Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge II

GA 90b — 16 October 1905, Berlin

XVI. Self-knowledge and Knowledge of God

On Friday at seven o'clock there is a meeting of the Besant branch. On the agenda is: “Preliminary discussion of the general assembly taking place on Sunday”. On Sunday at ten o'clock is the general assembly: reporting on the management and so on. If the general assembly permits, a more factual discussion about Theosophy will take place at four o'clock in the afternoon. At the assembly next Monday, I will speak about “Occultism, Esotericism and Theosophy. I would like to point out that this topic will be related to current trends. I would like to invite as many external members as possible.

Today I would like to speak to you first about “Self-knowledge” and “Knowledge of God”. These are two terms that are very easily misunderstood in the sense of occult world striving and, from experience, are also very easily and often misunderstood. Again and again you read in theosophical books and hear in these or those popular theosophical lectures or in other lectures that belong to related schools of thought that man carries the divine self in his soul, carries it within himself, and that in order to come to the knowledge of God, he need only let this self speak, then he will also find the highest knowledge of God in himself. The “knowledge of the divine self” has almost become a familiar saying. As true as it is that the old sentence “know thyself” should stand as a sacred motto before every theosophical assembly, it is also true that this “know thyself” causes the greatest difficulties. Today we will spend a little time trying to understand this saying: “Know thyself” — and the other saying “Self-knowledge is the first step, the beginning of improvement.” “Self-knowledge” sounds much more trivial, but it is just as true. These two sayings must complement each other. I have met people who approached me with the saying, “I am the Atma, the divine self lives in me, the divine man lives in me” — and the like. Above all, anyone who wants to penetrate into the occult views of life must thoroughly unlearn the trivial view of such sayings. And today we want to discuss some of these sayings from the point of view of the occultist. The occultist does not speak like that, and his words will never be: “Self-knowledge is knowledge of God”. But to see this in the right light, we must ask ourselves: What can we actually find in ourselves? How much can we learn from ourselves? I will start this lecture with a saying of such individuals who have progressed far beyond us all and from whom we all have much to learn. They tell us about self-knowledge: “We learn a great deal” - that is, the higher individuals - “from the nature around us, we learn a great deal from the human life around us. We learn infinitely valuable things from our older brothers; we learn nothing at all from ourselves.”

Let us keep this saying in mind. It is a saying of those who have progressed far ahead of us in development. Those who realize what a human being actually is will gradually learn to understand this saying. What is a human being? Here we have to look back at some of what has been discussed here during these lessons. We know, of course, that a human being is not something that is born out of nothing. We know that he is the re-embodiment of his earlier personality. When we look at the person of today, we have to ask ourselves: in which personalities was this person embodied earlier? And so we come to a series of life courses of the individuality standing before us. And even when we have reached the first incarnation of such a person, we have still not come to a beginning. We only reach older regions. Man was not yet anything that resembles what he is today. But he was already something. And further back, we find man embedded in the facts and beings of the things of the past. There we find the causes of present human existence. And when we ask ourselves, “What are we?” we have to say, “We are the effect of past lives, of days in times gone by.” If we look at ourselves today, we are basically nothing more than what is composed of the causes of our past actions and the actions of the powers of the world that are at work in us. We are a consequence of the past, and everything we can find in us has happened once in the past. Whatever is personality in us was an action - karma, personal, individual or world karma - in the past. We are an expression of this karma. And if we could look into ourselves with true self-knowledge, then, when we undergo the training that the occult schools offer us, we find our own past lives, the people who were connected to us in the past, then we find ourselves entangled with the world of people around us.

If we take into account what I have said in previous lessons, we also know where to look if we want to see the matter in a different form. Before we became physical, we were astral bodies. These are the sum of passions and desires as they were prepared at the time and as they then emerged in the physical body. What is at work in our physical body today is the astral body of the past. It contained the instincts and passions. And what we see outside of us in the animals are the passions that have split off from us. If you look out at the lion, you can say: I once had this lion nature within me; I threw it out so that I could develop higher. What is in me as an impulse, I have cast off and purified. I have fused it into harmony within me, while they have spread out in the animal kingdom. I see my astral past spread out in the various animal groups of the world.

And before I was in the astral body, I was in the mental body. Even then I shed beings to develop myself higher. And in the plant world that I see around me, I see the whole past in the mental body. The delicious fruits of the plants express it.

And when I look into the very depths of nature, into what has become mind and consciousness in me, then I have to perceive this thinking mind in its various images and forms in all mineral nature. This too is part of my own past.

