will be possible for some short minute on the higher cultural levels only.
2At the stage of culture, the higher emotionality (48:2 and 3; 48:3 to begin with and during a long series of incarnations). In that process it becomes possible for the individual to influence the causal envelope so that its passivity ceases. Until then, its activation has chiefly consisted in receiving influences from without or at the termination of the incarnation when the two causal portions are made to coalesce.
3If the individual at the cultural stage acquires esoteric knowledge as well, then even the higher mental consciousness (47:5) begins to make itself felt. That is why it is difficult to establish the stage of development of such individuals. Therefore, what has been said about the “mystics” concerns just those who are ignorant of esoterics and cultivate their emotionality only.
4As the causal envelope is activated, also the ennoblement of the individual begins, and an interaction between the vibrations in the emotional and causal envelopes becomes ever more noticeable. The emotional vibrations also supply the causal envelope with increasingly more causal molecules of the lowest kind (47:3). At the stage of humanity, 47:2 molecules are supplied.
5He begins to receive inspirations from the causal superconscious of the monad, hitherto only telepathic ones. At the emotional stage, man is his illusions. He has subjective consciousness in the whole emotional world, so that he thinks he is “united with the absolute”, etc.
6Having this sporadic contact with causal superconsciousness, the individual begins to be able to work by himself to attain higher molecular consciousnesses. The more energetically he concentrates on purposively redirecting his feeling and thinking, the less incarnations this will take.
7Everything that fills consciousness has its inevitable effect, even though in the individual cases this does not manifest itself at once. This ability to occupy consciousness with interests that entail concentration or sustained attention and counteract the scattering of consciousness is one of the secrets of successful results.
7.17 The Work of the Planetary Hierarchy
1The individual belongs to a clan, the group of monads he has accompanied through the lower natural kingdoms. When the individual has become causally conscious, he begins to take an interest in the members of his clan in order to form a group in the causal world. That is the group with which he will cooperate in the future. It may happen that the individuals belonging to it have not made as rapid a “career” as he has. He knows his people, however, and tries to help them. That is the explanation why a causal self is interested in certain individuals in a way that others cannot understand, and not in other individuals who perhaps are more advanced.
2As long as the members of the clan are found at lower stages, they may often hinder each other and refuse to acknowledge each other, just as the individual may be in the way of himself. Then they are victims of the form and attach more importance to the form than to the “soul” in the form. When they love the soul in the form, they begin to perceive what it means to love.
3To seek your group is to go on acquiring the quality of love. To seek your group is to seek the lowest unity. So doing you gain an understanding of unity and you mature for entering the world of unity.
4When the individual has removed the obstacles in himself to finding his group, then he will find it.
5The elite of mankind has now developed so far that individuals everywhere begin seeking their groups. Groups are being formed everywhere. When these groups have become sufficiently numerous, the planetary hierarchy can appear and take over the management of the affairs of our planet and to guide the further evolution of consciousness in visible shape as well.
6Our planet holds a special position, not just in our solar system but also in the greater globe comprising seven solar systems. Nowhere has such a mass of monads of repulsive basic tendency been gathered, nowhere has the tendency to selfish individual character been so intense. Nowhere has mank ind incurred such a bad reaping by bad sowing. Our planet is the star of sorrow in our cosmic globe.
7However, this has eventually its own compensation as well. When mankind has acquired common sense with a higher mental consciousness, has assimilated the knowledge of reality that always exists (in the world of ideas), evolution can progress with giant strides. For the qualities that the individuals have acquired with so much suffering are the more concentrated. They enable the individuals to develop a one-pointed purposiveness that makes it possible for them to reach ever higher levels relatively quickly.
8Thus the elite is mature for this immense experiment. They must be prepared, however, to face a frantic resistance also from those who ought to have a better understanding. Everything new that brings about changes of cherished ways of perception or living arouses opposition in which the old, well-tried weapons are put in: criticism, casting of suspicion, ridicule, scorn, etc., attempts at division, etc., persecution of all kinds.
9Many shall be called, but as usual only a few let themselves be chosen. Often it is the called ones who deliver the criticism. They just sit there twiddling their thumbs, are looking on and ask why it was not done otherwise. No one who lets himself be chosen a pioneer, however, will find any reason to regret that choice. It is a very old bad sowing that is paid off with such a good sowing. Those who know say this offer is without parallel heretofore and will not be renewed for a very long time.
10A group of members of the planetary hierarchy have made themselves available for service as supervisors of this particular experiment. New esoteric knowledge orders will be instituted for those who let themselves be chosen. In these new schools, the disciples will learn facts that are not suitable for others than those who approach the stage of ideality and who have prospects of acquiring intuition and understanding of causal ideas.
11If these new orders will become what is hoped for, this will prove to be of use to all mankind as the worst superstitions, illusions, and fictions are eliminated for the benefit of consciousness development.
12In the groups there will be no opportunity for group selfishness, but they will enhance the prospects of serving the cause of unity and mankind.
13The new groups will be given the task of cultivating group consciousness, so that the members of the hierarchy are relieved of their work with particular individuals and can treat the group as a unity. Of course no member of the group will have a dominant position, but all “gather at the round table”. Any kind of criticism within the group is of course completely out of the question. Those having critical tendencies are immature for this kind of group work.
