MAN
AND HIS BODIES.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
So
much confusion exists as to consciousness and its vehicles, the man and
the garments that he wears, that it seems expedient to place before
Theosophical students a plain statement of the facts so far as they are
known to us. We have reached a point in our studies at which much that was
at first obscure has become clear, much that was vague has become
definite, much that was accepted as theory has become matter of first-hand
knowledge. It is therefore possible to arrange ascertained facts in a
definite sequence, facts which can be observed again and again as
successive students develop the power of observation, and to speak on them
with the same certainty as is felt by the physicist who deals with other
observed and tabulated phenomena. But just as the physicist may err so may
the metaphysicist, and as knowledge widens new lights are thrown on old
facts, their relations are more clearly seen, and their appearance changes
- often because the further light shows [1] that
the fact which seemed a whole was only a fragment. No authority is claimed
for the views here presented; they are offered only as from a student to
students, as an effort to reproduce what has been taught but has doubtless
been very imperfectly apprehended, together with such results of the
observations of pupils as their limited powers enable them to make.
At
the outset of our study it is necessary that the Western reader should
change the attitude in which he has been accustomed to regard himself, and
that he should clearly distinguish between the man and the bodies in which
the man dwells. We are too much in the habit of identifying ourselves with
the outer garments that we wear, too apt to think of ourselves as though
we were our bodies; and it is necessary, if we are to grasp a true
conception of our subject, that we shall leave this point of view and
shall cease to identify ourselves with casings that we put on for a time
and again cast off, to put on fresh ones when we are again in need of such
vestures. To identify ourselves with these bodies that have only a passing
existence is really as foolish and as unreasonable as it would be to
identify ourselves with our clothes; we are not dependent on them - their
value is in proportion to their utility. The blunder so constantly made of
identifying the consciousness, which is our Self, with the vehicles in
which that consciousness is for the moment functioning, can only be
excused by [2] the
fact that the waking consciousness, and to some extent the dream
consciousness also, do live and work in the body and are not known apart
from it to the ordinary man; yet an intellectual understanding of the real
conditions may be gained, and we may train ourselves to regard our Self as
the owner of his vehicle and after a time this will by experience become
for a definite fact, when we learn to separate our Self from his bodies,
to step out of the vehicle, and to know that we exist in a far fuller
consciousness outside it then within it, and that we are in no sense
dependent upon it; when that is once achieved, any further identification
of our Self with our bodies is of course impossible, and we can never
again make the blunder of supposing we are what we wear. The clear
intellectual understanding at least is within the grasp of all of us, and
we may train ourselves in the habitual distinguishment between the Self -
the man - and his bodies; even to do this is to step out of the illusion
in which the majority are wrapped, and changes our whole attitude towards
life and towards the world, lifting us into a serener region above
"the changes and chances of this mortal life," placing us above
the daily petty troubles which loom so largely to embodied consciousness,
showing us the true proportion between the ever-changing and the
relatively permanent, and making us feel the difference between the
drowning man tossed and buffeted by the [3] waves
that smother him, and the man whose feet are on a rock while the surges
break harmlessly at its base.
By
man I mean the living, conscious, thinking Self, the individual; by
bodies, the various casings in which this Self is enclosed, each casing
enabling the Self to function in some definite region of the universe. As
a man might use a carriage on the land, a ship on the water, an airplane
in the air, to travel from one place to another, and yet in all places
remain himself, so does the Self, the real man, remain himself no matter
in what body he is functioning; and as carriage, ship and air plane vary
in materials and arrangement according to the element in which each is
destined to move, so does each body vary according to the environment in
which it is to act. One is grosser than another, one shorter-lived than
another, one has fewer capacities than another; but all have this in
common - that relatively to the man they are transient, his instruments,
his servants, wearing out and renewed according to their nature, and
adapted to his varying needs, his growing powers. We will study them one
by one, beginning with the lowest, and then take the man himself, the
actor in all the bodies. [4]
THE
PHYSICAL BODY
Under
the term physical body must be included the two lower principles of
manin Theosophical parlance the Sthula Sharira and Linga
Sharira-since they both function on the physical plane, are composed of
physical matter, are formed for the period of one physical life, are cast
off by the man at death, and disintegrate together in the physical world
when he passes on into the astral.
Another
reason for classing these two principles as our physical body or physical
vehicle is that so long as we cannot pass out of the physical world - or
plane, we are accustomed to call it - we are using one or other or both of
these physical vestures; they both belong to the physical plane by their
materials, and cannot pass outside it; consciousness working in them is
bound within their physical limitations, and is subject to the ordinary
laws of space and time. Although partially separable, they are rarely
separated during earthly life and such separation is inadvisable and is
always a sign of disease or of ill-balanced constitution.
They
are distinguishable by the materials of which they are composed into the
gross body and the etheric [5] double,
the latter being the exact duplicate of the visible body, particle for
particle, and the medium through which play all the electrical and vital
currents on which the activity of the body depends. This etheric double
has hitherto been called the Linga Sharīra, but it seems advisable,
for several reasons, to put an end to the use of the name in this
relation. "Linga Sharīra" has from time immemorial been
used in Hindu books in another sense, and much confusion arises among
students of Eastern literature, whether Easterns or Westerns, in
consequence of its arbitrary wresting from its recognized meaning; for
this reason, if for no other, it would be well to surrender its improper
use. Further, it is better to have English names for the subdivisions of
the human constitution, and thus remove from our elementary literature the
stumbling block to beginners of a Sanskrit terminology. Also, the name
etheric double exactly expresses the nature and constitution of the
subtler portion of the physical body, and is thus significant and
therefore easy to remember, as every name should be; it is
"etheric" because made of ether, "double" because an
exact duplicate of the gross body - its shadow, as it were.
Now
physical matter has seven subdivisions, distinguishable from each other,
and each showing a vast variety of combinations within its own limits. The
subdivisions are: solid, liquid, gas, ether, the latter [6] having
four conditions as distinct from each other as liquids are distinct from
solids and gases. These are the seven states of physical matter, and any
portion of such matter is capable of passing into any one of these states,
although under what we call normal temperature and pressure it will assume
one or other of these as its relatively permanent condition, as gold is
ordinarily solid, water is ordinarily liquid, chlorine is ordinarily
gaseous. The physical body of man is composed of matter in these seven
states - the gross body consisting of solids, liquids and gases; and the
etheric double of the four subdivisions of ether, known respectively as
Ether I, Ether II, Ether III, and Ether IV.
When
the higher Theosophical truths are put before people, we find them
constantly complaining that they are too much in the clouds, and asking:
"Where ought we to begin? If we want to learn for ourselves and prove
the truth of the assertions made, how are we to start? What are the first
steps that we should take? What, in fact, is the alphabet of this language
in which Theosophists discourse so glibly? What ought we to do, we men and
women living in the world, in order to understand and verify these
matters, instead of merely taking them on trust from others who say they
know?" I am going to try to answer that question in the following
pages, so that those who are really in earnest may see the earlier
practical steps they ought to take - it [7] being
always understood that these steps must belong to a life, the moral,
intellectual and spiritual parts of which are also under training. Nothing
that a man can do to the physical body alone will turn him into a seer or
a saint; but it is also true that inasmuch as the body is an instrument
that we have to use, certain treatment of the body is necessary in order
that we may turn our footsteps in the direction of the Path; while dealing
with the body only will never take us to the heights to which we aspire,
still to let the body alone will make it impossible for us to scale those
heights at all. The bodies in which he has to live and work are the
instruments of the man, and the very first thing we have to realize is
this: that the body exists for us, not we for the body; the body is ours
to use - we do not belong to it to be used by it. The body is an
instrument which is to be refined, to be improved, to be trained, to be molded
into such a form and made of such constituents as may best fit it to be
the instrument on the physical plane for the highest purposes of the man.
Everything which tends in that direction is to be encouraged and
cultivated; everything which goes contrary to it is to be avoided. It does
not matter what wishes the body may have, what habits it may have
contracted in the past, the body is ours, our servant, to be employed as
we desire, and the moment it takes the reins into its own hands and claims
to guide the man instead of being [8] guided
by the man, at that moment the whole purpose of life is subverted, and any
kind of progress is rendered utterly impossible. Here is the point from
which any person who is in earnest must start. The very nature of the
physical body makes it a thing which can be turned fairly easily into a
servant or an instrument. It has certain peculiarities which help us in
training it and make it comparatively easy to guide and mould, and one of
these peculiarities is that when once it has been accustomed to work along
particular lines it will very readily continue to follow those lines of
its own accord, and will be quite as happy in doing so as it was
previously in going along others. If a bad habit has been acquired, the
body will make considerable resistance to any change in that habit; but if
it be compelled to alter, if the obstacle it places in the way be
overcome, and if it be forced to act as the man desires, then after a
short time the body will of its own accord repeat the new habit that the
man has imposed on it, and will as contentedly pursue the new method as it
pursued the old one to which the man found reason to object.
Let
us now turn to the consideration of the dense body that we may roughly
call the visible part of the physical body, though the gaseous
constituents are not visible to the untrained physical eye. This is the
most outward garment of the man, his lowest [9] manifestation,
his most limited and imperfect expression of himself.
The
Dense Body. We must delay sufficiently long on the constitution
of the body to enable us to understand how it is that we can take this
body, purify it, and train it; we must glance at a set of activities which
are for the most part outside the control of the will, and then at those
which are under that control. Both of these work by means of nervous
systems, but by nervous systems of different kinds. One carries on all the
activities of the body which maintain its ordinary life, by which the
lungs contract, by which the heart pulsates, by which the movements of the
digestive system are directed. This is composed of the involuntary nerves,
commonly called the "sympathetic system." At one time during the
long past of physical evolution during which our bodies were built, this
system was under the control of the animal possessing it, but gradually it
began to work automatically - it passed away from the control of the will,
took on its own quasi-independence and carried on all the normal vital
activities of the body. While a person is in health, he does not notice
these activities; he knows that he breathes when the breathing is
oppressed or checked, he knows that his heart beats when the beating is
violent or irregular, but when all is in order these processes go on
unnoticed. It is, however, possible to bring the [10] sympathetic
nervous system under the control of the will by long and painful practice,
and a class of Yogi in India - Hatha Yogis they are called - develop this
power to an extraordinary degree, with the object of stimulating the lower
psychic faculties. It is possible to evolve these (without any regard to
spiritual, moral or intellectual growth) by direct action on the physical
body. The Hatha Yogi learns to control his breathing even to the point of
suspension for a considerable period to control the beating of his heart,
quickening or retarding the circulation at will, and by these means to
throw the physical body into a trance and set free the astral body. The
method is not one to be emulated; but still it is instructive for Western
nations (who are apt to regard the body as of such imperative nature) to
know how thoroughly a man can bring under his control these normally
automatic physical processes, and to realize that thousands of men impose
on themselves a long and exquisitely painful discipline in order to see
themselves free from the prison-house of the physical body, and to know
that they live when the animation of the body is suspended. They are at
least in earnest, and are no longer the mere slaves of the senses.
Passing
from this we have the voluntary nervous system, one far more important for
our mental purposes. This is the great system which is our instrument of
thought, by which we feel and move on the physical [11] plane.
It consists of the cerebro-spinal axis - the brain and spinal cord -
whence go to every part of the body filaments of nervous matter, the
sensory and motor nerves - the nerves by which we feel running from the
periphery to the axis, and the nerves by which we move running from the
axis to the periphery. From every part of the body the nerve-threads run,
associating with each other to make bundles, these proceeding to join the
spinal cord, forming its external fibrous substance, and passing upwards
to spread out and ramify in the brain, the centre of all feeling and all
purposive motion controllable by the will. This is the system through
which the man expresses his will and his consciousness, and these may be
said to be seated in the brain. The man can do nothing on the physical
plane except through the brain and nervous system; if these be out of
order, he can no longer express himself in orderly fashion. Here is the
fact on which materialism has based its contention that thought and
brain-action vary together; dealing with the physical plane only, as the
materialist is dealing, they do vary together, and it is necessary to
bring in forces from another plane, the astral, in order to show that
thought is not the result of nervous actions. If the brain be affected by
drugs, or by disease, or by injury, the thought of the man to whom the
brain belongs can no longer find its due expression on the physical plane.
The materialist will also point out that if you have [12] certain
diseases, thought will be peculiarly affected There is a rare disease,
aphasia, which destroys a particular part of the tissue of the brain, near
the ear, and is accompanied by a total loss of memory so far as words are
concerned; if you ask a person who is suffering from this disease a
question, he cannot answer you; if you ask him his name, he will give you
no reply; but if you speak his name he will show recognition of it, if you
read him some statement he will signify assent or dissent; he is able to
think, but unable to speak. I seems as though the part of the brain that
has been eaten away were connected with the physical memory of words, so
that with the loss of that the man loses on the physical plane the memory
of words and is rendered dumb, while he retains the power of thought and
can agree or disagree with any proposition made. The materialistic
argument at once breaks down, of course, when the man is set free from his
imperfect instrument; he is then able to manifest his powers, though he is
again crippled when reduced once more to physical expression. The
importance of this as regards our present inquiry lies not in the validity
or invalidity of the materialistic position, but in the fact that the man
is limited in his expression on the physical plane by the capabilities of
his physical instrument, and that this instrument is susceptible to
physical agents; if these can injure it they can also improve it - a [13] consideration
which we shall find to be of vital importance to us.
