Spiritual Teachings Concerning the Soul

GA 52 — 7 November 1903, Berlin

III. The Nature of Divinity from a Theosophical Point of View

The knowledge of the original source of all things is something that theosophists do not readily speak of. Theosophy is supposed to be the path that leads us to finally grasp this concept with our intellect; it is supposed to show us the way that leads us to gain clarity, as far as it can be gained, about this mental image. This path is long and leads through many stages, and each individual stage is not just to be passed through, but we must stand and learn at each one.

But not only the starting point is important, but also the keystone. If we keep this in mind, we must first of all delve a little into the nature of theosophical life in order to see how theosophy relates to the concept of God. Theosophy, as it has been pursued since 1875 in the society founded by Madame Blavatsky, is something different from what is called Western science, something different from what our Western culture and its scholarship strive for in outer life. The nature of Western knowledge differs fundamentally from what theosophical wisdom is. Theosophical wisdom is ancient, as old as the human race, and those who delve deeply into the course of human development will always want to learn more about the starting point of humankind than what our cultural history of the last few decades has so readily believed, namely that humans originated from a state of ignorance and lack of culture. Let us see how it really is when we delve into the life of primeval times. There we see that human spiritual development originated from a high spiritual power of vision, that at the beginning of human development, true divine wisdom was present everywhere. Those who study the ancient religions receive the light of this wisdom. Our time, in accordance with the meaning of our lives, now gives theosophists a renewal of this spiritual life that flows through all of humanity.

Our Western spiritual life is based primarily on our intellect. It is based on one-sided thinking. If you examine our entire Western culture, you will encounter our great discoveries and inventions, our sciences, and what they have done to enlighten the mysteries of the world. You will encounter thinking, intelligent thinking, observation with the senses, and so on. In this way, the Western intellect spreads its knowledge in all directions. It investigates with instruments, with the telescope it explores space, and with the microscope it penetrates the smallest world of bodies. It connects all this with the intellect. In this way, our Western knowledge spreads in all directions. We know more and more about what surrounds us, but we never achieve a deepening of our knowledge, namely, a penetration into the actual essence of things. Therefore, we should not be surprised that Western science cannot cope with the concept of God. We must penetrate to the source of existence, to the spiritual essence. They cannot be combined and cannot be perceived by the senses; they must be perceived in another way.

Those who know that there is another way than the one our Western world is taking seek to attain wisdom in a completely different way. Go back to the wisdom of the Egyptian priests, back to the Greek mysteries, back to India, go back to all these religions and worldviews, and you will find that those who sought wisdom did so in a completely different way than European scholarship. Self-education and self-development were what the students of wisdom sought above all else. They sought self-education through the honest struggle of the human soul, and through this they sought to attain higher wisdom. From the outset, they were convinced that human beings, as they are born into the world, are destined for ascent, for higher development. They were convinced that human beings are not finished, that they cannot attain the highest degree of perfection in a single lifetime, that human beings and their soul capacities must develop, similar to a plant, where the roots remain even when the leaves and flowers wither. It is similar when we take self-education into our own hands in the right way, which brings forth blossoms and fruits in earthly life when we work at it properly. This is what the student of wisdom strove for. He sought a guide. This guide gave him pointers on how he could develop his astral organs through an appropriate life. Then he developed step by step upwards. His soul became ever more far-seeing and far-reaching, ever more sensitive and perceptive to the primordial sources of existence. At each new stage he gained new insights. With each stage he drew closer to the being whose concept we are to discuss today. He saw that he could not grasp God with his intellect. So he sought above all to elevate himself. He was convinced that the divine being can be found in all of nature and also in the human soul. This divine being is never a finished, completed entity; it is a development in all living things, in all things. We ourselves are this divine being. We are not the whole, but we are a drop of the same quality, of the same essence. Deep within us, in hidden abysses and underground, which do not lie on the surface of the day, lies our true divine nature. We must seek it and bring it up. Then we also bring up something that is above our ordinary existence, then we also bring up what is divine within us. Each of us is, as it were, a ray of the deity or, let us say, a reflection of the deity. If we were to form in our minds a mental image of the deity as the sun, each of us would be like a reflection of the sun in a drop of water. Just as the drop of water reflects the sun completely, so every human being is a true, genuine reflection of the divine being. The divine nature rests within us, but we know nothing about it; we must draw it out of ourselves. We must first approach it. Goethe says that he cannot understand how anyone could want to advance directly to the divine. We must approach it more and more. Self-development gradually leads us to an understanding of the meaning of life.

