5 THE PATH TO KNOWLEDGE AND UNITY

5.1 Introduction
The path to knowledge and unity is the path on which mankind is wandering towards the
inevitable final goal: the next higher natural kingdom, the fifth one.
2
We are in the physical world to have experiences and to learn from them, to acquire
insight and understanding and qualities and abilities requisite for further development in the
higher kingdom.
3
The path is long from the stage of barbarism to the stage of ideality, from the physical,
emotional, and mental worlds of ignorance to the worlds of knowledge and unity.
4
In the following, it will be shown that without esoteric knowledge of reality and life man
will be the victim of his emotional illusions and mental fictions.
5
He has no idea of the fact that he is a monad in a causal envelope, that being incarnated in
an organism he possesses four additional envelopes made of molecular matter of successively
higher kinds with different kinds of consciousness. He will be able to ascertain these facts
when he has acquired consciousness in his highest envelope (intuition in his causal envelope
in the world of Platonic ideas).
6
The maya of the Indians was originally a common term for all the conceptions of reality,
life, and the meaning of life that people invent. Maya thus does not mean (as Western
philosophers think) that the physical world is an illusion, a figment of the imagination, that
physical matter is unreal.
7
Maya means that a knowledge of reality cannot be acquired by men, not by any kind of
beings in the three worlds of man (the physical, emotional, and mental) but only in the causal
world, which belongs to the fifth natural kingdom. If those who have attained that kingdom
incarnate in order to help men, they return, having left their organisms, to their worlds. They
do not dwell in the emotional or mental world.
8
Thus maya is the sum total of all kinds of philosophical constructions and scientific
hypotheses and theories; in addition, all kinds of emotional illusions and mental fictions and
all kinds of clairvoyant investigation.
9
Man has yet to learn that he is quite simply inconceivably ignorant of practically
everything in the cosmos in which he exists. So-called Sokratean wisdom (the supreme
wisdom available to man) consists in the insight that practically he knows only that he knows
nothing. We believe that we know but we do not truly know even the things we have
explored the most. Perhaps in some hundred years time it will dawn on mankind that the
authorities that have been its guides have only led astray (excepting, of course, the
messengers from the planetary hierarchy). We must rely on authorities in all the various
fields of research, since they know more than what the layman can know. However, that
remains an emergency for the time being. When these authorities appear with normative
pretensions, they display a fundamental deficiency in their intellectual equipment.
10
Where mans way of life in various respects is concerned, the esoterician has been taught
to see that the knowledge of the laws of life is the only standard, those laws of life of which
mankind still is ignorant and which it still, as it seems, refuses to heed, being entangled in its
emotional illusions and mental fictions. To liberate mankind from these things will probably a
long time yet be beyond Hercules feat of cleaning the Augean stables.
1

THE WORLD OF EMOTIONAL ILLUSIONS

5.2 Introduction
The emotional world is the world of illusions. Emotional consciousness is by nature
exclusively desire, urge, or what the individual at the emotional stage perceives as dynamic
will. At the stage of barbarism, before mentality has yet been activated, desire expresses itself
as more or less uncontrolled impulses. According as the mental envelope is affected by the
vibrations of the emotional envelope, the two envelopes are interwoven, mental consciousness
is roused to life, and desire and thought merge. If desire preponderates, desire coloured with
thought (feeling) is obtained. If thought preponderates, thought accentuated by desire
(imagination) is obtained. It is feeling and imagination that give rise to the illusions of
emotional thinking. At the stage of civilization, most thinking is the wishful thinking of
desire. The individual is always personally committed and never fully impersonal except
when it comes to purely mental problems (mathematical ones, for instance.).
2
In the normal individual in physical incarnation, emotional consciousness is subjective,
individually or collectively. It falsifies the conception of and attitude to reality there is in
mental consciousness. Thus illusion is misleading, disorienting, and life-falsifying desire,
feeling or imagination.
3
During thousands of years man has identified himself with his illusions, which therefore
are latent in his subconscious and determine his instinct at lower stages. The subconscious,
which consists of complexes, more than 90 per cent illusory complexes, is the material that
psychoanalysis tries to explore by sporadic nose dives and the individual himself tries to
sound in so-called self-analysis. True man is the sub- and superconscious, largely inaccessible
to waking consciousness.
4
During the emotional eon, emotional matter is the most vitalized, emotional vibrations are
the strongest, emotional consciousness is the most suggestive, and emotional will is the most
dominant. The certainty of feeling is absolute when determined by the will of desire.
Liberation from all this is possible only for mental consciousness methodically and
systematically activated.
1

5.3 The Objective Illusions of the Emotional World

Emotional matter is formed instantaneously after the faintest expression of emotional
consciousness. This explains why the emotional world is filled with emotional material forms.
In the three lower regions of that world, which are made up of the three lowest emotional
molecular kinds, there are in addition enduring counterparts of the physical forms. In the four
higher regions, all material forms (except the emotional envelopes of emotional beings) are
created by the imagination of emotional beings. The life-time of the forms is conditioned by
the intensity of the desire that formed them.
2
There is no possibility for a clairvoyant or a newcomer in the emotional world to judge the
reality content of emotional forms. The esoteric axiom says: No self-tutored seer ever saw
correctly. He cannot decide whether what he is seeing (a mountain, a lake, a tree, an animal,
a man, a building, etc.) has any physical counterpart, nor whether the human form he is seeing
belongs to an evolutionary monad living also in the physical world, is only the emotional
corpse of a man, or a figment of the imagination. He cannot judge whether the events he is
observing are happening in that very moment or are reflections of historical events in the past
or descriptions in a novel or a drama.
3
Religious ideas of god or Christ, etc., become, just as everything else, forms in emotional
matter. The saint, who lives in a heartfelt community with god, unconsciously shapes a divine
form, which, when he leaves the physical world, will appear to him as the reality he has
believed in.
1