These
nervous systems, like every part of the body, are built up of cell, small
definite bodies, with enclosing wall and contents, visible under the
microscope, and modified according to their various functions; these cells
in their turn are made up of small molecules, and these again of atoms -
the atoms of the chemist, each atom being his ultimate indivisible
particle of a chemical element. These chemical atoms combine together in
innumerable ways to form the gases, the liquids, and the solids of the
dense body. Each chemical atom is to the Theosophist a living thing
capable of leading its independent life, and each combination of such
atoms into a more complex being is again a living thing; also each cell
has a life of its own, and all these chemical atoms and molecules and
cells are combined together into an organic whole, a body, to serve as
vehicle of a loftier form of consciousness than any which they know in
their separated lives. Now, the particles of which these bodies are
composed are constantly coming and going, these particles being
aggregations of chemical atoms too minute to be visible to the naked eye,
though many of them are visible under the microscope. If a little blood be
put under the microscope, we see moving in it a number of living bodies,
the white and red corpuscles, the white being closely similar in
structure [14] and
activity to ordinary amoebas; in connection with many diseases microbes
are found, bacilli of various kinds, and scientists tell us that we have
in our bodies friendly and unfriendly microbes, some that injure and
others that pounce upon and devour deleterious intruders and effete
matter. Some microbes come to us from without that ravage our bodies with
disease, others that promote their health, and so these garments of ours
are continually changing their materials, which come and stay for a while,
and go away to form parts of other bodies - a continual change and
interplay.
Now,
the vast majority of mankind know little and care less for these facts,
and yet on them hinges the possibility of the purification of the dense
body, thus rendering it a fitter vehicle for the indwelling man The
ordinary person lets his body build itself up anyhow out of the materials
supplied to it, without regard to their nature, caring only that they
shall be palatable and agreeable to his desires, and not whether they be
suitable or unsuitable to the making of a pure and noble dwelling for the
Self, the true man that liveth for ever more. He exercises no supervision
over these particle as they come and go, selecting none, rejecting none,
but letting everything build itself in as it lists, like a careless mason
who should catch up any rubbish as materials for his house, floating wool
and hairs, mud, chips, sand, nails, offal, filth of any kind - the veriest
jerry-builder [15] is
the ordinary man with his body. The purifying of the dense body will then
consist in a process of deliberate selection of the particles permitted to
compose it; the man will take into it in the way of food the purest
constituents he can obtain, rejecting the impure and the gross; he knows
that by natural change the particles built into it in the days of his
careless living will gradually pass away, at least within seven years -
though the process may be considerably hastened - and he resolves to build
in no more that are unclean; as he increases the pure constituents he
makes in his body an army of defenders, that destroy any foul particles
that may fall upon it from without or enter it without his consent; and he
guards it further by an active will that it shall be pure, which, acting
magnetically, continually drives away from his vicinity all unclean
creatures that would fain enter his body, and thus shields it from the
inroads to which it is liable, while living in an atmosphere impregnated
with uncleannesses of every kind.
When
a man thus resolves to purify the body and to make it into an instrument
fit for the Self to work with, he takes the first step towards the
practice of Yoga - a step which must be taken in this or in some other
life before he can seriously ask the question, "How can I learn to
verify for myself the truths of Theosophy?" All personal
verification of superphysical facts depends on the complete subjection of
the physical [16] body
to its owner, the man; he has to do the verification, and he cannot do it
while he is fast bound within the prison of the body, or while that body
is impure. Even should he have brought over from better-disciplined lives
partially developed psychic faculties, which show themselves despite
present unfavorable circumstances, the use of these will be hampered when
he is in the physical body, if that body be impure; it will dull or
distort the exercise of the faculties when they play through it, and
render their reports untrustworthy.
Let
us suppose that a man deliberately chooses that he will have a pure body,
and that he either takes advantage of the fact that his body completely
changes in seven years, or prefers the shorter and more difficult path of
changing it more rapidly - in either case he will begin at once to select
the materials from which the new clean body is to be built, and the
question of diet will present itself. He will immediately begin to exclude
from his food all kinds which will build into his body particles which are
impure and polluting. He will strike off all alcohol, and every liquor
which contains it, because that brings into his physical body microbes of
the most impure kinds, products of decomposition; these are not only
offensive in themselves, but they attract towards themselves - and
therefore towards any body of which they form [17] part
- some of the most objectionable of the physically invisible inhabitants
of the next plane. Drunkards who have lost their physical bodies, and can
therefore no longer satisfy their longing for intoxicants, hang round
places where drink is taken, and round those who take it, endeavoring to
push themselves into the bodies of people who are drinking, and thus to
share the low pleasure to which they surrender themselves. Women of
refinement would shrink from their wines if they could see the loathly
creatures who seek to partake in their enjoyment, and the close connection
which they thus set up with beings of the most repellent type. Evil
elementals also cluster round the thoughts of drunkards clad in elemental
essence, while the physical body attracts to itself from the surrounding
atmosphere other gross particles given off from drunken and profligate
bodies, and these also are built into it, coarsening and degrading it. If
we look at people who are constantly engaged with alcohol, in
manufacturing or distributing spirits, wines, beers, and other kinds of
unclean liquors, we can see physically how their bodies have become gross
and coarse. A brewer's man, a publican - to say nothing of persons in all
ranks of society who drink to excess - these show fully what everyone who
builds into his body any of these particles is doing in part and slowly;
the more of these he builds in, the coarser will his body become. And so
with other articles of diet, [18] flesh
of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish, with that of crustaceous creatures
and mollusks which feed on carrion - how should bodies made of such
materials be refined, sensitive, delicately balanced and yet perfectly
healthy, with the strength and fineness of tempered steel, such as the man
needs for all the higher kinds of work? Is it necessary again to add the
practical lesson that may be learned by looking at the bodies of those
living in such surroundings? See the slaughterman and the butcher, and
judge if their bodies look like the fittest instruments for employment on
high thoughts and lofty spiritual themes. Yet they are only the highly
finished products of the forces that work proportionately in all bodies
that feed on the impure viands they supply. True, no amount of attention
paid to the physical body by the man will of itself give him spiritual
life, but why should he hamper himself with an impure body? Why should he
allow his powers, whether great or small, to be limited, thwarted, dwarfed
in their attempts to manifest by this needlessly imperfect instrument?
There
is, however, one difficulty in our way that we cannot overlook; we may
take a good deal of pains with the body and may resolutely refuse to
befoul it, but we are living among people who are careless and who for the
most part know nothing of these facts in nature. In a town like London, or
indeed in any Western town, [19] we
cannot walk through streets without being offended at every turn, and the
more we refine the body the more delicately acute do the physical senses
become, and the more we must suffer in a civilization so coarse and animal
as is the present. Walking through the poorer and the business streets,
where there are beerhouses at every corner, we can scarcely ever escape
the smell of drink, the effluvium from one drinking-place overlapping that
from the next - even reputedly respectable streets being thus poisoned;
so, too, we have to pass slaughter-houses and butchers' shops. Of course
one knows that when civilization is a little more advanced better
arrangements will be made, and something will be gained when all these
unclean things are gathered in special quarters where those can seek them
who want them. But meanwhile particles from these places fall on our
bodies, and we breathe them in with the air. But as the normally healthy
body gives no soil in which disease-microbes can germinate, so the clean
body offers no soil in which these impure particles can grow. Besides, as
we have seen, there are armies of living creatures that are always at work
keeping our blood pure, and these regiments of true lifeguards will charge
down upon any poisonous particle that comes into the city of a pure body
and will destroy it and cut it to pieces. For us it is to choose whether
we will have in our blood these defenders of life, or whether we
will [20] people
it with the pirates that plunder and slay the good. The more resolutely we
refuse to put into the body anything that is unclean, the more shall we be
fortified against attacks from without.
Reference
has already been made to the automatism of the body, to the fact that it
is a creature of habit, and I said that use could be made of this
peculiarity. If the Theosophist says to some aspirant who would fain practice
Yoga and win entrance to higher planes being: "You must then begin at
once to purify the body, and this must precede the attempt to practice a
Yoga worthy of the name; for real Yoga is as dangerous to an impure and
undisciplined body as a match to a cask of gunpowder"; if the
Theosophist should thus speak, he would very probably be met with the
answer that health would suffer if such a course were to be adopted. As a
dry matter of fact the body does very much care in the long run what you
give it, provided that you give it something that will keep it in health;
and it will accommodate itself in a short time to a form of pure and
nutritious food that you choose to adopt. Just because it is an automatic
creature, it will soon stop asking for things that are steadily withheld
from it, and if you disregard its demands for the coarse and ranker kinds
of food it will soon get into the habit of disliking them. Just as even a
moderately natural palate will shrink with a sickening feeling of disgust
from [21] the
decaying game and venison if yclept* [* Archaic
English, meaning called or named.] "high",
so a pure taste will revolt against all coarse foods. Suppose that a man
has been feeding his body with various kinds of unclean things, his body
will demand them imperiously, and he will be inclined to yield to it; but
if he pays no attention to it, and goes his own way and not the way of the
body, he will find, perhaps to his surprise, that his body will soon
recognize its master and will accommodate itself to his orders; presently
it will begin to prefer the things that he gives it, and will set up a
liking for clean foods and a distaste for unclean. Habit can be used for
help as well as for hindrance, and the body yields when it understands
that you are the master and that you do not intend the purpose of your
life to be interfered with by the mere instrument that is yours for use.
The truth is that it is not the body which is chiefly in fault, but Kama,
the desire-nature. The adult body has got into the habit of demanding
particular things, but if you notice a child, you will find that the
child's body does not spontaneously make demands for the things on which
adult bodies feast with coarse pleasure; the child's body, unless it has a
very bad physical heredity, shrinks from meat and wine, but its elders
force meat on it, and the father and mother give it sips of wine from
their glasses at dessert, and bid it "be a little man," till the
child by its own imitative faculty and by the compulsion of others is
turned into [22] evil
ways. Then, of course, impure tastes are made, and perhaps old kamic
cravings are awakened which might have been starved out, and the body will
gradually form the habit of demanding the things upon which it has been
fed. Despite all this in the past, make the change, and as you get rid of
the particles that crave these impurities you will feel your body altering
its habits and revolting against the very smell of the things that it used
to enjoy. The real difficulty in the way of the reformation lies in Kāma,
not in the body. You do not want to do it; if you did, you would do it.
You say to yourself: "After all, perhaps it does not matter so much;
I have no psychic faculties, I am not advanced enough for this to make any
difference." You will never become advanced if you do not endeavor to
live up to the highest that is within your reach - if you allow the
desire-nature to interfere with your progress. You say, "How much I
should like to possess astral vision, to travel in the astral body!
"but when it comes to the point you prefer a "good" dinner.
If the prize for giving up unclean food were a million pounds at the end
of a year, how rapidly would difficulties disappear and ways be found for
keeping the body alive without meat and wine! But when only the priceless
treasures of the higher life are offered, the difficulties are
insuperable. If men really desired what they pretend to desire, we should
have much more rapid changes around us [23] than
we now see. But they make believe, and make believe so effectually that
they deceive themselves into the idea that they are in earnest, and they
come back life after life to live in the same unprogressive manner for
thousands of years; and then in some particular life they wonder why they
do not advance, and why somebody else has male such rapid progress in this
one life while they make none. The man who is in earnest - not
spasmodically but with steady persistence - can make what progress he
chooses; while the man who is making believe will run round and round the
mill-path for many a life to come.
Here,
at any rate, in this purification of the body lies the preparation for all
Yoga practice - not the whole preparation most certainly, but an essential
part of it. This much must suffice as to the dense body, the lowest
vehicle of consciousness.
The
Etheric Double.-Modern
physical science holds that all bodily changes, whether in the muscles,
cells or nerves, are accompanied by electric action, and the same is
probably true even of the chemical changes which are continually going on.
Ample evidence of this has been accumulated by careful observations with
the most delicate galvanometers. Whenever electric action occurs ether
must be present, so that the presence of the current is proof of the
presence of the ether, which interpenetrates all, surrounds all; no
particle of physical matter is in contact with any other particle, but
each swings in a field of ether. The Western scientist asserts as a
necessary hypothesis that which the trained pupil in Eastern science
asserts as a verifiable observation, for as a matter of fact ether is as
visible as a chair or a table, only a sight different from the physical is
needed to see it. As has already been said, it exists in four
modifications, the finest of these consisting of the ultimate physical
atomsnot the so-called chemical atom, which is really a complex
bodyultimate, because they yield astral matter on disintegration.* [
See Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater.]