When we develop in this way, we are doing nothing other than living a theosophical life. Everything that spiritual science teaches and recommends we live by, all the great laws that it makes clear to us and that its students, who truly want to cooperate, make into a living truth within themselves, the teachings of reincarnation and karma, the law of destiny, of the intermediate beings, of the primordial ground and universal being that governs the entire universe, that is the inner world, which we call the astral and mental worlds, the buddhi world and the atma world. We learn something about all these worlds, and what we learn from them are steps toward wisdom that lead us to the highest. If we seek to climb these steps, it is a long way. Only those who have reached the highest summit of human development will one day be able to see that they perhaps have an inkling of the scope of that concept, which we want to discuss today in a suggestive way.

Hence the caution with which theosophy speaks about the concept of God. The theosophist speaks about these concepts in much the same spirit as a Hindu speaks about Brahma. If you ask him, “What is Brahma?” he may answer, “Mahadeva, Vishnu, and Brahma.” Brahma is one of the divine beings, or rather an expression of the divine being. But behind all this, for the Hindu, there is something else. Behind all the beings to whom he attributes the origin of the world, there is something he calls Brahma or Brahman. Brahman is impersonal. And if you ask him what is behind the entities he speaks of, he says nothing about it. He says nothing about it because it is impossible to speak about it. All that man can say in this regard are hints, hints pointing toward that perspective at the end of which the divine essence is for us. — This is also where what we call the motto of our Theosophical Society leads. You may be familiar with this motto. It expresses nothing other than what I have just tried to indicate in a few words. This motto is usually translated as: No religion is higher than truth. — Let us see to what extent the whole of theosophical striving leads to this. — What do we know about human striving? Human knowledge must always aim to penetrate the mysteries of existence in the various philosophies and worldviews and to find the original sources of life.

Let us take a look at the various religions. They appear to contradict each other, but they only contradict each other when viewed superficially. If we look at them more deeply, they are connected. They do not have the same content. Christianity, Hinduism, Brahmanism, Zoroastrianism do not have the same content, and neither does today's natural science. And yet — all these different worldviews represent nothing more than attempts by the human spirit to approach the source of existence. There are different ways to reach the summit of a mountain. An area looks different from different vantage points, and so the primordial truth also looks different when viewed from different vantage points. We are all different from one another. One person has this character, another has that character, this or that spiritual development. But we all also belong to a race, a tribe, an age. It has always been this way. But because we belong to a tribe, a race, an age, and have a character, we have a sum of different sensations and feelings among humans. These form the different languages in which people ask themselves questions and communicate about the riddles of life. The Greeks could not have the same mental images as modern people because their view of the world was completely different. Thus, theosophists see different aspects, different kinds of wisdom everywhere. If we look for the reason for this, we see that we have a hidden but ever-revealing primordial wisdom within us that is identical with divine wisdom.

So what have people formed over the course of time, and what will they always form? They will form opinions. Opinions are what we are dealing with. One opinion is different from another; one is higher than another. And we have an obligation to ascend to ever higher and higher opinions. But we must be clear that we must go beyond the sea of opinions. The truth itself is still hidden in opinions at present; it is still veiled, still revealing itself in different forms and aspects. But we can certainly hold these opinions within ourselves, if only we take the right standpoint, the right perspective on the opinions and truths themselves. We must never presume to believe that we can grasp the truth—which Goethe calls identical with the divine—with our limited abilities. We must never presume to believe that it is possible to reach a final conclusion. But if we are aware of this, then we feel something that goes beyond it, then we have something of what theosophy, in the higher sense of the word, calls wise modesty.