What has been said here explains why a Swedenborg, a Steiner, a Martinus, a
Ramakrishna, etc. took such material forms for thoroughly genuine realities. The Virgil with
whom Swedenborg conversed was not the Roman poet but a replica of him. The same is often
true of the characters appearing at spiritist evocations.
5
The one thing that man can learn in the emotional world is that everything there is illusory
and deceptive. The sooner those who have entered the emotional world strive to reach the
causal world or to reincarnate, the better.
6
In the following, the emotional illusions of physical man will be treated. The ability to see
through them is a prerequisite of having a knowledge of life.
5.4 The Illusions of Self-Centredness
The self is the centre of its circle and the focal point round which the universe rotates.
Everything else is irrelevant. The self lives in its wishful thinking. Self-centredness is
anchored in the subconscious. The latent self complex is roused through everything that
deprives the child of its spontaneity and simplicity, impersonality and objectivity. Thereby
also begins the falsification of reality through subjectivation. Soon the passive inferiority
complex as well as the active superiority complex are fully functioning. These two vast
complexes are by their basic tendencies repulsive, although they can mask themselves as
attractive ones as need arises.
2
These complexes develop in the child from the age of three years through everything that
comes into a relation with the self complex. Inferiority is formed partly through the
expression of depreciatory personal opinions, partly through comparisons with others. Such
actions destroy instinctive self-reliance and security, foster fear and vulnerability. The
complex of superiority is stimulated partly through personal rather than objective praise,
partly in self-defence against unsuitable treatment and aggressiveness.
3
At lower stages of development, self-centredness is a factor necessary to development, at
higher stages it becomes a factor hampering development. At the stage of barbarism, it
stimulates the individual to acquire superior faculties; at the stage of civilization, to acquire a
greater insight. It is only when the sense of solidarity makes itself felt that group-thinking
begins to supersede self-thinking. At the stage of culture, egoism becomes ever more refined
and self-deception, falsifying everything, ever more difficult to discover. Nothing is as easily
corrupted as your own motives, and what facilitates this corruption is the fact that
development involves a continuous shift of motives.
4
The illusions of self-centredness include, among other things, everything that goes to form
self-assertion: self-underestimation, self-overestimation, self-delusion, self-blindness, selfimportance, self-sufficiency, self-excellence, self-pity. Moral illusionism belongs here.
Vanity, pride, false humility, judging, indignation, disdain, malicious pleasure, etc. belong
here. The illusions of power and glory belong here as well. Self-centredness is both the
ground and cause of the fact that practically everything human in us and about us is lie. The
wee bit of truth existing is the divinity within us.
1

5.5 The Illusions of Possession

The Buddha as well as Christos warned emphatically against the illusions of possession.
2
Desire is insatiable, and increased possibilities of satisfying our needs, if we yield to the
inherent tendency, have the result that desires can grow endlessly. All the gold of the earth
does not suffice for the desires of one single man, according to the Buddha.
3
The mania for collecting things is a manifestation of thoughtless egoism. The desire of
acquisition can grow into a greed that stifles all noble feelings, kills out the love for ones
neighbour, and makes man hard before the distress of others. The most common motives for
collecting money are probably fear of poverty and striving for the power that wealth affords.
1

Many a miser deceives himself by assuring that he collects money to donate it to charities
some time. A typical example of the relation between wealth and so-called charity was the
man who prayed to god to be given a million so that he could succour a person in distress
with one thousand crowns.
4
How the individual relates to money is one of the most important tests to show whether he
has acquired an understanding of life. The illusions of possession vanish as the understanding
of the law of reaping and of the meaning and goal of life awakens.
5
For many reasons Christos warned against collecting possessions. Our heart will be
where our treasure is. The collection of money draws our thoughts from the essential things of
life. It also has consequences for the future. In life upon life the miser will lay up treasures for
himself only to lose them in some way, in all conceivable ways, until he realizes the absurdity
of this kind of Sisyphean work with ensuing torments of Tantalus.
6
Poverty, like injudicious self-denial, is nothing to strive after, but becomes an obstacle if it
makes it more difficult for us to rightly fulfil our mission.
7
Money is goods held in charge, and we are responsible that it is put to use in the right way.
It requires judgement even to make sacrifices.
5.6 The Illusions of Sentimentality
The illusions of sentimentality, or emotionalism, include the illusions of egoistic love as
well as cultural and political illusions of all kinds.
2
Four main kinds of love can be distinguished: Self-pity. The love that wants to evoke
reciprocated affection in order to be loved. The relatively unselfish love, which manifests
itself as admiration, devotion, and sympathy. Finally, entirely unselfish love, which desires
the happiness of the loved one, irrespective of the lovers own happiness.
3
Self-pity is the crassest, most self-blinding kind of egoism. It is typical of this self-love
that it believes itself to suffer more than those on whom it inflicts suffering. This would imply
that persecution and torment of others were sophisticated self-torture.
4
Egoistic love includes that particular kind of envy which is called jealousy, an incurable
disease. (Schleiermacher illustrated this state by his formulation, unsurpassable in its
sharpness, Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht was Leiden schafft.*) It is
characteristic of egoistic love that it wants to be the sole possessor of the object of its love,
and in so doing binds, limits, excludes, instead of setting free. *See endnote.
5
Our true friends belong to our clan, and we have been united with them during thousands
of lives with all the different kinds of family ties. We can never lose them, although we would
not meet them in some incarnation.
6
Individuals waste an immense amount of time, work, and money on the meaningless
conventions of social life, on helping other people to waste valuable time, on satisfying
curiosity and the desire of gossip, on wrapping other people up in pleasant states in order to
enjoy them themselves.
7
The cultural phenomena can be said to include the products of fiction literature, art, and
music. Their function should be to beautify and ennoble life and facilitate evolution thereby.
Nowadays they do everything to counteract evolution. Instead of ennobling emotionality and
strengthening noble emotions, fiction literature (novels, dramas, etc.) contribute only to
amusements, to fostering romantic oozing sentimentality, to resuscitating the illusions of the
stage of barbarism, and to filling the emotional world with repulsive vibrations and material
forms, to making reality a hell. Modern art does its best to uglify life. Atonal music believes
itself able to reach some higher harmony through dissonance. That, too, is a sign of mens
disorientation and torn psyche.
8
Most political idiologies are the work of life-ignorant so-called idealists who believed
themselves able to construct communities and change people by means of theories. They have
1

