THE LAW OF DEVELOPMENT

Introduction

”All participate in the process of development by their activity or passivity, in a positive or negative way. In so doing nobody escapes his share in responsibility and participation in destiny.”

The law of development says that there are forces working in various ways towards the cosmic final goal. The power of attraction is one such force. Man’s response to this power is another similar force. It expresses itself in his striving for self-realization. When he has once decided to work for self-realization and follows the attraction to the higher he senses, his development may accelerate forcefully.

The law of self-realization is in fact a law concomitant to the law of development. It is true that man must do his due and as though no help were to be found. But if he does so, his purposiveness will be rewarded. The forces of the law of development will then automatically add to his own contribution, strengthening it. Without this addition, his own forces would not suffice.

But note this: the law of development is the manifestation of a force of unity. Whether energy is added to man depends on his attitude to unity. Anyone who wants to develop for any other motive than to serve life, anyone who wants to develop for himself, will have to do without this help. However, to the same extent that man lives for others his own development is promoted so that he will be able to make an ever more efficient contribution.

The lower a man is in development, the more experiences of a similar kind are necessary for him to learn, to comprehend, and to understand. That is why development at the stage of barbarism takes such an enormous time.

When man has once acquired that general fund of experience of life which is required for comprehension, he can start specializing. In life upon life he has to study ever new spheres of life, until a dawning general understanding of life makes itself felt.

This is repeated at each stage of development. The stage of civilization has its particular understanding of life, the cultural and humanist stages have theirs. This is why people at these various stages “do not speak the same language”. They all have the words in common, but the content of experience that man puts into them differs for different stages. What a barbarian means by “freedom” is not the same as what a cultural individual puts into the word.

When man reaches the stages of culture and humanity, he eventually develops his sense of reality and his interest in human things, his understanding of the true values of life, of the meaning and goal of life and the means for attaining the goals.

Having contact with other people and sharing their experiences, the self learns to perceive and understand and it tries to orient itself in its world. Whatever the self has no opportunity to contact again remains latent. The capacities the self does not exercise again remain latent.

During his childhood and adolescence man recapitulates the general consciousness development of mankind from the stage of barbarism. It depends on many factors how long a time he must spend until he reattains his true level, the level he reached in former lives: the capacity of his new brain, his environment, education, opportunities of contact with things that may bring his subconscious (latent) knowledge to a new life. There are many people who in a new life never reach their old level. There are others who reach it but in old age. If life takes a normal course, man should have covered the stage of barbarism at 14 years, the civilizational stage at 21, the cultural stage at 28, to start anew where he left off at 35 years – provided he has previously reached the humanist stage, which not many have. The higher the level the self has managed to reach, the faster man passes these stages in each new incarnation, if bad reaping does not hinder.

Those who have acquired the ability to study their own and other people’s past lives and are able to follow the development of individuals during many series of incarnations, testify to the following facts: that the self’s working up of its experiences from physical life between incarnations eventually in new lives effects a change of instinctive direction towards higher goals; that the law of destiny and the law of reaping guide the individual to ever-increasing understanding of the essentials of life, increasing understanding of the fact that benefit and welfare are inseparable from justice and uprightness, that salvation consists in forgetfulness of egoistic strivings, that evil is mistakes as to the Law, that what we took to be evil proved to be for our own good, that everything we meet with is necessary experience, lesson, test, hardening, liberation, and settlement of an old debt.

Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Seven, The Law of Development www.hylozoik.se
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Development www.laurency.com

Development of Consciousness and Self-Realization

”Good is everything that furthers development towards unity, evil is everything that counteracts unity, that becomes obstacles to the achievement of the goal. Every mistake as to laws of life can also be called wrong.”

In the human kingdom consciousness development can be divided into five stages or 777 levels [link PhS: 2.38 The Levels of Human Development]. On 700 of those levels, or at the stages of barbarism, civilization, and culture; emotional consciousness is the dominant one. Emotional thinking rules in all domains that can directly or indirectly affect personal interests.