The
etheric double is composed of these four ethers which interpenetrate the
solid, liquid and gaseous constituents of the dense body, surrounding
every particle with an etheric envelope, and thus presenting a perfect
duplicate of the denser form. This etheric double is perfectly visible to
the trained sight, and is violet-grey in colour, coarse or fine in its
texture as dense body is coarse or fine. The four ethers enter into it, as
solids, liquids and gases enter into the composition of the dense body,
but they can be in coarser or finer combinations just as can the denser
constituents; it is important to notice that the dense body and its
etheric double vary together as to their quality, so that as the aspirant
deliberately and consciously refines his dense [25] body,
the etheric double follows suit without his consciousness and without any
additional effort.* [* On looking at a man's lower bodies with astral
vision, the etheric double (Linga Sharīra) and the astral body (kāmic
body) are seen interpenetrating each other, as both interpenetrate the
dense physical, and hence some confusion has arisen in the past and the
names Linga Sharīra and astral body have been used interchangeably,
while the latter name has also been used for the kāmic or desire-body.
This loose terminology has caused much trouble, as the functions of the
kāmic body, termed the astral body, have often been understood as the
functions of the etheric double, also termed the astral body, and the
student, unable to see for himself, has been hopelessly entangled in
apparent contradictions. Careful observations on the formation of these
two bodies now enable us to say definitely that the etheric double is
composed of the physical ethers only, and cannot, if extruded leave the
physical plane or go far away from its denser counterpart; further, that
it is built after the mould given by the Lords of Karma, and is not
brought with him by the Ego, but awaits him with the physical body formed
upon it. The astral or kāmic body, the desire-body, on the other hand, is
composed of astral matter only, is able to range the astral plane when
freed from the physical body, and is the proper vehicle of the Ego on that
plane; it is brought with him by the Ego when he comes to re-incarnate.
Under these circumstances it is better to call the first the etheric
double, and the second the astral body, and so avoid confusion.]
It
is by means of the etheric double that the life-force, Prāna, runs along
the nerves of the body and thus enables them to act as the carriers of
motor force and of sensitiveness to external impacts. The powers of
thought, of movement and of feeling are not resident in physical or ether
nerve-substance; they are activities of the Ego working in his inner
bodies, and the expression of them on the physical plane is rendered
possible by the [26] life-breath
as it runs along the nerve-threads and round the nerve-cells; for Prāna,
the life-breath, is the active energy of the Self, as Shrī
Shankaracharya has taught us. The function of the etheric double is to
serve as the physical medium for this energy, and hence it is often spoken
of in our literature as the "vehicle of Prāna".
It
may be useful to note that the etheric double is peculiarly susceptible to
the volatile constituents of alcohols.
Phenomena
connected with the Physical Body. When a person "goes to
sleep" the Ego slips out of the physical body, and leaves it to
slumber and so to recuperate itself for the next day's work. The dense
body and its etheric double are thus left to their own devices, and to the
play of the influences which they attract to themselves by their
constitution and habits. Streams of thought-forms from the astral world of
a nature congruous with the thought-forms created or harboured by the Ego
in his daily life, pass into and out of the dense and etheric brains, and,
mingling with the automatic repetitions of vibrations set up in waking
consciousness by the Ego, cause the broken and chaotic dreams with which
most people are familiar.* [* See the articles on "Dreams"
in Lucifer, November and December, 1895; republished in book form,
1898.] These broken images are instructive as showing the
working [27] of
the physical body when it is left to itself; it can only reproduce
fragments of past vibrations without rational order or coherence, fitting
them together as they are thrown up, however grotesquely incongruous they
may be; it is insensible to absurdity or irrationality, content with a
phantasmagoria of kaleidoscopic shapes and colours, without even the
regularity given by the kaleidoscope mirrors. Looked at in this way, the
dense and etheric brains are readily recognized as instruments of thought,
not as creators thereof, for we see how very erratic are their creations,
when they are left to themselves.
In
sleep the thinking Ego slips out of these two bodies, or rather this one
body with its visible and invisible parts, leaving them together; in death
it slips out for the last time, but with this difference, that it draws
out the etheric double with it, separating it from its dense counterpart
and thus rendering impossible any further play of the life-breath in the
latter as an organic whole. The Ego quickly shakes off the etheric double,
which, as we have seen, cannot pass on to the astral plane, and leaves it
to disintegrate with its lifelong partner. It will sometimes appear
immediately after death to friends at no great distance from the corpse,
but naturally shows very little consciousness, and will not speak or do
anything beyond "manifesting" itself. It is comparatively easily
seen, being physical, and a [28] slight
tension of the nervous system will render vision sufficiently acute to
discern it. It is also responsible for many "churchyard ghosts,"
as it hovers over the grave in which its physical counterpart is lying,
and is more readily visible than astral bodies for the reason just given.
Thus even "in death they are not divided" by more than a few
feet of space.
For
the normal man it is only at death that this separation takes place, but
some abnormal people of the type called mediumistic are subject to a
partial division of the physical body during earth-life, a dangerous and
fortunately a comparatively rare abnormality which gives rise to much
nervous strain and disturbance. When the etheric double is extruded the
double itself is rent in twain; the whole of it could not be separated
from the dense body without causing the death of the latter, since the
currents of the life-breath need its presence for their circulation. Even
its partial withdrawal reduces the dense body to a state of lethargy, and
the vital activities are almost suspended; extreme exhaustion follows the
re-uniting of the severed parts, and the condition of the medium until the
normal union is reestablished is one of considerable physical danger. The
greater number of the phenomena that occur in the presence of mediums are
not connected with this extrusion of the etheric double, but some who have
been distinguished for the remarkable character of the [29] materializations
which they have assisted in producing offer this peculiarity to
observation. I am informed that Mr. Eglinton exhibited this curious
physical dissociation to a rare extent, and that his etheric double might
be seen oozing from his left side, while his dense body shriveled
perceptibly; and that the same phenomenon has been observed with Mr. Husk,
whose dense body became too reduced to fill out his clothes. Mr.
Eglinton's body once was so diminished in size that a materialized form
carried it out and presented it for the inspection of the sitters - one of
the few cases in which both medium and materialized form have been visible
together in light sufficient to allow of examination. This shrinkage of
the medium seems to imply the removal of some of the denser "ponderable"
matter from the body - very possibly part of the liquid constituents -
but, so far as I am aware, no observations have been made on this point,
and it is therefore impossible to speak with any certainty. What is
certain is that this partial extrusion of the etheric double results in
much nervous trouble, and that it should not be practised by any sensible
person if he finds that he is unfortunate enough to be liable to it.
We
have now studied the physical body both in its dense and etheric parts,
the vesture which the Ego must wear for his work on the physical plane,
the dwelling which may be either his convenient office for physical [30] work,
or his prison-house of which death alone holds the key. We can see what we
ought to have and what we can gradually make - a body perfectly healthy
and strong, and at the same time delicately organized refined and
sensitive. Healthy it should be - and in the East health is insisted on as
a condition of discipleship - for everything that is unhealthy in the body
mars it as an instrument of the Ego, and is apt to distort both the
impressions sent inwards and the impulses sent outwards. The activities of
the Ego are hindered if his instrument be strained or twisted by
ill-health. Healthy then, delicately organized, refined, sensitive,
repelling automatically all evil influences, automatically receptive of
all good - such a body we should deliberately build choosing among all the
things that surround us those that conduce to that end, knowing that the
task can be accomplished only gradually, but working on patiently and
steadily with that object in view. We shall know when we are beginning to
succeed even to a very limited extent, for we shall find opening up in us
all kinds of powers of perception that we did not before possess We shall
find ourselves becoming more sensitive to sounds and sights, to fuller,
softer, richer harmonies, to tenderer, fairer, lovelier hues. Just as the
painter trains his eye to see the delicacies of colour to which common
eyes are blind; just as the musician trains his ear to hear overtones of
notes to which common ears are deaf [31] so
may we train our bodies to be receptive to the finer vibrations of life
missed by ordinary men. True, many unpleasant sensations will come, for
the world we are living in is rendered rough and coarse by the humanity
that dwells in it: but, on the other hand, beauties will reveal themselves
that will repay us a hundred-fold for the difficulties we face and
overcome. And this, not that we may possess such bodies for selfish
purposes either of vanity or of enjoyment, but in order that we, the men
who own them, may own them for wider usefulness, for added strength to
serve. They will be more efficient instruments with which to help the
progress of humanity, and so more fit to aid in that task of forwarding
human evolution which is the work of our great Masters, and in which it
may be our privilege to co-operate.
Although
we have been only on the physical plane throughout this part of our
subject, we may yet see that the study is not without importance, and that
the lowest of the vehicles of consciousness needs our attention and will
repay our care. These cities of ours, this land of ours, will be cleaner,
fairer, better, when this knowledge has become common knowledge, and when
it is accepted not only as intellectually probable, but as a law of daily
life. [32]
THE
ASTRAL OR DESIRE BODY
We
have studied the physical body of man both as to its visible and invisible
parts, and we understand that man - the living, conscious entity - in his
"waking" consciousness, living in the physical world, can only
show so much of his knowledge and manifest so much of his powers as he is
able to express through his physical body. According to the perfection or
imperfection of its development will be the perfection or imperfection of
his expression on the physical plane; it limits him while he functions in
the lower world, forming a veritable "ring pass-not" around him.
That which cannot pass through it cannot manifest on earth, and hence its
importance to the developing man. In the same way when the man is
functioning without the physical body in another region of the universe,
the astral plane or astral world, he is able to express on that plane just
so much of his knowledge and his powers, of himself in short, as his
astral body enables him to put forth. It is at once his vehicle and his
limitation. The man is more than his bodies; he has in him much that he is
unable to manifest either on the physical or on the astral plane; but so
much as he is able to express may [33] be
taken as the man himself in that particular region of the universe. What
he can show of himself down here is limited by the physical body; what he
can show of himself in the astral world is limited by the astral body; so
we shall find as we rise to higher worlds in our study, that more and more
of the man is able to express itself as he himself develops in his
evolution, and also gradually brings towards perfection higher and higher
vehicles of consciousness.
It
may be well to remind the reader, as we are entering on fields
comparatively untrodden and to the majority unknown, that no claim is here
put forward to infallible knowledge or to perfect power of observation.
Errors of observation and of inference may be made on planes above the
physical as well as on the physical, and this possibility should always be
kept in mind. As knowledge increases and training is prolonged, more and
more accuracy will be reached, and such errors will thus gradually be
eliminated. But as the writer is only a student, mistakes are likely to be
made and to need correction in the future. They may creep in on matters of
detail, but will not touch the general principles nor vitiate the main
conclusions.
First,
let the meaning of the words astral plane or astral world be clearly
grasped. The astral world is a definite region of the universe,
surrounding and interpenetrating the physical, but imperceptible to
our [34] ordinary
observation because it is composed of a different order of matter. If the
ultimate physical atom be taken and broken up, it vanishes so far as the
physical world is concerned; but it is found to be composed of numerous
particles of the grossest kind of astral matter the solid matter of
the astral world.* [* The word "astral", starry, is not a very
happy one, but it has been used during so many centuries to denote
super-physical matter that it would now be difficult to dislodge it. It
was probably at first chosen by observers in consequence of the luminous
appearance of astral as compared with physical matter. The student is
advised to read, on this whole subject, Manual No. V., The Astral
Plane, by C. W. Leadbeater.] We have found seven sub-states of
physical matter - solid, liquid, gaseous, and four etheric - under which
are classified the innumerable combinations which make up the physical
world. In the same way we have seven sub-states of astral matter
corresponding to the physical, and under these may be classified the
innumerable combinations which similarly make up the astral world. All
physical atoms have their astral envelopes, the astral matter thus forming
what may be called the matrix of the physical, the physical being embedded
in the astral. The astral matter serves as a vehicle for Jīva, the
One Life animating all, and by means of the astral matter currents of Jīva
surround, sustain, nourish every particle of physical matter, the currents
of Jīva giving rise not only to what a popularly called vital forces,
but also to all electric, magnetic, chemical, and other energies,
attraction, [35] cohesion,
repulsion and the like, all of which are differentiations of the One Life
in which universes swim as fishes in the sea. From the astral world, thus
intimately interpenetrating the physical, Jīva passes to the ether of
the latter, which then becomes the vehicle of all these forces to the
lower sub-states of physical matter, wherein we observe their play. If we
imagine the physical world to be struck out of existence without any other
change being made, we should still have a perfect replica of it in astral
matter; and if we further imagine everyone to be dowered with working
astral faculties, men and women would at first be unconscious of any
difference in their surroundings; "dead" people who wake up in
the lower regions of the astral world often find themselves in such a
state and believe themselves to be yet living in the physical world. As
most of us have not yet developed astral vision, it is necessary to
enforce this relative reality of the astral world as a part of the
phenomenal universe, and to see it with the mental eye, if not with the
astral. It is as real as - in fact, not being quite so far removed from
the One Reality, it is more real than - the physical; its phenomena are
open to competent observation like those of the physical plane. Just as
down here a blind man cannot see physical objects, and as many things can
only be observed with the help of apparatus - the microscope,
spectroscope, etc. - so is it with the astral [36] plane.