wrought more evil than good. It is a psychological mistake to preach ideals belonging to
higher stages of developments to people who are at lower stages. They will deride and reject
everything that is above their ability to understand and realize.
9
The assertion of Marx that physical factors are the only active forces in social development
evidences his ignorance of life. Emotional illusions and mental fictions are far more powerful
than physical factors.
10
Sentimentality affords power of deciding to ignorance and impotence, grants rights
without duties, gives power without responsibility, preaches equality, so doing away with all
differences between stages of development. That is like allowing children to rule in the
society of adults.
11
Sentimentality also manifests itself in perverse coddling pedagogy, in the goodness that is
just weakness and irresolute laxity, that lets children grow up in ignorance of the laws of life,
makes them weak-willed milksops, victims of their own impulses, unable to take care of
themselves, hold them back at the infantile stage of barbarism with its arbitrariness and
wilfulness.
5.7 The Illusions of Happiness and Unhappiness
Emotionality is by nature attractive or repulsive, mostly inconstant and easily affected. As
long as the individual is centred in the consciousness of his emotional envelope and takes this
to be his soul, he is the victim of the pairs of opposites, the veers between harmonious and
disharmonious vibrations, manifesting themselves in desire or distaste, satisfaction or
dissatisfaction, confidence or fear, joy or sorrow, happiness or unhappiness, etc. Those who
are dependent on those states live in the sense of insecurity and uncertainty, become
hesitating and groping, easily led and unreliable, are torn between opposite desires, have a
bad conscience however they act. They constantly risk to lose their balance, standing neither
prosperity nor adversity. When they have fortune, they are intoxicated with conceit and pride.
When they meet with misfortune, they are the victims of despondency, depression, and
despair.
2
The egoist pursues happiness and runs the risk of never finding it but in a short-lived and
fickle shape. He is unhappy whenever he cannot satisfy without restraint the desires that are
the meaning of life to him.
3
Everyone has his conception of happiness. Life-ignorant people seek happiness
everywhere except where it is to be found: in unity. Any opposition to life makes man
unhappy and only makes division stronger. To reach unity we must cultivate emotional
attraction; without it, we shall have a wrong direction in life and we shall lack any prospect of
understanding life.
4
Success and failure are among the illusions that make us happy or unhappy. There is no
failure. There are no other misfortunes than the belief of our ignorance that they are
misfortunes, just as there can never be any desperate situations, only desperate people. Every
evil thing that comes our way is reaping and repay of an old debt, a lesson, hardening, or a
test, and often all of this at the same time. Anyone who has rightly understood life will
overcome in his very ruin. Most people probably have experienced that what they thought
was their utter undoing proved to be the best thing that could happen to them.
5
Suffering is bad reaping and ceases when sowing has been reaped. Pity increases the
worlds suffering, makes us nervous wrecks unfit for life and incapable of helping others.
Anyone who has reached the stage of culture has sympathy for all who suffer and takes it to
be his duty to do everything in his might to fight suffering, everywhere and always. We all are
accessory to the immense suffering of mankind. We all have in past lives contributed to
increasing the worlds suffering in every way through our lawlessness. However, we do not
1

help anyone by torturing ourselves. By being unhappy we make others unhappy as well and
contribute to increasing universal depression.
6
A life led in accord with the Law is emotional happiness, mental joy, and essential bliss.
The physical and emotional worlds, too, will become the abode of happiness when mankind
has acquired a knowledge of the Law and some ability to apply the Law.
7
The art of leading a happy life was called the art of living by the ancients. In the negative
sense, the art of living consists in the ability to forget oneself and ones insignificance, not to
pay attention to whatever is apt to make us unhappy, deprive us of calm, courage, confidence.
The stoic does not worry about the future, nor does he fret over the past; he makes himself
unaffected of how it feels in the present. The wise man leads a tragic life but never takes it
tragically. We must reap what we have sown. That is knowing the law, not fatalism nor the
belief in inevitable destiny. In the positive sense, the art of living consists in striving to reach
higher levels, to give life a meaning by fulfilling your duties in an expedient way. Permanent
happiness is gained through liberation from the lower by identification with the higher.
5.8 The Illusions of Devotion
The illusions of devotion belong at the highest stage of emotional development, the stage
of the cultural individual, the mystic, and the emotional saint. These expressions of attraction
cannot be rightly understood at lower stages. When they are misinterpreted they become
hindrances to those who using those illusions must acquire the qualities and abilities of
attraction: admiration, affection, sympathy, respect, reverence, enthusiasm, the spirit of selfsacrifice.
2
The pertaining illusions make it possible to confuse higher emotionality with essentiality,
to see ideals as ends rather than means. Included here are the false notions that the views of
the saint or the so-called truths of faith agree with the knowledge of reality and life, that good
motives are defences of all manner of mistakes, that you can do evil that good may come, that
the end justifies the means.
3
Devotion can blind you. The illusions of devotion include glorification of all manner of
talents and geniuses, undiscerning worship of authority which proclaims a book the word of
god and turns an idiology into supreme truth. This makes for the brutalities of despotism
commanded by a Jahwe, an inquisition, a Hitler, or a Stalin. All of this gives evidence of the
unreliability of so-called conscience. Without a knowledge of the laws of life, man is like a
reed shaken with the wind.
4
The emotional saint is the last incarnation at the emotional stage. Such an individual
appears perfect, because he has had the opportunity of activating his latent emotional qualities
together with the most expedient reaping. The undiscerning crowd regards this kind of saint
as all-knowing and as speaking nothing but the word of god. Often the saint himself believes
in his omniscient wisdom and fables about cosmic consciousness, thinks he has attained the
absolute, entered nirvana, etc. Upon his incarnation as a saint, the individual enters the
stage of humanity. The individuals humility manifests itself in his realization of his immense
limitation and in his lack of the grand airs of authority.
5
Our conception of godhood indicates our stage of development. The lower the level, the
coarser the idea of god. Any attempt at defining the godhead is an evidence of ignorance.
6
Everything can be a source of mistake before the individual has acquired at least the
common sense of the humanist stage.
7
The greatest and last illusion, which no man can liberate himself from, is the one that
makes him think that he is free from illusions.
1