You see, we understand the mineral world because we once were it ourselves. We understand rock crystal because we have separated it from ourselves. What our mind thinks, that once created the whole mineral world. Thus our own being is spread around us, and by looking around in this world, we see only our own self, our past self. And by seeing the people around us, people who may be at a lower level of development, by seeing everything around us, we see the images of our own past embodiments and form our own later embodiment. Just as some people around us are today, so were we once ourselves. [As the Hottentots were, so were we; in the Divine we shall be.]

Thus we come to a picture of the past and a picture of the future. Knowledge of nature is knowledge of the self, a mirror of the past and the future. Bearing this in mind, the only truly clarifying word about self-knowledge that comes from the depths of our being is the Vedanta wisdom, the most wonderful wisdom the world has ever produced: 'Tat twam asi' - 'That thou art'. There is no thing in the external world that is not part of our being, of our self. Look at the stone you step on – that is something that was once connected to your own self. Look at the plants and the animals – all of them are pieces of our own self. They were once woven into our self. We belong to a single being, with the past and the future. That is why we say to what is spreading out in space: “That is you.”

Not that is self-knowledge when you look into your inner self, but precisely when you look out into the world with the awareness that in every world being there is a piece of your own being: The world is not within you, but out there on the great tableau of the universe. It is not from within you, but from the great tableau of the universe, that the creative God speaks. You attain self-knowledge by attaining knowledge of the world, by listening to every being in nature, by opening the senses and spiritual organs to what speaks to you from the outside world. You should not close yourself off from the outside world, but open the self outwards, by first expressing the self and becoming aware that your true self is outside in the outside world, which has created in the most ancient times that which still rests within you as perceptible. Feel yourself one with that which lives and moves in the outer space, and feel this in the saying: “That art thou [dw]. The stone outside is the cause that certain things are within you. Feel, by looking at minerals: ”That art thou [dw].

Man belongs not only to the past but also to the future. He must work into the future; he must learn what he will become. This self that we carry within us will one day be something quite different from what it is today. But what it will be in the future, we cannot find in our self. That is not in our self. Our self is karma – the effect of the past. What the self makes of this, that we will only be in the future. But we cannot learn this from ourselves, but only from those who have progressed one step further than we have, from our older brothers, who are in a more advanced reincarnation than ours. That is why the more highly developed person says: I must learn what I was and what I will be. I can learn a lot from the nature around me, a great deal from the people around me, infinitely valuable lessons from my older brothers, but nothing at all from myself – and by that he means the self that is present at the moment.

Perhaps it needs to be understood more that a deeper self is spread out in nature, insofar as it has its cause in the past. And it must also be understood that what our older brothers, the wise brothers of humanity, experienced is a prefiguration for our own future today. So we must understand that we cannot counter self-knowledge with what our older, wise brothers teach, but that we have to see our own self in these older brothers, that we have to see our future in these older brothers. What they are today, we will be one day, and if we want to learn what we will be in the future, then we have to let ourselves be told what they have already been through. How could the animals, plants and lowly humans provide an explanation of their own selves? That which we are today, they will be in a later time. But we can only have our own selves explained to us by those who have reached the stages that we still have to come to.

Thus we can only sit in humility at the feet of the great teachers of mankind. The wise of India say: The disciple must sit devoutly at the feet of the great guru. This does not exclude self-knowledge, but includes true self-knowledge. Imagine: I am sitting at the feet of the exalted guru – I dare not say: I do not want to learn from you, but from myself. That would be a misunderstanding of the true, higher self. The higher self speaks from all. From his words, my self also speaks.

What I can learn from my self, that sounds from the lips of my guru. Theory, gray theory, is when you think you should let your own self speak. And true esoteric practice is when you listen to the older brothers of humanity. What we are, what our self has to say to us, is best expressed in a book like “Light on the Path” or similar. In the eternal sentences that you find in this book or in the New Testament, namely in the Gospel of John or in the venerable writings of the great masters, your self speaks to you. And when you become silent and still in what you are even now, as an effect of the past at the feet of the guru – he need only be more developed than you – then your own self speaks to you instructively in your ears, in your soul.

And when you are confronted with a sentence as it is written here: “Expect the blooming of the flower in the silence after the storm, not before,” then this is a saying of a master who has long since passed through the stage at which I am standing and who can teach me about my self. That is why the occultist says: First of all, I have to immerse myself in what the wise guides of humanity have produced. And so, in humility and serenity, he gradually ascends. First, we listen to what the greats of humanity have to say, who have emerged in all fields and who were wiser than we were. We look up to the great artists, to the great wise leaders, insofar as they come to us in the outer, exoteric history.