All emotional expressions can be divided into two basic, principal groups: attractive (love) or repulsive (hatred). Everything that is not love is hatred. Love includes all altruistic feelings and qualities, hatred all egoistic ones. Emotions are woven into complexes which are easily vitalized and are unfailingly intensified if attended to.

At lower stages the state of hatred is the normal one. Hatred lends life and colour to existence, which would be dreary, empty, meaningless if it were not for the emotions. Hatred stimulates like an elixir of life without which people cannot live. The tendency of hatred always seeks for motives that stimulate it, and almost everything can be made a motive. Religious and moral, social and political, philosophic and scientific fictions, all kinds of personal relations, all barriers to egoism, can inflame hatred.

It is so much easier to be inactive than active, negative than positive. People with their repulsive basic attitude (their latent, easily activated hatred) feel their kinship with what is diabolical. That clarifies what general stage of development mankind is at. Human egoism counteracts and so delays development. The teaching of reincarnation should clarify to men how short-sighted their life-blind egoism actually is. Those who strive for power, glory, wealth, and succeed in achieving these goals, generally have sown a bad sowing for their future incarnations. For success in one incarnation they have counteracted themselves for a whole series of incarnations to come. You could call that blindness in life. Anyone who lives in order to serve evolution and mankind not just develops faster but also gets ever more and greater opportunities to do so in his future lives.

Good and evil (right and wrong) are and are not absolute, relative, objective, and subjective; depending on different viewpoints and standpoints. They are absolute in their opposition on each level. For the individual there must be an opposition between good and evil, which must not be made relative if the individual does not want to end up in a chaos of right and wrong. They are relative inasmuch as good and evil on one level are not necessarily good and evil on another level. Good and evil are objective as a synthesis of universal human experience, laid down in social convention and legal code. They are subjective in so far as the understanding of right and wrong depends on the individual’s self-acquired experience of life, and therefore is part of his individual character. For the individual, good is the steps above his level, and in particular degree the immediately higher step. Evil is the lower, that which is below his level and, usually, in particular degree the one he has recently left.

Those who have found the “truth” are very willing to help other people to have it as well. But without knowledge of the various stages of development their attempts at “saving” other people will easily fail. The presentation must be adapted to the possibilities there are of comprehending, understanding, and realizing. On the whole the rule holds true that only those are ripe for the knowledge who long for the “truth” and are willing to receive it. Without this longing there will be a sowing in unsuitable soil. When knowledge is forced on the unwilling there will often be a bad sowing both for the receiver and the giver who carries the responsibility for the perverse result.

We attract such individuals as correspond to our most dominant quality during various phases of our life. A humanist, who had to grow up in an unsuitable environment but after passing the stages of barbarism, civilization, and culture finally reaches his true level, may observe how different the people were whom he knew during these different periods. This insight also has the effect that he does not stubbornly cling to people he has once known when he has ascertained their levels. It would just arouse old debasing vibrations to a new life.

To raise a man to your own level of development is possible only if the person in question reached that level in a previous life. To elicit his understanding of your own higher level is possible only if he is very close to your level and makes serious efforts to understand. In contrast, it is relatively easy to be dragged down to the lower level of another, especially if personal attraction contributes.

According to the law everybody must himself seek, find, and realize. The best help consists in helping everybody where he is to reach the clarity he seeks, his solution of his own problems. To give knowledge which the receiver cannot use is not to help him but rather to confuse him. We approach the goal step by step and there is no patent solution good for all.

Evolution consists of a series of consciousness levels: in leaving the lower for the higher when you have learnt the lessons of your level.

Henry T. Laurency:
– Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Development
– The Philosopher’s Stone, Esoteric Life View, The Law of Development
www.laurency.com

The Stage of Barbarism

”Characteristic of the stage of barbarism is the contempt for man. Human dignity, human right, human happiness, are not only unknown but also unimaginable concepts.”