THE WORLD OF MENTAL FICTIONS

5.9 Introduction
The mental world is the world of fictions.
2
Mental consciousness is not its own criterion of truth or of reality. It is an instrument
which objective sense uses to ascertain facts, which subjective reason uses to put the facts into
their historical, logical, psychological, and causal contexts, and to concretize the ideas of the
causal world.
3
Facts can be grouped into subjective and objective ones. Subjective facts belong to the
consciousness aspect; objective facts, to the matter and motion aspects.
4
The objective perception of reality afforded by sense is always correct as far as it goes. In
epistemological respect, everything is above all what it appears to be but besides that always
something different and immensely more.
5
Facts are largely useless until reason can fit them into their correct contexts. Facts turn into
fictions when ignorance puts them into wrong contexts. Contexts are systems. All thinking is
based on principles and systems, whether people know about it or not. All explanations that
are not supported by sufficient facts are fictions.
6
Thinking man, striving for clarity, seeks to determine principles and systems in order to
comprehend. The system affords him a survey of facts, enables him to rightly apprehend the
grounds and consequences of subjective facts and the causes and effects of objective facts.
The quality of the system indicates the individuals level of development, his power of
apprehension, and his knowledge of facts. Ignorance of existence, reality, and life is so
profound that the dogmatic systems of theology, the speculative systems of philosophy, and
the hypothetic systems of science have been accepted as rational and correct explanations.
7
Fictions are conceptions that have no counterpart in reality. Fictions include vagaries,
imaginings, suppositions, conjectures, the assumptions of arbitrariness, false facts, dogmas,
hypotheses, facts in wrong contexts, ideas taken out of their systems, the part taken to be the
whole. Fictions thus include all ideas, conceptions, concepts, and systems that mislead, that
falsify reality. More than 90 per cent of the intellectual life of most people is made up of
fictions. This sort of life was what the ancients called living in appearances.
8
Fictions are individual and collective. Collective fictions include the prejudice,
idiosyncrasies, idiologies, etc., of ones family, class, nation, or of mankind. They can be
classified into religious, moral, philosophical, scientific, and social fictions. All exoteric
world views and life views are fiction systems.
9
We see just what we already know, more exactly: what we believe we know, which is
something quite different. We perceive reality through our false systems. Therefore, reason is
restlessly occupied with constructing new systems as new facts are added. Only stupid
dictatorships imagine that they are able to stop people from thinking, falsify facts, force
people to accept systems that do not agree with reality. Errors, whether intentional or
unintentional, will all be corrected sooner or later.
10
The superiority of the esoteric mental system appears in the fact that new facts can be
fitted into the system without constraint. Education does not consist in being crammed with
the disordered facts of encyclopedias, but in having facts put into systems and into systems of
systems. That is the way we orient ourselves in reality.
11
Systems have a suggestive power, which is immense until they have proved to be fiction
systems. But even afterwards, systems once inoculated into the individual lead their own lives
in his subconscious. If in addition they have been woven into emotional illusions, they are
practically ineradicable for that incarnation. In fanatics, fiction systems have engraved
themselves so strongly that their effects can extend over several lives, if they have
opportunities to be revived through a renewed contact. Then they are received as
1

revelations. Fanaticism destroys the sense of reality, makes impersonal judgement

impossible, which is demonstrated by such phenomena as Jesuits, moralists, Marxists, Nazis,
Freudians, etc.
12
Exoteric learning is the result of research and speculation. Research yields facts.
Speculation constructs the system that is to afford meaning to facts. The more facts that enter
into the systems, the better the latter are as systems of orientation, indicating how far research
has advanced, making it possible for the successors to follow on where their predecessors left
off. It is through the endless series of fiction systems that science advances. Fiction systems
will be necessary until a connection has been made with the esoteric mental system. Even the
esoteric system will become richer with constantly added facts. That system need never be
remade, however, since the framework of basic facts is given once and for all. Moreover,
without the esoteric system it is impracticable to determine the reality content of fictions. It is
below ten per cent in most cases.
13
Exoteric systems generally are the results either of processes of synthesization in the
subconscious or of contact with superconscious thought forms in the mental world,
concretizations of Platonic ideas. Those who occupy themselves intensively with a certain
problem can suddenly, in their waking consciousness, experience the idea that affords the
solution.
14
Illusions can be mainly assigned to life view; fictions, to both world view and life view.
5.10 The Fictitiousness of Mental Consciousness
Mental matter is even more easily affected by consciousness than emotional matter. In
addition, it is more difficult to free oneself from fictions than from illusions, unless illusions
are reinforced by fictions. At the stage of humanity, emotionality is controlled with mentality.
Liberation from the power of mentality, however, requires causal consciousness, permanently
accessible only at the stage of ideality.
2
At the conclusion of his incarnation, the normal individual leaves his organism and etheric
envelope in the physical world, his emotional envelope in the emotional world, and his mental
envelope in the mental world. In the mental world, he leads a life of absolutely subjective
consciousness without any possibility of objectivity. He is wholly unaware of the fact that his
immensely intensive experiences in that world are his own productions made from the
materials of imagination he gathered while living in the physical world.
3
Anyone who acquired mental objective consciousness while living in the physical world
can, when in the mental world, explore the properties of mental matter. This presupposes
subjective causal consciousness and instruction by some member of the planetary hierarchy.
A long training is required before mental consciousness has learnt to tell the different
compositions of mental matter apart.
4
Therefore, the majority of people in the mental world are incapable of judging the reality
content of their fictions. It is clear from this how meaningless it is to try to acquire
clairvoyance before the individual has become a causal self. If he did, he would become the
defenceless victim of his own fictions. Our elder brothers in higher worlds warn us against
those abilities so eagerly strived for by the ignorant.
5
In the following, just a few of the religious, philosophical, and scientific fictions of the
present time are discussed. Since the life of exoteric thought consists of fictions, these are of
course innumerable.
1

