3 ESOTERICS

3.1 Preface
Under the general heading Esoterics, facts and comments have been brought together that
have not found their proper places under any other heading.
2
The term hylozoics has been reserved for such facts and ideas as are part of the hylozoic
world view. Hylozoics is the knowledge of reality formulated in a mental system. Soon enough
even the term hylozoics will be idiotized. That seems a hard a saying, and sensitive minds react.
It would be better if they reacted against idiotization, stupidization, and deliberate distortion in
pretty combination.
1

3.2 INTRODUCTION
Among the so-called educated and even in the opinion of the learned, there is an amazing
ignorance about the esoteric knowledge of reality. In newspapers you may still meet with such
expressions as the supernatural. Is it impossible for people to grasp that there cannot exist
anything supernatural but that there exists an unknown, unexplored reality? The fact that
theologians, philosophers, and scientists consider it below their dignity to examine the reality
content of esoterics, proves that dogmatic thinking still prevails over the so-called critical reason
they boast about. Scandinavia, in particular, is that stronghold of science which deserves the
name of Sleepy Hollow.
2
However, the signs of the times portend that the age of dogmas is at an end. The new
generations are ever more skeptical to the heritage of belief given them.
3
When the esoteric knowledge of reality, which during millennia had been taught in secret
knowledge orders, was allowed to become exoteric in 1875, even the few facts that were
publicized in the beginning aroused a great interest in those seekers who had seen through the
absurdity of the ruling idiologies. An English enthusiast, editor-in-chief A. P. Sinnett, published
in quick succession two works, The Occult World in 1881 and Esoteric Buddhism in 1883, which
were both published in Swedish translation in 1887. The translator of The Occult World, Victor
Pfeiff, wrote a preface from which the following is quoted. It testifies that he possessed the
prerequisites of understanding the esoteric view revolutionizing all scientific thinking:
4
The seemingly impossible events or phenomena described here have of course provoked
scorn and mockery from ordinary thoughtless readers as well as from those narrow-minded
physicalists who do not recognize any other reality than the physical material one, nor any other
life than the one we live here on earth, and who in the matter of human psychology acknowledge
only the external aspect, mechanical molecular motion, viewing the spiritual aspect of things
(appearing in man as thought and will) only a quality of matter. They do not admit that spirit and
matter are equivalent realities, the inner and outer aspects of an eternal, personal, self-conscious
life, such as its appears in the course of development.
5
The present book, however, clarifies to the true scientists the necessity of a more profound
study of human psychology and of the forces which, once aroused into actuality, may prove to be
connected with forces of nature as yet not discovered by science. This book is an introduction to a
subsequent one by Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism, which presents a summary of that wisdomteaching, hidden from the public, which is at the bottom of the different religions. That teaching
has been handed down from the initiates of the ancient temple mysteries through secret societies
unto our times.
6
Of the teaching presented one may hold any opinion whatever; one thing is certain, namely,
that at the bottom of it there are profound spiritual truths and that its study will have a reconciling
effect during the present conflict between a one-sided materialism, unable to explain spiritual
1

phenomena, and an equally one-sided idealism, unable to explain material phenomena.

7
To Sinnetts second book A. F. kerberg wrote a preface from which the following
noteworthy comments are quoted:
8
The present work is a systematic presentation of the teaching of those initiated into the secret
wisdom of the Orient. The problems treated by it are the most important for mankind, the
problems of life itself, what man is, whence he has come, and whither he is going.
9
It has been known and acknowledged, doubted and denied that man is a free and selfresponsible creature. Experience testifies not just to mans freedom and power but also to his
unfreedom and impotence. The ordinary view either stops at this contradiction or removes it with
dogmatic and dictatorial statements, whereas the teaching of the initiates clarifies that human
freedom is a product of evolution, is a result that is obtained in the course of development. The
human self is yet far from its age of majority. The history of mankind presents just the preparatory
stages of it. The first step is the development of free-will. The next step is the union of that will
with the ultimate purpose of nature. Only when man realizes that no outer authority is the lord of
his destiny in spiritual respect but himself alone, will he be able to assume that position in nature
from which he will descry the amazing possibilities that are connected with his own future
evolution. The self will itself acquire that high estate in which it will become a creative principle
in nature.
10
The development of the human individual to that lofty goal coincides with the development
of mankind, which is explained in the doctrine of reincarnation. That human self, which develops
into consciousness in and through sense perceptions, and into self-activity through physical needs,
is (despite its apparent independence) only the envelope of a higher self, which at the present
stage of mankinds development manifests only sporadically in the expressions of hidden soullife.
11
Esoterics makes us perceive the dawn of a new day, the forebode of mankinds age of
majority.
12
Usually you hear from those who begin to study esoterics that it all seems so strange. What
do they expect? To read about things they already know? They have a knowledge of physical
reality. Does not the simplest reflection tell them that the knowledge of the superphysical must be
something totally different, that they must be prepared for the experience that this new and
unknown is something truly new and that this new may seem fantastic?
13
But how can you know that this new knowledge is correct? That is something you must make
sure of. There is just one way of doing it, and that is to learn to master the system, convince
yourself that it is non-contradictory and then use it as a basis of explanation. Is it correct in all
details? Is it common sense, logical, clear, comprehensible, incontrovertible? The proof that a
hypothesis is correct is that it explains in the simplest manner what was previously inexplicable. If
you find a hypothesis that proves to be tenable in under all circumstances, then common sense
says that it must be correct. There is no absurdity in hylozoics, nothing that must be taken on
faith, nothing that cannot be grasped, and it provides a perspective on existence like nothing else.
If there is something better, accept that instead.
14
Only those who have in previous lives acquired a knowledge of esoterics find it immediately
self-evident. Generally they are the ones that are the most disoriented in their new incarnation,
since no ruling idiologies correspond to the life-instinct of their latent knowledge. At school they
are uninterested because of the slow, discursive method, the tedious repetitions of things they
rapidly understand, the absence of perspectives on the material. Therefore they feel inferior to all
who are dead certain of what they believe they know. In many cases they also think they are
failures, since nobody is able to understand them but everybody thinks they are odd. They do
not understand themselves, since they have not had an opportunity to study the esoteric fact
system with their new brain. Because all new knowledge must be acquired anew in each new life,

whereas understanding is innate. Comprehension is the business of the new brain, understanding
is remembrance anew. On the other hand, it is a mistake to believe that you can reacquire your old
knowledge through deep meditation. Such people as think that this is so obvious that it need
not even be said have never learned to see the enormous difference between before and after.
Everybody can pretend to be wise after he has received knowledge. The comical feature of it is
that many then consider themselves superior to all the others, feel they are supermen and, as a
rule, also think the teacher is inferior to them, too pedantic.
15
Esoterics is not for those who seek knowledge just to gain clarity, but for those who want to
know more in order to serve better with insight and understanding. Rightly understood, esoterics
is the science of forces and energies and their right management. Everything else is just
propaedeutics (preparatory study), always combined with responsibility, an obvious condition that
seems inconceivable to the majority.
16
Esoterics is only for those who already possess the knowledge latently, who have seen the
insufficiency of the ruling idiologies, who despite everything have remained seekers, driven by an
instinct telling them that the truth (the knowledge of reality) must exist somewhere. Anyone
who is seeking will find it, for he is driven by subconscious certainty that what he is seeking must
exist. The esoterician is not motivated by fear of the unknown, by fear of a god that does not
measure up to what the humanists common sense and humanity requires. He accepts nothing
absurd.
17
Anyone who is in a position to compare the content of rationality and content of reality of the
various esoteric sects will also see which of the prevalent working hypotheses is the most
tenable.
18
The Buddha was asked whether one dared to doubt the ruling religious view, and he
answered that if god had given man his reason as lifes most precious gift, then god could not
possibly be angry if man used that gift.
19
Nobody becomes an esoterician without willing and daring, without the courage to stand
alone against all, without possessing emotional as well as mental courage.
20
The individual must develop so far as to be absolutely independent of other peoples opinions
in all respects. He must get to know reality, for that knowledge is the one rock bottom for his
uninterrupted future development. He must grasp the meaning and goal of life and try to arrange
his life as far as possible according to this insight. His ascension is done from a lower level, and it
is the energies of this lower level that make the ascension possible.
21
There is a limit to the possible development of the individual, and that limit is set either by
the age of his causal envelope or by the time of the monads sojourn in the human kingdom on
this or another planet, in this or another solar system. There is a law of normal development, of
the reformation of the individuals envelopes, for the exchange of atoms in the triads, of necessary
experiences of life, for requisite qualities and abilities in the different molecular kinds and in the
three aspects. Nature makes no leaps, and even though the processes can be accelerated, yet there
is a limit to the speed. The individuals who approach the higher stages: the stage of the mystic, the
stage of the saint, the stage of humanity, the causal stage, thus are old souls. Not anyone is ripe
to enter into an essential group with a common consciousness.
22
The composition of matter also undergoes a continuous change, you could say a
transformation, making higher kinds of consciousness and energy possible. Also this process
takes place according to cosmic laws. The result is that also the laggards with a relatively small
effort can reach the higher stages before the time is up for the total remoulding of a planet or a
solar system. It also works in the opposite manner so that the requirements are continually raised
for those who want to reach the fifth natural kingdom. Also this kingdom develops and thereby
the demands for transition into it are raised as well.
23
In the vegetable kingdom, the monad inhabiting a tree cannot change the form of the tree but

it is obliged to use the resources that the given form offers for its experiences. The same is true of
all kingdoms.
24
It seems that we should be prepared for surprises also as for statements by the planetary
hierarchy about the time of evolutionary epochs. New cosmic factors can to an unsuspected
degree accelerate changes in material structures and thereby speed up evolution. General physical
etheric and emotional objective consciousness for the human organism seems probable within the
new zodiacal epoch, and increasing percentages of mankind attain to the causal stage in the
current eon.
3.3 ESOTERIC HISTORY
In Lemuria as well as in Atlantis the state was the creation of the planetary hierarchy.
2
In Lemuria and Atlantis the higher priesthood possessed a knowledge of reality. That
knowledge was never a property of the masses, just of the priesthood. Even this was too much,
however. The lower priesthood made a revolution and succeeded so far that continents had to be
sunk. That is easily done. A small tilt at the earths axis and the apple-peel thin crust breaks.
3
Races and nations have, like the individual, their life periods. The total lifetime of a nation is
calculated at 30 000 years.
4
Just as our chronology should be based on astronomical zodiacal epochs (of some 2500 years)
in a continuous series, so the epochs of history should be divided on the same grounds. Those are
the only correct ones, even though historians do not succeed in discovering them, if they even
possess the qualifications to do so. They can be aided in this by the esoteric historian who starts
from the very zodiacal epochs.
5
To the esoterician who has access to the causal memory of our planet, so-called world history
is largely the imaginative construction of ignorance, in so far as it is not deliberate falsification
and distortion. The rewriting of history ordered by Stalin in Russia appears grotesque to modern
man but is in actual fact just a repetition of what has always been done. If he had succeeded in his
attempt, then a few thousand years hence his conception of history would have been accepted by
posterity as the true history.
6
Some critics have blamed Platon and Aristoteles for not objecting to slavery, and they have
thought that its abolition is the merit of Christianity. Actually, it is the merit of humanism.
7
The first Christians thought neither better nor worse of slavery than did the state and the legal
authorities in general, and they never thought of abolishing slavery for humanitarian or related
reasons not even in their own circle; on the religious plane, however, equality held sway, here
the slaves and their masters were brothers in Christ. (Harnack)
8
An orthodox socialist idealist, quoting the above, adds: The modern socialist view is, as
everyone knows, the direct opposite: on the worldly plane, social democracy demands equality for
all citizens, whereas it is fully aware (sic) that the talk about the equality of all on the intellectual
plane is a great falsehood. It will take quite a time before that insight is common property. But as
always the genius, in his sanguine idealism, thinks that everybody has as clear vision as himself.
1

ESOTERIC EDUCATION
3.4 Mistakes at the Publication of Esoterics
After 1875, esoteric facts have been publicized. But just very few of these facts have yet been
put into their right contexts. Loose facts are worthless and too few facts will easily be misleading.
2
It is very deplorable that this secret knowledge at its first appearance was given such an
abortive presentation. The whole thing was botched from the start. The meaning was to set up a
society that would proclaim and realize the law of the divinity and solidarity of all life, and that
the teaching was to be communicated in different degrees according to individual powers of
conception. And the result was a fiasco.
3
The various theosophical attempts at esoteric world view are incomplete to the extent of being
misleading (Sinnett and Judge), or all too one-sided (Leadbeater) to meet the demands of
intellectuals for an all-sided mental system. It is true that Blavatsky publicized a great number of
esoteric facts, but she did not bother to put them into comprehensible contexts. Her writings (Isis
Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine) are certainly gold-mines of facts, more resembling voluminous
encyclopaedias, but are largely inaccessible for those who have not acquired a system. Her
inability to find a terminology suitable for Western language usage makes it even more difficult to
study her writings.
4
Add to this the fact that this knowledge was of course in opposition to all ruling idiologies in
philosophy, science, and theology and, consequently, was frantically attacked by all those
fictionalists. Then you see what almost insurmountable obstacles the true knowledge still has to
overcome.
5
Sinnett, Judge, and Hartmann were taught by H.P.B. However, she never taught them to
distinguish between esoterics and yoga philosophy. The result was an irremediable confusion of
concepts which is clearly apparent in their writings. Only Leadbeater could formulate a truly
rational system on the basis of his own research. Regrettably, he thought himself able to settle
matters that only 45-selves are able to judge. That was the cause of the many mistakes he made as
to the origin of energies, etc. His system, however, is the foremost one in theosophy.
6
You undeniably get the impression that those who gave out the first esoteric facts and ideas
through Blavatsky totally overrated the perceptive powers of the intelligentsia of the time, not
being clear about the fact that new knowledge must be given in a (however simple) mental system
and not as loose ideas. Still the intelligentsia is too primitive to be able to put facts and ideas into
their right contexts (systems).
7
It must be admitted that theosophy had only itself to blame for falling into disrepute. The
knowledge offered to the seekers was given such a form that it all had a deterring effect. If the
author writes so that not even the learned understand what is intended, it is all rejected summarily.
The concepts used must be clearly defined. They must be part of Western language and scientific
mode of presentation. If you want to give knowledge to people, you must do it in such a manner
that they are able to comprehend it. Instead, there was a monstrous mixture of symbolic sayings
and unintelligible terminology with Sanskrit words already misunderstood. When, in addition,
even the writers did not grasp what they were speaking about, we may justly wonder that some
results were obtained at all.
8
It is pretty meaningless to describe the planetary chains (the seven-globe systems), since
understanding is not possible until the individual has acquired consciousness in higher worlds
with their greater number of dimensions. That is an item of knowledge belonging to the fifth
natural kingdom. In the fourth, it will just provide imaginative minds with materials for
misleading speculations. The first presentations of esoterics give an impression of helplessness
and planlessness. Much could have been left unsaid and much should have been said which
1

remained unsaid. You hardly wonder that the intelligentsia refused to study such vague teachings.
Not even Winston Churchill, who nevertheless was a former initiate, knew how to understand
Sinnetts Esoteric Buddhism.
9
We hope that future writers have learnt from these mistakes. The knowledge of reality can be
given a mathematically exact formulation and then should be given such a one. The principle
must be that only that is said which is allowed to be said and therefore can be expressed exactly.
The method of using incomprehensible statements is not part of scientific esoterics. So-called
blinds, for which H.P.B. had a predilection, are not allowed since they mislead.
10
We must react against Alice A. Baileys contemptuous remarks on theosophy, etc. Certainly,
the esoteric knowledge had been presented in a highly incomplete and unsatisfactory manner. But
it could not be better done with the few facts that the first writers were furnished with. Indeed, the
hierarchy encouraged those unlearned authors to do their best, which they did. Then blaming them
for not being able to do it better is unjust, not to say outrageous.
11
When the esoteric knowledge was allowed to become exoteric (in 1875), H.P.B. was ordered
to give out esoteric facts just little by little.
12
As a consequence of this method we have got a series of different teachings partially
contradicting each other.
13
The following table is intended to give a survey of this historical development.
14
The teaching of the Hindu Brahmins, popularized by Ramakrishna, reckons with three
worlds:
the physical world
the intermediate world, from which the soul is reborn to the physical world
(metempsychosis)
nirvana wherein the soul is united with the universal soul.
15
According to theosophy as presented by H.P.B., Sinnett, Judge, Hartmann, atomic worlds 45
49 were divided into seven worlds.
16
According to theosophy as presented by Annie Besant, Leadbeater, Steiner, there were worlds
4349.
17
According to esoterics (D.K.) there exist worlds 149. (Also theosophists got that idea after
1919, when D.K. started dictating articles to Alice A. Bailey.)
18
Through its secretary D.K. the planetary hierarchy during the years 19201950 gave out
certain facts in order to put and end, if possible, to the enormous mischief occultists have
practised with speculations, which are fancies from the emotional world. The planetary hierarchy
has categorically declared that it has no concern with anything in the emotional world. D.K. is the
only possibility of contact with the planetary hierarchy (KR 3.9.1) after 1920 and he has said
everything he intends to say before the year 2000.
19
There are live replicas in emotional matter of some members of the planetary hierarchy.
These individuals have as categorically declared that those live figures are downright
falsifications that do not correspond to the originals.
20
Letters have been published, purported to be written by masters. Also those occult
communications are forgeries.
21
The planetary hierarchy does what it can to develop reason and energetically to counteract
everything that furthers that occult gullibility which occultists promote, victims as they are of the
illusoriness of the emotional world. And this is true of clairvoyants of all sorts, also of raja yogis.
They quite simply have not a chance to guess right, being victims of impulses whose origin they
cannot determine or of phenomena in the emotional world which they are unable to judge rightly.
D.K. warns energetically against any experimentation with and meditation on centres in the
envelopes, such as occultists are busy with. The consequences will just be deplorable. (Se also KR
3.7, 6.3, 7.14, 7.15)