The theosophist goes beyond himself with his feelings and his thinking. He says to himself: I must have opinions, for I am only human, and it is my spiritual duty to form thoughts and concepts about the riddles of existence; but I have something within me that cannot be expressed in a limited concept; I have something within me that is more than thinking, that goes beyond thinking: that is life. And this life is the divine life that flows through all things, that also flows through me. — It is that which carries us forward, that which we can never comprehend. We will never be able to comprehend it. But if we concede that in the distant future we will have achieved higher and higher things than we have now, then we must also concede that in the distant future we will have other opinions that are higher than those we have now. But you cannot have the living life that is within us any other way. You cannot have it any other way, for this life is divine life itself, leading to the higher thoughts that are yet to come, that we will also have one day. If we have this feeling toward our concepts, and if we have it above all toward the concepts of the divine being, then we say to ourselves: Truth is identical with the divine; the divine lives in my veins. It lives in all things and it also lives in me. — And when we think this thought within ourselves, it is divine, but it is not God himself and cannot encompass the deity. We must say to ourselves: beyond every human opinion, beyond every opinion of time and people, there is the primordial truth that reveals itself in all of you, which we must feel and which we must seek with aspiration. But no human opinion is higher to us than this living feeling for the unfathomable wisdom and divinity expressed in what I have just said. Let us be convinced that we are embraced by the divinity, that God works in us when we are living beings. This is the meaning of the theosophical motto: No human opinion is higher than the living feeling of divine wisdom, which is ever-changing and never fully revealed in its entirety. — Then we should not be surprised when we see that Goethe's saying is true:

As a man is, so is his God;
That is why God has so often been mocked.

Certainly, we humans cannot form any other concept of the divine being than one that is adapted to our respective abilities. But if we look at the matter as we have just done, we must say: We also have a right to form a corresponding concept of the divine. Only one thing is necessary, and that is to have the good will not to stop there. It would be presumptuous to believe that we have attained primordial wisdom. It is also presumptuous of science to believe that it has now explained the concept of God. In this respect, our present-day culture is indeed once again at one of those low points that humanity sometimes finds itself in. As you know, our present-day culture is somewhat presumptuous when it comes to the concept of God. And it is precisely those who want a new Bible, a so-called natural history of creation, who have often been found to be presumptuous in a way that prevents them from making any further progress. There is a work by David Friedrich Strauss entitled “Old and New Faith,” which was published in 1872 and directly presents the opinion that it is a new Bible in contrast to the old Bible, that what comes from natural science is true. For what the Bible tells us shakes us so much that these concepts must be discarded.

Believe me, it is the best people who are caught up in such a delusion today, it is the best people who believe in good faith that we can arrive at the primordial essence of existence through the dissemination of human knowledge, through what we encounter as matter and force. What is this materialistic belief in God that we encounter? It is often outstanding personalities who have come to say: Matter is our God. — These swirling atoms, which attract and repel each other, are supposed to bring about what constitutes our own soul. What is the materialistic belief in God? It is atheism! This can be compared to a stage of religion that also exists elsewhere in the world, but which we can only truly find if we have the characteristic concepts from the materialistic new belief. Dead matter and dead force are what the materialist offers and worships. Let us look back to the times of ancient Greece, and let us not take the deep mystery religions, but the folk religion of the Greeks. Their gods were human, were idealized humans. If we go back to other stages of existence, we find that people worshipped animals, that plants were symbols of the divine for them. But all of these were beings that had life within them. These were higher stages than those of the savages, who approached a block of stone and worshipped it as if it were alive. The block of stone differs in no way from what is force and matter. As incredible as it sounds, materialists are on the same level as such fetish worshippers. Of course, they say they do not worship force and matter at all. When they say that, we reply: you have no real understanding of what the fetish worshipper feels towards his fetish. The fetish worshippers are not yet able to rise to a higher conception of God. Their culture does not allow them to do so. For them, it is a legitimate opinion to worship an image that they themselves have created. Today, it is not only savages who hold this opinion, but also materialists. But anyone who is a scientific fetish worshipper today, who creates an image of matter and power for themselves and worships it, is guilty of something. By virtue of the level of culture we have achieved, they could see, if only they wanted to, how low a level they have remained at.