5.11 Religious Fictions

We incarnate in order to explore the physical world and to acquire the qualities and
abilities that will enable us to reach the next higher natural kingdom.
2
Therefore, the purpose of religion should to teach people a conception of right or the
knowledge of the laws of life, instruct people in how to think and feel for expedient selfrealization.
3
Any life that is led in accord with the Law is a religious or spiritual life. What world
view or creed the individual has or what work he does is in this very respect unimportant. Any
work is spiritual work, when it is done in the right spirit. Anyone who has faithfully fulfilled
his task in life, however small it seems to people, has led a spiritual life.
4
The dogmatic systems of the religions are the fictions of life ignorance. Even if belief is
emotional by nature, the religions are based on some sort of explanation of the world,
however primitive this may be.
5
In emotional respect, religions can be divided into higher and lower ones. The ideals of
higher religions are part of the consciousness domains of emotional attraction.
6
The religion that has succeeded in preserving the teachings of its author in a least distorted
state is Buddhism. It teaches the existence of higher worlds, the pre-existence of the soul, and
rebirth, as well as the law of sowing and reaping. Since only esotericians are able to interpret
the teaching of the Buddha correctly, it was inevitable that this teaching was misunderstood.
Reincarnation became metempsychosis, karma a law of reaping applied without meaning, and
nirvana was turned into a world too easily accessible.
7
No exoterists (prophets or theologians) even suspected the existence of our planetary
hierarchy. The Buddha as well as Christos were the highest representatives of the hierarchy.
The Buddha incarnated for the last time to liberate mankind from religious illusions, and
Christos the last time to save us from fictions. Of their teachings, only the Buddhas teachings
on the noble middle path between asceticism and indifference to individual development, on
the four noble truths, and on the noble eightfold path have been preserved in their pristine
purity.
8
Christianity was born from gnostics, which was the original teaching of Christos, adapted
to suit the possibility of understanding that then existed. Whatever in church history has been
given out as gnostics are the misconceptions of right reverend fathers of the church. Christos
imparted his teaching only to those who were initiated into the secret knowledge order of the
gnosticians. To the people he spoke only in parables, since they were unable to comprehend
the esoteric symbols. The Christian dogmas are proof of how right he was in doing so. Some
of those dogmas are discussed below.
9
Dogma: Christianity is the unadulterated teaching of Christ.
10
Truth: There is hardly anything left in Christianity of the original teaching of Christos.
11
Dogma: Sin is a crime against an infinite being, and therefore requires an infinite
punishment. God can forgive sins only for Christs sake.
12
Truth: There is no sin, no crime against any god. There are only mistakes in respect of the
Law, which is the sum total of all laws of life known and unknown. The individual will gain a
knowledge of those laws by experiencing their sowing and reaping.
13
Dogma: The Mosaic ten commandments are dictated by god.
14
Truth: God lays down no commands or prohibitions. God is the guide and supervisor of
the process of manifestation.
15
Dogma: God is wrath and punitive righteousness.
16
Truth: God can neither be wrathful nor punish. God is perfect Law.
17
Dogma: God needs to be atoned with man.
18
Truth: God does not need to be atoned with man, but man needs to be atoned with god.
19
Dogma: Christos is gods only son.
1

