Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I

GA 90a — 16 August 1904, Berlin

LIV. On the Purpose and the Home of Man

It is only through Pasteur that science is able to prove that living things can never arise from non-living things: the air alone is full of life germs; if you let them go through embers, no more life will arise. “All life originates from the living,” says modern science. However, it still believes that spiritual things can arise from corporeal ones. Through theosophy, we know that in the living, soul-like qualities never arise without the addition of the soul germ.

In the stream of development, the inanimate gives rise to the inanimate; if the animate is to arise, a new stream with life-germs must arise. But if the soul is to arise, a new stream with a soul-germ must arise. The inanimate is therefore the soil and the arena within which the animate realizes itself; never its cause. The living is always only the scene within which the soul realizes itself, never its cause. This is what leads us to the great law of reincarnation; we must seek the causes for everything we find in the soul in the soul self.

The species is born where the external conditions correspond to the species. If they do not, the individual being perishes; the species survives. So it is with the soul, which, after all its past life in a raw way of life, immediately thrives. The soul is emotionally connected to its surroundings; among those who are the same, the soul retains the tendency to return to its former habits.

The physical, kamic and mental bodies are composed of matter with corresponding laws. The same law returns after the matter has fallen away and it has unfolded in devachan, but draws to itself a related law in its new accumulation of matter. That is the law of karma: every past life remains as a cause for the following lives, and indeed the mental properties of the following lives will be based on the mental ones of the past, the kamic ones on the kamic ones of the past and the physical ones on the physical properties of the past.

The greatest difficulty begins with the incarnation in the physical body. Only in life can there be an interaction of the three bodies; the physical must become an instrument. We know that the virtues that strive up and down in human life interact. The “struggle for existence” leads to the lowest level of Kamaloka. “Selfishness, ‘lack of direction’ and ‘deception’ bring people to the second, third and fourth sections of Kamaloka.

The purification in the three upper stages consists in those who form the negation of the three higher qualities: mistaking the symbol for the thing; reading the B [illegible] word in the Bible instead of the spirit; literalism and symbol worship find their purification in the fifth region of Kamaloka.

Genuine piety is devotion to the spiritual. It can be directed towards the temporal or the eternal in the spirit. Revelers in the realm of the spirit, who pursue beautiful spirituality as a pleasure, purify themselves in the sixth department. In the seventh department are the idealists who seek God in nature, the theoretical materialists. The vices are nothing more than the shadow images of the Kama world in our physical world.

Justice, which draws Kama-Manas to Manas, still has to be purified, but in Devachan it leads to unity. The sense of extending justice beyond the boundaries of the immediate environment is awakened in the first region of Devachan. The virtue of abstinence from the worldly, devotion to the spirit is formed in the second stage of Devachan. The devout in the ordinary sense. - The active interest in life, the outward expression of fortitude, is purified in the third realm of devachan. People who take the initiative, who don't let themselves go.

Wisdom - anyone who can control the physical world from within - leads to the fourth level. Leaders and guides of humanity in external culture - musicians, educators.

[Those who] incline towards the eternal, [to them] it becomes a symbol. Increase of abstinence: true beauty. - When man allows himself to be determined by the eternal instead of by the transitory, we have piety, life in spiritual steadfastness. Wisdom is the height of wisdom. The seventh virtue of Manas is [a gap in the transcript].

Just as the scales of the manas can tip, so too can those of desire and harder vices. Everything is related in Kama; those who are entangled in it no longer have a fight to fight; the entities that want it can approach them. — When the craving for pleasure is increased, then the person no longer lives within himself, but rather in the external world: devotion to pleasure – the fifth vice. Epidemics – lust... When a person is completely controlled by external forces, has absolutely lost his way, is absorbed in desire, then we come to the sixth vice, which almost brings him to the destruction of his own being: instability. When he gives himself up to any kind of deception, when he does not see through anything with cleverness, when deception loses itself in dullness, then we have the last vice.

The personality thus holds everything together, it is between life and death. When it falls away, the two sides remain, pushing up and down. The measure of vices leads him to Kamaloka - the others to Devachan. As long as the personality holds together the struggle for existence and justice, the human being oscillates – when it falls apart, it is drawn in both directions. In the personality there was balance. Without personality, the virtues or vices fall prey to their own realms and laws. Plant – salts – seed.

Now we must bear in mind that all the virtues in man have developed within the domain of desire. As long as a being lives in the lower realm, it clings to the lower; it cannot live in the higher. Everything that clings to a person from Kama must be handed over to Kamaloka; only then can he ascend to Devachan. As long as something physical clings to the plant, it must live in the physical realm. – Kamaloka is the place where what was desire in the human being must be satisfied; there the human being must live out his virtues, whereas in the sensual life the physical shell was able to hold them together. – Thanatos, Sisyphos.

