I listened to this with a strange feeling. On the one hand I was pleased with everything that G. said. I was attracted by the absence of any element of sentimentality, of conventional talk about “altruism,” of words about “working for the good of HUMANITY” and so forth. On the other hand I was surprised at G.’s apparent desire to convince me of something in connection with the question of money when I needed no convincing. Fragments: One

Somewhere about this time I was very much struck by a talk about the sun, the planets, and the moon. I do not remember how this talk began. But I remember that G. drew a small diagram and tried to explain what he called the “correlation of forces in different worlds.” This was in connection with the previous talk, that is, in connection with the influences acting on HUMANITY. The idea was roughly this: HUMANITY, or more correctly, organic life on earth, is acted upon simultaneously by influences proceeding from various sources and different worlds: influences from the planets, influences from the moon, influences from the sun, influences from the stars. All these influences act simultaneously; one influence predominates at one moment and another influence at another moment. And for man there is a certain possibility of making a choice of influences; in other words, of passing from one influence to another. Fragments: One

“But first of all another thing must be understood, namely, that knowledge cannot belong to all, cannot even belong to many. Such is the law. You do not understand this because you do not understand that knowledge, like everything else in the world, is material. It is material, and this means that it possesses all the characteristics of materiality. One of the first characteristics of materiality is that matter is always limited, that is to say, the quantity of matter in a given place and under given condi­tions is limited. Even the sand of the desert and the water of the sea is a definite and unchangeable quantity. So that, if knowledge is material, then it means that there is a definite quantity of it in a given place at a given time. It may be said that, in the course of a certain period of time, say a century, HUMANITY has a definite amount of knowledge at its disposal. But we know, even from an ordinary observation of life, that the matter of knowledge possesses entirely different qualities according to whether it is taken in small or large quantities. Taken in a large quantity in a given place, that is by one man, let us say, or by a small group of men, it produces very good results; taken in a small quantity (that is, by every one of a large number of people), it gives no results at all; or it may give even negative results, contrary to those expected. Thus if a certain definite quantity of knowledge is distributed among millions of people, each individual will receive very little, and this small amount of knowledge will change nothing either in his life or in his understanding of things. And however large the number of people who receive this small amount of knowledge, it will change nothing in their lives, except, perhaps, to make them still more difficult. Fragments: Two

“There are periods in the life of HUMANITY, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge. This, in its turn, necessitates the work of collecting this matter of knowledge which would otherwise be lost. Thus the work of collecting scattered matter of knowledge frequently coincides with the beginning of the destruction and fall of cultures and civilizations. Fragments: Two

Consider what the cultured HUMANITY of our time spends money on; even leaving the war out, what commands the highest price; where the biggest crowds are. If we think for a moment about these questions it becomes clear that HUMANITY, as it is now, with the interests it lives by, cannot expect to have anything different from what it has. But, as I have already said, it cannot be otherwise. Imagine that for the whole of mankind half a pound of knowledge is allotted a year. If this knowledge is distributed among everyone, each will receive so little that he will remain the fool he was. But, thanks to the fact that very few want to have this knowledge, those who take it are able to get, let us say, a grain each, and acquire the possibility of becoming more intelligent. All cannot become intelligent even if they wish. And if they did become intelligent it would not help matters. There exists a general equilibrium which cannot be upset. Fragments: Two

“Only thought as theoretical and as far removed from fact as modem European thought could have conceived the evolution of man to be possible apart from surrounding nature, or have regarded the evolution of man as a gradual conquest of nature. This is quite impossible. In living, in dying, in evolving, in degenerating, man equally serves the purposes of nature — or, rather, nature makes equal use, though perhaps for different purposes, of the products of both evolution and degeneration. And, at the same time, HUMANITY as a whole can never escape from nature, for, even in struggling against nature man acts in conformity with her purposes. The evolution of large masses of HUMANITY is opposed to nature’s purposes. The evolution of a certain small percentage may be in accord with nature’s purposes. Man contains within him the possibility of evolution. But the evolution of HUMANITY as a whole, that is, the development of these possibilities in all men, or in most of them, or even in a large number of them, is not necessary for the purposes of the earth or of the planetary world in general, and it might, in fact, be injurious or fatal. There exist, therefore, special forces (of a planetary character) which oppose the evolution of large masses of HUMANITY and keep it at the level it ought, to be. Fragments: Three