When we let a picture by Raphael work on us, when we let Plato's great works on the immortality of the soul or his “Phaedo” penetrate us, when we let the writings left to us by our German Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, or similar great men, then our self speaks to us, then our self talks to us, and then we rise up the first step to a higher element of our self. Then, when we have absorbed what is on this level within us, at least partially, then we can reach the depths of those who do not call themselves because their name is not important, for example in a writing like “Light on the Path”, which was only written down through the instrument of Mabel Collins, but which comes from a great, wise guide, then we can climb to higher levels.

In the same way, our Self speaks to us through the Gospel, through the Bhagavad Gita, through the ancient scriptures of mankind. It is all our Self that speaks, and we find it best when we seek it not within us but without, as it says in the Vedanta verse: 'Tat twam asi' - 'That art thou'.

And then, when we no longer feel that we have something to say to ourselves, when we merely want to be a vessel, when we have given up everything that is connected with our narrower self, which is an effect, then, only then does higher individuality speak to us. But there is still more to it than that. Above all, we must take to heart the saying that self-knowledge, the knowledge of our so-called inner being, is the beginning of the will to perfect not only our knowledge but ourselves as well. We learn nothing at all from our self. In truth, man is subject to the most serious deceptions through this self. This self – just take a look at it. Is it you in your daily activities? Is it you when you go to eat? Is it you when you go about your business? A clear self-knowledge will tell you that it is not yourself, but that it is natural instincts. What your physical body, what nature makes of you, that drives you, that only pushes and pushes in you. It is the greatest illusion when someone says: I eat, I go for a walk, I do this or that business - because he is not the driver, but the driven. For those who immerse themselves in this self-knowledge, it is not the source of the truth that they might find in their self, but they realize that it is precisely in their self that they find the outside world, that which pushes and drives them from the outside. No matter how much you are connected to your present individuality, what are you? You are the result of your karmic development from the past. What we think and feel today, we think and feel that way because we have been driven to this or that in past lives. The past lives continue to have an effect throughout our lives.

When you ask yourself in the process of self-knowledge why you do this or that, you do not arrive at your self, but at the earlier causes in your past lives. And if you go further and examine for yourself what you have acquired in the present life, you will find the same thing. Take language, for example. Is language your self? You speak, you mean to speak. Can a person speak from his or her self? If that were so, every person would have to be able to form new words, every person would have to give birth to language out of their self. But language speaks, the language of the tribe, of the people. The whole nation speaks through language. The whole nation stands behind us and speaks to us, through us.

We can always strive for self-knowledge and will find that the self goes further and further out of us. And when we understand “Tat twam as” and see this self spread and poured out over the outside world, then we live in self-knowledge. You just have to realize this clearly and feel it once, what it means to stand before yourself so hollowed out by self-knowledge. Hollowed out, the self-aware stands before himself. It must first become bleak and dark within us if we want to reach the end of self-knowledge. Where we used to feel warmth, we later feel through self-knowledge that this warmth does not come from our heart, but that it is only poured into it by the outside world and that our self is only the confluence of the forces of the outside world. In place of every arrogant feeling of self, there then comes the most perfect modesty and the realization that we are nothing compared to the world around us. Barrenness and emptiness and hollowness is the result of that self-knowledge, which only wants to search within itself. When we have arrived there and realized that our self lies entirely in the outside world, then we are ripe to let the teachings of our older brothers flow into us, then they speak to us, the seal-keepers of our higher self, when we want to be nothing more of this higher self. Our lower self is spread out in the various stages outside, and our higher self is spread out outside in those who have come further than we have.

Self-knowledge is knowledge of the world, and the beginning of self-knowledge is that our self must flow into us from the outside. No one can walk the path and feel the saying, “Seek the way of inner contemplation,” without being driven to the other saying, “Seek the way by boldly stepping out of yourself.” That is true self-knowledge, that we no longer search within ourselves, but in the outside world. And then something of the future reveals itself to us, of that which is not yet. There are those who, by virtue of their further development, can already see into that which our own self will only see in the future.

We have passed through the astral and mental worlds, and we will struggle up again to an astral and mental world through this physical world of ours. But to do that, we must first develop the strength to move up to these higher worlds, where we depart with death; they can be seen by our older brothers. Those who have humbly reached the level of the older brotherhood already see within life those realms that man enters when he has passed through the gate of death.