When we are surrounded today by this downright paralyzing conception of God, we say to ourselves: That is a reason to speak about the conception of God. — Therefore, I may perhaps refer to a book. It is said that it is a great merit of Feuerbach, the philosopher, that he represented a so-called “fantastic” God. In 1841, Feuerbach published a book in which he argued that we must reverse the statement “God created man in his own image” and say instead that “man created God in his own image.” We must be clear that man's desires and needs are such that he likes to see something above himself. So his imagination creates an image of itself. The gods become images of man. Feuerbach is said to have expressed a high, sublime wisdom with this statement. But if we go back to the times of ancient Greece, back to Egypt, and so on, we see that time and again people formed a mental image of the gods as they themselves were. Thus, they could also form ideas of gods as bulls and lions. If people were bull-like in their souls, then bulls became their gods, and they became bull-like; if they were lion-like, then lions and lion-like images became their gods. So this is not a new wisdom. It is a wisdom that is only becoming widespread again in our time.

But is it not true that human beings actually create their own gods? Is it not true that our opinions about the gods spring from our own hearts? Is it not true that when we look around us in the world, we do not see the divine with our eyes or with our senses? Those who want to see with their senses and understand with their minds will speak like Du Bois-Reymond, the great physiologist: I would believe in a ruler of the world if I could prove his existence; if I could prove it as I can prove the existence of the human brain. But then I would have to be able to prove its existence in the outside world, just as I can prove the existence of nerve strands in the human body. — We cannot find the deity in the outside world, as Du Bois-Reymond and the more recent thinkers want us to. Their opinions are created from their own hearts, as Feuerbach says.

But one can also say: What speaks in the human soul when this human soul forms opinions and thoughts? — We know that we ourselves are part of this divine essence; we know that God lives in us. We know that we humans are, so to speak, the final link in all things that surround us in this physical world, the noblest and most perfect beings within this world. Must we not then say that man, insofar as he develops physically, develops according to God as the most perfect being? Who would not agree with Goethe when he expresses his opinion in these beautiful words: “When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified, and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself, would rejoice at having reached its goal and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.” European and American knowledge considers itself wise and sublime, so wise and sublime that nothing surpasses it. Everyone believes that they have the sum of all wisdom. Those who adhere to Eastern and theosophical wisdom are quite different. They say to themselves: What you have achieved, you can surpass every day if you continue on the path. Everything you have achieved is your inner treasure. But you must not rest; you must continue on your path and listen to the voice of nature and your own heart.

Human beings form thoughts; thoughts spring from the human breast. But what speaks from the human breast? God himself speaks from it — if only human beings are inclined to listen to this inner voice selflessly, not allowing it to be drowned out by their everyday interests and inclinations. That is it: it is indeed the human voice, but in the human voice is the voice of God. Therefore, it is not surprising that we have different aspects, different views of the primordial divine wisdom in the human voice. A higher, spiritual modesty is what must permeate the theosophist if he wants to acquire this concept of God. Above all, he must be clear that life is an eternal learning process, that he never concludes with one opinion; that everything is in development. The human soul is also in development. Then it follows naturally that there are lower and higher souls. Then there are also souls that are not yet very advanced in their conception of God, and then again there are souls that have long since gone beyond the ordinary and, with lofty world concepts, have also acquired sublime concepts of God.

