The Only Good

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You probably know the gospel story of the rich young man; the tale of the man who came to Jesus the Lord with the question: 'Good Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' Before answering the question, Jesus replied: 'Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone'.

When we look at the tenth book of Hermes Trismegistus we notice that these words from the gospel are a quotation from the hermetic philosophy. One can state this quite certainly because the hermetic philosophy existed thousands of years before the Christian gospel. In the very first verse we read:

The Good is exclusively in God, or rather: God is the Good, in all Eternity.

These words make clear straight away that that, for us, the Good is an unknowable reality: an allusion to a state that we ourselves are unable to approach.

If you think about this idea, you will realize that your good, what you are accustomed to calling 'good', has to do with something entirely different. It is a relative concept, of value to the I-being for a limited period only. And you know that what you call good, someone else will find utterly bad or reprehensible. What one person prizes as the most noble, is rejected by another as the most terrible.

There are as many standards of good and evil as there are human beings. In general, you find 'good' those things which strike you as pleasant or agreeable, or which are in keeping with your insight into life. The opposite you consider 'evil'. The result is an appalling chaos, since in our field of life there are no genuinely good people, any more than The Good, the Only Good, can be found in our life field.

We do not intend to bore you with our insights into good and evil. No, our aim is to free you from all this and direct your attention to the one genuine Good, which exists in God alone. Verse 14, at the end of the tenth book, speaks about man's dilemma with respect to good and evil:

Thus it is with regard to human goodness and human beauty. And we can neither escape nor hate them, for the hardest thing of all is that we need them and cannot live without them.

Our aim is to raise you, if possible, to the hermetic perspective. If you consider all the fuss about the progress made by human beings in various groups the world over, if you become involved in all this turmoil, you will surely not find it in you to love it, if you are a genuine seeker of Truth. Certainly, in many respects, you may see in it elements of practical value. Sometimes it may also be agreeable. But if you view it in the light of hermetic philosophy you will immediately recognize its inadequacy, its hopelessness, and it will not be possible to for you to love such attempts at goodness. The same applies to love as applies to goodness. Just as The Good is in God alone, so love, too, is only in God. Neither are found in human beings born of nature. Seekers of Truth, then, ought not to try an find them where they do not exist.

But neither ought you to hate human goodness and human beauty, for hate burns, destroys. Love, too, is a fire. Love is an astral force that has to do with the heart. When a person who seeks love is disillusioned, he always undergoes a purification and his hunger for the One Thing Necessary becomes that much purer and more urgent. But the fire of hate, which is also an astral radiation in the heart sanctuary, destroys and withers the heart. For the person who hates, nothing is left.

However, there is a third attitude, in which neither expects nor seeks what is impossible. Instead, one adopts a purely objective standpoint with respect to these things, and in this way maintains a kind of neutral goodwill, in which one simply accepts things as they are. That is why Hermes says:

We can neither escape nor hate them, for the hardest thing of all is that we need them and cannot live without them.

For as long as you are obliged to live the life of nature, you will need that life and its attributes. That is why the advice is give neither to harbor hate on account of life in nature, nor to try to escape it.

But what, then? Well, if you neither love nor hate human beauty and goodness, and neither do you try to escape them, your position with respect to dialectical nature will be that of detachment. There will be nothing that binds you to it, and nothing that can hold you back. You will do your daily duty without grumbling, without sighing, without feelings of vengeance and without rebellious actions.

You are passing through the dismal life of the nature-of-death as the result of a law* which compels you to do so. You cannot deny your birth in the nature-of-death. So do your duty, because that is what you have to do at this moment, and do it with your head held high -- without hate, without running away, without attachment. And if, on life's paths, you meet a fellow Seeker of Truth, content yourself with an understanding wink.

* The Laws of Karma, Attraction, Cause-And-Effect

The Truth-seeker is returning to The Only Good. Only in God is the Good to be found. And he who finds God, he who gains participation in The Good, is from then on no longer of this world. When you have found God, you will exist with the other brothers and sisters in the New Life-Field, in the Soul-World.

But remember that, although man can participate in The Good, he cannot be The Good, as Hermes says. The Good will always remain different from man. In that sense, no one is good, not even one.

That is why we need to examine what The Good is and to what extent a human being can participate in it. In addition, we will need to understand clearly what kind of living being nature-born man is in actual fact. Between the nature-born human being and The Good lies a path, the Path to participation in The Good. Anyone who wishes to walk the Path will have to begin by becoming non-attached in the way we have described. Only when you are no longer attached to the nature in which you were born and bred, neither by love nor by hate, will you be able to travel with the New Soul from Bethlehem to Golgotha. Then you will walk the Path to Divine Unity, to the Only Good.

From The Mystery Of The Good - The Egyptian Arch-Gnosis Vol. III - Jan van Rijckenborgh

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