22

All serious seekers are encouraged to use their common sense, their highest sense, and the
power of critical judgement they have acquired through their own experience on their levels.
3.5 Esoterics and the Exoteric Must be Kept Apart
The serious error made by those who begin to study esoterics is that they do not distinguish
between what they have been taught exoterically and esoterically. They introduce esoteric facts
and ideas into their previous stock of ideas. This warning they have been given before, and several
times, but they forget it constantly, and so they mix up esoteric and exoteric concepts, with the
result that what they then think to be esoterics is abracadabra pure and simple. It cannot be
stressed too emphatically that anyone who begins to study esoterics must definitively refrain from
any attempt at mixing it with exoteric ideas and concepts. Esoterics has nothing in common with
exoteric views. It is a matter of two totally different mental spheres that in no point must touch
each other. The neophyte must step out of his old mental sphere and leave everything he has learnt
hitherto outside. He enters into a completely new sphere with totally new concepts and he must
carefully keep the two spheres apart. The least error in this respect results in superstition.
2
From this it also follows that it takes a great while before the neophyte has gathered so many
esoteric facts and ideas that he can start thinking right. It was a pedagogically correct principle
that Pythagoras did not allow beginners even to ask questions during the first two years of
preparatory teaching. For in order to be able to ask rationally you must know what you ask about,
what the matter is about. And it takes at least two years of study before the uninitiated has any
prospect of asking right.
3
Therefore the result is grotesque when an exoterist tries to judge the esoteric knowledge.
People are ready at once to give their opinions before they know what the matter is about. Modern
presumption starts to correct the teacher before it has read even one single book. This is evidence
that the modern education the young receive at school turns them into conceited fools who are
able to judge everything without further ado.
4
Very few people understand of themselves that they cannot comprehend without knowledge of
facts and that, where esoterics is concerned, it is a matter of thousands of facts previously
unknown to them. The esoteric knowledge is not acquired at once. New facts are combined with a
fictional system already acquired, and the necessary consequence is that the study implies a
continuous re-thinking until gradually all fictions have been discarded and thinking deals with
nothing but esoteric facts.
5
It is characteristic of the presumptuous conceit even in born esotericians who possess the
knowledge latently that they often imagine that they are able to judge all esoteric problems
because they believe themselves able to understand at once. It remains for them to learn to see that
their new brain must be supplied with all the mental molecules that existed in the former brain
before they have reacquired the power of judgement they once had. An esoteric teacher
experiences the same thing again and again, that the pupil very soon believes he is better able than
the teacher to judge the matter. The pupil starts from what he has already learnt and conceived in
his own way. And since his conception must be correct, the teacher has not fully grasped the
matter. It is the same phenomenon at all stages. They think they comprehend what they have been
taught and do not see that the learning has largely been mixed up with older conceptions and
become new fictions. Sometimes it happens that the pupil, years afterwards, realizes that the
teacher was right. But most often he forgets that he was ever mistaken. The acquisition of the new
knowledge would be enormously facilitated if the pupil could be brought to see that he must
postpone his work of reflection proper until he has learnt the new system mechanically quite apart
from his old one and without mixing up old and new.
1

3.6 D.K.
The present secretary of the planetary hierarchy, 45-self D.K., dictated during the years 1919
1949 to clairaudient Alice A. Bailey 18 esoteric works. The expert very soon sees that no human
intellect could have authored this.
2
D.K. is the foremost expert on the literature written by the Atlantean rishis, whose archaic
locutions he is especially fond of quoting. Most of what he writes is symbolical, even when it
appears comprehensible. There is a great risk that much of it will be wrongly conceived, despite
D.K.s recurrent warnings against misconceptions and his repeated statement that he writes only
for initiates. Probably, only causal selves are able to rightly understand his work. Certainly it
can serve to train intuition in 47:5-selves if they refrain from believing they understand the
meaning intended.
3
As an exoteric philosopher, D.K. is a pronounced Oriental who disregards the matter aspect of
reality wherever it can be done. Many of his tenets are undisguisedly subjectivistic. Obviously, he
did not observe that axiom of logic which says that one must not mix up the different conceptions
of reality there are in the different atomic worlds, must not, when it comes to clarifying physical,
emotional, and mental reality philosophically, start from the conception of reality there is in the
essential world. The result is an irremediable confusion of ideas. Occidental exoterists and
esotericians spend a great amount of toil in fixing the reality concepts once and for all. The result
achieved with so much toil must not be ruined with new illusion concepts.
4
Everything is illusion. Everything is consciousness. Everything is energy. There is no
time. There is no astral world. These and similar absolute sayings, which constantly recur,
must be misleading, to say the least of it.
5
If such expressions were sporadic, the absolutification they imply could be left out of
consideration. But when they constantly recur, are constantly repeated, the formulation certainly is
misleading.
6
One of the most curious formulations is the following, which recurs: There is naught but
energy for God is life. Logically it means that because god is life there is only energy and neither
matter nor consciousness. The intended meaning probably is that the entire cosmos is a dynamic
whole.
1

3.7 Difficulties in Esoteric Authorship

Esoteric literature is no easily accessible literature. Anyone who thinks the contrary is
mistaken. Esoteric authorship the effort of making esoterics comprehensible for exoterists is
always a difficult task.
2
Who should write books on esoterics? Masters of symbolism may have particular difficulties
in writing comprehensibly for discursive intellects. Higher selves possessing knowledge of all the
facts perhaps do not know how to compile them and present them in the most suitable manner.
Lower selves lack the knowledge of facts and, because of that, cannot present esoterics in the
best way, however skilful writers they are.
3
It is astonishing how even the most eminent esotericians are unable to find exact terms and
express themselves exactly. They use the causal language when writing for mentalists,
orientalisms for Westerners, subjectivisms for objectivists. It is about time they learnt how to
write comprehensibly. The only one able to do so was C. W. Leadbeater. A. P. Sinnett, too, would
have been able to, had he been given more facts.
4
Neither H. P. Blavatsky nor A. A. Bailey had the qualifications for treating esoterics
scientifically (methodically and systematically). One may ask whether this was a condition for
their work as amanuenses of the planetary hierarchy.
5
It is perhaps thought that those who have reached higher kingdoms and thereby incomparably
greater knowledge and insight, would be the most suitable teachers of mankind. It is not, however,
1

a matter of course that individuals of the fifth or sixth natural kingdom possess the best
qualifications for authorship.
6
On the contrary it has appeared that the distance is too great, that they find particular
difficulty in entering into general and individual illusoriness and fictitiousness and adapt their
presentation to these conditions. Even essential selves (46) are too far removed from the mental
selves possibility of understanding. What to 46-selves are evident realities only humanists
thousands of years hence will be able to grasp rightly, unless they have once been initiates of
esoteric knowledge orders and possess the insight latently.
7
The assertion you sometimes may hear from theosophists (wherever they have got it from)
that only causal selves can treat of esoteric problems comprehensibly is erroneous. On the
contrary, mental selves (47:4,5) should write for mentalists.
8
Of course causal selves are able by themselves to ascertain facts in the worlds of man, and
concerning superhuman facts they may consult members of the planetary hierarchy. However, it is
by no means a matter of course that causal selves understand the particular difficulties with which
the uninitiated (who moreover start from highly varying individual conditions) have to contend,
decide which facts should be included or excluded. The causal self knows but cannot
communicate his knowledge in a comprehensible manner unless he has been trained in concrete
thinking.
9
Thus causal selves do not as such suit to be writers. They have removed themselves too far
from human ways of looking at things. Some of them have lacked the ability of clear expression
or the sense of system. Paracelsus as well as Blavatsky proved unsuitable as teachers.
10
Only mental selves who have acquired a knowledge of the collected ideas of mankind and
received the training in logic requisite for methodical and systematic thinking are suited as
teachers of esoterics. And they can become such teachers, if they are given the necessary facts and
ideas. Professors should not write textbooks for children in the first form. That should be done by
educators who have experience of how children are taught to read. The analogy holds good all the
way up into the highest sphere of consciousness.
11
The problem of the mental selves is that they often lack the requisite facts. Probably, the
happiest solution would be a collaboration of the teacher and the giver of ideas. Then the mental
self can to an unlimited extent consult the causal self furnishing the facts, while the mental self
formulates the system. Moreover, the mental self should have the second as well as fifth
departments in his envelopes. And finally Westerners should write for the peoples of the West.
12
Sinnett, Leadbeater, and Laurency have shown how to treat of esoteric problems: simple
common sense with facts objectively presented, without symbols and various adornments.
Leadbeater could even as a causal self write in a manner that made him easily understood because
he learnt that skill before he became a causal self.
3.8 Causal Selves as Teachers
Causal selves are in an intermediate position between the planetary hierarchy and mankind.
They are practically perfect men in so far as they are able to explore the worlds of man on their
own. They understand human language and people on the different levels of development. They
are able to convey the ideas to men. And all of this because consciousness in the causal envelope
contains the true knowledge of the course of past events, the ideas that have dominated mankind
in the different epochs, and the ideas that remain to be acquired by mankind before it will possess
the knowledge of reality and life. At the same time causal selves are in touch with members of the
planetary hierarchy and are informed about the hierarchys plans for the next evolutionary phase.
2
In contrast, the essential self has had his old causal envelope with all its content of ideas
dissolved. Certainly the essential self is able to remember anew what he once knew as a causal
self. But this involves extra work, thus is no direct knowledge as it is for the causal self. The
1

essential self has entered into the worlds of the fifth natural kingdom, has the view on reality
belonging to this kingdom, and has thereby in some measure become estranged from mankinds
views.
3
From this it follows that causal selves find it easier to help human beings directly with their
problems, their mental problems in particular, easier to convey the knowledge in an educationally
suitable manner. This is what makes many causal selves voluntarily refrain from trying to become
essential selves. Such an attitude may justly be called one of sacrifice. Much pleasure cannot be
derived from incarnating in a mankind ignorant of life and finding it generally impervious to
common sense.
4
From what has been said above it follows that the higher kingdom an individual has attained,
the more difficult is it for him to be a suitable teacher of men before they have acquired at least
objective consciousness of the lowest material worlds and have learnt to think in accordance with
that reality, liberated themselves from their emotional illusions and mental fictions which make it
impossible to think right or to acquire what esotericians call common sense.
5
It is true that the conception of reality is different in the different worlds, but the pervading
analogy between the worlds makes it incomparably easier to understand the different conceptions
and, above all, to easier for those in higher worlds to communicate with those in lower worlds
when the latter have acquired knowledge of their own worlds and do not any more live in their
own imaginings about these.
6
The important thing for human beings thus is to become first selves and understand their own
worlds, reach the knowledge of reality concerning these worlds. That is the prerequisite of further
consciousness development. The fantasts in the occult sects, who begin to imagine about the
second selves view of reality and imagine they are second selves, live, they too, in a illusory
world of self-made fictions. Men must become perfected first selves before they can proceed any
further. They have still a very long way to go even to that goal.
3.9 Authority
There must be some authority because the individual who knows nothing must learn from one
who knows something. On the other hand, all cult of authority is to be rejected. Blind and
uncritical trust in authority is always wrong. The ignorant attack authority. Thereby they show that
they have not understood and that they do not know what they are speaking about. Cult of
authority and contempt for authority are equally primitive.
2
Anyone who possesses insight and understanding never cares about authority. It does not
matter who said it but whether it is factually correct or not.
3
The opinions of the great authorities (not to say the many lesser ones) concerning things that
none of them can know anything about (in the history of religions, for instance) appear almost
comical to an esoterician. When the public accept their guesswork, it turns tragicomic. Where
historical figures such as Buddha and Christos are concerned, the planetary hierarchy asserts
emphatically that everything said about them is part of the legend. Then historians of religion and
all other so called authorities may say what they like. Truth is one and single. And whenever there
are different opinions among the learned, then all are wrong.
4
There are three different kinds of contempt for authority. The first kind is that of the fool who
knows everything best. The second kind is the realization of the illusoriness and fictitiousness of
theology, philosophy, and science; contempt for authoritarian manners and authoritarian demands.
The third kind is the skeptics dogmatic contempt for everything that does not suit him in his
Nietzschean self-apotheosis.
5
The esoterician obtains knowledge of the limits to human understanding of reality and the
progress of the various idiologies towards those limits. Contempt is a word that does not occur in
his dictionary. That quality he has definitively discarded from his subconscious acquisition of
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qualities. 6The esoterician also knows that ignorance is due to the absence of authoritative
knowledge. We receive all our true knowledge from individuals in higher kingdoms. And this is
true of everybody in the six natural kingdoms of the solar system and in the five lower cosmic
divine kingdoms. All are disciples all the way up. Anyone who has ceased being a disciple has
ceased to learn and has concluded his consciousness development for that incarnation.
7
The esoterician is also informed that knowledge without application in real life is dead
knowledge and just implies increased responsibility in life. He receives the basic facts he needs to
understand existence and its laws. But the problems that he thanks to this knowledge is able to
solve he must solve by himself. For that is the only way of developing. Such solutions as we steal
from others do not help us but instead make it more difficult for us to solve future problems. Even
those in the fifth and sixth natural kingdoms have their problems to solve, as difficult for them as
our problems are for us. Only the problems we have solved ourselves we are able to solve at once
in our next life.
8
Theoretical learning (facts) we can communicate to others. The experience we can share with
others, however, is the one we have realized ourselves. Anyone who seeks to give what he is will
find that he begins to understand, that he is about to enter into the reality which the learning is
intended to familiarize us with.
9
The leaders in the esoteric groups are automatically those who have the best orientation in
esoterics. They give no orders, however, not even advice to others in the groups, and they do not
assert their own opinion. Their task is to supply facts and to help those who want information in
order to orient themselves better and form their own opinion. There are no dictators in higher
kingdoms. There are always those who know more and are better able, but they give no
instructions, just help those who desire clarity about how things are. The planetary ruler himself
governs through his supreme insight and ability to clarify his greater knowledge of the Law, and
he does not resort to the language of force.
3.10 Systems
The system puts facts in their right places, inserts facts into their right contexts, and indicates
that they have also ended up there. The system affords us clarity and enables us to comprehend.
Without a system facts end up in wrong contexts. The greatest teacher is the one who elaborates
the best, that is to say: the simplest system.
2
Facts are the building-blocks and the system is the house.
3
What more than anything else has hindered people from examining the tenability of esoterics
has been the absence of systems, real systems. Thinking esoterically is possible only when you
can proceed by deduction from universals to particulars. And you can do that only when the
correct system has been formulated.
4
Neither theosophists nor Rudolf Steiner nor the so-called Rosicrucians have been able to
formulate that system.
5
The precondition of a correct system also is that the concepts are formulated in close
agreement with the conception of reality possible for man, so that readers trained in philosophy
and science have the greatest possible clarity. That is the reason why the systems must be
reformulated according as research progresses and new reality concepts are added that facilitate
conception. However, the reality concepts formulated by Pythagoras should be in such agreement
with reality that they cannot be superseded by better ones. They probably match all demands until
mankind has acquired causal consciousness and is able to live in the world of ideas.
1