More than half of all the levels of development (400 of 777) are at the stage of barbarism. The distances between the different levels are minimal as compared to those at higher stages. Nevertheless, each level requires a much greater number of incarnations. This is due to the faint self-initiated consciousness activity. Physical life dominates the barbaric individual. Any kind of work, any unnecessary exertion, disgusts him and is considered foolish by him. Only urgent physical needs or excited affects cause him to abandon that indolence which to him is happiness and the meaning of life. Typical is his inability to learn from anything but physical experiences.

The difference between the lowest and highest barbaric levels existing appears principally in a more rapid apprehension of sense and in the increased fund of general experience of life, which fact of course facilitates the activity of reason and makes more differentiated emotional states possible.

For individuals with a repulsive basic tendency of their individual characters it is necessary to have egoistic interests to neutralize their instinctively inflammable hatred, and to have stronger motives the stronger this tendency is. The emotions of hatred express themselves as envy, bitterness, fear, contempt, cruelty, vengefulness, suspiciousness, disrespect, malicious pleasure, irreverence, anger. The higher the level, the more differentiated are these emotions, which fact also appears in their modes of expression. There are many degrees between brutality, cunning, or egoism inclined to show some consideration.

At low levels, before feelings have been developed, emotionality is mostly the desire to own, rule, destroy, annihilate. The two opposite basic tendencies (repulsion and attraction) appear, for example, in one individual wishing to rule by strength, violence, fear, etc.; the other by admiration, affection, etc., aroused by joviality, kindness, generosity, etc., which can also be egoistically motivated (desire to be loved, etc.). In general, individuals of different basic tendencies belong to different clans. Thus, entire ethic groups can, even on the lowest levels, display either predominantly attractive or repulsive qualities.

At the stage of barbarism, the activity of reason is predominantly imitative, and thinking is some sort of tribal collective thinking. Superstitions are handed down from the fathers and are made ineradicable by being inoculated from early childhood. The individual is born into his milieu of opinion, religion, etc. Where divergent opinions do not exist, the possibility of seeing through the absurdities is precluded. The arbitrariness of existence is sovereign. Thus thinking is based on tradition, conformity, and the simplest analogy. The essence of faith appears early as blind acceptance and conviction absolutized by emotion. Emotion reacts against departures from habits and ways of thinking once acquired. Should doubt appear, aroused by foreign opinions, doubt would of course be as absolute and indiscriminate.

On the highest levels of the stage of barbarism, and in civilizational nations, mental activity can reach certain strength. Then the need for knowing what ought to be thought and said is characteristic. The content of reason is determined by ruling authorities or by class thinking. The toilsome work in trying to grasp correctly the opinions of others is the emotional proof of the correctness of your opinion. Then if you can account for your opinion in your own words, you have given proof of independent judgement.

The regulations necessary to the continuance of the tribe: those against homicide, theft, etc., apply but to the tribe. Out in the jungle the law of the jungle, or the right of violence and of the stronger force, still prevails. The absurdities of traditional conventions remain intact, since nobody dares to question changes of what nobody comprehends.

Characteristic of the stage of barbarism is the contempt for man. Human dignity, human right, human happiness, are not only unknown but also unimaginable concepts. Only the members of the tribe have a right to exist, and this only on condition that they observe taboos and other superstitions. All other living beings are possibly allowed to live if it is deemed suitable, desirable, useful. Might is right and right is maintained, if need be, by terror. Punishment is brutal. Robbers’ expeditions against, and attacks on, weaker tribes are lawful enterprises. Rather early haunts the fiction of outraged honour, etc.

At this stage of development, ideals coincide with idols, understandable only as qualities in legendary heroes. Matchless in crude strength, the idol always conquers in battle, triumphs in cunning over his enemies, wins a rich booty, becomes the chief of the tribe, and exterminates all nearby tribes, or makes them his slaves. The idol satisfies the needs of vanity and pride, the desire to rule and dominate, etc. If the barbarian is born into a civilized nation, certain external traits of his idol are changed, but he remains the triumpher, outshining, outwitting all.