14Service is no easy work. It takes time to learn that art, see what qualifications you have and what attitude you need. Service does not consist in preaching, doing charity, imitating Christ or other kinds of copying. Service is, first and foremost, to fulfil your duties, those you have assumed yourself or those destiny has imposed on you. That is more than sufficient where most people are concerned. If you wonder in what way you can serve more, you will find it if you want to. Some people prepare themselves for a calling in the future, acquiring qualities and abilities. True service is aspiration to unity.
15“Sacrifice” is to leave the lower for the higher before you know what compensation this higher holds in store. In that sense, evolution is a never-ending sacrifice. Anyone who has a knowledge of the law of sacrifice has no higher wish than to be able to sacrifice. This, too, can become an illusion, however, and in that case you will be cruelly disappointed. There are meaningless sacrifices, sacrifices for the sake of glory, sacrifices that you regret, sacrifices that are not in proportion to the true need, sacrifices that make it difficult to fulfil the meaning of life in that incarnation.
16Not all are ripe for the higher mentality, for causal consciousness or for essentiality, for transition to the fifth natural kingdom; not all belong in the vanguard of the spiritual conquerors. The angel of Paradise with the flaming sword protects the immature from entry into a kingdom replete with dangers and risks, too trying for all who are not ripe for giving up their toys in the physical, emotional, and mental worlds. As long as such things still are essentials, man is not ripe for “sacrifice”.
17Philosophical dualism sees a non-existent opposition between outer and inner, matter and spirit, matter and consciousness.
18Esoteric dualism is the same as the dualism between lower and higher, between the kingdom you belong to and the next higher kingdom, between what you actually are and what you potentially are and actually will become. For we would never reach the goal of life, if we were not divine in our inmost essence from the beginning. And that is what every monad, every atom is. That is the meaning of the saying, “thou art that”, in the yoga philosophy. But when the yo gi begins drivelling, “I am god”, he has misunderstood ancient symbols. It will be a long time before he can acquire consciousness in an envelope in the lowest divine kingdom.
7.18 The Knowledge of the Stages of Development
1Anyone who wants to help people seeks to do this on the levels where they stand. The different stages of development disregarded, all are equals as members of the same natural kingdom. It is not our business to care about the levels but to help if we are allowed to help and if they want to be helped and receive our help (which is not our help).
2The different stages of development facilitate assessment concerning the needs (emotional and mental) existing. All knowledge is abused. Antipathy makes people underestimate their fellow human beings, just as sympathy raises them up the gamut. We have not received a knowledge of levels in order to place ourselves and others higher or lower. We cannot know the individuals’ latent levels that they have never had an opportunity to reattain. If only the bad qualities have been developed, then we have a completely false picture of the individual.
3There are risks involved in giving people a knowledge of reality, for everything they can abuse will be abused without fail, and everything they cannot grasp will be distorted without fail, and in its state of distortion it will be an obstacle to future generations. This mass, soon unsurveyable, of idiologies wrought by the life-ignorant, of fictions manufactured by writers, are as many stones on the road that must be cleared away. And for each stone that is rolled aside several new ones are brought forward.
4Thus there is a great risk that the knowledge of the stages of mankind’s development will be abused by the individuals at the stage of civilization and give occasion to new disorientations, will be exploited by hatred for underestimations and by propaganda for overestimations.
5It is important, however, that those who are in a position to understand are liberated through this insight from a multitude of prejudice, superstition, and demands for equality. People must cease making comparisons and liberate themselves from their complexes of superiority and inferiority.
6Understanding of the stages of development must result in tolerance.
7Thus it must be firmly asserted that no member of the human kingdom is able to determine which stage of development an individual has attained. Nobody can determine what an individual has acquired in past incarnations and what thus exists latently in his subconscious, or whether these qualities and abilities remain inaccessible in a certain incarnation. They can be resuscitated rapidly enough. This warning, too, will of course be rejected out of hand, for mankind will never take warning. It has at least been clearly stated so that the responsibility is put on the abuser.
8Only those who have acquired causal sense (objective consciousness) and are able to study the previous incarnations of an individual can assess his level of development. However, an approximate understanding of the individual’s general stage of development can be obtained if you can ascertain what general understanding of life that individual possesses. Such an understanding is innate, is not acquired through learning (by studying what others have said), generally does not make itself felt until after the fifth age of life (35 years), when the brain has become mentally as vitalized as it was in the previous incarnation. Then you may present to the individual some mental systems, based on principles, to choose from. From his choice it will appear what he possesses in latent state and can immediately apprehend.
9Anyone who has some knowledge of the stages of development can spare himself countless historical (always unreliable) studies and countless personal experiences. When you know that there are concentration camps for political dissidents, you need no detailed descriptions. You know what the lack of legal rights means for the prisoner and what lawlessness means for his guards. Anyone who is able to call gruesome descriptions from such places lies is devoid of judgement (always based on his level of development, determined by experiences in past lives). The fact that an individual has attained the stage of humanity does not mean that all his judgements are part of that stage of development. There is a certain basis, however, and certain principles are unshakably firm, for instance the qualities of attraction (admiration, affection, sympathy), uprightness, understanding, tolerance, etc., and the desire to serve evolution.
The above text constitutes the essay Consciousness Development by Henry T. Laurency. The essay is part of the book Knowledge of Life Two by Henry T. Laurency, published in Swedish in 1987. Translation by Lars Adelskogh. Copyright © 2004 by the Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation.
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