3.11 Esoteric Teaching Must Start from a System

The basic fault with all those premature teachers who at the stage of culture think themselves
competent to teach esoterics is that they lack that essential qualification: the realization that only
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when you have mastered the whole (the system) you are able to rightly understand and judge the
part (a separate fact), that the meaning of what is said is lost if you cannot insert it into its right
total context, that to put it philosophically the relative emerges clearly only when it has been
given its right place in the absolute.
2
Bostrm defined philosophy as the doctrine of the absolute and the explanation of the
relative from it. As applied to philosophy with its human limitation, his definition seems almost
ridiculous, but as a causal idea it is correct. The part has its true meaning only when seen in
relation to the whole. Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is the result of deduction.
Detached statements lose their meaning. Bostrm had several causal ideas, which he himself
misinterpreted, since he inserted them into wrong contexts, because he did not have the absolute
mental system.
3
Thus you should not be a teacher until you have mastered the system that you are about to
teach to the pupils. That is a viewpoint which has been all too little considered in theosophical
education. Certainly the teacher learns by teaching others, but if he does not have a clear system,
then neither the pupil can reach clarity. That is the reason why theosophical literature is
unsatisfactory and has rapidly become obsolete. Moreover, if the teacher possesses the system, he
stands on firm ground which affords his teaching an exactness that would else be lacking. Clarity
and exactness are what the mentalist must have. In contrast, what the emotionalist needs is
material for his imagination. By supplying such material you do not help philosophers and
scientists, intellectuals worldwide. The theosophical method may be right for esoteric
researchers who are also teachers. Using their method they ascertain facts. These facts end up in
their correct contexts or not depending on whether the researcher already has the system or not.
4
The purpose of theosophy was not to give mankind a finished system. Mankind was neither
ripe for that nor had a right to receive it. Theosophy was intended for initiates of old who
possessed the knowledge latently. In ancient times they had received the knowledge in secret
orders for several reasons. Because of their attitude to the planetary hierarchy they had not
betrayed it in Atlantis. Subsequently they did not deserve to be idiotized by the ruling idiologies.
In our times, however, mankind had so developed that intellectuals could start thinking
independently to an ever greater extent. And old initiates (the lite) would be put before harder
tasks: through isolated facts and stray hints as their only guides be forced to remember anew the
knowledge which they had received up to then and which they had once acquired themselves.
From then on it has been harder still, since the knowledge they must acquire in addition will be
the result of their own research and meditation. No more cramming or stuffing, no more mere idle
study, no more parrotry. The important thing is independent thinking, the acquisition of
perspective consciousness, system thinking, and finally intuition. You do not get that for nothing.
Aspirants shall no more live in their feeling or imagination but only in their mentality.
Emotionality has to sink down into the subconscious. The will shall no more be emotional but
mental, the energy be directed by mental motives. Human beings shall be directed to
consciousness development and so have quite other interests. That will put an end to the hyenalike interest in personalities and all manner of gossip displayed by newspapers and individuals. A
great thing!
3.12 The Insufficiency of Human Concepts
All esoteric works are to some extent deficient. This is due to the absence of many esoteric
facts as well as to the inability of writers and readers to grasp the teaching right.
2
To be able to conceive you must have concepts. That is the difficulty in presenting the esoteric
knowledge which mainly is concerned with realities for which concepts still are absent in thinking
and words in language. The presentation is in its chief features determined by the possibility there
is to connect, at least by analogy, to prevalent views, which almost entirely consist of fictions, and
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eventually introduce some few new concepts and discard some old ones, until in a long process
everything old has been weeded out. Otherwise it would be like speaking to the blind about
colour.
3
Such concepts as cause and effect, sowing and reaping are properly just symbols and not
very happy ones. The cause is never single, and sowing often fails. Starting from such a
conception the idea may eventually be refined into a concept that better agrees with reality.
4
Higher worlds are described with concepts taken from the worlds of man. What in these
higher worlds is absolutely new and unknown must remain incomprehensible until such facts are
obtained as make some sort of visionary sketch possible. Also in its present formulation the
presentation of esoterics is probably unintelligible to others than those who have through studies
assimilated facts to such an extent that visionary imagination can make the description graphic.
The corresponding is obtained in studying astronomy, if the student is unable to calculate the
orbits of planets, for instance. As you can talk about imagination in mathematics or astronomy,
you can also talk about imagination in esoterics.
5
Mankind has physical experience, and concepts (attached to words) are physical concepts.
Concepts that refer to reality beyond human objective experience, that are based on subjective
experiences (emotions and thoughts) are highly conventional concepts and remain so until it will
be possible to study the pertaining realities objectively, to study all three aspects of reality
scientifically and make them the objects of scientific experiments. Only causal selves possessing
causal sense (objective consciousness in causal matter) are able to do so. If you have grasped this
fact, you understand that all phenomena in the emotional world and the mental world largely
remain emotional illusions and mental fictions to physical man. Phenomena in still higher worlds,
which thus are beyond the experience of even subjective consciousness, must be
incomprehensible.
6
Those ignorant of life who begin to study esoterics and believe they are able to comprehend
everything, demand that this totally unknown reality be made conceivable, which is impossible.
For new realities a terminology must be constructed. Regrettably, those who have tried to make
comprehensible systems of the esoteric facts that little by little have been communicated by the
planetary hierarchy have used old misleading terms that have made esoteric study even more
difficult.
7
The only possibility to have a vision of higher worlds and kingdoms is to apply the method of
analogy and start from concepts already known (space, time, matter, motion, energy,
consciousness, law, development, unity, etc.). It is necessary to see that the experience we put into
these concepts can never correspond to the reality of higher worlds, and that is why all
speculations must be erroneous.
8
To the esoterician, the conventional concepts lose their significance more and more in as
much as he sees the fictitiousness of their content. They have lost their meaning. If you use the
same words (the vocabulary of a language is limited), you must try new definitions so that people
may see that you mean something else. That is a thing which esoteric writers have considered
all too little; a heedlessness that has caused unnecessary misunderstanding. The best solution
would be to introduce new words for new concepts and new realities. But then they raise an
outcry, calling it incomprehensible. Nowadays you hardly dare to use old, uncommon words and
expressions. Those who do not understand should not be content with their deficient vocabulary
but should procure a dictionary.
9
However, one cannot sufficiently warn people who start reading esoteric literature to believe
they always understand what is intended. The disciple is taught to consider the writers insight and
understanding. What a causal self, an essential self, a 45-self says can mean different things, even
if they use the same words. Rightly it has been said, therefore, that esoterics remains esoteric,
even though it is publicized and the symbols are elucidated.

13

10

Everything in the physical world is part of evolution. But there are seven parallel evolutions
and not all of them use triads for their evolution.
11
We have not received information about how mineral triads and vegetable triads are
distributed in nature, except for the fact that there is a triad in every tree. Presumably we are not
given such data because we do not need them. We get as many fact as we need in order to know
how the cosmos is composed and to have a conception of the processes of manifestation in broad
outline to get the necessary perspectives.
12
There are immensely many things which we cannot picture to ourselves (view plastically
with our objective sense as graphic objects) but which we must try to comprehend with our
subjective reason as well as that can be done. We cannot conceive of a primordial atom, not even
a 45-atom. Everything that is beyond possible human experience also is beyond our conceptual
world. Our prospects even to comprehend the fourth or fifth dimension are ridiculously small. We
must do what we can, but that is not much. One feels little, very little before the task of trying to
understand. The consciousness of a man relates to that of a 45-self as the consciousness of a plant
to that of a man. And for a 45-self there is the consciousness of 44 worlds left to be acquired, and
each higher world consciousness presents the same distance. We should try to comprehend such
realities by thinking mathematically.
13
It is meaningless to invent new names for higher worlds, higher kingdoms of which only
know that they exist. The only expedient nomenclature is the mathematical one. We cannot
comprehend how higher kingdoms perceive reality, their work at the processes of manifestation,
their methods for the facilitation of consciousness development in lower kingdoms. It is sufficient
information for us that matter, energy, consciousness are totally different from one world to
another. Using mathematical terms we at least know where the world in question belongs in the
totality. If that method had been used in the ancient knowledge orders, then there could not have
arisen such a total confusion about nirvana, which Indians delegated to some imaginary world
anywhere above the emotional world.
3.13 Paradoxes
Esoterics teems with paradoxes, which properly speaking imply logical contradiction. Such a
paradox is for instance: the various worlds are totally different and yet analogous. Paradoxes
clarify that we lack the facts necessary to comprehension. For life is logical once we have got the
facts. Without facts it appears illogical. Without facts it is paradoxical. Without facts it is a
mystery. Without facts it is incomprehensible. All these expressions have the same meaning.
2
Mystics (emotionalists) and causal selves use paradoxes. Mental selves prefer logical
consistency. To the great ones the paradox is very close to a kind of humour (which in the widest
sense means: a sense of proportion).
3
Many are confused by the apparent contradictions in the esoteric authors. According to some
of them the entire biological and psychological evolution has worked its way up gradually through
the various natural kingdoms. According to others, the civilizations and cultures that have been
produced cannot possibly be the products of a mankind descended from ape-man. Both views are
right and imply no contradiction. Culture is the work of individuals from the fifth natural kingdom
who have incarnated in order to help mankind. It stands to reason that the pertaining problems
still cause problems to scientists who deny the existence of superphysical kingdoms and worlds,
and that they are unable to solve these problems. They must give up most problems of human life
as insoluble. They do so rather than they examine esoterics, which provides quite sufficient
explanations.
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3.14 The Limits to Knowledge

To the esoterician there are in principle nothing absolutely unknowable. The degree of
unknowability indicates the level of development. Absolute knowledge, however, is attained only
at the highest cosmic stage of development.
2
Spencers unknowable logically implies a contradiction. One either knows or knows not.
Thus one cannot know whether there is anything unknowable. Another matter is that we are able
to fix the limits to exploration of reality once we have received authoritative information about
the ever higher atomic worlds and about the worlds in which the individual has succeeded in
acquiring his own material envelopes with their kinds of consciousness. The individual can by
himself acquire knowledge of the world his material envelope is part of but not of higher worlds.
His level of development indicates to what extent he has succeeded in realizing this possibility.
The proofs that esoterics accords with reality are logically incontrovertible and cannot be denied
by anyone who claims to possess common sense. There is nothing else that can be defended with
such incontrovertible proofs. One must be incurably idiotized by illusions and fictions not to see
that no theological, philosophical, scientific idiology contains anything that matches up to these
proofs in their tenability.
1

3.15 Self-Assertion Always Hinders Understanding

If one observes how students assimilate the esoteric knowledge one can distinguish two
strikingly opposite types, the subjective personal and the objective impersonal type. The
subjective type must conceive everything in his own way and therefore has to take a long
roundabout way to reach the exact conception of reality. The objective type studies the matter
such as it is independently of the selfs demand of seeing it as the self wants. Thus it appears also
in the case of objective reality that the individuals self-assertion always is a hindrance to true
understanding. The subjective type generally prefers to start from the consciousness aspect,
whereas the objective type finds it most natural to start from the matter and motion aspects. The
subjective type therefore is an extra burden to the teacher imparting the knowledge. He meets with
constant opposition from the part of the student, which often has the result that he must give up
his attempt at teaching him and must leave it to self-assertion to learn in its own way, a circuitous
path through many misconceptions. If in addition the subjective type is hyperintelligent and has
always been intellectually superior in his dealings with other people, then there is a risk that he
never reaches the objective conception in that incarnation but goes astray in a fiction system of his
own making. Well-known such types were Swedenborg, Rudolf Steiner, and Ramakrishna. If the
subjectivist in addition has emotional objective consciousness, which always confirms individual
misconceptions in the emotional world, then you may consider the case hopeless.
2
In esoterics the thesis applies saying that knowledge does not precede experience but is a
consequence of it. We learn by living, by making our own experiments in life. The knowledge we
have received before experience has quite another significance through experience. Neither does
knowledge impart the ability of realization. Man learns that by experience, by the endless number
of unsuccessful experiences. Life-ignorant man lets himself be cast down by failures, blames
himself, and loses his trust in life. The man experienced in life knows that mistakes are
unavoidable and that he learns the most by making mistakes. He acquires trust in self through his
failed attempts, for having made them he knows much more than before. Anyone who does not
dare to act for fear of failing often misses valuable opportunities of learning. Many people also
fear the criticism of others. Criticism (other peoples lack of understanding) must be taken into
account and be used to liberate oneself from the dependence on the opinions of others.
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3.16 Reminders About Esoteric Studies