“For instance, the evolution of HUMANITY beyond a certain point, or, to speak more correctly, above a certain percentage, would be fatal for the moon. The moon at present feeds on organic life, on HUMANITY. Humanity is a part of organic life; this means that HUMANITY is food for the moon. If all men were to become too intelligent they would not want to be eaten by the moon. Fragments: Three

“But, at the same time, possibilities of evolution exist, and they may be developed in separate individuals with the help of appropriate knowledge and methods. Such development can take place only in the interests of the man himself against, so to speak, the interests and forces of the planetary world. The man must understand this: his evolution is necessary only to himself. No one else is interested in it. And no one is obliged or intends to help him. On the contrary, the forces which oppose the evolution of large masses of HUMANITY also oppose the evolution of individual men. A man must outwit them. And one man can outwit them, HUMANITY cannot. You will understand later on that all these obstacles are very useful to a man; if they did not exist they would have to be created intentionally, because it is by overcoming obstacles that man develops those qualities he needs. Fragments: Three

“In the history of HUMANITY there are known many examples when entire civilizations have perished because knowledge outweighed being or being outweighed knowledge.” Fragments: Four

“Man number one, number two, and number three, these are people who constitute mechanical HUMANITY on the same level on which they are born. Fragments: Four

“If we desire an answer to the question what is the world or worlds in which we live, we must first of all ask ourselves what it is that we may call ‘world’ in the most intimate and immediate relation to us., “To this we may answer that we often give the name of ‘world’ to the world of people, to HUMANITY, in which we live, of which we form part. But HUMANITY forms an inseparable part of organic life on earth, therefore it would be right to say that the world nearest to us is organic life on earth, the world of plants, animals, and men. Fragments: Four

“Examples of the action of the three forces, and the moments of entry of the third force, may be discovered in all manifestations of our psychic life, in all phenomena of the life of human communities and of HUMANITY as a whole, and in all the phenomena of nature around us. Fragments: Four

Then a great deal was elucidated for me by the idea that each center was not only a motive force but also a “receiving apparatus,” working as receiver for different and sometimes very distant influences. When I thought of what had been said about wars, revolutions, migrations of peoples, and so on; when I pictured how masses of HUMANITY could move under the control of planetary influences, I began to understand our fundamental mistake in determining the actions of an individual. We regard the actions of an individual as originating in himself. We do not imagine that the “masses” may consist of automatons obeying external stimuli and may move, not under the influence of the will, consciousness, or inclination of individuals, but under the influence of external stimuli coming possibly from very far away. Fragments: Six

“The same thing happens in all spheres of human activity. In literature, science, art, philosophy, religion, in individual and above all in social and political life, we can observe how the line of the development of forces deviates from its original direction and goes, after a certain time, in a diametrically opposite direction, still preserving its former name. A study of history from this point of view shows the most astonishing facts which mechanical HUMANITY is far from desiring to notice. Perhaps the most interesting examples of such change of direction in the line of the development of forces can be found in the history of religion, particularly in the history of Christianity if it is studied dispassionately. Think how many turns the line of development of forces must have taken to come from the Gospel preaching of love to the Inquisition; or to go from the ascetics of the early centuries studying esoteric Christianity to the scholastics who calculated how many angels could be placed on the point of a needle. Fragments: Seven

“Let us take some event in the life of HUMANITY. For instance, war. There is a war going on at the present moment. What does it signify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people. They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up. Everything that takes place is owing to this sleep. Fragments: Eight

“This is why in true work, that is, in true ‘doing,’ the producing of infatuation in people is not allowed. What you call black magic is based on infatuation and on playing upon human weaknesses. Black magic does not in any way mean magic of evil. I have already said earlier that no one ever does anything for the sake of evil, in the interests of evil. Everyone always does everything in the interests of good as he understands it. In the same way it is quite wrong to assert that black magic must necessarily be egoistical, that in black magic a man strives after some results for himself. This is quite wrong. Black magic may be quite altruistic, may strive after the good of HUMANITY or after the salvation of HUMANITY from real or imaginary evils. But what can be called black magic has always one definite characteristic. This characteristic is the tendency to use people for some, even the best of aims, without their knowledge and understanding, either by producing in them faith and infatuation or by acting upon them through fear. Fragments: Eleven

“So you see that art is not merely a language but something much bigger. And if you connect what I have just said with what I said earlier about the different levels of man’s being, you will understand what is said about art. Mechanical HUMANITY consists of men number one, number two, and number three and they, of course, can have subjective art only. Objective art requires at least flashes of objective consciousness; in order to understand these flashes properly and to make proper use of them a great inner unity is necessary and a great control of oneself.” Fragments: Fourteen