Astrally blind people cannot see astral objects at all, and many things
escape ordinary astral vision, or clairvoyance. But at the present stage
of evolution many people could develop the astral senses and are
developing them to some extent, thus enabling themselves to receive the
subtler vibrations of the astral plane. Such persons are indeed liable to
make many mistakes, as a child makes mistakes when he begins to use
physical senses, but these mistakes are corrected by wider experience, and
after a time they can see and hear as accurately on the astral as on the
physical plane. It is not desirable to force this development by
artificial means, for until some amount of physical strength has been
evolved the physical world is about as much as can conveniently be
managed, and the intrusion of astral sights, sounds and general phenomena
is apt to be disturbing and even alarming. But the time comes when this
stage is reached and when the relative reality of the astral part of the
invisible world is borne in upon the waking consciousness.
For
this it is necessary not only to have an astral body, as we all of us
have, but to have it fully organized and in working order, the
consciousness being accustomed to act in it, not only to act through it on
the physical body. Everyone is constantly working through the astral body,
but comparatively few work in it separated from the physical. Without the
general [37] action
through the astral body there would be no connection between the external
world and the mind of man, no connection between impacts made on the
physical senses and the perception of them by the mind. The impact becomes
a sensation in the astral body, and is then perceived by the mind. The
astral body, in which are the centres of sensation, is often spoken of as
the astral man, just as we might call the physical body the physical man;
but it is of course only a vehicle - a sheath, as the Vedāntin would
call it - in which the man himself is functioning, and through which he
reaches, and is reached by, the grosser vehicle, the physical body.
As
to the constitution of the astral body, it is made up of the seven
sub-states of astral matter, and may have coarser or finer materials drawn
from each of these. It is easy to picture a man in a well-formed astral
body; you can think of him as dropping the physical body and standing up
in a subtler, more luminous copy of it, visible in his own likeness to
clairvoyant vision, though invisible to ordinary sight. I have said
"a well-formed astral body," for an undeveloped person in his
astral body presents a very inchoate appearance. Its outline is undefined,
its materials are dull and ill-arranged, and if withdrawn from the body it
is a mere shapeless, shifting cloud, obviously unfit to act as an
independent vehicle; it is, in truth, rather a fragment of astral [38] matter
than an organized astral body - a mass of astral protoplasm of an amoeboid
type. A well-formed astral body means that a man has reached a fairly high
level of intellectual culture or of spiritual growth, so that the
appearance of the astral body is significant of the progress made by its
owner; by the definiteness of it outline, the luminosity of its materials,
and the perfection of its organization, one may judge of the stage of
evolution reached by the Ego using it.
As
regards the question of its improvement - a question important to us all -
it must be remembered that the improvement of the astral body hinges on
the one side on the purification of the physical body, and on the other on
the purification and development of the mind. The astral body is
peculiarly susceptible to impressions from thought, for astral matter
responds more rapidly than physical to every impulse from the world of
mind. For instance, if we look at the astral world we find it full of
continually changing shapes; we find there "thought-forms" -
forms composed of elemental essence and animated by a thought - and we
also notice vast masses of this elemental essence, from which continually
shapes emerge and into which they again disappear; watching carefully, we
may see that currents of thought thrill this astral matter, that strong
thoughts take a covering of it and persist as entities for a long time,
while weak thoughts clothe themselves feebly and waver out [39] again,
so that all through the astral world changes are ever going on under
thought-impulses. The astral body of man, being made of astral matter,
shares this readiness to respond to the impact of thought, and thrills in
answer to every thought that strikes it, whether the thoughts come from
without, from the minds of other men, or come from within, from the mind
of its owner.
Let
us study this astral body under these impacts from within and without. We
see it permeating the physical body and extending around it in every
direction like a coloured cloud. The colours vary with the nature of the
man, with his lower, animal passional nature, and the part outside the
physical body is called the kāmic aura, as belonging to the Kāma or
desire-body, commonly called the astral body of man.* [* This separation
of the "aura" from the man, as though it were something
different from himself, is misleading, although very natural from the
point of view of observation. The "aura" is the cloud round the
body, in ordinary parlance; really, the man lives on the various planes in
such garments as befit each, and all these garments or bodies
interpenetrate each other; the lowest and smallest of these is called
"the body", and the mixed substances of the other garments are
called the aura when they extend beyond that body. The kāmic aura, then,
is merely such part of the kāmic body as extends beyond the physical.]
For the astral body is the vehicle of man's kāmic consciousness,
the seat of all animal passions and desires, the centre of the senses, as
already said, where all sensations arise. It changes its colours
continually as it vibrates under thought-impacts; if a man loses his
temper, flashes of [40] scarlet
appear; if he feels love, rose-red thrills through it. If the man's
thoughts are high and noble they demand finer astral matter to answer to
them, and we trace this action on the astral body in its loss of the
grosser and denser particles from each sub-plane, and its gain of the
finer and rarer kinds. The astral body of a man whose thoughts are low and
animal, is gross, thick, dense and dark in colour - often so dense that
the outline of the physical body is almost lost in it; whereas that of an
advanced man is fine, clear, luminous and bright in colour - a really
beautiful object. In such a case the lower passions have been dominated,
and the selective action of the mind has refined the astral matter. By
thinking nobly, then, we purify the astral body, even without having
consciously worked towards that end. And be it remembered that this inner
working exercises a potent influence on the thoughts that are attracted
from without to the astral body; a body which is made by its owner to
respond habitually to evil thoughts acts as a magnet to similar
thought-forms in its vicinity, whereas a pure astral body acts on such
thoughts with a repulsive energy, and attracts to itself thought-forms
composed of matter congruous with its own.
As
said above, the astral body hinges on one side to the physical, and it is
affected by the purity or impurity of the physical body. We have seen that
the solids, liquids, gases and ethers of which the physical body is [41] composed
may be coarse or refined, gross or delicate Their nature will in turn
affect the nature of their corresponding astral envelopes. If, unwisely
careless about the physical, we build into our dense bodies solid
particles of an impure kind, we attract to ourselves the corresponding
impure kind of what we will call the solid astral. As we, on the other
hand, build into our dense bodies solid particles of purer type, we
attract the correspondingly purer type of solid astral matter. As we carry
on the purification of the physical body by feeding it on clean food and
drink, by excluding from our diet the polluting kinds of aliment - the
blood of animals, alcohol and other things that are foul and degrading -
we not only improve our physical vehicle of consciousness, but we also
begin to purify the astral vehicle and take from the astral world more
delicate and finer materials for its construction. The effect of this is
not only important as regards the present earth-life, but it has a
distinct bearing also - as we shall see later - on the next post-mortem
state, on the stay in the astral world, and also on the kind of body we
shall have in the next life upon earth.
Nor
is this all: the worse kinds of food attract to the astral body entities
of a mischievous kind belonging to the astral world, for we have to do not
only with astral matter, but also with what are called the elementals of
that region. These are entities of higher and lower [42] types
existing on that plane, given birth to by the thoughts of men; and there
are also in the astral world depraved men, imprisoned in their astral
bodies, known as elementaries. The elementals are attracted towards people
whose astral bodies contain matter congenial to their nature, while the
elementaries naturally seek those who indulge in vices such as they
themselves encouraged while in physical bodies. Any person endowed with
astral vision sees, as he walks along our London streets, hordes of
loathsome elementals crowding round our butchers' shops; and in
beer-houses and gin-palaces elementaries specially gather, feasting on the
foul emanations of the liquors, and thrusting themselves, when possible,
into the very bodies of the drinkers. These beings are attracted by those
who build their bodies out of these materials, and such people have these
surroundings as part of their astral life. So it goes on through each
stage of the astral plane; as we purify the physical we draw to ourselves
correspondingly pure stages of the astral matter.
Now,
of course, the possibilities of the astral body largely depend on the
nature of the materials we build into it; as by the process of
purification we make these bodies finer and finer, they cease to vibrate
in answer to the lower impulses, and begin to answer to the higher
influences of the astral world. We are thus making an instrument which,
though by its very nature sensitive to [43] influences
coming to it from without, is gradually losing the power of responding to
the lower vibrations, and is taking on the power of answering to the
higher - an instrument which is tuned to vibrate only to the higher notes.
As we can take a wire to produce a sympathetic vibration, choosing to that
end its diameter, its length and its tension, so we can attune our astral
bodies to give out sympathetic vibrations when noble harmonies are sounded
in the world around us. This is not a mere matter of speculation or of
theory; it is a matter of scientific fact. As here we tune the wire on the
string, so there we can tune the strings of the astral body; the law of
cause and effect holds good there as well as here; we appeal to the law,
we take refuge in the law, and on that we rely. All we need is knowledge,
and the will to put the knowledge into practice. This knowledge you may
take and experiment on first, if you will, as a mere hypothesis, congruous
with facts known to you in the lower world; later on, as you purify the
astral body, the hypothesis will change into knowledge; it will be a
matter of your own first-hand observation, so that you will be able to
verify the theories you originally accepted only as working hypothesis.
Our
possibilities, then, of mastering the astral world, and of becoming of
real service there, depend first of all on this process of purification.
There are definite methods of Yoga by which development of the
astral [44] senses
may be helped forward in a rational and healthy way, but it is not of the
least use to try to teach these to anyone who has not been using these
simple preparatory means of purification. It is a common experience that
people are very anxious to try some new and unusual method of progress,
but it is idle to instruct people in Yoga when they will not even practice
these preparatory stages in their ordinary life. Suppose one began to
teach some very simple form of Yoga to an ordinary unprepared person; he
would take it up eagerly and enthusiastically because it was new, because
it was strange, because he hoped for very quick results, and before he had
been working at it for even a year he would get tired of the regular
strain of it in his daily life and disheartened by the absence of
immediate effect; unused to persistent effort, steadily maintained day
after day, he would break down and give up his practice; the novelty
outworn, weariness would soon assert itself. If a person cannot or will
not accomplish the simple and comparatively easy duty of purifying the
physical and astral bodies by using a temporary self-denial to break the
bonds of evil habits in eating and drinking, it is idle for him to hanker
after more difficult processes which attract by reason of their novelty
and would soon be dropped as an intolerable burden. All talk even of
special methods is idle until these ordinary humble means have been
practiced for some time; but with the [45] purification
new possibilities will begin to show themselves. The pupil will find
knowledge gradually flow into him, keener vision will awaken, vibrations
will reach him from every side, arousing in him response which could not
have been made by him in the days of blindness and obtuseness. Sooner or
later, according to the Karma of his past, this experience becomes his,
and just as a child mastering the difficulties of the alphabet has the
pleasure of the book it can read, so the student will find coming to his
knowledge and under his control possibilities of which he had not dreamed
in his careless days, new vistas of knowledge opening out before him, a
wider universe unfolding on every side.
If,
now, for a few moments, we study the astral body as regards its functions
in the sleeping and waking states, we shall be able easily and rapidly to
appreciate its functions when it becomes a vehicle of consciousness apart
from the body. If we study a person when he is awake and when he is
asleep, we shall become aware of one very marked change as regards the
astral body; when he is awake, the astral activities - the changing
colours and so on - all manifest themselves in and immediately around the
physical body; but when he is asleep a separation has occurred, and we see
the physical body - the dense body and the etheric double - lying by
themselves on the bed, while the astral body is floating [46] in
the air above them.* [* See for a fuller description the articles on
Dreams before referred to.] If the person we are studying is
one of mediocre
development,
the astral body when separated from the physical is the somewhat shapeless
mass before described; it cannot go far away from its physical body, it is
useless as a vehicle of consciousness and the man within it is in a very
vague and dream condition, unaccustomed to act away from his physical
vehicle; in fact, he may be said to be almost asleep, failing the medium
through which he has been accustomed to work, and he is not able to
receive definite impressions from the astral world or express himself
clearly through the poorly-organized astral body. The centres of sensation
in it may be affected by passing thought-forms, and he may answer in it to
stimuli that rouse the lower nature; but the whole effect given to the
observer is one of sleepiness and vagueness, the astral body lacking all
definite activity and floating idly, inchoate, above the sleeping physical
form. If anything should occur tending to lead or drive it away from its
physical partner, the latter will awaken and the astral will quickly
reenter it. But if a person be observed who is much more developed, say
one who is accustomed to function in the astral world and to use the
astral body for that purpose, it will be seen that when the physical body
goes to sleep and the astral body slips out of it, we [47] have
the man himself before us in full consciousness; the astral body is
clearly outlined and definitely organized, bearing the likeness of the
man, and the man is able to use it as a vehicle - a vehicle far more
convenient than the physical. He is wide awake, and is working far more
actively, more accurately, with greater power of comprehension, than when
he was confined in the denser physical vehicle, and he can move about
freely and with immense rapidity at any distance, without causing the
least disturbance to the sleeping body on the bed.
If
such a person has not yet learned to link together his astral and physical
vehicles, if there be a break in consciousness when the astral body slips
out as he falls asleep, then, while he himself will be wide awake and
fully conscious on the astral plane, he will not be able to impress on the
physical brain on his return to his denser vehicle the knowledge of what
he has been doing during his absence; under these circumstances his
"waking" consciousness - as it is the habit to term the most
limited form of our consciousness - will not share the man's experiences
in the astral world, not because be does not know them, but because the
physical organism is too dense to receive these impressions from him.