Anyone who starts studying esoterics on his own is wise in not demanding to comprehend
what he reads at once, for this is impossible. The right method is to read the book through several
times attentively. Then you will find that you understand more at each new reading, until finally
everything has been clarified. You should allow some time to pass after each reading in order to
give the subconscious the time to do its work, which facilitates comprehension.
2
A serious reminder to esotericians: Do not try to do as exoterists do: conclude from effects to
causes, but try to obtain knowledge of those causes. That knowledge exists in the world of
Platonic ideas. Exoterists pursue the path of induction, esotericians that of deduction.
3
The most important knowledge to understand the meaning and goal of existence is the
knowledge of the three aspects and the consciousness development of the monads through the
natural kingdoms.
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DEGENERATED ESOTERICS
3.17 Degeneration of the term esoteric
As the term esoteric has become generally known, also the original meaning has been lost.
The meaning of course is ever more debased until it reaches the bottom level. The original and
true definition of esoterics is that knowledge of reality and life which was imparted to the initiates
of the secret knowledge orders instituted by the planetary hierarchy. Actually, not the hierarchy
itself but some member of it (a 46-self) instituted the order and formulated its teaching (approved
by the head of the second department), adapted to the general conceptions ruling at the time.
There is a risk that also the idea of planetary hierarchy is soon enough idiotized so that every
fool thinks he has got his brainwaves from that superhuman organization.
2
Esoterics has been allowed for publication to an ever greater extent. But still this concerns
only the most basic facts about the cosmos, worlds, matter, consciousness etc. As this knowledge
comes to the fore, everything that acute and profound philosophy has fantasized is relegated to the
archives of cast-off superstition. It is just a question of time (a century or so), however much the
conscious or unconscious enemies of truth in all camps try to delay that process. (Dogmatists are
and remain the enemies of truth.)
3
In our time, they have also started calling all the literature belonging to the stage of the mystic
(religious mysticism) esoteric, for instance Islamic sufism, popular works on vedanta and yoga,
Jewish Kabbala, Tibetan mysticism, all the various conceptions handed down through generations
among the medicine-men of various ethnic tribes, a diversified mixture that will probably become
even more diversified.
4
Mentally uncontrollable imagination has produced all manner of speculation in various
domains. This gets a greater market value if guilded with the special advertisement name of
esoteric, which is still salable.
5
The old terms mysticism and occultism, which bring about unclarity and
misunderstanding, as all traditional terms do, could better be replaced with emotionalism and
mentalism. It is desirable that neither term is used in literature treating of the superphysical.
That part of the planetary hierarchys knowledge which exists in the causal world and which does
not need to be kept secret anymore, should not be called occultism. It is not occult, or secret.
6
After the knowledge has been allowed for publication, the word occult (secret) is downright
false. In contrast, the term esoteric is still justified, since higher knowledge will always exist.
It does not need to be secret for it is inconceivable to consciousness of a lower kind.
7
Laurency has kept the term esoteric, partly because it clarifies the historical origin of the
teaching, partly in order to replace the abortive terms mysticism, occultism, theosophy (meaning
divine wisdom), anthroposophy (human wisdom), Rosicrucianism, etc. The knowledge
system of the hylozoician Pythagoras is not concerned with either divine or human wisdom but
with reality.
8
The esoteric knowledge of reality and life is the knowledge in possession of the fifth natural
kingdom, the planetary hierarchy. That knowledge will always remain incomprehensible to man.
The portion of their knowledge given to us is the representation of reality that man (the mental
self) is in a position to understand. It is thus adapted (popularized).
9
That is not all, however. If you have rightly understood what the very designation esoterics in
the inmost sense implies, then you see that everything is esoteric that is part of a higher level of
development than the individual has attained. That is an insight which democrats can never reach.
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3.18 Occultists
Since neither philosophy nor science will ever be able to ascertain that esoterics agrees with
reality, esoterics is not meant for those who have been able to content themselves with philosophy
and science. Esoterics is not for all but for those who have seen that such idiologies or views are
untenable. Not to see this is one of the many mistakes made by the theosophists and other closely
related societies. Another mistake they make is to consider their primitive mental systems (based
on too few esoteric facts) final. There will never exist a final system, since the number of facts is
unlimited. At the utmost, a fundamental system can be achieved, a system that can constitute the
very founding stone for future systems of ever vaster dimensions.
2
Esoterics is for those who have the prerequisites of understanding it. In the hands of others, it
will be distorted into false doctrines, as it has always been. All existing religions and sects of all
kinds are proofs of that. This cannot be said too often nor be inculcated sufficiently.
3
The fact that the esoteric knowledge has been made accessible to the public at large, to those
at the stage of civilization and not least to those at the stage of culture, has had deplorable
consequences. All who have read some esoteric literature believe they understand what they
hardly are able to comprehend. They make cocksure statements that just seem comical and think
they are able to judge things of which they actually know nothing. The result of this attitude is
particularly serious when these esoteric novices have the most primitive superphysical
experiences. Not having any idea of what is required for correct perception of things in world 48,
they believe they have acquired causal as well as essential consciousness. It is no use warning
these know-alls about the pertaining experiences, which they are absolutely unable to judge. They
receive everything as divine revelation and they say the warner just wants to inhibit their spiritual
development. For the teacher it only remains to leave these self-deluded people to live in their
illusions. To those who are not filled with their own importance it may be said that we are here in
the physical world in order to get to know it and not higher worlds, that we are here in order to
acquire the qualities and abilities that can be acquired in the physical world only, that all occult
experiences you have on your own without a direct physical contact with a teacher from the fifth
natural kingdom will most often be hindrances to self-realization, particularly to the acquisition of
common sense. Common sense is rarely met, also in the occult societies. In this connection, the
pen refuses to write esoteric.
4
They talk about theosophy or divine wisdom and anthroposophy or human wisdom and they
lack the qualifications for any kind of wisdom. It is more important to acquire common sense.
5
It is utterly meaningless to try to convince anyone that esoterics is true. You must realize this
yourself at the first acquaintance, experience the knowledge as a revelation that solves the
problems you have till then tried to solve in vain. Trying to convince people is not mere
meaningless but even harmful. For truth to an individual is what he is able to understand and must
never be a matter of belief. If he accepts truths that are above his level, then it will unfailingly
sooner or later be a setback the consequences of which may be disastrous. Only whatever the
individual has acquired by his own work has a firm foundation.
6
It is in this respect that the occult sects have made serious mistakes. Theosophists,
anthroposophists, and Rosicrucians are largely believers just as those who believe in religious
dogmas, even if their conviction is somewhat more mentally conditioned than it is in the religious
people who are solely emotionally determined. The fact that members of those occult sects are
believers is clear from their dependence on authority. They have not comprehended the esoteric
idea system, let alone understood it. Because those who understand also see that that reality and
existence must be like that and cannot be otherwise.
7
They have perhaps been brought to see that the teaching of reincarnation and the law of
sowing and reaping are sensible explanations. There goes the limit to their understanding. The rest
is a lesson they have learnt by rote not grasping the meaning and goal of existence. For this reason
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the teaching in the societies should be done in graded classes and remain esoteric until the
teachers have made sure that the pupils have fully understood what they have been taught.
8
The Catholic Church does not allow its faithful to study the Bible, and very rightly. For
nobody can understand it. It can just be misinterpreted, which it indeed has been with hundred of
Christian sects as a result, every one of them as little wise as any other.
9
Something similar we may see in esoterics when books are put into the hands of people who
lack the prerequisites of understanding them. That mistake will not be repeated in the new esoteric
knowledge orders that are in the making.
10
There are plenty of occultists who devour one esoteric book after the other instead of
studying thoroughly one single book. The result is superficiality, conceited enterprisingness, and
injudiciousness. All too many theosophists have read everything and understood nothing. It is
more important having assimilated the contents of one book than having read a hundred.
11
The great mistake occultists make is that they generalize everything they hear about in
esoterics, not understanding that everything is rather individual or unique, applies for a certain
time, for a certain group, for certain types, etc., or even for one single individual.
12
The history of occultism has already clarified that the perception and judgement of occultists
are not of a higher level than that of the average intellectual. This fact appears in their comments
on the esoteric facts that mankind has received. Their own opinions have been erroneous without
exception. That is partly due to the fact that they still use exoteric ways of looking at things. That
admixture is totally abortive. But above all their level appears in the fact that they have not learnt
to put off expressing an opinion until the planetary hierarchy formulates one for them. We may
certainly fantasize. It develops us. But that does not mean that we can guess right.
13
Esoterics is the only knowledge that can teach man to see what an idiot he is in life. When he
sees this, there is a hope that he is able to learn something sensible. Thereupon he will be able to
learn from the lessons that life must give him constantly anew. That he profits by them is
necessary if he will be wise, be able to rightly apply the knowledge of life. He will not learn that
from theory only.
3.19 Some Words of Warning
Hylozoics presents that skeleton framework, that basic system which cannot be ruined except
with a great amount of skill. What is said in addition is said with continuous warnings to the
immature: Do not venture into matters you cannot master! Do not imagine you understand things
that are beyond your qualifications. The history of philosophy is a two thousand years story of
how the most acute minds did not possess even that amount of self-criticism that they saw how
ridiculous it is to have faith in ones own judgement. Do not teach things the correctness of which
has not been confirmed to you! We have had enough of coxcomb prophets of all descriptions.
And they sow much bad sowing for the future. Leading people astray entails a responsibility that
none would take if he knew the consequences.
2
Moreover, esoterics must not be turned into a source of income for all manner of charlatans,
be they however ignorant of the fact that they are the tools of the black lodge, always ready to
idiotize or mislead.
3
The usual criticasters will of course scoff at such warnings, saying that esotericians try to
revive the medieval fear of hell, etc., in that reviewer style which is just too well-known. They are
mistaken. Esoterics and theology have nothing in common. The motives of satanists in all times
were to prevent mankinds consciousness development by every available means. How well they
have succeeded in our time is witnessed by all the modern idiologies, by modern culture
(literature, art, and music) and not least by the inhuman policies of Nazism and Bolshevism,
which have brought mankind to the edge of annihilation.
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TERMINOLOGY
3.20 Generals
The esoteric knowledge is true science. Therefore, it should be given a scientific formulation
in accord with solely scientific views, and it should be given a scientific terminology. To go on
using old, completely abortive symbolism is to directly counteract the purpose of spreading the
knowledge.
2
One has every reason for wondering why the different world, different envelopes, different
kinds of consciousness and energy cannot be given a scientific treatment, one freed from those
incomprehensible, unsuitable, and misleading names they received in the religious, mystic, occult,
Vedic literature of past ages. Why should we waste an enormous amount of energy on studying
symbolic names in all languages and in all kinds of literature? Why not put new wine in new
bottles? Everything can be given an enormously simple presentation.
3
As for presenting esoterics to mentalists (philosophers and scientists), it is important that you
use exact concepts only and do not presuppose causal intuition, which does not need such
concepts but manages with hints. That is a thing which Orientals apparently have difficulty in
understanding. Yoga philosophy is a very typical example. Its terms are explained by hints, and so
every yogi has his own idea of their meaning. Also from Indian philosophy in general it is
apparent that precise, clearly defined concepts are necessary if you wish your readers to gain
clarity and have an exact conception of reality. Hints are always cherished by mystics
(emotionalists) but impossible for mentalists (a category including not only those at the humanist
stage but civilizational individuals as well: the higher and the lower mental stage).
4
Lacking handy terms for new (hitherto unknown to man) realities, esoteric writers resort to
previously existing terms that have already been given their exact definition, and in so doing they
cause confusion of ideas. Thus for instance the terms involution and evolution have been used
also for cultural phenomena (universal wave motion up and down), the phase-out of a cultural
epoch and the shaping of new civilizational and cultural phenomena.
5
A confusion of ideas is also caused by the use of the term elemental about evolutionary beings
that have not yet acquired self-consciousness. According to the exact terminology, elementals
belong to involution, are made up of elemental matter formed by evolutionary beings. It is
deplorable that disciples who are to present facts from the planetary hierarchy have not learnt the
common names for the things they write about. All of it finally degenerates into a regular
confusion of terms as the different schools use current terms for quite different things. It is almost
shocking when a disciple (B.S.) of a 45-self calls the causal world the higher astral, to cite just
an instance. Is it too much to expect that writers have a basic orientation in the esoteric literature
and terminology?
6
You cannot understand or interpret esoteric literature or judge from the facts it presents until
you have acquired causal consciousness. Just as the religious concepts have caused a never-ending
confusion of concepts, so in the future the concepts and facts of occult literature will cause a
mental chaos. The signs are already at hand in the rubbish of theosophists, anthroposophists, and
Rosicrucians.
1

3.21 World-View and Life-View

The world view affords us a knowledge of reality and of the three aspects of reality.
2
The life view shows us that the meaning of life is consciousness development and how we can
develop.
3
All life views must start from some sort of world view. If the world view is untenable, the
whole of the life view is in the air. An esoterician has no difficulty in leading the life view back to
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its world view and determine its content of reality.

3.22 Subjective and Objective
The majority of philosophic terms have been coined by subjectivists. Those are subjectivists
who either deny that matter exists or assert, like Kant, that we cannot know anything about matter
or, like Hume, that we cannot know whether our perception of matter is correct.
2
In contrast to the subjectivists, esotericians declare that the knowledge of matter we have is
correct as far as it goes, but that the knowledge we can acquire in the visible physical world is
only one per cent of the content of matter; so composed is it.
3
Also the occultists are subjectivists if they have any idea at all of this problem. This is
partially due to the fact that they have borrowed their designations from philosophy with its
subjectivist terms. Their inability or unwillingness to find new words for new things is
remarkable. Some of them probably think that the new will not seem so strange if the familiar
terminology is used. If so, they underrate the risk of confusion of ideas. That risk is always great,
as experience has shown.
4
Some occultists call everything conscious subjective, it may then refer to any one of the three
aspects. Those who have borrowed terms from the Indian philosophy of illusion sometimes call
everything visible illusion and everything invisible subjective, independent of the aspects. All of it
is evidence of the usual confusion of ideas.
5
According to hylozoics, the conception by consciousness of everything in the consciousness
aspect is subjective and the exact conception by consciousness of everything in the matter and
motion aspects is objective.
1

3.23 Worlds
Every now and then you come across expressions like inner worlds or subjective worlds
in esoteric literature. The right term is higher worlds. Those are neither inner nor subjective
but quite as much outer and objective as the physical world. As seen by the highest or 49dimensional vision, all the 49 worlds make up one single world, the cosmic world or the cosmos.
2
According to the terminology elaborated by Alice A. Bailey in Arcane School, a distinction is
made between the individuals life in the three lowest atomic worlds (4749) and his life in higher
worlds, and mans life is called life in form. But also higher material kinds consist of atoms and
molecules, and even the atom is a form, the planets, the solar systems are forms. It should be
sufficient to give the mathematical designations of the various material worlds without using this
nebulous terminology, which introduces a number of perfectly useless new designations. The
more you can simplify it all, the more intelligible will it be for future generations. We need to rid
ourselves of all unnecessary burdens.
3
When you have once clearly indicated the kinds of matter, kinds of energy, and kinds of
consciousness of the various worlds, their atomic kinds and molecular kinds, it is subsequently
sufficient to use the mathematical designations without dragging around all the repetitious
periphrases, which must tire everybody unnecessarily and irritate the beginners. That is why it is
so important to have as few, simple, and exact definitions as possible. The unclear ones are not
made any clearer by being repeated.
1

3.24 Envelopes
The terms soul, spirit, spiritual, ego, monad, self, overself, personality, individuality, triad
lack an unambiguous meaning with most writers.
2
When speaking about soul some of them seem to refer to 47:1-3 or 46 or 4547 (the second
triad).
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The monad develops in and through envelopes from the lowest etheric envelope to cosmic
worlds. The monad acquires ever new envelopes in successively higher worlds. Step by step it
acquires self-consciousness in the ever higher molecular kinds of its envelope by learning to
activate consciousness in these. So doing it finally becomes the master of its envelope. Until then,
the monad is disoriented in the consciousness chaos of this envelope.
4
The old terms, always abused by ignorance, soul, spirit, god, etc. had reference to the
envelopes of the monad in higher worlds. Soul meant mans permanent causal envelope (47envelope); spirit, his future 45-envelope; god, the 43-envelope.
5
You cannot take someones life, destroy a life. Life is the monad, and it is unassailable in
all kingdoms. You can destroy the envelopes of the monad but not the life (monad) of the
envelope.
3.25 Different Kinds of Consciousness
In theosophical literature you often come across the expressions physical, psychic, and
spiritual consciousness. Many people do not see that in this juxtaposition, psychic refers to the
emotional and mental, and spiritual to the causal and essential. There is an amazing vagueness
prevalent in these matters because of the generally stereotyped mode of presentation in speech and
in writing.
2
The ancients called collective consciousness anima mundi = the world-soul, comprising all
individual souls (soul here meaning consciousness).
3
In esoteric writings there is much talk about the planetary logos. This refers to the collective
consciousness of Terra as well as those monads of the two cosmic divine kingdoms 2935 and
3642 who have voluntarily joined the Terran evolution.
4
Cosmic consciousness begins in world 42, thus does not exist within the solar system (43-49).
People who believe they possess cosmic consciousness are victims of emotional illusions. They
do not even possess consciousness within the words of man (47-49). To do so would require the
status of being a causal self. Those victims of illusion know nothing about the worlds of the
planetary hierarchy (43-46).
5
When in esoterics there is mention of continuity of consciousness this may refer to a
number of different things. Continuity of emotional consciousness implies that the individual has
acquired the ability to remember everything he has experienced in his emotional envelope during
the sleep of his organism with its etheric envelope. Continuity of causal consciousness implies
that the individual knows about his experiences in past incarnations (whenever he needs them).
Everything the monad has experienced is found in its subconsciousness. It can be aroused to
remembrance anew in the form of understanding. What the monad has experienced as a man is
found in the memory of the causal envelope. What the monad has experienced in the animal,
vegetable, and mineral kingdoms it can explore as an essential self. In order to study the monads
past on other planets in the solar system 45-consciousness is required. In order to go still further
back in time ever higher kinds of cosmic consciousness are required, starting from 42consciousness. When the monad has become a 1-self in the highest cosmic world (1), it is able to
study the coming into being of the its own cosmos. Everything the monad has experienced and
learnt in its three triads is unlosable and available quite easily to the self as a 43-self even after it
has dissolved its three triads.
1

3.26 Meditation
The public has picked up the word meditation. And at once religious prophets, mystifying
the subject-matter, start fabulating about the art of teaching the art of meditation. The meaning of
the word is the easiest conceivable one: the ability to think for yourself and to analyse a problem
(a mathematical one, for instance) yourself. The majority cannot think. They can think only as
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they have been taught to think. Their thinking is a memory thinking and belongs at the lowest
mental stage (47:7).
2
Like other esoteric terms, concentration, meditation, etc., means different things at different
stages of development, since other kinds of consciousness have other resources. Everyone uses his
capacities according to his own ability. Meditation means something quite different for a mental
self than for a causal self, an essential self, etc.
3.27 Spirit, Matter, Energy
The juxtaposition spiritmatter can be understood in several senses. In hylozoics, it means
that spirit is the unlosable consciousness of the atoms. Some esotericians call world 43 with its
three aspects spirit and world 49 matter, since the matter aspect has vanished to 43consciousness and the consciousness aspect has vanished to 49-consciousness. The vague
formulation (the absence of the three aspects) had the result that many people believed this meant
that matter was a coarser form of spirit and spirit a finer form of matter, that spirit and matter
were basically of the same nature, that it was an instance of some sort of sublimation,
transformation, of matter. This confusion of known (matter) and unknown (spirit as a symbol)
which the logician regards as absolutely forbidden and common sense, as deplorable is the cause
of the confusion of ideas so frequent in pupils of Blavatsky.
2
Some esotericians call matter in lower worlds matter and that in higher worlds, substance,
which, however, is just another word for matter. Likewise, they call energy in higher worlds
energy and energy in lower worlds, force.
1

3.28 Space and Time

Strangely enough, there are still esoteric writers who use the terms matter and space and
time only in reference to the physical world and express themselves as though everything
superphysical were beyond space and time, which is impossible.
2
Matter, space and time exist in all manifestation (all the cosmic atomic worlds), although they
are of different and not quite comparable kinds and are perceived in quite a different manner in
each particular world. Of this fact, that they are perceived differently, they have made an
untenable construction, which must entail confusion of ideas. Fundamentals must not be
reconstructed. The term materialism should be changed for physicalism, since otherwise you
easily get the impression that only the physical world should be thought of as material. The
misleading expression beyond space and time should be replaced with beyond physical space
and physical time. It always turns out that terms that have not been given their exact definitions
will sooner or later cause confusion of ideas.
3
You can understand why those authors from the fifth natural kingdom use such expressions,
because there is no conception of space and time in the emotional and mental worlds. It is in the
very nature of the matter that you cannot use the methods of the physical world to measure the
passing of time in worlds 48 and 47, but this does not mean that there is no duration in those
worlds. The fact that in worlds 4643 time is measured by centuries, millennia, eons, time
periods, or cycles of any kind means that there is time or duration. If a 45-self would visit Sirius,
he certainly would experience space as well as time on his journey. Even in higher kingdoms rules
the law of relativity, and so no such concepts should be made absolute. Alice A. Baileys assertion
that time is merely the apprehension of the human brain is subjective, illogical, and misleading.
1