Henry T. Laurency, The Philosopher’s Stone, Esoteric Life View, The Law of Development www.laurency.com

The Stage of Civilization

”Typical of the stage of civilization is the general recognition of the justification of egoism. The egoism of the civilizational individual is insatiable.”

At the stages of barbarism, civilization, and culture, the individual is principally an emotional being, determined by emotional motives in his feeling, thinking, and acting. Those qualities acquired by individual character which automatically make themselves felt belong to any of the 700 emotional levels, 600 of which belong to the lower emotionality (48:4-7).

The distances between the different levels of the stage of civilization are somewhat greater than those of the stage of barbarism, but they are of course unnoticeable to ignorance. A race that can indulge in fancies of “equality” of course is not in a position to understand these matters. Psychologists fail to notice any difference where a developmental lead of one or two eons may be the fact. Not suspecting the importance of the latent experience of life, they assess the results of tests on principles conditioned by hereditary dispositions from ancestors, intellectual milieu during childhood, education, etc.

For those at lower levels, the lower emotionality remains the dynamic force of their consciousness expressions. Envy, vengefulness, malicious pleasure, are efficient motives. Civilized hatred appears the most clearly in the intolerance and morality ruling. Intolerance has many degrees from antipathy and tactlessness to arrogant aggressiveness.

On higher civilizational levels, imagination (the “intellect”) develops powerfully. This has entailed a grotesque overestimation of the discerning power of the still undeveloped intellect. The emotional thinking of imagination has ended up in absolute subjectivism.

Most intellectuals think according to memorized theories, not being able to judge the relative or temporary validity of these theories, or how the theories have originated. They have not learnt to discriminate between what they know and do not know, but still defend their opinion by the fact that they believe it. Reason becomes sovereign and proclaims, without knowledge of reality, the dictatorship of reason. Without knowledge of the laws of life, however, reason is arbitrariness. Subjectivism is that principle of arbitrariness which must lead to lawlessness, formlessness, and chaos.

Aesthetics is as divorced from reality, as disoriented, as the rest of philosophy. Literature becomes art by cultivation of the higher emotionality. Poetry, novel, drama, are beautiful when genius has formed their characters. Art can ennoble. It can also, to a horrifying degree, further stupidity, crudeness, ugliness. Modern literature works frantically at tearing down everything sublime, noble, beautiful. Murders and horrors of all kinds are described with sadistic revelling in all disgusting details. Primitive types are depicted as if there existed no others. Nobler types are apparently beyond the experience of the authors.

“Sense of art” is a sum total of many different abilities previously acquired. It takes many incarnations to educate the sense of music, the understanding of the essence of music (rhythm, harmony, and melody). The sense of harmony is ruined by learning to “understand”, to enjoy, dissonance, atonalism, noise. The corresponding applies to all art. Once ruined, this sense is difficult to regain.

At the stage of civilization, dictatorships and democracies succeed one another. The continual social changes are due to the fact that the human intellect is unable to solve social problems permanently, that men lack the will to unity, that men are never content with their conditions, that they always blame society for their own shortcomings, that social envy creates eternal discontent, that ignorance always believes that society can raise the standard of living for everybody without further ado, that power-thirsty demagogues always succeed in making the credulous believe in their false promises of paradise.

Dictators believe that people will let themselves be enslaved indefinitely. Democrats believe in the equality of all, that education can abolish the inequalities of nature. Anarchists believe that men are angels who are corrupted by being brought up to lead orderly lives, etc., that if the state and the laws are abolished, then man will be perfect. Fantasts believe in the ideal state, that societies can be constructed and the established order of things can be safely overthrown. All are believers, and with belief you can prove everything.

