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Franz Hartmann

Franz Hartmann


Franz Hartmann (22 November 1838 - 7 August 1912) was a German physician, theosophist, occultist, geomancer, astrologer, and author of esoteric works. He wrote esoteric studies and a biography of Jakob Bohme and of Paracelsus. He translated the Bhagavad Gita into German and was the editor of the journal Lotusblaten. He was at one time a co-worker of Helena Blavatsky at Adyar. In 1896 he founded a German Theosophical Society. He also supported the Guido-von-List-Society (Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft). He cofounded the Ordo Templi Orientis with Carl Kellner and Theodor Reuss. (wikipedia)


"A person whose whole attention is given to sensual pleasure, or to intellectual pursuits on the material plane, carries nothing with him into the subjective existence after the death of the body, which can exist permanently. His sensations leave him at death, and the images caused in his mind by the recollection of the superficial knowledge which he has acquired during life will gradually fade away; the intellectual forces which have been set into motion by his scientific pursuits, will be exhausted, and after that time the spirit of such a person, even if he has been during life the greatest scientist, speculator, and logician, will be nothing but an imbecile being, having merely the feeling that he exists, living in darkness, and being drawn irresistibly towards reincarnation; seeking to reimbody itself again under any circumstances whatever, to escape from nothingness into existence. But he who acquires spiritual self consciousness will be self luminous and live in eternal light. He brings a light with him into the darkness, and that light will not be extinguished; for it is eternal, while the light of this world is like darkness to him." [Franz Hartmann]


"Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." Rom. xii. 2.
THE Universe is a manifestation of thought, and thought is an action of Mind. The mind whose thought can bring an universe into existence must be an Universal Mind, embracing in its totality all the individual minds that ever existed, and containing the germs of everything that will ever come into existence.
Mind is a motion of will. Without the will acting either consciously or instinctively (mechanically) within the mind, there would be no production of thought; nor could the will produce any orderly thought on the mind if there were no Wisdom, and it will therefore be safer to say: The Universe is a product of thought, will and wisdom; nor could either of these three ever produce anything, if they were seeking to act independently of each other; they must necessarily be one, and that one, representing itself in three different aspects, as Creative Thought, Universal Will and Divine Wisdom, is commonly called God. It will therefore be best to say: The Universe is a manifestation of God.
I am well aware that the use of such an expression always gives rise to innumerable misunderstandings in the minds of theists, atheists and pantheists; because each of these classes has its own conception of "God;" forgetting that the finite mind cannot conceive of the infinite, and that the universal God is beyond the understanding of anything less than its own divine self.
A man's life does not reside outside, but within his own body, and likewise God does not live outside of His own creation; but His power acts inside of Nature. God is everything in Nature, and also in that which is not produced by nature, and therefore supernatural and eternal, such as Justice and Truth. Nevertheless Nature is not God; everything is not divine; but everything is a state of being wherein, under certain conditions, the power of God can become manifest. Likewise a stone or a tree is not nature; but in each stone and in every tree certain qualities of natural laws are revealed.
If God is all and one, then there can be only one original power and one original substance; and power and substance themselves can only be two modes of manifestation of the eternal One. There can be neither "matter" nor "motion" per se; these two terms signify merely two aspects of that which is beyond our conception. If our minds were independent of the conceptions of time and space, we might perceive how it was that the One ever came to manifest itself as a Three and to create a world; but as we are ourselves His creatures, we cannot encompass our Creator, we cannot penetrate with our curiosity into the sanctuary of the mystery of mysteries; we can merely rise up in our thought to the throne of the Eternal, and seek to feel the power of God within our own heart, and then we will know more about Him than if we study the whole library of the Vatican, or learn by heart the Encyclopedia theologica.
Jacob Boehme, a man who was capable to open his eyes and to see the truth, and who was therefore not under the necessity of depending on mere belief in what he might have imagined to be true in consequence of drawing logical inferences from external observations, says: The eternal foundation, the will of God, became desirous of conceiving of something, and as there was nothing but its own self, this universal consciousness conceived of its own self; 'it looked within itself,' or, to express it in other words, God beholds Himself in the mirror of His own eternal Wisdom.
Human language is not well adapted to the discussion of eternal truths which are beyond finite comprehension, and which can never be understood unless we call to our aid that very light of whose existence we desire to obtain proof. Therefore, the external reasoner and doubter, he who relies solely on his own intellectual reasoning, will never arrive at eternal truth, because he rejects the light of the spirit, and extinguishes not the light but his own capacity of understanding." ["Magic, white and black"; c. 1890, by Hartmann, Franz]


What is Man?
"The most important question that was ever asked, and is still asked with anxiety and often with fear, is the same that was propounded thousands of years ago by the Egyptian Sphinx, who killed him that attempted to solve the riddle and did not succeed: What is man?
Ages have passed away since the question was first asked, nations have slain each other in cruel religious warfare, making vain efforts to impose upon each other such solution of the great problem as they believed they had found, but from the tombs of the past only re-echoes the same question What is Man?
And yet the answer seems simple. Common sense, if divested of religious or scientific prejudices, tells us that man, like every other form in the universe, is a collective centre of energy, a solitary ray of the universally present Divine Light which is the common source of everything that exists; he is a true child of the great Spiritual Sun. As the rays of our sun only become visibly active in contact with dust, so the divine ray is absorbed and reflected by matter. It mingles for a while with matter, and draws up towards the sun such elements as are sufficiently refined to escape the attraction of Earth.
The sun-ray plays with the waves of the ocean : the heat created by the contact of water with light from above extracts from below the refined material, and the vapors rise to the sky, where, like the ghosts of the seas, they wander in clouds of manifold shapes traveling freely through the air, playing with the winds, until the time arrives when the energies which keep them suspended become exhausted and they once more descend to earth.
In a similar manner the divine ray of the spiritual sun mingles with matter while dwelling on Earth, absorbing and assimilating whatever he chooses or what corresponds to his needs. As the butterfly flits from flower to flower, tasting the sweets of each, so the human monad passes from life to life, from planet to planet, gathering experience, knowledge, and strength, but when the day of life is over, night follows, and with it follows sleep bringing dreams of vivid reality.
The grossest elements remain to mingle again with earth, the more refined elements the astral elements which are still within the attraction of the planet float about, driven hither and thither by their inherent tendencies, until the energy which holds them together is exhausted, and they dissolve again in the plane to which they belong; but the highest spiritual energies of man, held together by love freed from the attraction of Earth, ascend to their source like a white-robed spirit, bringing with it the products of its experience beyond the limits of matter. Man's love and aspiration do not belong to Earth.
They create energies which are active beyond the confines of the grave and the funeral-pyre; their activity may last for ages, until it becomes exhausted, and the purified ray, endowed with the tendencies impressed upon it by its last visit to the planet, again seeks association with matter, builds again its prison-house of animated clay, and appears an old actor in a new part upon the ever-changing stage of life." [Franz Hartmann, "Magic, white and black", c. 1890]

See Also


Franz Hartmann, wikipedia
Theosophical Siftings
13.40 - A Modern Wizard
19.07 - A Modern Wizard The Keely Motor And Its Inventor

Created by Dale Pond. Last Modification: Tuesday September 19, 2023 04:56:16 MDT by Dale Pond.