3.29 The Eternal Present

The abortive concepts also include eternal present, which is used by many. It belongs to the
concept of time, which has never been given its rational definition.
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There is no time in the usual philosophical sense. However, there is duration. Time is only a
manner of measuring motion (the processes of nature or of manifestation), and this is why time
has been divided into countless segments from millionths of seconds to eons (billions of years)
whenever there has been a need for determining the duration of a process. For practical reasons it
is handy to keep the division into past, present, and future.
3
Eternal present is another way of expressing the absence of time when measurement is not
necessary.
4
Esoterically, eternal present implies that both the past and the future live in the present. It is
devoid of meaning, however, if you are incapable of ascertaining the past as though it were
present and survey the future so far as it is determined by past causes.
5
Time exists and is absolute, whatever is said about it. Time exists where manifestation exists
and thus processes of manifestations are going on for time is the gauge of processes. Only
primordial matter is without space and time. In man, the brain is the only organ capable of
recording time. Neither emotional nor mental organs are able to do so. Planetary time is measured
by the movements of the planets and the solar system and cannot be ascertained in those worlds of
human rest. Perhaps the seemingly endless chatter about time may be considered finished by this.
3.30 Death
It is typical of the misleading terms of life ignorance to call the release from (and subsequent
dissolution of) an envelope death. Regrettably, such terms have largely been preserved in
occultism. The esoterician regards it as one of his tasks to liberate mankind from such a barbarous
terminology.
2
Many people seem to love the word death, although there is no death. The primordial atomthe monad-the individual-the self is immortal. And everything consists of primordial atoms. What
happens is that matter dissolves (and subsequently re-forms). What people call death is the
passing of the monad to higher envelopes in higher worlds. Where man is concerned, there are
three deaths: the passing from the organism to the emotional envelope, to the mental envelope,
and to the causal envelope.
3
Out of predilection for the word death that term has been used about the elimination of the
long series of world views and life views according as people have acquired a greater knowledge
of reality and life. In that respect, even the word annihilation has come to be used; it is,
however, unsuitable as well. Most views, belonging on different levels, still live on and also enter
into that history of knowledge where everybody may pick whatever corresponds to his selfacquired experience and understanding of life.
4
If you want a suitable and more international term for this process (death), then elimination
probably is more apposite. You eliminate your lower envelopes when they have accomplished
their service. You eliminate a view when you have found a better one.
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THE ESOTERICIAN
3.31 Esotericians of various kinds
You are not an esoterician merely because you are a member of a society (theosophical,
anthroposophical, Rosicrucian). The level of the societies is very low. Except the fact that they
possess a few facts (rebirth, law of reaping, some higher worlds and envelopes) they are found on
the average level as those in the religious sects, at the transition from the stage of civilization to
the stage of culture (48:448:3).
2
People think they are esotericians whenever they have studied esoteric writers and have
accepted their teachings as a matter of belief. To call himself an esoterician, however, the
individual must be able, not only to lecture on the hylozoic system but also see that its esoteric
facts are correct. For the esoterician there is only one authority his own common sense. Anyone
who talks about other authorities has not understood that matter.
3
You do not become an esoterician merely by learning the hylozoic mental system but by
mastering it, and very few people have done so actually only highly intellectual people who
have devoted their lives to it as their only true task. You master it so that you can yourself explain,
in a simple, unitary, and rational manner, whatever in default of this knowledge has remained
inexplicable and a mere matter of belief. You must in this way be able to prove its accordance
with reality and become independent of who said it.
4
Only anyone who has entered into esoterics and mastered the esoteric mental system can
experience the incomparable clarity, survey, understanding of the phenomena of life afforded by
that system. It activates his mental consciousness as no other system can do, due to the fact that
his own mental vibrations harmonize with the vibrations of mental reality. The greater the
accordance, the stronger the effect. Too many esoteric students are content to comprehend the
system and think about it at particular occasions. That is not how it becomes a living power or the
benefit it could become.
5
The esoterician (if you by that mean anyone who has acquired the hylozoic correct conception
of reality) need not at all be intuitive. Mental systems belong to the mental stage. Intuition is
obtained only when the individual has acquired consciousness in the knowledge or unity centre of
the causal envelope by which a contact with the second triad consciousness becomes possible.
Even with the Sokratean realization (that man, despite everything, is an idiot), the individual
finds it very easy to overrate his own capacity. Intense desire to reach higher easily becomes a
source of many kinds of self-deception. You all too easily believe you are greater than you really
are.
6
There are many categories of people interested in esoterics. Those of the most elementary
category have acquired understanding of the concepts of rebirth and the law of sowing and
reaping. Next in succession are those who see that the visible world cannot be all that is but
accept as a hypothesis the facts of esoterics about higher kinds of matter and material worlds. And
among these esotericians you can discern a number of degrees, like different grades in school.
7
Two kinds of esoteric students can be differentiated: those who have the knowledge latently
(here, too, there are several degrees) and those who have acquired the knowledge by a thorough
study of the pertaining facts. Those who have the knowledge latently find it immediately evident.
They have previously acquired this knowledge just as far as they find what they learn evident, but
not further. There goes the limit to their old learning and from there they must resume their study.
It is not uncommon to meet esotericians who have been in the first grade but imagine they have
taken the tenth degree.
8
Those who in past centuries were members of esoteric knowledge orders have this knowledge
latently (generally limited to a knowledge of the five worlds of man, mans higher envelopes,
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reincarnation, and the law of reaping) and have thereby acquired an esoteric instinct. Even if in
new incarnations they may accept other hypothesis systems, this remains temporary, until they
again catch the old knowledge system, and in any case their belief is always subject to strong
doubt.
9
Only anyone who has the esoteric knowledge latently at once sees its validity. The others
must, in order to independently assess its reality content, have so entered into the knowledge that
they can draw conclusions from the system and these prove to agree with reality. Prior to that they
have not mastered the system and until then their opinions about it are without significance.
10
If you do not have the esoteric knowledge latently, if you have never before been acquainted
with it, you will not understand it. But you can easily learn to comprehend it and then instinctively
feel that there is something to it. If this instinct is sufficiently strong, you go on researching
until you are able to explain for yourself realities that were previously inexplicable. This happens
ever more often and finally your are convinced that it is correct.
3.32 Latent Esotericians
It is true that (apart from the effect of the law of destiny and the law of reaping) the instinct of
life makes itself felt even at seven years of age, but to what extent this happens depends on the
environment and its emotional and mental atmosphere. (It is high time that the expression
spiritual atmosphere were eliminated. Spirituality belongs in the sixth natural kingdom and
not in the fourth.)
2
If the esoterician in a new incarnation has no opportunity to re-establish his contact with his
subconscious esoteric knowledge, so that he can remember it anew, the knowledge remains latent.
And this will be a very trying incarnation characterized by constant uncertainty and insecurity
with a sense of estrangement. Of course he will be judged by the environment, always without
understanding, as poorly gifted and on the whole unfit for life. If he is born into an environment
belonging to the stage of the mystic, his situation will not be much better, since his subconscious
instinct tells him that the idiologies of this stage do not agree with reality. It is true that he finds
the emotional atmosphere to be the right one and to be preferred to the family atmosphere of the
stage of civilization, but often he is put off by the lack of common sense. The excesses of
emotional imagination in those who are not capable of mental control are often trying.
3
Often the latent esoterician feels more lost and disoriented in life than other people. Those
other people are disoriented, it is true, but they do not feel that way, because they find support in
the idiology they embrace. That recourse is not available to the esoterician and because of that
there is a risk that he makes big mistakes. With amazement he observes the behaviour of other
people and wonders what is wrong with himself, since he thinks that others behave so absurdly.
Others consider him an eccentric, and he resigns, putting up with the belief that he is even more
absurd than the others.
4
If, later in life, he has an opportunity to remember anew the old knowledge he has lost and
instinctively have been missing, to be an esoterician again and begins examining the reality
content of the conceptions he held in years past, then there is a risk that his view of his
environment becomes too negative. Reaching the insight that you have largely made nothing but
mistakes, however you have thought, felt, and acted and whatever you have said, that you have
always been misunderstood, wrongly judged, and underrated, then this may re-act on his balance.
He is greatly helped to regain his balance by his knowledge of the levels of development, the fact
that all development of consciousness implies a never-ending, continuous series of ever higher
levels for all individuals from the mineral kingdom to the highest divine kingdom. His experience
helps him to see how easily you misjudge other peoples levels of development, since you can
never determine what exists in other peoples subconscious. It is true that this usually appears in
the understanding of life other people show, but the ruling idiologies also can have the effect that
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the true understanding of life will never assert itself.

5
A 45-self points out that a perfectly balanced human being cannot exist but would be an
anomalous phenomenon. The lack of balance is due to the fact that centres are over- or
underdeveloped and that the capacity of the human brain does not yet match that of the etheric
envelope. Man has for more than twelve thousand years idiotized his mental faculty, been content
with parrotry, and neglected mental self-activity, not dared to think for himself out of fear of
theologians and the masses under their rule, not dared to think by himself on account of the
theologians mental taboos and dominating fictions of a vindictive god that condemns everybody
to an everlasting hell. Only theologians knew the will of god, knew what god sanctioned and
condemned. And such mad ideas dominate the majority of mankind this very day.
6
Those esotericians who decide to incarnate in our time make a great sacrifice merely by doing
so. For what awaits them? From the beginning they become idiotized by parents, brothers and
sisters, friends. In school they are crammed with the ruling illusions and fictions. The esoteric
literature, which could rouse their latent knowledge into life, is largely unknown and so
practically unavailable. It appears to be pure chance, if they would in any way have an
opportunity to familiarize themselves with it. They walk through life as eccentrics, finding
everything meaningless, not to say senseless. If they, at long last, acquire the knowledge, they are
abandoned by their associates who consider them nutty. How would they be able to help when
no one desires such help?
7
The esoterician must feel compassion for young people who in their idealism and enthusiasm
want to make a contribution and help people. They plunge headlong into science to discover,
when they have completed their education, that they have been chasing a chimaera. Science with a
capital S proved to be an immense mass of learning which is of little avail to them when they
want to help others. Many have a shock which they never get over. Many resign with the phrase,
As science now stands. They have learnt a profession. They must put a good face on it and
keep up the appearances of expert knowledge. Most of them do not even discover how little they
understand of reality, never realize the enormous limitation of science. Extremely few reach the
Sokratean realization. They are content to be narrow specialists.
8
The more the esoteric world view (hylozoics) becomes a generally accepted working
hypothesis and the esoteric life view (the knowledge of the laws of life) is seen to be the most
rational one, the easier will it be for the esoterician in future incarnations with ever increasing
prospects of having the right attitude to life even in childhood and be spared that mental
uncertainty and insecurity with those crises of consciousness that normally mark his seeking after
the lost knowledge.
3.33 The Esotericians Situation in Life
Anyone who in developmental respect is ahead of his times cannot expect to be accepted by
his contemporaries. Even if he is silent about things which other people cannot understand, they
must become aware of the fact that this person is odd in a strange way, since there are so much
in other people that he cannot appreciate, if he does not give up himself and compromises
about his conviction to please other people.
2
The would-be esoterician is informed that he must be prepared for loneliness, since he cannot
be understood by others. That is no voluntary loneliness due to some exclusiveness. The
esoterician is never exclusive but always inclusive in his attitude to human beings. He counts
nothing human alien to him, which not at all means that everything is equally good, that there
are no differences in level. The fact that you love people does not mean that you share their views,
share their ways of life, share their tastes.
3
An esoterician is a first self with the second selfs view of existence. And that is always a
difficult situation, since to the esotericians common sense physical life today appears as one big
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asylum or as a hell. Perhaps a matter of taste whichever expression you prefer.