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Truth: Every monad is potentially divine and will some time in the process of cosmic
manifestation attain the omniscience and omnipotence of the highest divine kingdom. That is
the final goal of all beings. The path to the goal is called self-realization, the acquisition of all
requisite qualities and abilities in the five natural kingdoms and the seven divine kingdoms.
The envelopes that the monad is eventually invested with in ever higher kingdoms are
intended to be serviceable tools for the gathering and working up of experiences in the
different worlds. Evolution consists of a series of levels from the lowest kingdom to the
highest, and each level is filled with beings on their way to the final goal.
21
Dogma: The soul is created along with the body and dies with it.
22
Truth: There is no death, just dissolution of a form unfit for life. When the organism is
left off, the self-consciousness of the monad moves to the next higher envelope of the monad.
23
Dogma: In the last day soul and body will be created anew by a miracle.
24
Truth: The so-called resurrection of the body is nothing else than reincarnation (not
metempsychosis!).
25
Dogma: There is an everlasting hell.
26
Truth: The only hell there is are the regions in the physical and emotional worlds
consisting of the three lowest molecular kinds, and reincarnation with a bad reaping. There is
no other punishment, no other suffering, than the bad reaping resulting from bad sowing.
Life is happiness when the bad sowing has been reaped.
27
Dogmas are characterized by their unchangingness. What ignorance in a certain epoch
believed shall be regarded as knowledge for all times. Orthodoxy refuses to receive any
instruction or information. In so doing dogmatism becomes an enemy of development.
28
The dogmas of the church are misinterpretations of gnostic symbols the right
interpretation of which was made exoteric only in our times. Salvation originally had three
meanings: liberation from bad reaping (illness and poverty), acquisition of esoteric
knowledge, entry into the fifth natural kingdom. The sin against the holy spirit meant
idiotization of common sense through acceptance of absurdities, contempt of the good, true,
and beautiful, as well as conscious opposition to evolution.
29
The power of the church rests upon the dogma of sin and forgiveness of sins. That dogma
is the biggest lie of the church and makes people indifferent to their development. Since all
people are thought to be irremediable and they are all guaranteed forgiveness in beforehand
for all conceivable misdeeds, nobody needs to strive to improve. The Italian bandits worry
about the scientific researchers soul was typical of the pertaining fictitiousness Not that I
have anything against an honest robbery or, if that were the case, making a hole in the head of
a priest, but I am careful with my soul and would never make a pact with Satan. Since people
knew that they could always do penance and receive absolution, sin added zest to things. A
renaissance lady, for instance, whose cook had surprised her with a new dessert, said that the
only thing that was missing in the perfection of that course was that it was not sinful to eat it
as well.
30
The simplest common sense and humaneness make it clear that no omnipotence of love
can condemn innocent people to be born with sin and all manner of weaknesses, lead a life in
suffering in the physical world, and then a life in eternal hell. The simplest sense of justice
tells us that nobody must suffer for other peoples misdeeds without deserving it.
31
In 1958, a commission of British bishops sought a way out of these difficulties by
asserting that the dogmas contain a kernel of truth. Using that argument, however, you can
defend most lies. They always contain some percentage of truth.

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5.12 The Fictions of European Philosophy

The task of philosophy should be to afford mankind a system of thought useful for
orientation, a system of the facts of research about reality and life.
2
European philosophy, about 2500 years old, has been a speculation of ignorance and has
largely occupied itself with pseudo-problems. Philosophy in the proper sense started with the
sophists. Before them, no philosophy was needed, because all serious seekers after truth were
initiated into esoteric knowledge orders, which have always been instituted in all countries
where there were people possessed of a capacity for reflection and ideality. Along with
political decline and democratization went the lowering of the cultural standard and the
dissolution of the concepts of right, and that was why ever fewer seekers came up to the
entrance requirements. What historians believe they know about pre-sophist philosophy are
assumptions on the basis of a few fragments of symbolic writings and philosophical legends
in the form of myth. The sophists, who were realists and rationalists, grasped nothing of this
but started speculating on their own using the learning that was common property. Like all
other speculation without the requisite facts, sophistry, too, had to end in skepticism. It was
superseded by the Christian dogmatic system with its tyranny of opinion.
3
As the church declined during the renaissance, when even popes became skeptics,
speculation could gain ground anew and has been impossible to check ever since. The one
system after the other was concocted, until the culmination was reached with the Hegelian
system, which knew everything about nothing. About the year 1830, incipient natural
research had made such advancements that scientists could tear the imaginative constructions
of the philosophers to pieces. Since then, philosophy has mainly occupied itself with so-called
epistemology (the theory of knowledge), and new pseudo-problems. It wonders whether
existence is a figment of the imagination, whether matter is real, whether there is a material
external world. It doubts the objective perception of reality by sense, has more confidence in
the sophisms of subjective reason. Using so-called conceptual analysis it tries to examine
whether concepts have any reality content, not understanding that this presupposes the very
knowledge of existence that philosophers do not possess.
4
Scientific research coupled with common sense has been able to level a devastating
criticism against both the philosophical and the theological systems. Nuclear physics has not
merely split the chemical atom but has also broken up the foundation of the scientific view:
the hypothesis of the indestructibility of matter. In the process, mankind has slipped into a
new skeptic period. There are risks to dissolving all old systems without putting more rational
ones in their stead. The purge was certainly necessary. Philosophy with its irrational doubts
about the results of natural research, theology with its refusal to adjust its dogmas to the facts
of science, moral fictionalism with its taboos divorced from reality and hostile to life, had
outlived their day. Being deprived of those systems, however, people have lost the certainty
they need not to live in a mental chaos. The conception of right emanates from the life view,
which in its turn is based upon the world view. The general dissolution of systems has
brought about a dissolution of concepts of right, general lawlessness, and arbitrary legislation,
resulting in a contempt for laws of any kind. Bertrand Russell rightly points out that people
feel profoundly insecure about what is right and wrong. They are even uncertain whether right
and wrong are anything but old superstition.
5
Scientists who have understood the present emergency work energetically at new systems.
They are indubitably fully qualified for such work nowadays. Philosophers, on the other hand,
have gone out of work. Philosophy, such as it is still pursued, could without loss be
transferred to the history of exploded views.
6
Still philosophers are not prepared to assume the task of working out systems that could
mediate the transition from exoteric systems to the esoteric mental system.
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5.13 The Fictions of Indian Philosophy