“The evolving part of organic life is HUMANITY. Humanity also has its evolving part but we will speak of this later; in the meantime we will take HUMANITY as a whole. If HUMANITY does not evolve it means that the evolution of organic life will stop and this in its turn will cause the growth of the ray of creation to stop. At the same time if HUMANITY ceases to evolve it becomes useless from the point of view of the aims for which it was created and as such it may be destroyed. In this way the cessation of evolution may mean the destruction of HUMANITY. Fragments: Fifteen

“We have no clues from which we are able to tell in what period of planetary evolution we exist and whether the moon and the earth have time to await the corresponding evolution of organic life or not. But people who know may, of course, have exact information about it, that is, they may know at what stage in their possible evolution are the earth, the moon, and HUMANITY. We cannot know this but we should bear in mind that the number of possibilities is never infinite. Fragments: Fifteen

“At the same time in examining the life of HUMANITY as we know it historically we are bound to acknowledge that HUMANITY is moving in a circle. In one century it destroys everything it creates in another and the progress in mechanical things of the past hundred years has proceeded at the cost of losing many other things which perhaps were much more important for it. Speaking in general there is every reason to think and to assert that HUMANITY is at a standstill and from a standstill there is a straight path to downfall and degeneration. A standstill means that a process has become balanced. The appearance of any one quality immediately evokes the appearance of another quality opposed to it. The growth of knowledge in one domain evokes the growth of ignorance in another; refinement on the one hand evokes vulgarity on the other; freedom in one connection evokes slavery in another; the disappearance of some superstitions evokes the appearance and the growth of others; and so on. Fragments: Fifteen

“Of course there are very many people who consider that the life of HUMANITY is not proceeding in the way in which according to their views it ought to go. And they invent various theories which in their opinion ought to change the whole life of HUMANITY. One invents one theory. Another immediately invents a contradictory theory. And both expect everyone to believe them. And many people indeed do believe either one or the other. Life naturally takes its own course but people do not stop believing in their own or other people’s theories and they believe that it is possible to do something. All these theories are certainly quite fantastic, chiefly because they do not take into account the most important thing, namely, the subordinate part which HUMANITY and organic life play in the world process. Intellectual theories put man in the center of everything; everything exists for him, the sun, the stars, the moon, the earth. They even forget man’s relative size, his nothingness, his transient existence, and other tilings. They assert that a man if he wishes is able to change his whole life, that is, to organize his life on rational principles. And all the time new theories appear evoking in their turn opposing theories; and all these theories and the struggle between them undoubtedly constitute one of the forces which keep HUMANITY in the state in which it is at present. Besides, all these theories for general welfare and general equality are not only unrealizable, but they would be fatal if they were realized. Everything in nature has its aim and its purpose, both the inequality of man and his suffering. To destroy inequality would mean destroying the possibility of evolution. To destroy suffering would mean, first, destroying a whole series of perceptions for which man exists, and second, the destruction of the ‘shock,’ that is to say, the force which alone can change the situation. And thus it is with all intellectual theories. Fragments: Fifteen

“The process of evolution, of that evolution which is possible for HUMANITY as a whole, is completely analogous, to the process of evolution possible for the individual man. And it begins with the same thing, namely, a certain group of cells gradually becomes conscious; then it attracts to itself other cells, subordinates others, and gradually makes the whole organism serve its aims and not merely eat, drink, and sleep. This is evolution and there can be no other kind of evolution. In HUMANITY as in individual man everything begins with the formation of a conscious nucleus. All the mechanical forces of life fight against the formation of this conscious nucleus in HUMANITY, in just the same way as all mechanical habits, tastes and weaknesses fight against conscious self-remembering in man.” Fragments: Fifteen

“Can it be said that there is a conscious force which fights against the evolution of HUMANITY?” I asked. Fragments: Fifteen

“But as I have said already, this question has no practical significance for us. It is only important for us to establish the indications of evolution beginning and the indications of evolution proceeding. And if we remember the full analogy between HUMANITY and man it will not be difficult to establish whether HUMANITY can be regarded as evolving. Fragments: Fifteen

“So that in the actual situation of HUMANITY there is nothing that points to evolution proceeding. On the contrary when we compare HUMANITY with a man we quite clearly see a growth of personality at the cost of essence, that is, a growth of the artificial, the unreal, and what is foreign, at the cost of the natural, the real, and what is one’s own. Fragments: Fifteen