Public spirit is also destroyed by the attempt to base society on the principle of envy, or by granting rights without duties, by giving people social benefits that do not correspond to their contribution to society, by giving way to illegitimate demands of the eternally discontent. According to the law of reaping, there must always be some people who are better off than others, since they have already earned that right. If they fail to use their benefits according to the law of unity, then the result is a bad sowing.

Typical of the stage of civilization is the general recognition of the justification of egoism. The egoism of the civilizational individual is insatiable. “All the gold of the earth is not enough to satisfy one man.” (Buddha) [I svenska texten finns punkten efter Buddha, inte inom citatet, vilket är rätt?] When having such ideals as power, wealth, fame, loafing, love of amusement, etc., striving after unity or self-realization must of course appear as foolish utopianism.

Henry T. Laurency, The Philosopher’s Stone, Esoteric Life View, The Law of Development www.laurency.com

The Stage of Culture

”The cultural individuals sense their solidarity and regard it as their mission in life to help and not hinder each other. The serving attitude to life becomes instinctive and spontaneous.”

Emotionality at the stage of culture is characterized by the realization of the necessity to cultivate, as well as to strive to acquire, attractive emotions. Universal hatred can be overcome only by making admiration, affection, compassion, and other noble emotions determine our view of people.

All development is the result of work and toil (voluntary or involuntary), and higher levels are not reached just through theories, adages, good resolutions, and assumed patterns of behaviour. Such appearances always deceive the ignorant of life. Worse still is that the individual deceives himself by them.

The cultural man is still an emotional being. However, no longer the lower but the higher emotionality is the dynamic force of his thought and action. The feelings and outlooks corresponding to the higher vibrations are apprehended ever more intensely on each higher level, and result in a further ennoblement. They become the most important, however, in the activation of causal consciousness, previously inactive. This finds expression in the strengthening of the right instinct of life, the development of the sense of reality, and inspirations that afford guidance.

The cultural individuals sense their solidarity and regard it as their mission in life to help and not hinder each other. The serving attitude to life becomes instinctive and spontaneous. Egoistic calculation is superseded by the urge to help where help is needed, without demands, reservations, or expectations. In working for the welfare of all and ill of none, the individual grows beyond his personal limitation. The natural condition of group solidarity does not exist until then. The collective, at lower stages rather hampering and counteracting the individual’s development, facilitates it subsequently to an undreamt-of degree. Universal joy of life replaces that anxiety, depression, agony, which had paralysed the courage of life. Even the animals give up their fear and spontaneously seek refuge with man.

Belief (opinion) is typical of the stage of barbarism; comprehension, of the stage of civilization; understanding, of the stage of culture. Thousands of incarnations, in which the experience of life increases continually, intervene between each one of these developmental stages. Comprehension requires but power of reflection, whereas understanding presupposes power of judgement. Understanding requires an enormous latent fund of one’s own experience of life, of things experienced and entered into. Characteristic of understanding is also the life instinct’s marked sense of reality, which immediately rejects what is fictitious, illusory, false, spurious. Philosophers in all ages have comprehended everything, but have understood little or nothing of everything comprehended.

At the stage of culture man begins to deserve his name of rational being. Till then, his intellect has all too easily been idiotized by all manner of fictions and illusions. Cultural men are also influenced by emotionality. But this influence is in the direction of unity. They grow more and more keenly aware of the stupidizing and brutalizing influence of civilizational so-called cultural products in literature, art, and music.

The aesthetics (theory of beauty) of the philosophers has led to the intellectualization of art. However, art belongs to the higher emotionality, and its purpose is to ennoble feeling and imagination into ideality. At the stage of culture, the principle of harmony becomes the determining norm of all art. Harmony is the means by which unity expresses itself in emotionality. Harmony is the basis of the appreciation of all beauty and makes it possible to understand the true form of beauty, the causal form.

The artist is a discoverer. He discovers the forms of ideal reality in physical reality, and puts purpose and harmony into the seemingly irrational and disharmonious. He finds it his mission to teach men how to appreciate the good, noble, and beautiful. To make life easier to live is to accelerate development.