Sometimes, when the physical body awakes, there is a feeling that
something has been experienced of which no memory remains; yet this very
feeling shows that there [48] has
been some functioning of consciousness in the astral world away from the
physical body, though the brain is not sufficiently receptive to have even
an evanescent memory of what has occurred. At other times, when the astral
body returns to the physical, the man succeeds in making a momentary
impression on the etheric double and dense body, and when the latter is
awake there is a vivid memory of an experience gained in the astral world;
but the memory quickly vanishes and refuses to be recalled, every effort
rendering success more impossible, as each effort sets up strong
vibrations in the physical brain, and still further overpowers the subtler
vibrations of the astral. Or yet again, the man may succeed in impressing
new knowledge on the physical brain without being able to convey the
memory of where or how that knowledge was gained; in such cases ideas will
arise in the waking consciousness as though spontaneously generated,
solutions will come of problems before uncomprehended, light will be
thrown on questions before obscure. When this occurs, it is an encouraging
sign of progress, showing that the astral body is well organized and is
functioning actively in the astral world, although the physical body is
still but very partially receptive. Sometimes, however, the man succeeds
in making the physical brain respond, and then we have what is regarded as
a very vivid, reasonable and coherent dream, the kind of dream which
most [49] thoughtful
people have occasionally enjoyed, in which they feel more alive, not less,
than when "awake," and in which they may even receive knowledge
which is helpful to them in their physical life. All these are stages of
progress marking the evolution and improving organization of the astral
body.
But,
on the other hand, it is well to understand that persons who are making
real and even rapid progress in spirituality may be functioning most
actively and usefully in the astral world without impressing on the brain
when they return the slightest memory of the work in which they have been
engaged, although they may be aware in their lower consciousness of an
ever-increasing illumination and widening knowledge of spiritual truth.
There is one fact which all students may take as a matter of
encouragement, and on which they may rely with confidence, however blank
their physical memory may be as regards super-physical experiences: as we
learn to work more and more for others, as we endeavour to become more and
more useful to the world, as we grow stronger and steadier in our devotion
to the Elder Brothers of humanity, and seek ever more earnestly to perform
perfectly our little share in Their great work, we are inevitably
developing that astral body and that power of functioning in it which
render us more efficient servants; whether with or without physical
memory, we leave our physical prisons in deep sleep and work along [50] useful
lines of activity in the astral world, helping people we should otherwise
be unable to reach, aiding and comforting in ways we could not otherwise
employ. This evolution is going on with those who are pure in mind,
elevated in thought, with their hearts set on the desire to serve. They
may be working for many a year in the astral world without bringing back
the memory to their lower consciousness, and exercising powers for good to
the world far beyond anything of which they suppose themselves to be
capable: to them, when Karma permits, shall come the full unbroken
consciousness which passes at will between the physical and astral worlds;
the bridge shall be made which lets the memory cross from the one to the
other without effort, so that the man returning from his activities in the
astral world will don again his physical vesture without a moment's loss
of consciousness. This is the certainty that lies before all those who
choose the life of service. They will one day acquire this unbroken
consciousness; and then to them life shall no longer be composed of days
of memoried work and nights of oblivion, but it will be a continuous
whole, the body put aside to take the rest necessary for it, while the man
himself uses the astral body for his work in the astral world; then they
will keep the links of thought unbroken, knowing when they leave the
physical body, knowing while they are passing out of it, knowing their
life away from it, knowing when they [51] return
and again put it on: thus they will carry on week after week, year after
year, the unbroken, unwearied consciousness which gives the absolute
certainty of the existence of the individual Self, of the fact that the
body is only a garment that they wear, put on and off at pleasure, and not
a necessary instrument of thought and life. They will know that so far
from its being necessary to either, life is far more active, thought far
more untrammeled without it.
When
this stage is reached a man begins to understand the world and his own
life in it far better than he did before, begins to realize more of what
lies in front of him, more of the possibilities of the higher humanity.
Slowly he sees that just as man acquires first physical and then astral
consciousness, so there stretch above him other and far higher ranges of
consciousness that he may acquire one after the other, becoming active on
loftier planes, ranging through wider worlds, exercising vaster powers,
and all as the servant of the Holy Ones for the assistance and benefit of
humanity. Then physical life begins to assume its true proportion, and
nothing that happens in the physical world can affect him as it did ere he
knew the fuller, richer life, and nothing that death can do can touch him
either in himself or in those he desires to assist. The earth-life takes
its true place as the smallest part of human activity, and it can never
again be as dark as it used to be, for [52] the
light of the higher regions shines down into its obscurest recesses.
Turning
from the study of the functions and possibilities of the astral body, let
us consider now certain phenomena connected with it. It may show itself to
other people apart from the physical body, either during or after
earth-life. A person who has complete mastery over the astral body can, of
course, leave the physical at any time and go to a friend at a distance.
If the person thus visited be clairvoyant, i.e., has developed astral
sight, he will see his friend's astral body; if not, such visitor might
slightly densify his vehicle by drawing into it from the surrounding
atmosphere particles of physical matter, and thus "materialize"
sufficiently to make himself visible to physical sight. This is the
explanation of many of the appearances of friends at a
distance,
phenomena which are far more common than most people imagine, owing to the
reticence of timid folk who are afraid of being laughed at as
superstitious. Fortunately that fear is lessening, and if people would
only have the courage and common sense to say what they know to be true,
we should soon have a large mass of evidence on the appearances of people
whose physical bodies are far away from the places where their astral
bodies show themselves. These bodies may, under certain circumstances, be
seen by those who do not normally exercise astral vision, without
materialization being [53]resorted
to. If a person's nervous system be overstrained and the physical body be
in weak health, so that the pulses of vitality throb less strongly than
usual, the nervous activity so largely dependent on the etheric double may
be unduly stimulated, and under these conditions the man may become
temporarily clairvoyant. A mother, for instance, who knows her son to be
dangerously ill in a foreign land, and who is racked by anxiety about him,
may thus become susceptible to astral vibrations, especially in the hours
of the night at which vitality is at its lowest; under these conditions,
if her son be thinking of her, and his physical body be unconscious, so as
to permit him to visit her astrally, she will be likely to see him. More
often such a visit is made when the person has just shaken off the
physical body at death. These appearances are by no means uncommon,
especially where the dying person has a strong wish to reach someone to
whom he is closely bound by affection, or where he desires to communicate
some particular piece of information, and has passed away without
fulfilling his wish.
If
we follow the astral body after death, when the etheric double has been
shaken off as well as the dense body, we shall observe a change in its
appearance. During its connection with the physical body the sub-states of
astral matter are intermixed with each other, the denser and the rarer
kinds inter-penetrating and[54] intermingling.
But after death a rearrangement takes place, and the particles of the
different sub-states separate from each other, and, as it were, sort
themselves out in the order of their respective densities, the astral body
thus assuming a stratified condition, or becoming a series of concentric
shells of which the densest is outside. And here we are again met with the
importance of purifying the astral body during our life on earth, for we
find that it cannot, after death, range the astral world at will; that
world has its seven sub-planes, and the man is confined to the sub-plane
to which the matter of his external shell belongs; as this outermost
covering disintegrates he rises to the next sub-plane, and so on from one
to another. A man of very low and animal tendencies would have in his
astral body much of the grossest and densest kind of astral matter, and
this would hold him down on the lowest level of Kāmaloka; until this
shell is disintegrated to a great extent the man must remain imprisoned in
that section of the astral world, and suffer the annoyances of that most
undesirable locality. When this outermost shell is sufficiently
disintegrated to allow escape, the man passes to the next level of the
astral world, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he is able to
come into contact with the vibrations of the next sub-plane of astral
matter, thus seeming to himself to be in a different region: there he
remains till the shell of the sixth sub-plane is worn away and permits his
passage [55] to
the fifth, his stay on each sub-plane corresponding to the strength of
those parts of his nature represented in the astral body by the amount of
the matter belonging to that sub-plane. The greater the quantity, then, of
the grosser sub-states of matter, the longer the stay on the lower
kāmalokic levels, and the more we can get rid of those elements here the
briefer will be the delay on the other side of death. Even where the
grosser materials are not eliminated completely - a process long and
difficult being necessary for their entire eradication - the consciousness
may during earth-life be so persistently withdrawn from the lower passions
that the matter by which they can find expression will cease to function
actively as a vehicle of consciousness - will become atrophied, to borrow
a physical analogy. In such case, though the man will be held for a short
time on the lower levels, he will sleep peacefully through them, feeling
none of the disagreeables accompanying them; his consciousness, having
ceased to seek expression through such kinds of matter, will not pass
outwards through them to contact objects composed of them in the astral
world.
The
passage through Kāmaloka of one who has so purified the astral body that
he has only retained in it the purest and finest elements of each
sub-plane - such as would at once pass into the matter of the sub-plane
next above if raised another degree - is swift indeed. [56] There
is a point known as the critical point between every pair of sub-states of
matter; ice may be raised a point at which the least increment of heat
will change it into liquid; water may be raised to a point at which the
next increment will change it into vapour. So each sub-state of astral
matter may be carried to a point of fineness at which any additional
refinement would transform it into the next sub-state. If this has be done
for every sub-state of matter in the astral body, it has been purified to
the last possible degree of delicacy, then its passage through Kāmaloka
will be of inconceivable rapidity, and the man will flash through it
untrammeled in his flight to loftier regions.
One
other matter remains in connection with the purification of the astral
body, both by physical and mental processes, and that is the effect of
such purification on the new astral body that will in due course of time
be formed for use in the next succeeding incarnation. When the man passes
out of Kāmaloka into Devachan, he cannot carry thither with him
thought-forms of an evil type; astral matter cannot exist on the
devachanic level, and devachanic matter cannot answer to the coarse
vibrations of evil passions and desires. Consequently all that the man can
carry with him when he finally shakes off the remnants of his astral body
will be the latent germs or tendencies which, when they can find nutriment
or outlet, manifest as evil desires and [57] passions
in the astral world. But these he does take with him, and they lie latent
throughout his devachanic life. When he returns for rebirth he brings
these back with him and throws them outwards; they draw to themselves from
the astral world by a kind of magnetic affinity the appropriate materials
for their manifestation, and clothe themselves in astral matter congruous
with their own nature, so forming part of the man's astral body for the
impending incarnation. Thus we are not only living in an astral body now,
but are fashioning the type of the astral body which will be ours in
another birth - one reason the more for purifying the present astral body
to the utmost, using our present knowledge to ensure our future progress.
For
all our lives are linked together, and none of them can be broken away
from those that lie behind it or from those that stretch in front. In
truth, we have but one life in which what we call lives are really only
days. We never begin a new life with a clean sheet on which to write an
entirely new story; we do but begin a new chapter which must develop the
old plot. We can no more get rid of the karmic liabilities of a preceding
life by passing through death, than we can get rid of the pecuniary
liabilities incurred on one day by sleeping through a night; if we incur a
debt today we are not free of it tomorrow, but the claim is presented
until it is discharged. The life of man is continuous, unbroken; [58] the
earth lives are linked together, and not isolated. The processes of
purification and development are also continuous, and must be carried on
through many successive earth-lives. Some time or other each of us must
begin the work; some time or other each will grow weary of the sensations
of the lower nature, weary of being in subjection to the animals, weary of
the tyranny of the senses. Then the man will no longer consent to submit,
he will decide that the bonds of his captivity shall be broken. Why,
indeed, should we prolong our bondage, when it is in our own power to
break it at any moment? No hand can bind us save our own, and no hand save
our own can set us free. We have our right of choice, our freedom of will,
and inasmuch as one day we shall all stand together in the higher world,
why should we not begin at once to break our bondage, and to claim our
divine birthright? The beginning of the shattering of the fetters, of the
winning of liberty, is when a man determines that he will make the lower
nature the servant of the higher, that here on the plane of physical
consciousness he will begin the building of the higher bodies, and will
seek to realize those loftier possibilities which are his by right divine,
and are only obscured by the animal in which he lives. [59]
THE
MIND BODIES
We
have already studied at some length the physical and astral bodies of man.
We have studied the physical both in its visible and invisible parts,
working on the physical plane; we have followed the various lines of its
activities, have analysed the nature of its growth, and have dwelt upon
its gradual purification . Then we have considered the astral body in a
similar fashion, tracing its growth and functions, dealing with the
phenomena connected with its manifestation on the astral plane, and also
with its purification. Thus we have gained some idea of human activity on
two out of seven great planes of our universe. Having done so, we can now
pass on to the third great plane, the mind world; when we have learned
something of this we shall have under our eyes the physical, the astral,
and the mental worlds - our globe and the two spheres surrounding it - as
a triple region, wherein man is active during his earthly incarnations and
wherein he dwells also during the periods which intervene between the
death that closes one earth-life and the birth which opens another. These
three concentric spheres are man's school-house and kingdom: in them he
works out his development, [60] in
them his evolutionary pilgrimage; beyond them he may not consciously pass
until the gateway of Initiation has opened before him, for out of these
three worlds there is no other way.
This
third region, that I have called the mind world, includes, though it is
not identical with, that which is familiar to Theosophists under the name
of Devachan or Devaloka, the land of the Gods, the happy or blessed land,
as some translate it. Devachan bears that name because of its nature and
condition, nothing interfering with that world which may cause pain or
sorrow; it is a specially guarded state, into which positive evil is not
allowed to intrude, the blissful resting-place of man in which he
peacefully assimilates the fruits of his physical life.