And how does man learn to see into this world? Not by brooding over himself, but by listening to what our older brothers tell us; by understanding the sentence that self-knowledge is listening to the teaching of our older brothers. In the words of our older brothers lie the powers that not only teach and instruct us, but also awaken organs, spiritual eyes and spiritual ears in our own astral body and our own mental body. When the guru speaks to me, currents flow into me that awaken spiritual eyes and spiritual ears in me, through which I learn to see into the worlds into which he can see. Only when I no longer want what is within me and is only an effect of the past, when I have hollowed myself out and let the content of the higher brothers flow into the empty vessel, then I receive the content that allows me to see into the future of human life.

Thus, for the true occultist in practice, self-knowledge is the humble listening to those who have already learned what he still has to learn. And from this point of view, one learns the most. Therefore, the occultist worships the disciple and the master, and he seeks the disciple and the master not in himself, but in the other greater self that is out there in the world. For the occultist, self-knowledge means devotion to a disciple and to the master; and seeking the greater self in him, the saying is also true here: “That is you.”

And it would be immodest, in the highest sense of the word, to say that one could find within oneself what our older brothers teach. That is why one becomes so modest when one advances a little in knowledge. That is why, from a certain point on, one stops saying one's own opinion. Because what is it? Nothing but an effect of karma. But when we stand there and suppress our own opinion, initially keeping silent about everything we ourselves believe we have called for, and instead listen to what comes to us from the outside world from those who have progressed further than we have, then we deserve to be truly heard. And then even the simple person who lives in this way has beautiful and great things to say. If a man only expresses his opinion, he will have very little to say to you. If a man comes to you but only wants to express his opinion, he will have very little to say to you. But if he lets the eternal truths of those who are wiser than he is and of whom he is aware resound from his individuality, then he will have an infinite amount to say to you, even if it seems simple.

The highest truth sounds from the deepest modesty and humility. Those who have spoken the highest truths have spoken differently than those who so often speak to us, saying, “I mean this, I believe that, that is my point of view, that is my opinion.” Those who have progressed do not speak in this way; they refer to those who stand behind them. They know that their own opinion is worthless.

Those who founded the Theosophical Society, those who represent it in the right way, have always referred to the individuality behind them, to a true higher self that speaks behind them, [an individuality] that is a master and is therefore our higher self. The words of the external master personalities communicate the actual understanding of the work of the Theosophical Society. They [the founders of the Theosophical Society] completely surrender their will and make themselves their instruments. That is their attitude. They prefer to be able to step in front of others and say: There is nothing in me, nothing should come from me, I want to make myself an empty vessel from which the master speaks. But he should not be my own self, but this higher self should be the wise guides and brothers of humanity who live alongside us and whose words we want to hear and understand in the right sense.

We can learn a lot from the nature around us, a great deal from the people and the life around us, and we can learn the most valuable lessons from our older brothers. But we should learn nothing from ourselves, because we are only a point of passage. We can accomplish nothing in the world if we want to make this point of transition in our present effective. Think of what you would be if you only wanted to make your present effective. This is only the effect of karma. If you reject everything that is above you, nothing happens through you that has not already happened. You would be a barren fruit on the tree of humanity. For everything that could happen through you has already happened if you remain with your own self. Only when you fertilize your self with the higher self, with the higher self present in the world, can you bring something new into this world. Then something works out of you that is not merely the past and its effects. Only the connection with what has been achieved in the world as higher than we ourselves are, only this connection and this full, modest awareness gives us the strength to bring something productive into the world. And this decision to seek the connection with what is higher in the world than we are, out of the desert of our own self, this decision is the first step towards becoming a disciple. Those who seek a different self-knowledge than the one suggested can never become disciples or chelas in the occult sense. Only this gives us the strength to learn something in the world. Without this awareness, we are powerless and powerless - nothing.

All occult schools have summarized this awareness as a full reality in two sentences, which, if a person does not just keep them in mind theoretically, but lives by them in every moment of his life, give him an infinite abundance of soul power, as much as a person can have. All occultism and all human striving is included in these two sentences, which we will discuss in a moment. But these sentences must be lived in such a way that we are completely pulsed and flowed through by them at every step, that we do nothing without being aware of these two sentences. These two sentences basically go together, because what is around us has flowed together in us and brought us to the present point of view. There we stand and give ourselves everything that is around us. That is our own extended past.

You cannot find more in your self. You find the sensations spread out outside in your own astral body. Everything that can feel is a mirror image of what lives in your own astral body. [Everything that lives is a mirror image of our etheric body.] What is around us as stone and mineral is a mirror image of what lives in our own physical body.