It is typical of the self-sufficiency of Occidental philosophy that it has never concerned
itself with the Indian systems of thought.
2
There is a great number of such systems. Those attracting the greatest interest of
Westerners are vedanta, sankhya, and yoga.
3
Sankhya with purusha (consciousness) and prakriti (matter) is a dualist system. Vedanta
leads a theoretical double life, being monist as well as dualist. The monist variety (advaita) is
subjectivist, denies the existence of matter and the material external world. Whenever it has to
present a rational explanation of existence, however, concern itself with such a degrading
thing as prosaic reality, it must in any case step down into dualism, making mahat (universal
soul) emanate akasha (matter) and prana (motion, force, energy). Being acted upon by prana,
akasha produces the universe. The yoga philosophy, originating from Patanjali, incorporates
vedanta as well as sankhya.
4
Thus not even Indian philosophy has solved the basic problem of existence, the problem of
the trinity of reality. On the other hand, yoga philosophy has crossed the border of immanent
transcendental philosophy and become a philosophy of transcendence. It asserts that there are
higher worlds and undertakes to prove this to everyone willing to submit to its methods of
training. It is to be observed that the yoga philosophy strictly adheres to the demand for the
objectivity of sense also where higher worlds are concerned.
5
The yoga philosophy can be divided into two main forms: hatha and raja yoga. Hatha yoga
occupies itself mainly with the physical world (the visible and the etheric) in order to gain
command of physical matter. Raja yoga is more interested in the superphysical world, striving
by concentration, meditation, contemplation, and illumination to enter nirvana, which it thinks
the yogi can attain by following the three different paths in succession: karma yoga or the
path of physical service, bhakti yoga or the path of emotional devotion, and jnana yoga or the
path of reason.
6
That raja yogi, who has received his training in some one of the many secret yoga schools,
each one of which possesses its own eclectic system, receives a methodical training affording
him the opportunity of acquiring physical etheric and emotional clairvoyance.
7
It should be clear from what has been said here that the yoga philosophy, despite its
incomparable superiority to Occidental philosophy, has its great limitation. It knows nothing
about the true make-up the cosmos, about the individual ultimate self (the monad), about the
hierarchy of our planet. It uses terms which it has once borrowed from esoterics. Its
explanations of manas, buddhi, atma or nirvana, rebirth, and karma are positively erroneous
in essential respects.
8
For a system to stand a chance of being generally accepted by the Hindus, it is required
that it affords a boundless scope for never-ending imaginative speculation. Such a system
must not be made up of facts only. That is why Buddhism has scant prospects of ever being
recognized in India as the superb religion it is. The Buddhas demands for common sense and
for the restriction of thought to the possibilities of human experience within the physical,
emotional, and mental worlds meet with very little appreciation. The worlds of the fifth
natural kingdom (buddhi and nirvana), of which no human being can know anything from his
own experience, are much more interesting. This sentiment finds it all too easy to see an
avatar in every fantast.
9
Ever since Ramakrishna (who died in 1886) broke with secrecy and taught yoga openly,
many yogis have publicized certain methods of meditation, breathing exercises, etc. This has
proved disastrous. Not even all Indians have the necessary physiological preconditions for
those methods. The victims are legion. Tampering with ones breath can entail tuberculosis or
disturbances of the nervous system. Meditation on the envelope centres (chakras) results in
tumours. The esoterician warns emphatically of all the pertaining methods. The esoteric
1

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methods are simple and sovereign. They remain esoteric. Objective consciousness in lower
worlds without esoteric knowledge only strengthens maya, illusions, and fictions.
5.14 The Fictions of Science
The task of science is to explore the physical world and physical matter and give us the
knowledge resulting from this exploration, make man the master of the forces of physical
nature, enable him to abolish disease, poverty, and material want, grant him a physical
existence fit for a human being.
2
It is not the task of science to formulate a world view. This requires a knowledge of higher
worlds as well, worlds that cannot be explored with physical methods.
3
Science ascertains physical facts and describes physical reality. The physical outlook is of
old called materialism. The correct term is physicalism, because all the higher worlds are
made up of matter as well.
4
In order to comprehend right you need as system that puts facts into their right contexts.
The only system that will endure in the long run is the esoteric hylozoic system. Hylozoics is
the only system that clarifies the trinity of existence, its three equivalent aspects: the aspects
of matter, motion, and consciousness.
5
The physicalists, regarding the visible world to be the only one existing, have hitherto
considered it beneath their dignity to investigate without prejudice phenomena they cannot
explain. They bestow a smile of pity upon what Bacon called practical metaphysics
(magic), which is the application of the esoteric knowledge of the ability of consciousness to
direct etheric material energies in accord with physical etheric laws of nature and in so doing
to produce phenomena or measurable changes in visible matter.
6
In the following, some of the many scientific fictions are enumerated which still haunt
scientific literature like dogmas. The fact that several of them contradict each other is due to
the fact that the new fictions of nuclear physics occur along with older fictions.
7
Hypothesis: Science has almost explored the nature of matter.
8
Truth: Science, reduced as it is to the visible physical world, can explore only about one
per cent of the matter aspect of existence.
9
Hypothesis: Science has ascertained almost all the laws of nature and explored almost all
the forces of nature. Therefore, science can determine a priori whether so-called unknown
phenomena are possible or not, decide whether they conflict with the laws of nature.
10
Truth: Science still lacks a knowledge of approximately 99 per cent of all laws of nature
and forces of nature.
11
Hypothesis: There are no laws of nature, there are only frequency phenomena or
statistical laws.
12
Truth: The entire cosmos is one single continuous law-abidingness. There are laws in
everything and everything is expressive of law.
13
Hypothesis: The visible physical world is the only world there is.
14
Truth: The cosmos is made up of a series of interpenetrating worlds of different degrees
of density.
15
Hypothesis: There is no other matter than physical matter.
16
Truth: There is a long, continuous series of successively higher states of aggregation that
form a series of different worlds each one of which has its own kind of matter.
17
Hypothesis: Physical matter consists of three states of aggregation: solid, liquid, and
gaseous.
18
Truth: Physical matter consists of seven different states of aggregation, four in addition to
the three ones just mentioned: etheric, superetheric, subatomic, and atomic.
19
Hypothesis: Nuclear physics engages in atomic fission.
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20