A
preliminary word of explanation regarding the mind world as a whole is
necessary in order to avoid confusion. While, like the other regions, it
is sub-divided into seven sub-planes, it has the peculiarity that these
seven are grouped into two sets - a three and a four. The three upper
sub-planes are technically called arūpa, or without body, owing to their
extreme subtlety, while the four lower are called rūpa, or with body. Man
has two vehicles of consciousness, consequently, in which he functions on
this plane, to both of which the term mind body is applicable. The lower
of these, the one with which we shall first deal, may, however, be allowed
to [61] usurp
the exclusive use of the name until a better one be found for it; for the
higher one is known as the causal body, for reasons which will become
clear further on. Students will be familiar with the distinction between
the Higher and Lower Manas; the causal body is that of the Higher Manas,
the permanent body of the Ego, or man, lasting from life to life; the mind
body is that of the Lower Manas, lasting after death and passing into
Devachan, but disintegrating when the life on the rūpa levels of Devachan
is over.
(a)
The Mind Body. This
vehicle of consciousness belongs to, and is formed of, the matter of the
four lower levels of Devachan. While it is especially the vehicle of
consciousness for that part of the mental plane, it works upon and through
the astral and physical bodies in all the manifestations that we call
those of the mind in our ordinary waking consciousness. In the undeveloped
man, indeed, it cannot function separately on its own plane as an
independent vehicle of consciousness during his earthly life, and when
such a man exercises his mental faculties, they must clothe themselves in
astral and physical matter ere he can become conscious of their activity.
The mind body is the vehicle of the Ego, the Thinker, for all his
reasoning work, but
during
his early life it is feebly organized and somewhat inchoate and helpless,
like the astral body of the undeveloped man. [62]
The
matter of which the mind body is composed is of an exceedingly rare and
subtle kind. We have already seen that astral matter is much less dense
than even the ether of the physical plane, and we have now to enlarge our
conception of matter still further, and to extend it to include the idea
of a substance invisible to astral sight as well as to physical, far too
subtle to be perceived even by the "inner" senses of man. This
matter belongs to the fifth plane counting downwards, or the third plane
counting upwards, of our universe, and in this matter the Self manifests
as mind, as in the next below it (the astral) it manifests as sensation.
There is one marked peculiarity about the mind body, as its outer part
shows itself in the human aura; it grows, increases in size and in
activity, incarnation after incarnation, with the growth and development
of the man himself. This peculiarity is one to which so far we are now
accustomed. A physical body is built incarnation after incarnation,
varying according to nationality and sex, but we think of it as very much
the same in size since Atlantean days. In the astral body we found growth
in organization as the man progressed. But the mind body literally grows
in size with the advancing evolution of the man. If we look at a very
undeveloped person, we shall find that the mind body is even difficult to
distinguish - that it is so little evolved that some care is necessary to
see it at all. Looking [63] then
at a more advanced man, one who is not spiritual, but who has developed
the faculties of the mind, who has trained and developed the intellect, we
shall find that the mind body is acquiring a very definite development,
and that it has an organization that can be recognized as a vehicle of
activity; it is a clear and definitely outlined object, fine in material
and beautiful in colour, continually vibrating with enormous activity,
full of life, full of vigour, the expression of the mind in the world of
the mind.
As
regards its nature, then, made of this subtle matter; as regards its
functions, the immediate vehicle in which the Self manifests as intellect;
as regards its growth, growing life after life in proportion to the
intellectual development, becoming also more and more definitely organized
as the attributes and the qualities of the mind become more and more
clearly marked. It does not, like the astral body, become a distinct
representation of the man in form and feature when it is working in
connection with the astral and physical bodies; it is oval - egg-like - in
outline, interpenetrating of course the physical and astral bodies, and
surrounding them with a radiant atmosphere as it develops - becoming, as I
said, larger and larger as the intellectual growth increases. Needless to
say, this egg-like form becomes a very beautiful and glorious object as
the man develops the higher capacities of the mind: it is not visible
to [64] astral
sight, but is clearly seen by the higher vision which belongs to the world
of mind. Just as an ordinary man living in the physical world sees nothing
of astral world - though surrounded by it - until the astral senses are
opened, so a man in whom only the physical and astral senses are active
will see nothing of the mind world, or of forms composed of its matter,
unless mental senses be opened, albeit it surrounds us on every side.
These
keener senses, the senses which belong to mind world, differ very much
from the senses with which we are familiar here. The very word
"senses" in fact, is a misnomer, for we ought rather to say
mental "sense." The mind comes into contact with the things of
its own world as it were directly oven its whole surface. There are no
distinct organs for sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell; all the
vibrations which we should here receive through separate sense-organs, in
that region give rise to all these characteristics once when they come
into touch with the mind. The mind body receives them all at one and the
same time and is, as it were, conscious all over of everything which is
able to impress it at all.
It
is not easy to convey in words any clear idea of the way this sense
receives an aggregate of impressions without confusion, but it may perhaps
be best described by saying that if a trained student passes into
that [65] region,
and there communicates with another student, the mind in speaking speaks
at once by colour, sound and form, so that the complete thought is
conveyed as a coloured and musical picture instead of only a fragment of
it being shown, as is done here by the symbols we call words. Some readers
may have heard of ancient books written by great Initiates in colour-language,
the language of the Gods; that language is known to many chelās, and is
taken, so far as form and colour are concerned, from the mind-world
"speech," in which the vibrations from a single thought give
rise to form, to colour, and to sound. It is not that the mind thinks a
colour, or thinks a sound, or thinks a form; it thinks a thought, a
complex vibration in subtle matter, and that thought expresses itself in
all these ways by the vibrations set up. The matter of the mind world is
constantly being thrown into vibrations which give birth to these colours,
to these sounds, to these forms; and if a man be functioning in the mind
body apart from the astral and the physical, he finds himself entirely
freed from the limitations of their sense-organs, receptive at every point
to every vibration that in the lower world would present itself as
separate and different from its fellows.
When,
however, a man is thinking in his waking consciousness and is working
through his astral and physical bodies, then the thought has its producer
in the mind body and passes out, first to the astral and then [66] to
the physical; when we think, we are thinking by our mind body - that is,
the agent of thought, the consciousness which expresses itself as
"I". The "I" is illusory, but it is the only
"I" known to the majority of us. When we were dealing with the
consciousness the physical body, we found that the man himself was not
conscious of all that was going on in the physical body itself, that its
activities were partially independent of him, that he was not able to
think as the tiny separate cells were thinking, that he did not really
share the consciousness of the body as a whole. But when we come to the
mind body we come to a region so closely identified with the man that it
seems to be himself. "I think," "I know" - can we go
behind that? The mind is the Self in the mind body, and it is that which
for most of us seems the goal of our search after the Self. But this is
only true if we are confined to the waking consciousness. Anyone who has
learned that the waking consciousness, like the sensations of the astral
body, is only a stage of our journey as we seek the Self, and who has
further learned to go beyond it, will be aware that this in its turn is
but an instrument of the real man. Most of us, however, as I say, do not
separate, cannot separate in thought the man from his mind body, which
seems to them to be his highest expression, his highest vehicle, the
highest self they can in any way touch or realize. This is the more
natural and inevitable in that [67] the
individual, the man, at this stage of evolution, is beginning to vivify
this body and to bring it into preeminent activity. He has vivified the
physical body as a vehicle of consciousness in the past, and is using it
in the present as a matter of course. He is vivifying the astral body in
the backward members of the race, but in very large numbers this work is
at least partially accomplished; in this Fifth Race he is working at the
mind body, and the special work on which humanity should now be engaged is
the building, the evolution of this body.
We
are, then, much concerned to understand how the mind body is built and how
it grows. It grows by thought. Our thoughts are the materials we build
into this mind body; by the exercise of our mental faculties, by the
development of our artistic powers, our higher emotions, we are literally
building the mind body day by day, each month and year of our lives. If
you are not exercising your mental abilities; if, so far as your thoughts
are concerned, you are a receptacle and not a creator; if you are
constantly accepting from outside instead of forming from within; if, as
you go through life, the thoughts of other people are crowding into your
mind; if this be all you know of thought and of thinking, then, life after
life, your mind body cannot grow; life after life you come back very much
as you went out; life after life you remain as an undeveloped
individual. [68] For
it is only by the exercise of the mind itself, using its faculties
creatively, exercising them, working with them, constantly exerting them -
it is only by these means that the mind body can develop, and that the
truly human evolution can proceed.
The
very moment you begin to realize this you will probably try to change the
general attitude of your consciousness in daily life; you will begin to
watch its working; and as soon as you do this you will notice that, as
just said, a great deal of your thinking is not your thinking at all, but
the mere reception of the thoughts of other people; thoughts that come you
not know how; thoughts that arrive you do not know whence; thoughts that
take themselves off again you not know whither; and you will begin to
feel, probably with some distress and disappointments that instead of the
mind being highly evolved it is little more than a place through which
thoughts are passing. Try yourself, and see how much of the content of
your consciousness is your own, and how much of it consists merely of
contributions from outside. Stop yourself suddenly now and then during the
day, and see what you are thinking about, and on such a sudden checking
you will probably either find that you are thinking about nothing - a very
common experience - or that you are thinking so vague that a very slight
impression is made upon anything you can venture to call your mind. When
you have tried [69] this
a good many times, and by the very trying have become more self-conscious
than you were, then begin to notice the thoughts you find in your mind,
and see what difference there is between their condition when they came
into the mind and their condition when they go out of it - what you have
added to them during their stay with you. In this way your mind will
become really active, and will be exercising its creative powers, and if
you be wise you will follow some such process as this: first, you will
choose the thoughts that you will allow to remain in the mind at all;
whenever you find in the mind a thought that is good you will dwell upon
it, nourish it, strengthen it, try to put into it more than it had at
first; and send it out as a beneficent agent into the astral world; when
you find in the mind a thought that is evil you will turn it out with all
imaginable promptitude. Presently you will find that as you welcome into
your mind all thoughts that are good and useful, and refuse to entertain
thoughts which are evil, this result will appear: that more and more good
thoughts will flow into your mind from without, and fewer and fewer evil
thoughts will flow into it. The effect of making your mind full of good
and useful thoughts will be that it will act as a magnet for all the
similar thoughts that are around you; as you refuse to give any sort of
habourage to evil thoughts, those that approach you will be thrown back by
an automatic [70] action
of the mind itself. The mind body will take on the characteristic of
attracting all thoughts that are good from the surrounding atmosphere, and
repelling all thoughts that are evil, and it will work upon the good and
make them more active, and so constantly gather a mass of mental material
which will form its content, and will grow richer every year. When the
time comes when the man shall shake off the astral and physical bodies
finally, passing into the mind world, he will carry with him the whole of
this gathered-up material; he will take with him the content of
consciousness into the region to which it properly belongs, and he will
use his devachanic life in working up into faculties and powers the whole
of the materials which it has stored.
At
the end of the devachanic period the mind body will hand on to the
permanent causal body the characteristics thus fashioned, that they may be
carried on into the next incarnation. These faculties, as the man returns,
will clothe themselves in the matter of the rūpa planes of the mind
world, forming the more highly organized and developed mind body for the
coming earth-life, and they will show themselves through the astral and
physical bodies as the "innate faculties," those with which the
child comes into the world. During the present life we are gathering
together materials in the way which I have sketched; during the [71]devachan
life we work up these materials, changing them from separate efforts of
thought into faculty of thought, into mental powers and activities. That
is the immense change made during the devachanic life, and inasmuch as it
is limited by the use we are making of the earth-life, we shall do well to
spare no efforts now. The mind body of the next incarnation depends on the
work we are doing in the mind body of the present; here is, then, the
immense importance to the evolution of the man of the use which he is now
making of his mind bodes; it limits his activities in Devachan, and by
limiting those activities it limits the mental qualities with which he
will return for his next life upon earth. We cannot isolate one life from
another, nor miraculously create something out of nothing. Karma brings
the harvest according to our sowing: scanty or plentiful is the crop as
the labourer gives seed and tillage.
The
automatic action of the mind body, spoken of above, may perhaps be better
understood if we consider the nature of the materials on which it draws
for its building. The Universal Mind, to which it is allied in its inmost
nature, is the storehouse in its material aspect from which it draws these
materials. They give rise to every kind of vibration, varying in quality
and in power according to the combinations made. The mind body
automatically draws to itself from the general storehouse matter that can
maintain the combinations already [72] existing
in it, for there is a constant changing of particles in the mind body as
in the physical, and the place of those which leave is taken by similar
particles that come. If the man finds that he has evil tendencies and sets
to work to change them, he sets up a new set of vibrations, and the mind
body, moulded to respond to the old one resists the new, and there is
conflict and suffering. But gradually, as the older particles are thrown
out and are replaced by others that answer to the new vibrations - being
attracted from outside by their very power to respond to them - the mind
body changes its character, changes, in fact, its materials, and its
vibrations become antagonistic to the evil and attractive to the good.
Hence the extreme difficulty of the first efforts, met and combated by the
old form-aspect of the mind; hence the increasing ease of right thinking
as the old form changes, and finally, the spontaneity and the pleasure
that accompany the new exercise.