Nothing is as destructive to Western intellectual culture as our excessive criticism. For it is never conceived from the point of view that one must continue to develop, that one must never have a final judgment on a matter. The theosophist will never have this. He will boldly and courageously say what he has recognized as true: I evoke the same feeling in all who want to hear me, that I long and long again for higher stages and higher peaks of existence and wisdom. — So the theosophist will say. We will never arrive at the end of soul development; we will never have a complete world. We will seek the path that leads us to insights beyond our senses to the higher worlds, but above all, that gives us a correct feeling. No matter how highly developed each of us may be, we must always look deeper into the world, recognize the sources of life more deeply than we can today, when we stand within Western life and feeling. We should behave as higher human beings. That is why it is so difficult to live up to the wisdom that is poured into us by highly developed beings, poured in by beings who have already reached a higher level on the ladder of human development than the average person. These are beings who have much to say. We must have a feeling for where sublimity lies; then we will learn to listen and hear.

In this spirit, Theosophy seeks to build a spiritual current in order to attract a core of humanity that once again honestly and truly believes that the human soul is a product of evolution. If, millions of years ago, the worm that lived at that time had said, “I have reached the highest peak of existence,” then the worm could not have developed into a fish, the fish could not have developed into a mammal, and the mammal could not have developed into an ape or a human being. Unconsciously, they believed that they would grow beyond that, that they would have to grow to ever higher and higher heights. They believed in something that elevated them above their essence, and that is the power of their becoming. We humans cannot actually feel against nature. We should feel with nature. That which nature unconsciously has within itself as the power of becoming, which we should become more and more aware of, this awareness should be the power of our development. We must be clear that we must develop beyond ourselves. Just as in the world of animal life, the imperfect mammal lives alongside the perfect one, one remaining, as it were, at a lower stage, the other having already reached a higher stage and yet living alongside the lower one, so it is with human beings. Within humanity, different people live side by side at different stages of development.

We must admit that our concept of God is petty compared to that of a sublime being. We must also admit that our current concept of God will be petty compared to that which humanity will develop in millions of years when it has evolved further. Therefore, we must shift our concept of God into an infinite perspective and carry it within us as a living life. The fact that we must approach this, that we must strive for it, distinguishes the theosophical concept of God from all others. We do not deny any of these concepts. We are clear that they are all valid, depending on human capabilities. But we are also clear that none of them is exhaustive. We are clear that we cannot join those who sow discord between the different opinions. The different religious directions must exist side by side, not against each other.

And now we come to what we call the concept of God. It is not pantheism, not a pantheistic concept, not an anthropomorphic concept, not a defined concept. We do not worship this or that god; we worship behind Brahma Brahman, whom the Hindu reveres, who still has a feeling for things to which he can only respond with silence. We are clear that we can experience this divine being in life. We cannot form a mental image of it, but it lives in us as life. This is not knowledge of God, not science of God; theosophy is also not theology. Theosophy wants to find the way; it is the search for God.

A German philosopher said only a few words about this matter, but they were apt. Schelling said: Can one prove the existence of existence? — The various proofs of God's existence cannot be guides to God; at most, they lead us to a mental image of the deity. Real proof is only necessary where a thing must first be attained through our concept. God lives in our deeds, in our words. It cannot therefore be a question of proving the existence of God, but only of gaining opinions about Him and striving to make them ever more perfect. That is what it is all about, and the Theosophical Society has set itself the goal of contributing to this.

Those who today hold the theological point of view have no feeling, no idea of what guiding feelings there were in this regard in times past. I would like to remind you of a leading spirit of the 15th century who was already a theosophist in our sense of the word. He was a Catholic cardinal. I would like to remind you of the subtle theosophist Nicholas of Cusa, because he can be a role model for us theosophists today. He stated that there is a core in all religions, that they are different aspects of a primordial religion, that they should be reconciled, that they should be deepened. One should seek truth in them, but not presume to be able to grasp the primordial truth itself.