4
The esoterician is born with envelopes of incarnation of the kinds he left behind in his
previous life. After his latent knowledge has been roused to a new life through his contact with
esoterics, he is able to ennoble his envelopes in seven years through diet, emotional striving after
unity, controlling his thoughts. As a rule this brings about conflicts with his environment. If the
people around him have not reached the same level, loneliness is the necessary consequence.
According as he runs through the developmental stages of the various ages, he changes into
another human being, having other interests, new associates, new ideals. He does not grieve for
the loss of friends he must leave, for he knows that he will find them again some time. He must
leave everything that in any way conflicts with his further development, obstructs his assimilation
of a continually changing view of life with new valuations.
5
The esoterician is independent of the opinions of the day, of all the thousands of unessential
diversions offered by the present day amusement industry, feels no need of squandering the
energies of his attention on the propaganda of life ignorance that falsifies reality in almost all
respects of life. He leads a quiet life in his own world, undisturbed by the noise and din of the
world. How a rest that is for all his envelopes and his tired nerves. The lives of exoterists are
immensely complicated. That of the esoterician is immensely simple.
6
There are reasons for warning esotericians lest they yield to unnecessary irritation. Certainly
they cannot become full of self-importance. They have too much common sense for that, are too
much aware of their enormous life ignorance and how much remains for them to conquer (46
ever higher atomic worlds) before they have reached the goal. But the deep gulf separating the
esoterician from the exoterists makes itself felt every now and then. The difficulty of saying some
words of sense to help others catch a glimpse of reality, the difficulty of adapting to the many
twisted and perverted things, the difficulty of setting the time right, the difficulty of avoiding
being misunderstood in most things you say and do, everything conspires to paralysing the joy of
doing and the spirit of self-sacrifice.
7
Even individuals at the stage of humanity, who incarnate in order to develop further, as
children become disoriented through being fed with the ruling idiologies and can begin to liberate
themselves from them only after the age of 35. Until then they have felt instinctively insecure and
uncertain, since their instinct has told them that it cannot be as the learned say. Often others as
well as themselves look upon them as failures, until they possibly recover the knowledge of
reality. It should be to their interest to avoid this immense waste of incarnations as far as possible
by working for the spread of the knowledge, so that in their next lives they have a prospect of
receiving the right conception of life even as children and be able to quickly reach their old levels.
3.34 The Esotericians Own Development
The monad is dependent on its envelopes, is a slave to them, until it can control their content.
2
The mental envelope has its ideas, impressed during childhood and adolescence, imbibed
through studies of the ruling idiologies (historically conditioned).
3
The emotional envelope has its tendencies, often warped through a perverse upbringing and
life-ignorant company.
4
The individual must set about working with all this, completely breaking with it when
studying esoterics, which affords him totally new concepts in all respects. It should be quite clear
that this work of radical transformation cannot be accomplished at lower stages. The individual
must at least have realized that all exoteric idiologies are untenable. And how many people have
done that?
5
The many different kinds of atoms in the molecules and of molecules in the envelopes all have
their own kinds of consciousness (passive and more or less easily activated from without, from
the subconscious of the triad and the undeveloped monad the self). It is these kinds of
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consciousness that the self the individual must learn to control. As an esoterician he understands
the function of these different kinds of consciousness at the different stages of development but
also their obstructive burden to the individual who has reached the stage of humanity and strives
to reach the stage of ideality. As a causal self he can in a sovereign manner control them in his
evolutionary work, in his happiness of service. As an essential self he is definitively free from the
dependence on lower worlds (4749), and the envelopes he forms himself in these worlds are
completely automatized robots obeying his slightest hint. All of this is his own work done through
the abilities and qualities he has acquired in the physical, causal, and essential worlds. He regards
the emotional and mental abilities rather as by-products.
6
D.K. calls emotional consciousness the soul of form. That is an expressive definition
clarifying the power of emotionality over physical man. Anyone who has mastered emotionality
and liberated himself definitively from all kinds of illusions has accomplished his worst work. By
means of esoterics it is then relatively easy to liberate oneself from the power of mental fictions.
Perspective consciousness raises the individual up into a mental sphere where principles no longer
are obstacles but allow themselves to be fit into a greater context with constantly widening
horizons, until the intuition fits the systems into reality. Anyone who has experienced an intuition
is then able to concretize it in a series of mental systems that agree with reality.
7
Esoterics is the fundamental knowledge of existence as it is conceived by a causal self. The
esoterician tries by means of this knowledge to understand grounds and causes of circumstances
and events, both individually and generally. He thus tries to enter into the life of a causal self, tries
to see how a causal self looks upon that which is and happens, and to act accordingly. So doing he
eventually comes into contact with his Augoeides. This continuous attempt at living as if you
were a causal self is a psychological method of great value. But of course it requires common
sense, simplicity, naturalness and, above all, freedom from being overstrung or self-important.
You quite simply are such as man should be and such as he some time will be, without any trace
of saintly manners or a Messiah complex, those too common pathological phenomena.
8
Just as the ancient Greeks he [Goethe] thought that man could by his own power rise to some
kind of divine level of life. That is a proposition which needs to be commented upon, since all
esoteric concepts have been misinterpreted. The ancient Greeks were initiates and knew what
they were speaking about. What they said has been misapprehended, as usual. By his own
power means the assimilation of higher kinds of energies (still unknown to mankind). Rise to
some kind of divine level of life means the acquisition of the consciousness of intuition, causal
and essential consciousness. Anyone can do so who has been taught the right method. According
to an esoteric saying, it is not god that attracts man, but man that attracts god. But how could
esoterically ignorant people grasp such things? And finally: man is not any man whatsoever.
The different stages of development imply distances of tens of thousands of incarnations of work
for self-realization. The democratic concept of man has no counterpart in real life. It is a
caricature, since such a man has never existed and will never exist. Democracy has not the
knowledge of reality and life and is a grotesque political fiction.
3.35 The Esotericians Independence of Illusions and Fictions
Sometimes you hear occultists expressing the wish that they could study their past
incarnations. They should be grateful for being spared experiencing them again. They are
generally of such a kind that, when the individual has acquired causal consciousness, he is
grateful for not having to look back on his idiocy and bestiality. The esoterician takes no interest
in his past incarnations. They teach him nothing that he does not know before in the matter of law
of reaping and law of destiny. Such a study is a kind of curiosity about his own and other peoples
lives, a curiosity that he has learnt to regard as a violation of the sanctity of private life. As to both
present and past lives he has been taught to never look back. He lives in the present and in unity.
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Only so doing can he solve the problems of the present, for each moment has its own problems,
which he must learn to discover and solve. In any case there are so many unsolved problems on
hand that could be brought out and scrutinized that he will never be without occupation. There are
so many thoughts to be constantly emitted into the mental world; so many thought-forms that
need to be reinforced so as to become easily available to seekers, beacons with light energies for
sailors in the dark night who are seeking a haven.
2
The esoterician takes no interest in the so-called magical phenomena. He has a theoretical
knowledge of their reality and this is sufficient. He is not interested in childish matters. His
interests are wholly in learning the facts of the three aspects of reality, the evolution of the
monads through the natural kingdoms, and the Law the infallible application of which is the
condition of everything.
3
Perhaps it need not be said that the esoterician has already assimilated what he has been able
to learn in the instructions for a perfect life or similar writings by exoterists and mystics. The
esoterician thus is dealing with other concepts than those occurring in philosophical ethics or the
conceptual world of mystics or yogis. He starts from another world view, the one that agrees with
reality.
4
A mentalist, a mental self, without a knowledge of reality may be better adapted to physical
reality, more successful in domains of societal activity. That mental self, however, who in
addition is an esoterician, is incomparably superior in understanding of life and assessment of
people. He does not easily fall a victim to the illusoriness and fictitiousness of human life. He is
grounded on the rock-bottom of reality. That spells a solidity of quite a different kind. He is
liberated for ever from the dependence on theological, philosophical, scientific speculation and
eternal guesswork, not least from the heritage of history. This may in some respects cause
people to underestimate him in social intercourse. But he does not feel the need of taking part in
total disorienting physicalism, that is to say: fictionalism in everything except the mere physicalvisible, one per cent of reality.
3.36 The Esoterician Must Learn to Be Silent
To begin with, the esoterician is unaware of peoples almost total injudiciousness. Being full
of enthusiasm about his recently gained insight, he is eager to preach the knowledge to people.
Not having sufficient experience he too often believes he has made a find, hit upon a real
person, found someone who understands, because he has chanced upon intelligent people who
have picked up some esoteric ideas and appear very understanding. All too often he is cruelly
disappointed. Too late he realizes that he has sinned against the commandment of not casting
pearls. Only when he discovers that people begin looking upon him as a psychopathological
phenomenon does he realize the necessity of keeping silent about what he knows, regrettably
often too late for his physical wellbeing.
2
It is natural that the esoterician is very eager to communicate his learning to other people. He
may then present the ideas of reincarnation and the law of sowing and reaping. If he meets with no
understanding of these simplest and most rational explanations of the meaning of life, he is wise
to be silent, not just about esoterics but about everything connected with true understanding of
life. Then it remains little more than to report the opinions of others. He has to keep his own to
himself. The more or less abortive opinions of others are not his responsibility. So he might
criticize them, exhibiting his erudition, if that is his profession or if he wants people to think for
themselves.
3
The esoterician is prepared for loneliness in so far as he cannot speak to the uninitiated
about his conception of reality and life. If he does so, he will be looked upon as an injudicious
fantast with absurd ideas and will become isolated also in his outer life. Regrettably, there are
many who have had their career ruined, since they have not learnt to keep silent. Painful
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experiences teach them to be cautious with a view of life that is so far from the ruling religious,
philosophical, and scientific views. Tolerance is still a rare quality. Such an exhortation to caution
has been construed as expressing a tendency to egoistic and proud isolation, which is one more
proof how everything can be misconstrued.
4
The esoterician thinks like an esoterician and speaks like an exoterist.
5
The teacher of esoterics is wise not to satisfy curiosity about his personal circumstances or his
level of development. Most people misunderstand most things. The less facts they have, the more
erroneous therefore are their opinions and the less they harm the teacher and themselves.
Thoughts and feelings not in agreement with reality do not affect the teacher, and the sillier the
opinion is, the more easily will those hearing it rebut it.
6
A work must bear witness of itself, stand or fall on its own content of reality. The interest of
curiosity in the personal lives of esoteric writers must be eliminated for the future. This should be
obvious to those who see the mankinds (85 per cent) general level of development (the lower
emotional) and understand the effect of vibrations in the emotional and mental worlds. The writer
has an absolute right to remain anonymous. He shall not be the target of injudiciousness, gossip,
and repulsive energies. He has sufficiently much to bear as it is and should be spared additional
strain. Anyone who does not understand even that little has much to learn before he has any
prospects of understanding esoterics.
7
The difficulty of acting as a teacher and imparting knowledge that most people cannot
apprehend rightly has the effect that those who have acquired the art of being silent as a matter
of principle only answer questions. If these are rational, proofs of a desire to know, and evidence
something else than curiosity, the longed-for opportunity is at hand. You cast pearls when you
try forcing your esoteric opinions on people. That is not permitted and therefore brings about
unpleasant consequences.
8
Even in so-called esoteric circles there are risks involved in presenting new facts. The
reaction is the same as among the uninitiated, and the venture causes (note this!) generally
greater harm. It is difficult to be wise.
3.37 The Esoterician Makes No Propaganda
The esoterician makes no propaganda for his view. That would be pointless, since more than
99 per cent of people are quite unable even to examine whether hylozoics agrees with reality. And
he does everything to prevent hylozoics from becoming a matter of belief, for in that case it would
very soon be idiotized so that it would be unusable as a world view, as a scientific working
hypothesis. Possibly, hylozoics is for those who for logical reasons have rejected all the ruling
idiologies in theology, philosophy, and science.
2
The esoterician does not criticize the opinions of other people. Everybody has a right to his
own opinion and to be left alone with it, unassailed by the criticism of other people.
3
Esoterics is nothing you discuss. The pertaining problems are not solved by means of any
verbal arguments.
4
It follows from this that esoterics remains esoteric. Nowadays it is available in literature, and
anyone who seeks will find it, if he has resolved to seek until he finds. There are in all born
esotericians an instinct of the soul, which forces them to seek. And other people than born
esotericians (who have the knowledge latently) have no prospects of understanding it. Then they
do not need it.
5
That day will come in a not too distant future when hylozoics has been accepted as the only
tenable working hypothesis of science. Then it will be a matter of belief for the masses. But until
then it should not be allowed to become a religion.
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3.38 To Whom the Esoterician Turns

The esoterician makes no propaganda for the esoteric knowledge but tries to help everyone on
his level with the conditions of understanding that may be there. Everyone judges from his level.
And the ignorance of life in particular is boastful. Wisdom, the true knowledge, is never preached
on the marketplace of opinions (in our times literature and other mass media). That would be
pointless. For the knowledge is for the initiates (those who have the knowledge latently, and
they are scarcely 15 per cent).
2
You never need to propagate for and to advertise the true knowledge. You need not repeat it
incessantly, preaching it every Sunday and preferably also in between. It is sufficient that the
individual has once clearly conceived the idea. Then it is ineradicable and a power in existence
that need not be thrashed over and over again or be emotionalized.
3
It is not the task of the esoterician to convey esoteric knowledge to the masses at the stage
of mental discursivity (47:7). The esoterician turns to the intellectual people (47:6), who in their
turn popularize the knowledge of the laws of life into emotional ideals.
4
There is a difference between informing ignorant people and fobbing off ones opinions on
others, as the fanatic does. The esoterician does not wish to convince anyone. He is silent about
his knowledge in the circle of those who do not understand. Only seekers wish to know and are
able to receive.
5
You do not benefit consciousness development by forcing the knowledge on people. It must
be acquired through insight. The mentally blind has no use for the light of knowledge.
6
You can never convince people that their illusions and fictions are untenable, if these are
contained in a self-acquired idiology. Anyone acquires himself the view of life he needs on his
level. In time, in a new incarnation he must quite simply relearn, and then he will see his old
limitation.. If the mental system he possesses meets his needs and affords him satisfactory
explanations of what was previously inexplicable to him, then that system is right for him. Often
you harm people by demonstrating untenability to them, for then they inculcate the fictions on
their subconscious even more. Often you also arouse repulsion with hatred against the dissenter
yourself a hatred that harms themselves.
7
Mankind has become so disoriented by all idiologies that criticism of the ruling illusions and
fictions largely is a waste of time. Most people are unable to understand, even to see the elements
of contemporary culture that falsify reality and are hostile to life.
8
The esoterician will have to content himself with orienting the seekers who are still seeking
and thus have seen the life perversions of the ruling religion, science, and philosophy. If people do
not want to listen to the truth, but go on in madness, then there is nothing to be done.
9
The esoterician makes no propaganda to recruit believers and proselytes. Esoterics is nothing
for them. Esoterics is only for seekers who have not been able to accept the ruling idiologies, for
those who have seen through the untenability of the exoterists conceptions of the world and of
life and who know that reality is something totally different. Only the man who has seen the
fictitiousness of the various forms of religion, of philosophical speculation, and the scientific
hypotheses and theories is ripe for esoterics. It is to those seekers that the esoterician presents his
view so that they have the opportunity to examine the reality content of esoterics. Anyone who
takes such a trouble will find that esoterics is the simplest, most rational explanation of all those
things that were previously inexplicable.
10
Esoterics is only for those who have the esoteric knowledge latently in their subconscious
and who at their first contact with it in this life at once see that it agrees with reality. It is not
sufficient to realize that rebirth and karma are correct explanations. Almost all who were once
incarnated in India realize this, so that is exoteric knowledge. Esoterics equals hylozoics, and that
is quite a different thing.
11
Rather, what characterizes the seeker is the need of perspective on everything in existence,
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the need for increased clarity, the answer to the question of the meaning of life and, above all, the
absence of dogmatic restriction. Anyone who has locked himself up in some idiology is finished
for that incarnation and should be left alone with his petty belief unassailed by disturbing throwins.
12
It is the seeker you are able to help, not he idiologist who is confirmed in his dogmas.
Anyone who has finished seeking and inquiring, finished working to constantly expand his
consciousness, who refuses to consider uncomfortable facts, is unable to reexamine, time and
again, the tenability of his own system has also concluded his own mental development.
13
Esoterics is for young people who are on the hunt for a world view. It is not for those who
have already acquired such a one and who are content with it. Generally, only those who have
once been initiates of some knowledge order realize that it agrees with reality. Certainly, a trained
intellect is able to comprehend hylozoics and realize its superiority as a working hypothesis.
However, this presupposes such a strenuous work that a powerful inner urge or a powerful outer
stimulation is required for anyone to set about doing this. When, some time in the future, the
authorities of public opinion accept hylozoics, then we shall have quite a different starting
position. Then it will be part of general education to study hylozoics. And then it will be a matter
of belief to accept it without the demand of understanding. Then hylozoics will gradually become
emotionalized, so that feeling and imagination are satisfied and hylozoics will not appear to be a
cold, mental system as it does now.
14
Esoterics is by no means a necessary world view and life view. You can be a true humanist
without these. The essential thing is community, right human relations, true good will. Esoterics
is no human product, can never be more than a working hypothesis. It is only for those who
realize that it is superior to all other working hypotheses. If you cannot realize this, then you are
wise in keeping to something you can understand better. The planetary hierarchy considers that
the overcoming of hatred is incomparably more important than an exact world view. It is repulsive
emotionality that divides people and is the origin of all inhumanity. The knowledge is for those
who have overcome hatred in all its expressions.
3.39 The Esotericians View of Life and Activity in Society
The esoterician does not isolate himself but lives and works among people, familiarizes
himself with the ruling idiologies in politics, science, philosophy, religion, literature, and art. He
tries to be as allround as possible, conversant with the mental ideas that people accept. The more
oriented he is, the more he is able to help.
2
It is characteristic of those who have mastered esoterics that speculation, wishful thinking, and
hopeful aspiration are absent in them. Those things have been supplanted by the knowledge of
reality and trust in the Law.
3
Esotericians make a mistake if they judge the phenomena of their times from an esoteric
viewpoint. Then they do not assess or judge, but condemn, criticize without understanding the
inevitable limitation of their times. Add to this the fact that clans at very different stages of
development incarnate at different times. Esotericians have received their knowledge in order to
look forward, not back; looking back hampers them, since all energies have to be put in to
conquer the higher kinds of consciousness.
4
Ambition breeds pride. The esoterician is humble, but not before the ignorant of life who
demand humility in their sense of incompetence or envy. He is humble because he knows the
seemingly endless distance that separates him from the final goal of life (the highest cosmic
world), how little he knows about everything in the cosmos or in the solar system or in the planet
or in one single world of the planet. Eons of research and strenuous work extend before him. (One
eon = 4320 million years. It is important to fix the time length, lest we shall have the same
situation as in India, where a manvantara meant an eon but eventually has come to be a synonym
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for any shorter period whatever. There is already talk about the eon as though it were a zodiacal
period of 2500 years or a period of incarnation of indefinite length.)
5
The esoterician knows that everything he really knows has been given to him for nothing. It is
nothing to boast about. And he also knows that even if he knows a thousand times more than
others, it is just as a drop in the ocean in comparison with what a causal self knows, not to say still
higher selves. There is nothing more ridiculous than a man who thinks himself important in any
respect whatsoever. It bears witness to a very profound ignorance. The talk about equality
presupposes that individuals have the same level of development and the same distance covered,
the same understanding and capabilities in all respects. The correct view of democracy is the
fact that we are all in the same natural kingdom, all (consciously or unconsciously) under way to
the next higher kingdom and that it only is a matter of time when we shall reach it. The
differences between the various human developmental levels are just a matter of the time of the
monads transition from the animal to the human kingdom. It is all a question of age. And
generally the last one to arrive has acquired the greatest capacity as a man, since he has had the
opportunity to profit by an incomparably greater knowledge and so doing has acquired the
corresponding experience, something that always makes itself felt in monadic individual character
also in higher kingdoms.
6
An esoterician must in his heart always be among the opposition, since those who are in
power always abuse it. That does not hinder him from being in power. But in that case he is there
in order to try to prevent the tendency to abuse power in legislation and execution. Such an old
initiate was, unbeknownst to himself, Dag Hammarskjld.
7
The book containing a selection of the speeches made by Dag Hammarskjld in the years
1953-61 (published in Swedish by Norstedt & Sner) deserves very well to be studied by all who
are seeking the eternally valid norms of a humanist lifestyle. It can be considered as a truly
edifying book. Hammarskjlds speeches evidence common sense, all-round orientation in
general human values, statesmans wisdom, and that religion without a creed which has been
common to all wise men of all ages.
8
We might desire that a 45-self of the second department would let himself be born in the West
and plough through the cultural heritage of the West as thoroughly as 45-self D.K. has sifted the
Oriental heritage and the esoteric archives, whose Western treasures seem to have been left
disregarded.
9
The greatest service to be done by those who have acquired knowledge and thus are able to
think in accordance with reality is to think and emit their correct ideas into the mental world. For
they may not speak lest they will be considered as fantasts. They are not needed in the physical
world. They can do the same service by thinking.
3.40 Esotericians As People of Good Will
Those are the esotericians who consciously or unconsciously develop the causal intuition and
ever more easily have access to the ideas of this world (the world of Platonic ideas). They are
precursors to a new order of things, a radical rethinking in all respects. They are to be found in all
nations, in all kinds of societies. They are among them that are quiet in the land and work
through their personality. They belong to no party or religion and yet they belong to all parties and
all religions. They refrain as a matter of principle from criticizing those holding other opinions,
take no stand for or against, do not join in the disputes of the day. They are neither for nor against
the existing forms of government. They attack nobody, organize no campaigns, spend no money
on literature that takes sides. They do nothing, say nothing that arouses hatred, divides people.
They realize that all are on their way to the next higher kingdom, fellow wanderers on the path,
whether they know it or not.
2
That does not mean, however, that their striving is without a goal. And this goal is their work
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for spreading the knowledge of reality and life and its laws, and their efforts at unifying mankind,
rousing the will to unity, common good will, and furthering right human relations, also
counteracting hatred in all its forms, stimulating mankind to do what it must to enable the
planetary hierarchy to appear again. That was the meaning intended by the expression,
misinterpreted by Christians, establishing the kingdom of god on earth. It is the free choice of
mankind and no enforced theocracy. Mankind did not want its great leaders. It is up to mankind to
call them back. To do so requires the understanding that mankind cannot on its own solve its
problems of life. It should soon have learnt this lesson from history, which is the record of sheer
madness and error.
3
The esotericians work to heal what is broken. They cultivate the sense of unity. They teach
others to see that we are all dependent on one another. They do not want any racial barriers,
national barriers, class barriers, religious barriers. They work for universal understanding, for
right human relations. They are people of good will. They are inspired by disciples of the
planetary hierarchy and are, often unbeknownst to themselves, aspirants to discipleship. They are
distinguished by common sense, by freedom from fanaticism and all manner of onesided views.
They are no impractical mystics. They know what they want to do, rouse public opinion and bring
all people of good will together. They stand together in complete understanding and in concerted
work for the welfare of mankind.
4
There is a religion, the religion of love and wisdom, common to all wise men in all ages.
There is a brotherhood of those who have seen that all are brothers. They may be unknown to one
another. But they exist and they recognize each other when they meet as members of the same
brotherhood, and support each others work for mankind. It is only a matter of time when their
desire to find each other finds the requisite expression. They create no society, no organization,
for such things degenerate, strengthen egoism, excludes other people from community. They are
nevertheless more firmly united than in any organization. They sensed their loneliness and
isolation until they discovered the existence of the spiritual community in the unknown million.
They want to know each others existence in order to unite in mental community. The thoughtform they shape would contribute to reinforcing the idea of brotherhood throughout the world.
3.41 Genius
A genius is an individual who has in many incarnations cultivated a certain speciality, a
certain ability. Then he is born with an organism that allows the genius to express this speciality,
it is true, but in other respects does not enable him to hold the balance against the energies of
over-vitalized chakras.
2
In their total ignorance of everything esoteric and of bases and causes of gifts, talents, genius,
the pertaining authorities have believed themselves able to find the explanation in physical
heredity. Rather, the truth is that when a talent or a genius desires to incarnate, he selects an
environment that will be able to facilitate his remembrance and reacquisition of old abilities.
There is a real ground for the jocular expression, you should know how to choose your parents.
3
Regrettably, geniuses seldom have children possessing the same genius. This can have many
causes. Old antagonisms, bad reaping for both parties, competition about the place, in which
someone has the right of priority, also old friendship between individuals. The individual must
develop his brain on his own. Children of a genius have no use for ingenious brains if they are
unable to utilize the opportunities. Either they lack the requisite latent ability or they have no
opportunity to develop it. Genius is not hereditary, only the brain potential, which must be utilized
by a child having a latent genius.
4
All great thinkers have many incarnations behind them as thinkers. The same is true in art. It
is also true of so-called saints. The latter have during many lives strived to reach ever higher
within the sphere of emotional consciousness. They are artists in life of a particular kind. It is an
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esoteric truth that apparently cannot be too often repeated that three incarnations of specialization
are required to become a talent in some certain domain and seven incarnations to become
sovereign (a so-called genius). And the truly great geniuses have cultivated their capacities in
even more lives. In one examination it was seen that a brilliant orator had twelve such lives
behind him.
5
The so-called geniuses in philosophy, literature, oration, art, music by no means need to have
reached the perspective consciousness of the stage of humanity (47:5).
6
When you see how easily people lose their balance and become nutty out of sheer selfimportance at even the most trifling homage of the public, you almost congratulate the geniuses
for having been unappreciated. Perhaps that, too, was the intention of destiny, and not mere bad
reaping. The greatest genius is an idiot whenever he thinks himself important. True geniuses are
true channels of higher forces. Any self turns into a hindrance.
3.42 The Requisite Pioneer Spirit
The voice of one crying in the wilderness dies away unheard. A lone esoterician is seen as a
psychopathological phenomenon. But more and more people will reach the insight that
Pythagorean hylozoics is the only rational philosophical and scientific working hypothesis. This
reduces the risk for the esoterician to end up in a psychiatric hospital. This enhances his prospect
of teaching the doctrine of common sense without being regarded as an unreliable fantast. And
this increases his duty to life and truth of not being silent about what he knows of the esoteric
world view and life view. He is not alone. They cannot easily lock up one million esotericians
who share the same view. If only they become sufficiently numerous, they may hold any opinion
whatever without being regarded as mentally deranged. This is seen in the matter of the religious
sects. The pertaining follies are regarded as perfectly normal phenomena.
2
Spiritual leaders must be able to stand alone, and they are always able to do so if they have the
capacity for love. They must not let themselves be hindered by those who cannot keep up with the
pace. Leaders must have a goal, a sense of proportion, be able to think clearly, possess humility
and the ability of adaptation, feel sympathy for everybody within the sphere of their activity, avoid
pedantry.
3
Leaders must be count on being blamed for the failures of co-workers, on being attacked by
all who expect too much, by those who are unable to see and understand, by all criticasters of all
kinds who agitate public opinion.
4
True love (essentiality) is impersonal, objective, and imperturbable. Egoism and
sentimentality of any kind are alien to it.
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ESOTERICS IN A TRANSITION PERIOD