Another
way of helping the growth of the mind body is the practice of
concentration; that is, the fixing of the mind on a point and holding it
there firmly, not allowing it to drift or wander. We should train
ourselves in thinking steadily and consecutively, not allowing our minds
to run suddenly from one thing to another, not to fritter their energies
away over a large number or insignificant thoughts. It is a good practice
to follow a consecutive line of reasoning, in which one thought [73] grows
naturally out of the thought that went before it, thus gradually
developing in ourselves the intellectual qualities which make our thoughts
sequential and therefore essentially rational; for when the mind thus
works, thought following thought in definite and orderly succession, it is
strengthening itself as an instrument of the Self for activity in the mind
world. This development of the power of thinking with concentration and
sequence will show itself in a more clearly outlined and definite mind
body, in a rapidly increasing growth, in steadiness and balance, the
efforts being well repaid by the progress which results from them.
(b)
the Causal Body. Let us now pass on to the second mind body,
known by its own distinctive name of causal body. The name is due to the
fact that all the causes reside in this body which manifest themselves as
effects on the lower planes. This body is the "body of Manas,"
the form-aspect of the individual, of the true man. It is the receptacle,
the storehouse, in which all the man's treasures are stored for eternity,
and it grows as the lower nature hands up more and more that is worthy to
be built into its structure. The causal body is that into which everything
is woven which can endure, and in which are stored the germs of every
quality, to be carried over to the next incarnation; thus the lower
manifestations depend wholly on the growth and development of this man for
"whom the hour never strikes." [74]
The
causal body, it is said above, is the form-aspect of the individual.
Dealing, as we do here, only with the present human cycle, we may say that
until that comes into existence there is no man; there may be the physical
and etheric tabernacles prepared for his habitation; passions, emotions
and appetites may gradually be gathered to form the kāmic nature in the
astral body; but there is not man until the growth through the physical
and astral planes has been accomplished, and until the matter of the mind
world is beginning to show itself within the evolved lower bodies. When,
by the power of the Self preparing its own habitation, the matter of the
mind plane begins slowly to evolve, then there is a downpouring from the
great ocean of Ātmā-Buddhi which is ever brooding over the evolution of
man - and this, as it were, meets the upward-growing, unfolding
mind-stuff, comes into union with it, fertilizes it, and at that point of
union the causal body, the individual, is formed. Those who are able to
see in those lofty regions say that this form-aspect of the true man is
like a delicate film of subtlest matter, just visible, marking where the
individual begins his separate life; that delicate, colourless film of
subtle matter is the body that lasts through the whole of the human
evolution, the thread on which all the lives are strung, the reincarnating
Sūtrātmā, the "thread-self". It is the receptacle of all
which is in accordance with the Law, [75] of
every attribute which is noble and harmonious, and therefore enduring. It
is that which marks the growth of man, the stage of evolution to which he
has attained. Every great and noble thought, every pure and lofty emotion,
is carried up and worked into his substance.
Let
us take the life of an ordinary man and try to see how much of that life
will pass upwards for the building of the causal body, and let us imagine
it pictorially as a delicate film; it is to be strengthened, to be made
beautiful with colour, made active with life, made radiant and glorious,
increasing in size as the man grows and develops. At a low stage of
evolution he is not showing much mental quality, but rather he is
manifesting much passion, much appetite. He feels sensations and seeks
them; they are the things to which he turns. It is as though this inner
life of the man puts forth a little of the delicate matter of which it is
composed, and round that the mind body gathers; and the mind body puts
forth into the astral world, and there comes into contact with the astral
body, and becomes connected with it, so that a bridge is formed along
which anything capable of passing can pass. The man sends his thoughts
downwards by this bridge into the world of sensations, of passions, of
animal life, and the thoughts intermingle with all these animal passions
and emotions; thus the mind body becomes entangled with the astral body
and they adhere to each other and are difficult to separate [76] when
the time of death comes. But if the man, during the life which he is
spending in these lower regions, has an unselfish thought, a thought of
service to someone he loves, and makes some sacrifice in order to do
service to his friend, he has then set up something that is able to
endure, something that is able to live, something that has in it the
nature of the higher world; that can pass upwards to the causal body and
be worked into its substance, making it more beautiful, giving it perhaps
its first touch of intensity of colour; perhaps all through the man's life
there will only be a few of these things that are able to endure, to serve
as food for the growth of the real man. So the growth is very slow, for
all the rest of his life does not aid it; all his evil tendencies born of
ignorance and fed by exercise, have their germs drawn inward and thrown
into latency, as the astral body which gave them home and form is
dissipated in the astral world; they are drawn inward into the mind body
and lie latent there, lacking material for expression in the devachanic
world; when the mind body in its turn perishes, they are drawn into the
causal body, and there still lie latent, as in suspended animation. They
are thrown outwards as the Ego, returning to earth-life reaches the astral
world, reappearing there as evil tendencies brought over from the past.
Thus the causal body may be spoken of as the storehouse of evil as well as
good, being all that remains of the man after[77] the
lower vehicles are dissipated, but the good is worked into its texture and
aids its growth, while the evil, with the exception noted below, remains
as germ.
But
the evil which a man works in life, when he puts into its execution his
thought, does more injury to the causal body than merely to lie latent in
it, as the germ of future sin and sorrow. It is not only that the evil
does not help the growth of the true man, but where it is subtle and
persistent it drags away, if the expression may be permitted, something of
the individual himself. If vice be persistent, if evil be continually
followed, the mind body becomes so entangled with the astral that after
death it cannot free itself entirely, and some of its very substance is
torn away from it, and when the astral dissipates this goes back to the
mind stuff of the mind world and is lost to the individual; in this way,
if we think again of our image of a film, or bubble, it may be to some
extent thinned by vicious living - not only delayed in its progress, but
something wrought upon it which makes it more difficult to build into. It
is as though the film were in some way affected as to capacity of growth,
sterilized or atrophied to some extent. Beyond this, in ordinary cases,
the harm wrought to the causal body does not go.
But
where the Ego has become strong both in intellect and will without at the
same time increasing in unselfishness and love, where it contracts itself
round its own [78] separated
centre instead of expanding as it grows, building a wall of selfishness
around it and using its developing powers for the "I" instead of
for the all; in such cases arises the possibility alluded to in so many of
the world-scriptures, of more dangerous and ingrained evil, of the Ego
setting itself consciously against the Law, of fighting deliberately
against evolution. Then the causal body itself, wrought on by vibrations
on the mental plane of intellect and will, but both turned to selfish
ends, shows the dark hues which result from contraction and loses the
dazzling radiance which is its characteristic property. Such harm cannot
be worked by a poorly developed Ego nor by ordinary passional or mental
faults; to effect injury so far-reaching the Ego must be highly evolved,
and must have its energies potent on the mānasic plane. Therefore is it
that ambition, pride and the powers of the intellect used for selfish aims
are so far more dangerous, so far more deadly in their effects, than the
more palpable faults of the lower nature, and the "Pharisee" is
often further from the "kingdom of God" than "the publican
and the sinner." Along this line is developed the "black
magician," the man who conquers passion and desire, develops will and
the higher powers of the mind, not to offer them gladly as forces to help
forward the evolution of the whole, but in order to grasp all he can for
himself as unit, to hold and not to share. These set themselves to
maintain [79] separation
as against unity, they strive to retard instead of to quicken evolution:
therefore they vibrate in discord with the whole instead of in harmony,
and are in danger of that rending of the Ego which means the loss of all
the fruits of evolution.
All
of us who are beginning to understand something of this causal body can
make its evolution a definite object in our life; we can strive to think
unselfishly and so contribute to its growth and activity. Life after life,
century after century, millennium after millennium, this evolution of the
individual proceeds, and in aiding its growth by conscious effort we are
working in harmony with the divine will, and carrying out the purpose for
which we are here. Nothing good that is once woven into the texture of
this causal body is ever lost, nothing is dissipated: for this is the man
that lives for ever.
Thus
we see that by the law of evolution everything that is evil, however
strong for the time it may seem, has within itself the germ of its own
destruction, while everything that is good has in it the seed of
immortality; the secret of this lies in the fact that everything evil is
inharmonious, that it sets itself against the cosmic law; it is therefore
sooner or later broken up by that law, dashed into pieces against it,
crushed into dust. Everything that is good, on the other hand, being in
harmony with the law, is taken on by it, carried forward; it becomes part
of the stream of evolution, of that "not [80] ourselves
which makes for righteousness," and therefor it can never perish, can
never be destroyed. Here lie not only the hope of man but the certainty of
his final triumph; however slow the growth, it is there; however long the
way, it has its ending. The individual which is our Self is evolving, and
cannot now be utterly destroyed; even though by our folly we may make the
growth slower than it need be, none the less everything we contribute to
it, however little, lasts in it for ever and is our possession for all the
ages that lie in front. [81]
OTHER
VEHICLES
We
may rise one step further, but in doing so we enter a region so lofty that
it is well-nigh beyond our treading, even in imagination. For the causal
body itself is not the highest, and the "Spiritual Ego" is not
Manas, but Manas united to, merged in, Buddhi. This is the
culmination of the human evolution, the end of the revolution on the wheel
of births and deaths. Above the plane with which we have been dealing lies
a yet higher, sometimes called that of Turīya, the plane of Buddhi.*
[* This plane has also been called that of Sushupti. See Manuals IV and
V.] Here the vehicle of consciousness is the spiritual body, the
Ānandamayakosha, or body of bliss and into this Yogļs can pass, and in
it taste the eternal bliss of that glorious world, and realize in their
own consciousness the underlying unity, which then becomes to them a fact
of experience and no longer only an intellectual belief. We may read of a
time that comes to the man when he has grown in love, wisdom and power,
and when he passes through a great gateway, marking a distinct stage in
his evolution. It is the gateway of Initiation, and the man led through it
by [82] his
Master rises for the first time into the spiritual body, and experiences
in it the unity which underlies all the diversity of the physical world
and all its separateness, which underlies the separateness of the astral
plane and even of the mental region. When these are left behind and the
man, clothed in the spiritual body, rises beyond them, he then finds for
the first time in his experience that separateness belongs only to the
three lower worlds; that he is one with all others, and that, without
losing self-consciousness, his consciousness can expand to embrace the
consciousness of others, can become verily and indeed one with them. There
is the unity after which man is always yearning, the unity he has felt as
true and has vainly tried to realize on low planes; there it is realized
beyond his loftiest dreaming and all humanity is found to be one with his
innermost Self.
Temporary
Bodies. We cannot leave out of our review of man's bodies
certain other vehicles that are temporary, and may be called artificial,
in their character. When a man begins to pass out of the physical body he
may use the astral, but so long as he is functioning in that he is limited
to the astral world. It is possible, however, for him to use the mind body
- that of the Lower Manas - in order to pass into the mental region, and
in this he can also range the astral and physical planes without let or
hindrance. The body thus used is often [83] called
the Māyāvi Rūpa, or body of illusion, and it is the mind body
re-arranged, so to speak, for separate activity. The man fashions his mind
body into the likeness of himself, shapes it into his own image and
likeness, and is then in this temporary and artificial body free to
traverse the three planes at will and rise superior to the ordinary
limitations of man. It is this artificial body that is often spoken of in
Theosophical books, in which a person can travel from land to land,
passing also into the world of mind, learning there new truths, gathering
new experience, and bringing back to the waking consciousness the
treasures thus collected. The advantage of using this higher body is that
it is not subject to deception and glamour on the astral plane as is the
astral body. The untrained astral senses often mislead, and much
experience is needed ere their reports can be trusted, but this
temporarily formed mind body is not subject to such deceptions; it sees
with a true vision, it hears with a true hearing; no astral glamour can
overpower, no astral illusion can deceive; therefore this body is
preferably used by those trained for such journeyings, made when it is
wanted, let go again when the purpose for which it was made is served.
Thus it is that the student often learns lessons that otherwise could not
reach him, and receives instructions from which he would otherwise be
entirely shut off. [84]
Other
temporary bodies have been called by the name of Māyāvi Rūpa, but it
seems better to restrict the term to the one just described. A man may
appear a distance in a body which is really a thought-form more than a
vehicle of consciousness, thought clothed in elemental essence of the
astral plane. These bodies are, as a rule, merely vehicles of some
particular thought, some special volition, and outside this show no
consciousness. They need only be mentioned in passing.
The
Human Aura. We
are now in a position to understand what the human aura, in its fullest
sense, really is. It is the man himself, manifest at once on the four
planes of consciousness, and according to its development is his power of
functioning on each; it is the aggregate of his bodies, of his vehicles of
consciousness; in a phrase, it is the form-aspect of the man. It is thus
that we should regard it, and not as a mere ring or cloud surrounding him.