Culture is freedom. Patronizing is alien to the spirit of culture in its entirety. The individuals at the stage of culture have learnt that that social system which is in all respects the most free is the best one; that every infringement of the individual’s freedom of thought, speech, and action, of his initiative and enterprise, impedes cultural development and its material conditions.

Knowledge, insight, and ability, not party zeal or glibness, entitle to posts in society or in the legislative assembly. Rights are balanced by duties. Disputes are settled out of court. Decision in court is regarded as a final emergency. All get their share of the national income according to their competence and contribution. What is necessary to subsistence and education is guaranteed to all. Everybody is helped to get his place in the social organization, since unsuitable work is regarded as a waste of those national assets to be the most valued. Everything that belongs to the spheres of life and modes of expression of attraction becomes a standard of what is considered right and proper.

The cultural individual stands up against evil by legal means. He does not passively witness that freedom and right are violated by any power whatsoever. He knows that all share in the responsibility for the violation of freedom; that anyone who does not uphold freedom also for his own part gives up power to evil; that we are all at the mercy of evil, since we have all contributed to it and still allow it to continue. We have lost all our original rights through our own negligence, and we can regain them only through our own doing.

At the stage of culture, man is regarded as more important than anything else. Whatever at the stage of civilization was considered worth striving for (power, wealth, honours) has lost its charm after the knowledge of life has demonstrated the greater responsibility bound up with these things. The individual does not any longer regard it as his mission in life to make a career in society, elbow his way along, push others aside; but considers the “right” of the stronger to help and assist the weaker.

Humanity has become the universal ideal of the stage of culture.

Henry T. Laurency, The Philosopher’s Stone, Esoteric Life View, The Law of Development www.laurency.com

The Stage of Humanity

”Humanist nations are realized when the individuals are servers and nobody feels a master.”

Just as the stage of civilization brings with it an intellectualization of barbaric emotionality, so the stage of humanity entails the same as regards cultural emotionality. Intellectualization implies that feeling, poor in intelligence, becomes increasingly more rational, and eventually passes into, or is superseded by, imagination, and the latter in its turn by clear ideas.

The prerequisite of attaining the stage of humanity is to have activated the two highest kinds of emotional consciousness (48:2,3). But if the higher emotionality is developed exclusively by the cultivation of devotional intense longing for, aspiration towards merging in, essential unity (46), then the mental activation is neglected. The mystic remains mentally undeveloped. This is the cause of the infantile, rationally helpless trait of most mystics.

The higher remains “esoteric” to the lower. Understanding presupposes both the activation of the requisite consciousness domain and the corresponding latent experience, qualitatively and quantitatively. If understanding is lacking, there is always a risk of misunderstanding even by those who have comprehended clearly.

The stages of barbarism and civilization are those of ignorance, fictions, subjectivism. With the advent of natural science, sense began to prevail over arbitrary reason. And with that the foundation of culture is laid. At the stage of humanity, the higher two kinds of mental consciousness (47:4,5) are activated, which at the stage of civilization have been part of the superconscious. With that man begins to deserve his name of rational being. His latent experience of life, acquired during thousands of incarnations, eventually makes itself felt. Higher mental thinking (47:5) is acquired partly by research, partly by meditative activation of the superconscious. Research, ascertaining the facts and laws of material reality, formulating axioms and basic propositions, develops the sense of reality and, with it, the power to see through more clearly the fictitiousness of the lower mentality.

Humanist nations are realized when the individuals are servers and nobody feels a master. When all serve something higher, something above themselves, something for several, for many, for all together, everybody to his vision and ability, then that harmony of living together is obtained which can be called humanity. The individual knows that he exists for the community, and the community for the individual. Social systems are suited to their purpose, legislation shows understanding, the application of the law is dictated by good-will and the desire to help. Nobody needs to defend his right against the authorities. To protect the rights of the individual is a self-evident official duty.