3.43 Why Esoterics Has Been Allowed for Publication
As soon as people learn that there exists a fifth natural kingdom, they are eager to get there as
soon as possible, not understanding all that is required to attain that goal. Discipleship is for the
lite at the stage of humanity who often, without esoteric knowledge and without religion, have
spontaneously devoted their lives to the service of evolution and mankind. Of course this is not
said to deter anyone from trying, only that the aspirant should not feel disappointed. At all event
no effort done is ever wasted. Everything done is done ready for the future.
2
However, we have not been given the knowledge of reality in order to quickly become
supermen. The knowledge has been allowed for publication because there is nowadays a general
realization that theology and philosophy cannot answer the question of the meaning and goal of
existence. The general spread of agnosticism is evidence of the fact that theology and philosophy
have had their day and cannot any longer offer people a basis on which to stand. Mankind has
developed so far that it can comprehend esoterics and realize that it is the one tenable working
hypothesis. It is important, too, that mankind is liberated from a theology that poisons emotional
life and a philosophy that disorganizes reason. People who are seekers, who have never been
content with such things but go on seeking, restlessly, have the right of life to have at least the
most essential questions answered.
3
If mankind, in its immeasurable madness, is not to annihilate itself, the possibility of living
together without friction must be clarified to it. We must learn how to help and not to hinder each
other. We must learn how to lead rational lives. We should have learnt from history that it is not
possible any longer to lead our lives such as we have done. There must be a change and an end to
the reign of lie and hatred. Esoterics is the only possible basis, the rational explanation of the
meaning and goal of life. We have the prospects of learning to see this. That is precisely the
reason why esoterics has been allowed for publication.
1

3.44 The Still Esoteric

The knowledge of reality is still esoteric except for certain basic facts that have been allowed
for publication, since mankind has reached such an intellectual development that an
understanding of those hylozoic facts is possible for everybody.
2
What esoteric knowledge is found in the Indian Vedas and Upanishads is still esoteric. The
Brahmins (the clerical caste), who are in possession of these writings, are unable to interpret the
majority of them and their symbols. And this in spite of a well-preserved tradition extending over
millennia.
3
Orientalists, Western researchers into these Indian writings, have taken the pains to translate
them and try to interpret them. They are apparently ignorant of their esoteric character. It will take
a long time yet until they are correctly interpreted.
4
No matter how many esoteric facts are publicized, there will always be true esoterics that
cannot be taught to others than those who have definitively entered into unity.
5
Beginners in esoterics can seldom grasp why they are not taught that simple (even though
unobtainable without instruction) technique which would vitalize the chakras of the etheric
envelope above the diaphragm and so would put such energies at their disposal as would make
them causally conscious and causal power beings. They do not realize that this would infallibly
imply catastrophe for them. Nobody can skip levels of development with their qualities and
abilities that must make up a firmly built basis for the faculties of higher levels. And above all,
any possibility of self-assertion must be precluded for ever, a clear insight into the laws of causal
life and into all the risks connected with powers must be acquired, and all of this can be had
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after long experience only. Seemingly ineradicable human conceit, which thinks itself competent
to judge things of which it knows nothing or too little, does not appear to be able to learn that
individuals in higher kingdoms comprehend more, that their highest desire is to assist the
individual with knowledge when it becomes possible for him to receive it without harm to
himself.
3.45 Why Esoterics Cannot Be Fully Given Out
It has been asserted that the old knowledge orders have been disbanded. That is wrong. No
such orders are disbanded, since the individuals who were once initiates are still members of
them. The fact that nobody is nowadays initiated into them is due to the fact that the essential of it
has already become exoteric and so accessible for the uninitiated. However, new orders will be
instituted in which the knowledge will be taught according to entirely new methods. Each order
had its own method, one adapted to the current ways of looking at things and prospects of
apprehension. Modern natural research has made new modes of presentation possible and all such
are utilized.
2
Many people are indignant that there may exist secret knowledge at all. Instead, they should
use a wee bit of their power of reflection. There is a knowledge of forces of nature, which in the
possession of irresponsible people would counteract evolution and make it impossible to discover
or, in any case, prevent any kind of crime, and you do not put such knowledge into the hands of
individuals who are able to abuse power. You do not put weapons into the hands of murderers and
bandits. The indignant may be calmed with the information that everybody receives as much of
the knowledge of reality as he needs and is entitled to receive.
3
There is one very important reason why the esoteric knowledge can be communicated in a
piecemeal fashion only. Facts are not merely vibrations in the brain. They are also mental
molecules charged with energy, and such energies can have a disorganizing effect on brains that
have not been reorganized to endure the pertaining vibrations.
4
Ideas rule the world, for energy follows thought.
1

3.46 The Ignorance of Mankind

The exact knowledge of reality is made up of a system of facts in their correct contexts. Apart
from the systems that natural research formulates out of the facts of physical reality most human
learning can be said to consist of erroneous constructions. Idiologies replace each other at an ever
increasing speed. Never-ending analysis discovers ever more easily the errors in those syntheses
which are called theories and hypotheses and which largely are the guesswork of ignorance and
are based on insufficient facts. Add to this the fact that visible physical reality makes up only
one per cent of all reality. If etheric physical, emotional, and mental reality (to the normal
individual only partially subjectively perceptible) is included, then the result is about five per cent.
Since these lower worlds are composed of the matters and energies of higher worlds, it is seen
that our possibilities to explain events, the true nature of the three aspects of reality, and the
meaning of the whole are beyond the reach of human reason. This was made clear by the Buddha
about 600 BCE. What real avatars have said, however, has always been misunderstood, distorted,
or unheeded by mankind. False prophets have always successfully idiotized mankind.
2
Truths cannot be fitted into the systems of illusions and fictions. But all lies can. That is why
people reject the teachings of the light-bringers without further ado and without taking the trouble
to really examine them.
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3.47 Life Ignorance Idiotizes Everything

Our time is characterized by the struggle between emotionalists and mentalists, illusionists
and fictionalists. It is good that it is possible for man, if he uses his common sense, to see that
both categories are almost equally ignorant of life.
2
Everything is idiotized by life ignorance. The knowledge of reincarnation is turned into the
belief in metempsychosis. The knowledge of the laws of life is turned into moral prohibitions,
into the belief in sin and punishment. The knowledge of avatars and the sacrifice they make when
incarnating in a barbarous mankind is turned into the belief in the vicarious suffering of
atonement. The proclamation of brotherhood is idiotized into the fiction of the equality of
everybody.
3
Among the sayings of public opinion there are many words that people think they
comprehend, which is a very big mistake. When, some time in the future, they have acquired the
esoteric knowledge of reality, they will learn something different, they will relearn, they will learn
to see that they have not understood what they have been so eloquent about or analysed logically
in acute and profound philosophic treatises. They do not understand the correct meaning of such
words as self-reliance, self-determination, freedom, independence, for example. Do they realize
that absolute freedom means cosmic omniscience and omnipotence? That this freedom is
possible only through absolutely faultless application of the knowledge of all laws of nature and
life? Do they realize that anyone who talks big about independence is a victim of one of the
biggest illusions of life, gives evidence of his total ignorance of the laws of consciousness
development?
4
If a man has once made himself a view (in whatever way he did this), then this is of course the
only right one. Then there is no use presenting some divergent view to him. And so that
incarnation is wasted. Small wonder then that they need so many unnecessary incarnations.
1

3.48 Why Esoterics is Opposed

Life is change, constant change, change in every moment. But people, when they have once
settled down in life, want no change. Going on in the same old tracks, mechanizing their habits so
that they are spared thinking is their desire. And they regard as enemies all who want to alter the
traditional things, even the most absurd conditions. To be able to remain in undisturbed
possession is their ideal, and they accuse life of lacking in love, if some change comes their way.
2
A wee bit of reflection should tell them that without change there will be no development.
They do not even know that development means consciousness development. They stare at
physical material reality as if it were the meaning of life. They defend the superstitions with which
they were inoculated in childhood as though they were final truths. They have at all times
persecuted all those who have carried development forward. And such enemies of development
call themselves rational beings.
3
Esoterics has appeared with its revolutionizing teaching. It knows mankind. It knows what
opposition the new will meet. It knows that all are the sworn enemies of change, even though of
course they do not know why. The strongest opposition will come as always, of course, from
religious circles. But their resistance is vain. True, they will receive all the assistance the black
lodge can give them to fight the new truths. But the outcome is decided, for against the law of
development even the devils fight in vain. And as the supreme chief of the planetary hierarchys
department of culture (Mahachohan) said: The doctrine we promulgate, being the only true one,
must be ultimately triumphant. Then may all the authorities of religion, philosophy, science gang
up to stop evolution. They fight a hopeless battle. But they will probably say (as did Hitler): If I
will not have my way, then let heaven and earth perish. Poor superman apes who believe they are
gods. You know what happened to Hitler. Try to learn at least something of the history of our
times.
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3.49 The Impending Esoteric Revolution

Mankind has not yet reached the insight that human thinking is being revolutionized, and that
this revolution will change our entire view of existence and things human.
2
The bases of world view and life view presented hitherto have demonstrated their untenability.
Religion has gone bankrupt. Philosophy has revealed its inability to solve the problems of life. It
is becoming increasingly difficult for science to uphold its pretensions to being a substitute for
religion and philosophy.
3In essential respects our culture has been a culture of history. We have lived upon the ideas
we have received from ancient cultures, where the West is concerned, mainly the Greek and
Roman cultures. The pertaining studies have been called humanist, and with full reason during
the close on two thousand years that life ignorance and general barbarism have held sway. This
literature contains elements that enabled reason to liberate itself from the chains of dogmatic
thought and intellectual tyranny. It explained the ideals that could make man sovereign, develop
his reason into common sense and so bringing about truly human relations.
4
These ideals still await their realization. But the setting in which the ideals have been put has
in many respects become unsuited to the times. They need to be set free from the time-bound
conceptions in which they have been inserted. It is no longer necessary to study this literature in
order to assimilate those ideals or the humanism discernible in those societies, which were built
on slavery. Studying dead languages, which only future philologists and historians have any use
for, is an enormous waste with the valuable work-energy of young people during the school years
that are essential to mental development.
5
As it now is, young people are faced with the choice of studying classical literature or
mathematical-scientific-technical subjects. It is to be hoped that the esoteric literature will soon
have such an extent that its significance becomes increasingly obvious and it will so be possible to
set up esoteric high schools and universities.
1

3.50 When Esoterics Becomes Generally Accepted

When people have developed so far as to see that the illusions and fictions controlling
mankind do not agree with reality; when they have reached the insight that esoterics is the true
knowledge; when they see that there is something beyond physical reality, that the individual is
immortal, that all life develops according to laws of life; when they begin to care about laws and
to apply them, then we shall receive more knowledge of life as a free gift.
2
Mankind must have reached a certain stage of development before it can comprehend and
understand true reality. The planetary hierarchy has ever since 1875 been making a long prepared
attempt at opening the eyes of people. There is a possibility of comprehending esoterics. The
question is whether this attempt is doomed to failure and men will in their folly commit suicide.
Forces have been put at their disposal which can result in the annihilation of the race. In the long
run it is impossible to play with these forces. They must be put at the service of life or death. A
new catastrophe of the Atlantean kind is menacing, this time through mankind itself. Mankind is
at the crossroads.
3
It is high time that mankind realized that it cannot solve its most essential problems by itself.
It will be the task of the disciples to convey the knowledge from the planetary hierarchy to
mankind and to work for the reappearance of the hierarchy. There will be no peace on earth until
then.
4
Actually, only conscious or unconscious aspirants to discipleship take an interest in esoterics.
Others will accept it only when philosophers and truly great scientists declare it to be the only
tenable working hypothesis. It will not be accepted in this century. A revolutionary scientific
discovery will force an examination of hylozoics.
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No recognition of esoterics can be expected from science, which is totally unable to ascertain
superphysical facts and which refuses to accept anything that it cannot ascertain itself in its
laboratories.
6
Perhaps hylozoics will not be generally accepted until sufficiently many causal selves
incarnate who with their incomparable superiority in all respects and their complete consensus as
for facts have convinced a sufficient number of eminent seekers that hylozoics is the only tenable
working hypothesis.
7
Theology will be the greatest obstacle to truth, until mankind has seen the absurdity of the
theological dogmas and have their eyes opened to the one true religion: the religion of wisdom
and love, which has always been distorted.
8
According as the knowledge of superphysical reality becomes more common, the pertaining
problems will be treated in a fully natural manner. As it now is, many writers approach these
things with bated breath and wrap it all up in a veil of mysticism and oddity that makes a comical
impression on an esoterician.