Truth: The thing that nuclear physics calls the physical atom is the chemical atom, which
esoterics calls an etheric molecule. The fission of the true physical atom yields 49 emotional
atoms.
21
Hypothesis: Matter and energy are phenomena of two basically different kinds.
22
Truth: Matter and energy are one and the same thing. There is only matter. All higher
kinds of matter relate to lower kinds as energy to matter. Energy is matter.
23
Hypothesis: Physical matter is indestructible.
24
Truth: Physical matter can be dissolved and changed into emotional matter. The same is
true of higher kinds of matter. Only primordial atoms are indestructible.
25
Matter dissolves into energy.
26
Truth: As has already been said, all energy is matter. There is originally only one energy:
the dynamic energy of primordial matter.
27
Hypothesis: The cosmos is an eternally indestructible perpetuum mobile.
28
Truth: All manifested matter has once been formed out of primordial atoms and will some
time return to the primordial atomic state, in which process all the primordial atoms (monads)
will have acquired actualized active consciousness and omniscience in all the different worlds
of the cosmos.
29
Hypothesis: Consciousness is a property of organic matter only.
30
Truth: All matter has either potential consciousness or some sort of actualized
consciousness. Everything is simultaneously matter, motion, and consciousness. None of the
three can exist without the other two.
5.15 THE WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE
The world of knowledge has been given various names: the world of Platonic ideas, the
world of intuition, the causal world, the world of esoteric knowledge.
2
By mentioning the world of ideas and affirming its existence, Platon came close to what
was permissible, esoterically speaking. He gave the learned of posterity a hint which they
took in many different ways except, of course, in the only right way: that knowledge has its
own particular world and that mental speculation can only result in fictions.
3
When attaining that world of knowledge, man can prepare himself to pass to the fifth
natural kingdom. In the causal world, being the meeting-place for individuals of both the
fourth and the fifth natural kingdom, he comes in contact with members of the hierarchy of
our planet.
4
The learned smile superciliously at esoterics. Nobody has taught them how to comprehend
it. Therefore, it must be the fabrication of a charlatan. To those learned ones, the visible world
is the only one existing, and possibly also something called the spiritual world, whatever
that is. They have no ideas of reality and life, the meaning and goal of existence, the higher
worlds of our planet and the hierarchy ruling them. And it is not advisable to any academic
authority to move too far away from academic notions of so-called truth. The undaunted
pioneer, who dares to be ahead of his times and to defy academic opinion, slowly lagging
behind, will unfailingly be regarded as a fantast, mentally disordered, or senile.
5
In the causal world, there is no maya, illusoriness, or fictitiousness. It is only in that world
that the individual can acquire a knowledge of reality and life; that he always knows if he
knows or does not know, and not, as in lower worlds, just assumes or believes. Causal
consciousness always thinks in accord with reality. Of course, causal intution can refer only to
lower worlds, not to higher worlds. However, even regarding the higher worlds and existence
in general there is an enormous stock of knowledge mediated by the entire series of beings of
ever higher kingdoms.
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To attain the causal world it is necessary to have acquired higher mental faculties: beyond
ordinary inference thinking and principle thinking also perspective thinking and system
thinking. Only then will you have a prospect of reaching up to the intuition.
5.16 THE WORLD OF UNITY
The essential world, or the world of unity, is the lowest world of the fifth natural kingdom.
Anyone who wants to forge ahead of human evolution always has the possibility of doing so.
To attain that world it is necessary to acquire the twelve essential qualities and to serve
mankind, evolution, and life with one-pointed determination. Those qualities are described
symbolically in the esoteric tale of the twelve labours of Hercules, which have been distorted
in the exoteric legend, of course. It is unnecessary to speculate on those qualities. We must
rest content with knowing that there is a law saying that when the individual is ripe for higher
knowledge, then he will receive it for as a free gift in some manner.
2
The essential self understands what is meant by freedom, that freedom is won through law
and through expedient application of law. The so-called freedom of lower worlds consists in
the arbitrariness of ignorance, bringing about chaos. Everything that has become law is
perfect. Evolution is a continuous adaptation to the Law such as it works on the next higher
level. There is no failure, there are only more or less necessary lessons. Much that is called
evil is part of the necessary experiences of life.
3
The essential self sees the truth of sayings such as: It is best as it is, was, will be. Whatever
happens is in accord with the Law and existing conditions, the effect of pre-existent causes.
Nothing can befall us that we have not deserved. The sufferings of the individual are his own
work in the past. The talk of injustice in any respect whatsoever is the talk of ignorance and
envy. There are no undeserved privileges. The fact that human beings do not know how to
rightly use them only becomes a bad sowing for the future.
4
Therefore, the path to knowledge and unity implies self-acquisition of all the qualities and
abilities that make it possible for the individual to attain the next higher natural kingdom, the
fifth kingdom, and in so doing become an ever more capable server of life and evolution.
1

Endnotes by the Translator

To 6.4. Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht, was Leiden schafft means in a
literal English translation, Jealousy is a passion which eagerly seeks what brings suffering.
It is a German pun of extraordinary wittiness, regrettably lost in translation.
To 11.8 Gnostics and gnosticians. In accordance with Laurencys usage, genuine esoteric
doctrines or schools are denoted by names ending in -ics and their adherents, by names ending
in -icians; thus we have gnostics (the teaching) and gnosticians (its students), hylozoics and
hylozoicians, and, of course, esoterics and esotericians.
To 15.2. Platon. In my translations of Laurencys texts, I consistently use the Greek forms of
Greek names, not the Latinized forms established in English usage. Thus we have Platon
instead of Plato and Aristoteles instead of Aristotle, etc.
The above text constitutes the essay The Path to Knowledge and Unity by Henry T. Laurency.
The essay is part of the book Knowledge of Life Five by Henry T. Laurency. Translated from
the Swedish by Lars Adelskogh.
Copyright 2006 by the Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation.

15