Cusanus seeks to clarify the concept of God in a profound way. If you understand Cusanus' view, you will gain an understanding of how Christianity also had significant, profound minds within the Middle Ages, minds of a kind that we cannot even begin to form a mental image of with our ideas today. Cusanus says—and many others before him have said—that we have our concepts, our thoughts. Where do all our human mental images come from? From what surrounds us, from what we have experienced. But what we have experienced is only a small part of the infinite. And if we go to the highest, we take the concept of being itself. Isn't that also a human concept? Where do we get the concept of being? We live in the world. It makes an impression on our sensory organs, on our eyes. And from what we see and hear, we say: it is. We attribute being to it. Basically, “a thing is” means as much as: I have seen it. Being has the same root as “seeing.” When we say God is, we are attributing to God's being a mental image that we have gained solely from our experience. We are saying nothing other than that God has a quality that we have perceived in various things. That is why Cusanus uttered a word that is deeply significant. He says: God does not come from being, he comes from transcendence. — This is not a mental image that we can grasp with our senses. That is why the feeling of infinity also lives in Cusanus' soul. It is deeply moving how this cardinal says: I have studied theology my whole life, I have also pursued the sciences of the world and — as far as they can be understood with the mind — I have also understood them. But then I became aware within myself, and through this I experienced: in the human soul lives a self that is increasingly awakened by the human soul. — You can read about this in Cusanus. The meaning of what he says goes far beyond what we think and give a mental image of today.

As necessary as it is for us to arrive at clear and sharply defined concepts of everything we experience in the world, it is also necessary for us to be aware at every moment that our conception of God must go beyond everything we perceive with our minds and senses. Then we will be clear that we should not recognize God, but seek God. Then we will see more and more what the path to knowledge of God is, and then develop toward it. If God is not a closed life within us, but living life itself, then we will wait until higher spiritual powers are developed through the paths taken by theosophy. God reigns not only in this world, but also in those worlds that can only be seen by those whose spiritual eyes are open to all those worlds of which Theosophy speaks. And it speaks of seven stages of human consciousness. It knows that human development means not remaining at the physical stage of consciousness, but advancing to higher and ever higher stages.

Those who do so initially experience only a subordinate concept of it. Nevertheless, we must never despair, but must be clear that we have the right to form opinions and ever higher opinions of the divine being, but that it is presumptuous to believe that any opinion will ever exhaust the subject. We must be clear that we must have the right feelings and emotions within us, then the feeling will become reverent again from the vision, then we will become reverent again. We have only lost our reverence through European ideas. Reverence and devotion are something that needs to be reawakened. But what could awaken our reverence more than that which exists as a divine entity, as the original source of existence! If we learn to develop devotion again, then our soul will be warmed and inflamed by something completely different, namely by that which flows through the universe as the lifeblood. This will become a part of our being.

Spinoza also speaks of this. In his “Ethics,” Spinoza developed concepts of the deity, and he concludes his “Ethics” with a hymn to the deity. He concludes it in this sense: Only the person who has attained freedom, only the person who also creates a deep feeling, a feeling that allows the deity to flow into him, whose knowledge is connected in love. Amor dei intellectualis—intellectual love of God—that is, the love of the spirit for God that rests in knowledge is God's love itself. This is not a concept, not a limited mental image, but living life.

Thus, our concept of God is not a science of God, but the confluence of all that we can experience as science, the connection of all this in a living feeling, in life in the feeling of the divine. The word “theosophy” should not be translated as “divine wisdom,” but rather as “divine wisdom” or, even better, the search for a path to God, the search for ever-increasing deification. “The search for wisdom” — that is what it is.

More or less, those who have risen to higher heights of existence have always stood on this ground. Among others, Goethe, who was much more of a theosophist than is commonly suspected, is above all the theosophical poet of the Germans. He can only be fully understood when illuminated by the light of theosophy. Among many other truths that lie hidden in Goethe's works, there also lies the truth of theosophy itself. Goethe expressed it excellently: No religion is higher than truth! — Goethe was deeply imbued with this. Just as all existence has a form, so too are our thoughts formed. Just as every formed being is a parable, so too are our ideas of God a parable of God — but never the divine itself. Goethe's words also apply to the concept of God, which is transitory, and to the image of God, which is imperishable:

Everything transitory is only a parable.