“Everything I have said till now I have said about the whole of HUMANITY. But as I pointed out before, the evolution of HUMANITY can proceed only through the evolution of a certain group, which, in its turn, will influence and lead the rest of HUMANITY. Fragments: Fifteen

“Are we able to say that such a group exists? Perhaps we can on the basis of certain signs, but in any event we have to acknowledge that it is a very small group, quite insufficient, at any rate, to subjugate the rest of HUMANITY. Or, looking at it from another point of view, we can say that HUMANITY is in such a state that it is unable to accept the guidance of a conscious group.” Fragments: Fifteen

“It was pointed out before when we spoke about the history of HUMANITY that the life of HUMANITY to which we belong is governed by forces proceeding from two different sources: first, planetary influences which act entirely mechanically and are received by the human masses as well as by individual people quite involuntarily and unconsciously; and then, influences proceeding from inner circles of HUMANITY whose existence and significance the vast majority of people do not suspect any more than they suspect planetary influences. Fragments: Fifteen

“The HUMANITY to which we belong, namely, the whole of historic and prehistoric HUMANITY known to science and civilization, in reality constitutes only the outer circle of HUMANITY, within which there are several other circles. Fragments: Fifteen

“So that we can imagine the whole of HUMANITY, known as well as unknown to us, as consisting so to speak of several concentric circles. Fragments: Fifteen

“The third circle is called the ‘exoteric,’ that is, the outer, because it is the outer circle of the inner part of HUMANITY. The people who belong to this circle possess much of that which belongs to people of the esoteric and mesoteric circles but their cosmic knowledge is of a more philosophical character, that is to say, it is more abstract than the knowledge of the mesoteric circle. A member of the mesoteric circle calculates, a member of the exoteric circle contemplates. Their understanding may not be expressed in actions. But there cannot be differences in understanding between them. What one understands all the others understand. Fragments: Fifteen

“In literature which acknowledges the existence of esotericism HUMANITY is usually divided into two circles only and the ‘exoteric circle’ as opposed to the ‘esoteric,’ is called ordinary life. In reality, as we see, the ‘exoteric circle’ is something very far from us and very high. For ordinary man this is already ‘esotericism.’ Fragments: Fifteen

” ‘The outer circle’ is the circle of mechanical HUMANITY to which we belong and which alone we know. The first sign of this circle is that among people who belong to it there is not and there cannot be a common understanding. Everybody understands in his own way and all differently. This circle is sometimes called the circle of the ‘confusion of tongues,’ that is, the circle in which each one speaks in his own particular language, where no one understands another and takes no trouble to be understood. In this circle mutual understanding between people is impossible excepting in rare exceptional moments or in matters having no great significance, and which are confined to the limits of the given being. If people belonging to this circle become conscious of this general lack of understanding and acquire a desire to understand and to be understood, then it means they have an unconscious tendency towards the inner circle because mutual understanding begins only in the exoteric circle and is possible only there. But the consciousness of the lack of understanding usually comes to people in an altogether different form. Fragments: Fifteen

“If we imagine HUMANITY in the form of four concentric circles we can imagine four gates on the circumference of the third inner circle, that is, the exoteric circle, through which people of the mechanical circle can penetrate. Fragments: Fifteen

“But such pseudo-esoteric systems also play their part in the work and activities of esoteric circles. Namely, they are the intermediaries between HUMANITY which is entirely immersed in the materialistic life and schools which are interested in the education of a certain number of people, as much for the purposes of their own existences as for the purposes of the work of a cosmic character which they may be carrying out. The very idea of esotericism, the idea of initiation, reaches people in most cases through pseudo-esoteric systems and schools; and if there were not these pseudo-esoteric schools the vast majority of HUMANITY would have no possibility whatever of hearing and learning of the existence of anything greater than life because the truth in its pure form would be inaccessible for them. By reason of the many characteristics of man’s being, particularly of the contemporary being, truth can only come to people in the form of a lie — only in this form are they able to accept it; only in this form are they able to digest and assimilate it. Truth undefiled would be, for them, indigestible food. Fragments: Fifteen

“Humanity neither progresses nor evolves. What seems to us to be progress or evolution is a partial modification which can be immediately counterbalanced by a corresponding modification in an opposite direction. Fragments: Three

“Humanity, like the rest of organic life, exists on earth for the needs and purposes of the earth. And it is exactly as it should be for the earth’s requirements at the present time. Fragments: Three