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THE VALUE OF THE KNOWLEDGE

3.51 Esoterics is the Knowledge of the Fifth Natural Kingdom
Human thinking and research is a never-ending process with a constantly changing content of
reality. To mankind esoterics is the knowledge of the fifth natural kingdom, the fundamental facts
of the fifth natural kingdom. What is important for us to realize is that man is unable to acquire
right superphysical knowledge, is unable to rightly understand the phenomena in both the
emotional and mental worlds. That is a realization that spiritualists have not made. They believe
in their guides in the astral world and that these possess the knowledge of reality.
2
It can be firmly stated that no human intellect is able to construct the esoteric mental system,
which is non-contradictory in itself (the only non-contradictory system in existence), which
explains thousands of previously inexplicable things in the simplest, most logical, rational,
purposive manner, which can never be refuted by future research but will only be gradually
confirmed.
3
Everything in the matter of theology, philosophy, and science is belief, for they are all
ultimately based on articles of faith. Everything is belief which is not esoterics, true knowledge of
reality. True, esoterics cannot be anything else for most people than the only tenable working
hypothesis. But that exclusively depends on their inability to see the incontrovertible logic of the
five proofs for the agreement of esoterics with reality.
4
Since apparently you cannot express yourself too explicitly and too exactly (since people are
mentally too dull, lazy, and inactive) but must particularly emphasize what logically is the most
obvious conclusion, it must be clearly stated that knowledge is a gift from the planetary hierarchy,
that this knowledge has been given the name of esoterics, hylozoics, and that human so-called
knowledge (theology, philosophy, and science) are the speculations of ignorance, largely
distortions of the ideas communicated through disciples of the planetary hierarchy. If mankind
does not want to realize this, if it stubbornly refuses to receive the knowledge given it, then
mankind has itself to blame and has to pursue its path to destruction.
1

3.52 The Value of Esoterics

Esoterics affords life a meaning. Thanks to it, the question why can often be answered.
Without esoterics there is no rational answer to that question.
2
Everything is lie in us and about us. (Pythagoras) Lie rules the world of men. Esoterics,
which is the truth, is the only remedy. The doctrine we promulgate, being the only true one, must
be ultimately triumphant. (Mahachohan)
3
Esoterics grants man a view of reality, a basis of judgement, basis of valuation, understanding
of life, and knowledge of the Law, all of which is a condition of common sense. It liberates from
the idiologies of ignorance, emotional illusions, mental fictions, from the dogmas of religion, the
speculations of philosophy, the belief in the hypotheses of science and all the other kinds of
superstitions. It is probably inevitable at the present stage of mankinds development that you find
most of these things idiotic.
4
Only esoterics can elucidate the nature of religion, the meaning of science, and the aim of
education. Mankind knows nothing of this as yet. D.K.
5
People pray for light and power. They are ignorant of the fact that the molecules that
contain both ideas and energies are pouring down from higher worlds through lower worlds. It is
up to the individual to catch them. In doing so, however, difficulties arise. For the essential,
causal, mental, emotional molecules caught by them often bring about chaos in unprepared brains,
which have been idiotized by the current idiologies. Too many people become nutty, lose their
balance. Even in such cases esoteric reality systems would restore the balance.
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Esoterics does not separate us from mankind. On the contrary it shows us how we should
relate to people in the best way, affords us a greater possibility to understand them and so to help
them better on their levels. Esoterics shows us the path to right human relations and a life together
without friction. It shows us the poisoning effect of gossip. People at the stage of hatred seize
every opportunity to have an outlet of their hatred and contempt. The least failing in the greatest
genius or saint is the only thing they are able to appreciate, being blind to everything else.
7
To learn to observe the right relations to other people and to the environment is both art and
science. (D.K.)
8
Esoterics is the only tenable basis of science. It will become ever more obvious that esoterics
is the only thing that comes up to the name of common sense. Exoteric views are rational to the
extent that they since old have contained esoterics. Exoteric disciplines are based on insufficient
facts. They are in no position to decide whether sufficient facts are there for a reliable verdict.
Man requires something firm for his feeling and thought. That is why he accepts things exoteric.
3.53 The Significance of Religion, Philosophy, and Science
The esoterician fully appreciates the great significance of religion, philosophy, and science
both past and present. Science puts in tremendous work exploring the three lowest molecular
kinds of physical matter, and is approaching with rapid strides the lowest state of aggregation of
the physical etheric world. Religion increasingly endeavours to cultivate the higher emotionality
and to combat hatred between individuals. Philosophy teaches people to activate consciousness in
the two lowest mental molecular kinds. All of this is of importance to the development of
consciousness. There is no reason to depreciate those great contributions to development, as many
occultists do. What the esoterician must resolutely object to, however, is dogmatism and selfsufficiency of scientists, their unwillingness to examine the content of reality of spheres outside
their specialities. The true seeker examines everything. At all events he is never content with the
statements of other people on matters he has not had the opportunity to examine himself. Belief in
authority is an emergency to be taken when no other possibilities are available to him and is
resorted to only when circumstances compel him. However, he will not make the present-day
hypotheses the basis of any world view. They are not good enough for that.
2
The problem for physical man is to reach certainty that there is some higher kind of life than
the physical one. Science cannot provide that certainty until it has discovered physical etheric
reality and is able to film the process of dying, which will be possible within a hundred years.
Religion has lost its power, after science with its philosophy has broken the power of mass
suggestion over peoples minds. Mental doubt has proved to be ever stronger than the certainty of
emotional belief. Only esoterics is able to provide an irrefutable, unassailable mental system that
comes up to all demands to logic.
3
When philosophers and psychologists finally begin to concern themselves with esoterics, it
need not any longer be the expression of latent instinct seeking after the lost knowledge, but it
may be the philosophers need of a tenable world view, which philosophers have vainly searched
for in philosophy.
1

3.54 Correct Conception of Reality

True knowledge of reality is automatically accompanied by thinking in accordance with
reality and synchronization of ones own vibrations with the cosmic vibrations.
2
The increasingly correct perception of reality by our consciousness has the effect that the
human organism and the higher envelopes of the monad gradually, over the ages and to our
superficial reason imperceptibly, adapt to and are transformed to be in agreement with ever
higher kinds of vibrations.
3
The mysteries [the unexplored part of reality] are revealed, not primarily by the reception of
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information anent them and their processes, but by the action of certain processes, carried out
within the etheric body of the disciple; these enable him to know that which is hidden; they put
him in possession of a mechanism of revelation and make him aware of certain radiatory and
magnetic powers or energies within himself which constitute channels of activity and modes
whereby he may acquire that which it is the privilege of the initiate to own and to use. (D.K)
This mechanism is created during a long series of incarnations. These afford the self opportunities
to experiment, have experiences and test them in practice.
4
We shall be aware of reality only when we have eliminated those molecules which have
aroused illusions and fictions in us.
5
Seeing reality in everything (liberated from the appearance or veil of illusions and fictions),
the relations of unity, the possibilities of evolution, makes the aspirant a disciple.
6
To know something that is found in literature is to believe or, at best, to presume. To know
what is reality is something quite different. Not even experience will do, for it may be
misinterpreted, but only by conformity to the causal idea, for it renders unadulterated reality.
Neither emotional (48) nor mental (47:4-7) experiences are any proofs whatsoever. The only
proofs are causal experiences (47:1-3). All lower experiences need to be checked through the
causal consciousness. Anyone who has not acquired causal consciousness lives in appearances
and never knows whether facts ascertained are true facts.
7
In the matter of everything esoteric exceptions from the rule are numerous in all respects, so
that only ascertaining each thing in each particular case affords exact knowledge. The more
development proceeds during the course of millions of years, the more pronounced is the
individual character of everything. The concepts of time used in esoterics are different from the
ordinary ones, to be sure. We understand those who say they cannot discern any development.
They have no logical right, however, to contest the fact of development.
3.55 Factual, Right, Correct
There is a great confusion about these three concepts. Perhaps the following can contribute to
increasing clarity.
2
Facts are practically useless until they have been put into their correct contexts.
3
In order to be correctly comprehended, facts must be put into their correct contexts.
4
In order to understand you must possess a system of knowledge that explains the previously
inexplicable. True understanding implies the insight that the explanation given is the only true
one.
5
In order to judge correctly you must start from a system of knowledge that agrees with reality.
6
The four above propositions contain the logical basis of esoterics.
7
There are many kinds of facts, as many as there are different kinds of consciousness.
8
Reality is one, but the perception of reality changes with each kind of atomic consciousness.
Anyone who studies esoterics must never forget that each higher atomic world has one more
spatial dimension.
9
Good and evil are social concepts.
10
Right is everything that accords with the Law. Correct is everything that agrees with the three
aspects of reality.
11
It is not true, as the Greek sophist Protagoras asserted, that all people have an equally correct
conception of reality. In this case, correct and right have been confused. It is a totally different
matter that everybody has a right to his own conception, however erroneous this is.
1

3.56 Our Debt to the Higher

The ability to understand at once and to realize at once is an ability that Christian theologians
have never understood and that is why it is called grace. There is no grace in the whole cosmos,
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only Law. That is the only groundwork on which to build our understanding of the realities of life.
That groundwork affords ideas for interpretation that in any case approach the correct explanation
in contradistinction to the fiction of grace, which falsifies everything.
2
It is true that the whole cosmos has been brought into existence in order to enable the
unconscious monads in primordial manifestation (chaos) to acquire consciousness, omniscience,
and omnipotence. It is true that the entire cosmos has been built by an inconceivably vast
collective of 1-selves, that all the processes of manifestation are directed from the seventh divine
kingdom in worlds 17, that involution and evolution, and everything pertaining to them in the
matter of never-ending work at the three aspects of reality, are the results of the activity of higher
kingdoms. But it is an activity that in lower kingdoms has its reward in the form of help to a
quicker consciousness development and knowledge given of superconscious worlds. It is a law of
evolution that all must receive help and all must help with everything that all need, and this in all
kingdoms. Anyone who does not see and realize this counteracts evolution and commits treason
against life, assisting those who are consciously working to turn the cosmos into chaos. They are
similar to parasites in the human body that are working to destroy the home they have taken as
their abode. They have forfeited their right of domicile. If in addition they spread infection, they
are enemies of life, enemies of all men.
3
The individual is in debt of everything. He is in debt of the solar systemic and planetary
governments who have provided him with a planet where to develop, have supervised his
involution and evolution in the process of manifestation, given him his three triads, permitted him
to pay his debts by instalments, debts that would otherwise make it well neigh impossible for him
to continue his development. He is in debt of the different natural kingdoms (those of involution
and evolution) that have lent him envelopes and their matter. He is in debt of all people who have
in thousands of incarnations given birth to him, brought him up, etc. What if the individual made
the effort of thinking through all the processes he has been made to go through and not just
accepted life without thought, as a meaningless fact he in his unbelievable stupidity complains
about? He has by and large made nothing but stupid things and disdains others for theirs. Stupid.
He has received knowledge for nothing from all the geniuses of mankind and thinks he is
remarkable. Stupid. What if he learnt to see his unbelievable stupidity? Until he does so, he stands
no chance of becoming a disciple.
3.57 Realization
Esoterics affords us knowledge of reality, life, and the fundamental laws of life. It liberates us
from the illusions and fictions of ignorance. All of this are essential conditions of being able to
see the path that lies before us, the path to be walked. It remains to walk it, however, and that
presupposes the ability to walk. That ability remains to be acquired.
2
The fresh initiate thinks that this is all you need to know. Soon he will find, however, that
only now do the real difficulties begin, only now can he begin living purposively, only now does
he have the prospects of solving his daily problems in a purposive manner, only now does he
discover the significance of the energy aspect and that the art of living consists in discovering the
energies and being able to use them lawfully.
3
When the neophyte has received the second degree, he says that he knows nothing and can
do nothing, so enormously do the problems pile up before him. By each step he takes they
increase in numbers and appear ever more difficult to solve. And each new vision of the path
before him gives him a dizzy sense of ignorance and impotence, his perspective is too
overwhelming. Only his confidence in the Law restores assurance to him.
4
Intellectualism, looking at things superficially, has instilled into people the delusion that
knowledge is capability. That is radically false. Knowledge is theory. It affords no capability,
which can be acquired only now, if in addition you use all the energy you have at your disposal.
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Many people who study esoterics are eager to be informed of ever more facts. But we do not
receive more from the planetary hierarchy than we need to make a comprehensible system for us,
a general conception of existence that can serve as a practicable working hypothesis. Above all,
we do not receive facts that mankind is in a position to produce by its own exploration, being
aided by the system given to it. The essential thing, moreover, is not the theoretical world view
but the practical application of what we have been given to know.
6
There is much that esotericians would like to know, but they must wait until at least the
learned have started considering the esoteric knowledge already available. The esoteric lite have
already removed themselves too far from the rest of mankind with a risk of losing understanding
of general human views and being estranged from the people they should help. Besides, there are
still so many esoteric facts that esotericians have not fully utilized that they need not be short of
material. And above all they have neglected to put the knowledge received into real use in
practical life. That is a neglect which makes the planetary hierarchy reluctant to communicate
more facts for mere theoretical study. We have been given to know enough to be able to liberate
ourselves from the ruling idiologies and acquire a basically correct view of reality with an
overwhelming evidence for the reliability of this knowledge. Those who were initiated into the
three lowest degrees of the knowledge orders did not receive more. Those who by their service
show that they deserve to receive more knowledge and need such a knowledge for their
increasingly efficient service so doing qualify for discipleship and are brought together into
groups for common training. Such groups remain esoteric.

Endnotes by the translator into English:

3.3.8 the orthodox socialist idealist quoted was Swedish professor Bengt Lidforss (1868
1913), and the quotation is from his book Kristendomen frr och nu (Christianity Past and
Present; I do not know whether it has been translated into English; it was published in Swedish
in 1911.
3.20.5 the 45-self mentioned is H.
3.40.1 them that are quiet in the land. Psalms, 30:20.
3.50.4 will not be accepted in this century. Since this was written in the 1960-ies, the 20th
century is intended.
3.54.4 The D.K. quotation is taken from The Rays and Initiations, p. 357.

The above text constitutes the essay Esoterics by Henry T. Laurency.

The essay is part of the book Knowledge of Life Two by Henry T. Laurency.
Copyright 1999 by the Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation.

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