There are seven sections in both realms because there must be a corresponding atonement for each vice or each virtue; there are the laws for stripping away the seven disharmonious qualities, and the seven sections of the devachan are there for developing the seven harmonious qualities. The three lower ones for stripping away the coarse lower ones, the three higher ones for purifying the struggle for existence – the highest for stripping away deception.

Everything that is acquired as virtue in life finds its training in Devachan, the cargo is taken up into Devachan. Everything that occurs in sensual life is the phenomenal, the appearance; it points us to the noumenal, what is behind things. We must see personality in this twofold aspect. Here also lies what we call free will, which is given to us to help us in this struggle. Let vice be purified by freedom - the school of incarnation. Ever new interactions.

Man's true home is Arupa in Devachan. He descends into rupa and fills himself with the thought-body. In the arupa region he sees what his own self is, he enjoys the direct contemplation of the eternal. Now he is to go through the school of existence. In Arupa he would never come into contact with the world of separation. He must now [transform] the seeing of the eternal into thinking about the separate.

First, the human being surrounds himself with thought-material so that he can think the Eternal in the temporal. This brings him into the world of being special according to Rupa.

Second, the human being surrounds himself with astral-material so that he can feel the Eternal in the temporal. - Kama or astral world.

Three: The human being envelops himself in physical matter so that he can want the eternal in the temporal. Now he is incarnated again and is subject to the laws of the physical world until he takes the upward path again.

This is what we call the pilgrimage of the soul, which passes through the three worlds. Then comes the higher world, which is the soul's actual home, the formless world.

All the thoughts that we peel out of things must lie in things. We call their specific characteristic content form; but nothing can be formed without having a thin matter. So what we visualize in thought-matter is present as an entity.

The three upper principles rest within, while the three lower ones form the outer shell. They are present objectively and subjectively. The first three are only subjective. We cannot observe them. In the 4 Prana-Kama-Manas, thoughts become; they appear as shadows. If Manas, the soul, harbors thoughts, these thoughts would confront Kama-Manas in such a way that they would be its realities. Depending on the level of consciousness of a being, he calls something a reality. When man loses his physicality, he loses the physical principle. But when a principle darkens, a new one enters.

It shines within the soul 8. When he loses Prana and Kamaloka, 9 enters; [when he loses] Kama-Manas, then 10 enters. What is it that becomes active there?

When he loses Kama-Rupa, a new being enters into the depths of his soul; it is related to Kama-Rupa, but has a different law. This draws him into the world of the spirit. It is called the spiritual fire in occultism. “There will come one who baptizes you with fire.” What enters for the physical is that which contains everything, which dominates the physical with perfect wisdom. We call it ‘Mahav’ or ‘cosmic wisdom.’ It shines forth as we shed the physical.

The substances disappear, the laws become a higher principle. What becomes tendency and power shines forth again as a higher principle. When it gives up Kama-Manas, which is actually our self in this world, our truest self emerges - through being this being, our self-awareness. Now we address Manas as our body, the cosmic fire of thought that we carry. We address Manas as our objective, as we did our physical body before. When our self-awareness awakens, we feel as a unified being, belonging to the whole. St. Augustine: “We see things because they are; things are because God sees them.

We are, seen from a higher plane, thoughts of the world spirit cast into form. In the soul life of the world spirit, all things are truly present. When we strip away the embodiment, we remain in the soul life. That which we commonly call reality arises only when the higher principles darken and emerge in the world of particularity.

As an individuality, the human being is subject to the laws that prevail in the six higher realms; as a personality, they are subject to those that prevail in the four lower realms. Therefore, the lower realms must always be renewed. Man must die and be re-embodied because he lives in a world that is subject to the laws of birth and death. It is not man who is subject to the law of birth and death, but the lower worlds, in which man embodies himself from time to time.

Day and night change, but the law is eternal. We carry the law up, it shines in its beauty when we have shed the physical. Man carries the unified, the eternal, continually up into the higher realm. Man's task is to extract from the lower world as much of the higher world as is hidden in it. That is why he is esoterically compared to a bee. He has to raise the temporal in order to unite it with the eternal. Because he cannot do it all at once, he does it in successive embodiments. Since the world does not embody itself all at once, but in succession in epochs, man must also do the same. The reason for re-embodiment lies in the evolution of the world. We therefore not only redeem ourselves, but also the world, by developing ourselves, and fail in our task towards the Eternal if we do not further our development.