At first, your self is completely empty; because you say nothing to it other than 'I'. If you want to have more in this self, then you must look into the future, you must look at what is not the past for yourself. Then you must be aware that something important is expressed in the bridge between these two, namely that you yourself are expressed in the bridge between these two, that you are only a bridge between what you yourself have developed and what is yet to be developed. What we can see, we have already been; what we learn to see when we look at the teachings of the older brothers, we will see that is working towards the future.

Thus, he who has understood this looks out into the world and says: That has been and is there for my sake, so that I could arise. What I can perceive is all part of it. Take anything out of this environment, you would not be the same as you are today. And everything had to be there for you to be. Just as you build a house brick by brick, so it is also there. The lowest stone must be there so that the upper floors can be built. If you take out a single stone, the house will no longer look the way it should. It is the same with people. If you take out a building block, they will no longer look the way they do now. You don't understand this right away. But as the yoga student says, through some yoga exercises you learn to understand this. If we look at the world, we see what is around us in the world. If we look within ourselves, we find what is to become, we find the buds for the fruits of the future.

And then we also realize that we are not here for our own sake, but for the sake of becoming what our older brothers are, that we strive for them as our ideals. Not sophisticated ideas, but the example of [our older brothers] we should strive for. We should live in reality, not in abstractions. That is the second sentence.

This is how the divine develops, by connecting with what is present for us and what we are predisposed to become in the future. We are here for the sake of the divine, not for our own sake. Thus, the one who understands these two occult sentences does not think of himself at all. He thinks of what is there for his sake and of what is to become for the sake of what he is there for. From these two perspectives flows the strength to work, not for ourselves, but for the Divine, which is developing out of us. These are the two pillars of all occultism. If you want to ascend to the higher sources, then you must live under the auspices of these two sentences. They must permeate and pulsate through everything, and they must become very intimate and familiar to you. The two sentences in which the meaning of our discussion today is to be summarized are the sentences that stand in front of every secret school in golden letters, letters that only speak to the soul, but which are erased when someone wants to look at them with self-interest or selfishness. He who enters the gate of the secret school in complete selflessness sees these two pillars of all knowledge of reality, which read:

“All around us for us. And we ourselves for God.”

These are two sentences that give the occultist power when he has fully grasped them. We must really want to learn what is around us.

And when someone asks us about our higher self, we must point beyond ourselves, not to an indefinite, abstract emptiness, but to a concrete reality. We have nothing within ourselves; everything around us is there for us, and we are there for the divine.

The two principles of all occultism, they were written in golden secret letters that lost their luster when a profane eye looked at them, above the portals of all occult schools.

Not only can the profane not read them, but even if they could, they would not understand them. These are sentences that give strength to the occultist when he fully comprehends them.

This is how we should speak today. Because when such things are understood, then one also understands that the theosophical movement is not possible without an occult foundation, without the knowledge of the masters and without the knowledge of the higher worlds. These higher worlds are our future. What we do today is worked into our astral body, and this will build the world to come. There are also souls that have worked into it more than we ourselves are, and these provide us with images of our actual higher self.

When we live under the influence of such knowledge, we may encounter all kinds of difficulties in the theosophical movement. These difficulties usually come from people, not from our older brothers. And one comes more and more to the realization that the mistakes of such great movements, as the theosophical movement is, do not come from within, but are carried into it. What is a movement like Theosophy? It can come into being when a number of people are called together and the life and wisdom of the masters are to flow through their souls. Now they are together and this life flows through them. But these souls came from outside, they came together from all sides, and they bring their faults with them, do not immediately discard them, and so their faults must appear within the movement. But these are not the errors that come from the movement itself. People bring their errors into the movement. If there are bad habits in the movement, they are not those that lie in the theosophical movement, but those that are also out there in the world. We must be clear about this: serious crises may still come. We must also bear the mistakes of the people entering the theosophical movement. We should look at everything that happens in our movement in this way. Some of what we all do is open to criticism. But we have come in from outside and still have the faults of the outside world. And let us be clear about the fact that we must discard these faults through the theosophical movement. And if it were the most valuable members, they too would strive to discard their faults. It is a mistake to point out the mistakes. We should look for the mistakes in ourselves, and if there is greatness and sublimity, outside ourselves. Then we have properly aligned ourselves with the theosophical movement. If we criticize ourselves and not the movement, we can make progress. The Master's words in the sentences: “We learn much from nature, much more from people and infinitely valuable from the older brothers. Nothing from ourselves.” At most one thing: how we have to improve ourselves by the example of the older brothers.