The idea of brotherhood, at the stage of civilization a fair locution, becomes self-evident and realized. That brotherhood which is limited to race, creed, sex, etc., is not universal, and is part of the self-delusions of egoism. Mankind makes up a unity, which fact appears in the responsibility of all for all. The humanist has always waged an unremitting struggle for the never realized ideas of human dignity, tolerance, and the right to a self-acquired view. He knows that genuine religion is the path of feeling to unity, like true humanism is the path of reason to the same goal. He does what he can to teach mankind a world view and a life view that is free of all dogmas, and scientifically acceptable. But he also knows that the ruling fictional systems can be changed only gradually.

Of course it is harder still to overcome all the expressions of masked hatred. The humanist’s tolerance is not that of indifference. He does not in the least wish others to share his views. The higher the level and the greater the exact knowledge, the greater the differences of the subjective modes of expression of individual character. He helps everyone to acquire his own views by himself and to view in his own way everything that is part of mere subjectivity. He knows that ideals are incompatible with outer or inner compulsion. Noble feelings, thoughts, qualities, are strived after as means to reach unity. He knows that if egoistic motives contribute, then the result is moralism and self-deceptive appearances.

The nearer the individual approaches the stage of ideality, the more strongly the ideals influence him and appear as necessary factors of development. “Ideas rule the world.” This sentence of Platon is an esoteric axiom. At the stage of humanity the humanist ideas are sovereign. Right becomes the ruling power. The entire human development appears more and more clearly as an instinctual groping towards freedom and unity.

Henry T. Laurency, The Philosopher’s Stone, Esoteric Life View, The Law of Development www.laurency.com

The Stage of Ideality

”We are all wandering towards the world of ideals, and we shall some time enter into possession of it.”

As is clear from the foregoing, at the stage of barbarism, man identifies himself primarily with the physical and gains understanding of physical realities. At the stages of civilization and culture, emotionality becomes increasingly important. At the stage of humanity, the individual slowly strives to liberate himself from his slavish dependence on emotionality. The stage of ideality is characterized by a corresponding endeavour of the individual to liberate himself from concrete-formal mental thinking. It is only at the stage of ideality that the individual must and can liberate himself definitively from his egoism.

The idealist (meaning the individual at the stage of ideality) realizes fully his debt to life, that he has been given all for nothing, and becomes aware of his responsibility. For knowledge is power. And power is abused by all who have not reached the stage of ideality.

Ideality at lower stages is always a good thing. However, it too easily leads to self-deception, since man by and large is ignorant of human nature and its difficulties. Only at the stage of ideality is man in a position to realize how difficult it is to understand others and himself, realize that it is impossible for individuals at lower stages to judge correctly without a knowledge of reality and life.

The one that has achieved the stage of ideality knows that man is not improved by nagging homilies and passing the judgements of moralist hatred, but only by loving forth goodness; that the moralist with his morality counteracts the end he thinks he promotes. Neither does he witness to himself before a mankind that is ignorant of all higher reality. That would just evoke the ridicule of the ignorant, obtrusiveness of the curious, insatiable demand for more sensations of the sensationalists. When mankind has reached the stage of culture, has overcome hatred, has acquired respect for life and veneration for the unknown, only then will it be possible for it to walk with noble beings without detriment to itself.

At the stage of ideality, the ideals are realities. Only there is it known that ideals are the most important factors of consciousness development. Until this stage one does not understand their power, their purpose, their necessity. Only when ideals and reality coincide, one has, in accordance with the law of self-realization, realized unity and that freedom which is a law.

We are all wandering towards the world of ideals, and we shall some time enter into possession of it. In that connection it matters but little whether, at the stage of civilization, that world appears an absurd, impractical fiction; at the stage of culture, an unrealizable ideal; at the stage of humanity, still remote. We are all guided step by step towards that goal.

Henry T. Laurency:
– Knowledge of Life Two, The Stages of Human Development, The Stage of Ideality
– The Philosopher’s Stone, Esoteric Life View, The Law of Development
www.laurency.com