Most glorious of all is the spiritual body, visible in Initiates, through
which plays the living ātmic fire; this is the manifestation of man on
the buddhic plane. Then comes the causal body, his manifestation in the
highest mental world, on the arūpa levels of the plane of mind, where the
individual has his home. Next the mind body, belonging to the lower mental
planes, and the astral, etheric and dense bodies in succession, each
formed of the matter of its own region, and expressing the man as he is in
each. [85] When the student looks at the human being he
sees all these bodies making up the man, showing themselves separately by
virtue of their different grades of matter, and thus marking the stage of
development at which the man has arrived. As the higher vision is
developed the student sees each of these bodies in its full activity. The
physical body is visible as a kind of dense crystallization in the centre
of the other bodies, the others permeating it and extending beyond its
periphery, the physical being the smallest. The astral comes next, showing
the state of the kāmic nature that forms so great a part of the ordinary
man, full of his passions, lower appetites and emotions, differing in
fineness, in colour, as the man is more or less pure - very dense in the
grosser types, finer in the more refined, finest of all if the man be far
advanced in his evolution. Then the mind body, poorly developed in the
majority but beautiful in many, very various in colouring according to the
mental and moral type. Then the causal, scarcely visible in most, visible
only if careful scrutiny be brought to bear on the man, so slightly is it
developed, so comparatively thin is its colouring, so feeble is its
activity. But when we come to look at an advanced soul, it is this and the
one above it that at once strike the eye as being emphatically the
presentation of the man; radiant in light, most glorious and delicate in
colouring, showing hues that no language can describe, because they
have [86] no place in earth's spectrum - hues not only most pure
and beautiful, but entirely different from the colour known on the lower
planes, additional ones which show the growth of the man in those higher
regions in the loftier qualities and powers that there exist. If the eye
be fortunate enough to be blessed with the sight of one of the Great Ones,
He appears as this mighty living form of life and colour, radiant and
glorious, showing forth His nature by His very appearance to the view:
beautiful beyond description, resplendent beyond imagination. Yet what He
is, all shall one day become: that which He is in accomplishment dwells in
every son of man a possibility.
There
is one point about the aura that I may mention as it is one of practical
utility. We can to a great extent protect ourselves against the incursions
of thoughts from outside by making a spherical wall round us from the
auric substance. The aura responds very readily to the impulse of thought,
and if by an effort of the imagination we picture its outer edge as
densified into a shell we really make such a protective wall around us.
This shell will prevent the incoming of the drifting thoughts that fill
the astral atmosphere, and thus will prevent the disturbing influence they
exercise over the untrained mind. The drain on our vitality that we
sometimes feel, especially when we come into contact with people who
unconsciously vampirize their neighbours, may also [87] be
guarded against by the formation of a shell, and anyone who is sensitive
and who finds himself very exhausted by such a drain will do wisely thus
to protect himself. Such is the power of human thought on subtle matter
that to think of yourself as within such a shell is to have it formed
around you.
Looking
at human beings around us on every side we may see them in every stage of
development, showing themselves forth by their bodies according to the
point in evolution which they have reached, living on plane after plane of
the universe, functioning in region after region, as they develop the
corresponding vehicles of consciousness. Our aura shows just what we are;
we add to it as we grow in the true life; we purify it as we live noble
and cleanly lives; we weave into it higher and higher qualities.
Is
it possible that any philosophy of life should be more full of hope, more
full of strength, more full of joy than this? Looking over the world of
men with the physical eye only, we see it degraded, miserable, apparently
hopeless, as in truth it is to the eye of flesh. But that same world of
men appears to us in quite another aspect when seen by the higher vision.
We see indeed the sorrow and the misery, we see indeed the degradation and
the shape; but we know that they are transient, that they are temporary,
that they belong to the childhood of the race, and that the race
will [88] out-grow
them. Looking at the lowest and vilest, at the most degraded and most
brutal, we can yet see their divine possibilities, we can yet realize what
they shall be in the years to come. That is the message of hope brought by
Theosophy to the Western world, the message of universal redemption from
ignorance, and therefore of universal emancipation from misery - not in
dream but in reality, not in hope but in certainty. Everyone who in his
own life is showing the growth is, as it were, a fresh realization and
enforcement of the message; everywhere the first-fruits are appearing, and
the whole world shall one day be ripe for harvest, and shall accomplish
the purpose for which the Logos gave it birth. [89]
THE
MAN
We
have now to turn to the consideration of the man himself, no longer
studying the vehicles of consciousness but the action of the consciousness
on them, no longer looking at the bodies but at the entity who functions
in them. By "the man" I mean that continuing individual who
passes from life to life, who comes into bodies and again leaves them,
over and over again, who develops slowly in the course of ages, who grows
by the gathering and by the assimilation of experience, and who exists on
that higher mānasic or mental plane referred to in the last chapter. This
man is to be the subject of our study, functioning on the three planes
with which we are now familiar - the physical, the astral and the mental.
Man
begins his experiences by developing self-consciousness on the physical
plane; it is here that appears what we call the "waking
consciousness," the consciousness with which we are all familiar,
which works through the brain and nervous system, by which we reason in
the ordinary way, carrying on all logical processes, by which we remember
past events of the current incarnation, and exercise judgment in the
affairs of life. All that we [90] recognize
as our mental faculties is the outcome of the man's work through the
preceding stages of his pilgrimage, and his self-consciousness here
becomes more and more vivid, more and more active, more and more alive, we
may say, as the individual develops, as the man progresses life after
life.
If
we study a very undeveloped man, we find his self-conscious mental
activity to be poor in quality and limited in quantity. He is working in
the physical body through the gross and etheric brains; action is
continually going on, so far as the whole nervous system is concerned,
visible and invisible, but the action is of a very clumsy kind. There is
in it very little discrimination, very little delicacy of mental touch.
There is some mental activity, but it is of a very infantile or childish
kind. It is occupied with very small things; it is amused by very trivial
occurrences; the things that attract its attention are things of a petty
character; it is interested in passing objects; it likes to sit at a
window and look out at a busy street, watching people and vehicles go by,
making remarks on them, overwhelmed with amusement if a well-dressed
person tumbles into a puddle or is badly splashed by a passing cab. It has
not much in itself to occupy its attention, and therefore it is always
rushing outwards in order to feel that it is alive; it is one of the chief
characteristics of this low stage of mental evolution that the man working
at the physical [91] and
etheric bodies, and bringing them into order as vehicles of consciousness,
is always seeking violent sensations; he needs to make sure that he is
feeling and to learn to distinguish things by receiving from them strong
and vivid sensations; it is a quite necessary stage of progress, though an
elementary one, and without this he would continually be becoming
confused, confused between the processes within his vehicle and without
it; he must learn the alphabet of the self and the not-self by
distinguishing between the objects causing impacts and the sensations
caused by impacts, between the stimulus and the feeling. The lowest types
of this stage may be seen gathered at street-corners, lounging idly
against a wall and indulging occasionally in a few ejaculatory remarks and
in cackling outbursts of empty laughter. Anyone able to look into their
brains finds that they are receiving somewhat blurred impressions from
passing objects, and that the links between these impressions and others
like them are very slight. The impressions are more like a heap of pebbles
than a well-arranged mosaic.
In
studying the way in which the physical and etheric brains become vehicles
of consciousness, we have to run back to the early development of the
Ahamkāra, or "I-ness", a stage that may be seen in the lower
animals around us. Vibrations caused by the impact of external objects are
set up in the brain, transmitted by it to the [92] astral
body, and felt by the consciousness as sensations before there is any
linking of these sensations to the objects that caused them, this linking
being a definite mental action - a perception. When perception begins, the
consciousness is using the physical and etheric brains as a vehicle for
itself, by means of which it gathers knowledge of the external world. This
stage is long past in our humanity, of course, but its fleeting repetition
may be seen, when the consciousness takes up a new brain in coming to
rebirth; the child begins to "take notice," as the nurses say,
that is, to relate a sensation arising in itself to an impression made
upon its new sheath, or vehicle, by an external object, and thus to
"notice" the object, to perceive it.
After
a time the perception of an object is not necessary in order that the
picture of the object may be present to the consciousness, and it finds
itself able to recall the appearance of an object, when it is not
contacted by any sense; such a memoried perception is a idea, a concept, a
mental image, and these make up the store which the consciousness gathers
from the outside world. On these it begins to work, and the first stage of
this activity is the arrangement of the ideas, the preliminary to
"reasoning" upon them. Reasoning begins by comparing the ideas
with each other, and then by inferring relations between them from the
simultaneous or sequential happening of two or more of [93] them,
time after time. In this process the consciousness has withdrawn within
itself, carrying with it the ideas it has made out of perceptions, and it
goes (on) to and [projects on] to them something of its own, as when it
infers a sequence, relates one thing to another as cause and effect. It
begins to draw conclusions, even to forecast future happenings, when it
has established a sequence, so that when the perception regarded as
"cause" appears, the perception regarded as "effect"
is expected to follow. Again, it notices in comparing its ideas that many
of them have one or more elements in common, while their remaining
constituents are different, and it proceeds to draw these common
characteristics away from the rest and to put them together as the
characteristics of a class, and then it groups together the objects that
possess these, and when it sees a new object which possesses them, it
throws it into that class; in this way it gradually arranges into a cosmos
the chaos of perceptions with which it began its mental career, and infers
law from the orderly succession of phenomena, and the types it finds in
nature. All this is the work of the consciousness in and through the
physical brain, but even in this working we trace the presence of that
which the brain does not supply. The brain merely receives vibrations; the
consciousness working in the astral body changes the vibrations into
sensations, and in the mental body changes the sensations into
perceptions, and then [94] carries
on all the processes which, as just said, transform the chaos into cosmos.
And the consciousness thus working is, further, illuminated from above
with ides that are not fabricated from materials supplied by the physical
world, but are reflected into it directly from the Universal Mind. The
great "laws of thought" regulate all thinking, and the very act
of thinking reveals their pre-existence, as it is done by them and under
them, and is impossible without them.
It
is unnecessary almost to remark that all the earlier efforts of
consciousness to work in the physical vehicle are subject to much error,
both from imperfect perception and from mistaken inferences. Hasty
inferences, generalizations from limited experience, vitiate many of the
conclusions arrived at, and the rules of logic are formulated in order to
discipline the thinking faculty and to enable it to avoid the fallacies
into which it constantly falls while untrained. But none the less the
attempt to reason, however imperfectly, from one thing to another is a
distinct mark of growth in the man himself, for it shows that he is adding
something of his own to the information contributed from outside. This
working on the collected materials has an effect on the physical vehicle
itself. When the mind links two perceptions together, it also sets up - as
it is causing corresponding vibrations in the brain - a link between the
sets of vibrations from which the perceptions arose. [95] For
as the mind body is thrown into activity, it acts on the astral body, and
this again on the etheric and dense bodies, and the nervous matter of the
latter vibrates under the impulses sent through; this action shows itself
as electrical discharges, and magnetic currents play between molecules and
groups of molecules causing intricate inter-relations. These leave what we
may call a nervous track, a track along which another current will run
more easily than it can run, say, athwart it, and if a group of molecules
that were concerned in a vibration should be again made active by the
consciousness repeating the idea that was impressed upon them, the
disturbance there set up readily runs along the track formed between it
and another group by a previous linking, and calls that other group into
activity, and it sends up to the mind a vibration which, after the regular
transformations, presents itself as an associated idea. Hence the great
importance of association, this action of the brain being sometimes
exceedingly troublesome, as when some foolish or ludicrous idea has been
linked with a serious or a sacred one. The consciousness calls up the
sacred idea in order to dwell upon it, and suddenly, quite without its
consent, the grinning face of the intruding idea, sent up by the
mechanical action of the brain, thrusts itself through the doorway of the
sanctuary and defiles it. Wise men pay attention to association, and are
careful how they speak of the most sacred things, [96] lest
some foolish and ignorant person should make a connecting link between the
holy and the silly or the coarse, a link which afterwards would be likely
to repel itself in the consciousness. Useful is the precept of the great
Jewish Teacher: "Give not that which is holy to the dogs, neither
cast ye your pearls before swine."
Another
mark of progress appears when a man begins to regulate his conduct by
conclusions arrived at within instead of by impulses received from
without. He is then acting from his own store of accumulated experiences,
remembering past happenings, comparing results obtained by different lines
of action in the past, and deciding by these as to the line of action he
will adopt in the present. He is beginning to forecast, to foresee, to
judge of the future by the past, to reason ahead by remembering what has
already occurred, and as a man does this there is a distinct growth of him
as man. He may still be confined to functioning in his physical brains, he
may still be inactive outside them, but he is becoming a developing
consciousness which is beginning to behave as an individual, to choose its
own road instead of drifting with circumstances, or being forced along a
particular line of action by some pressure from without. The growth of the
man shows itself in this definite way, and he develops more and more of
what is called character, more and more of will-power. [97]
Strong-willed
and weak-willed persons are distinguished by their difference in this
respect. The weak-willed man is moved from outside, by outer attractions
and repulsions, while the strong-willed man is moved from inside, and
continually masters circumstances by bringing to bear upon them
appropriate forces, guided by his store of accumulated experiences. This
store, which the man has in many lives gathered and accumulated, becomes
more and more available as the physical brains become more trained and
refined, and therefore more receptive: the store is in the man, but he can
only use so much of it as he can impress on the physical consciousness.
The man himself has the memory and does the reasoning; the man himself
judges, chooses, decides: but he has to do all this through his physical
and etheric brains; he must work and act by way of the physical body, of
the nervous mechanism, and of the etheric organism therewith connected. As
the brain becomes more impressible, as he improves its material and brings
it more under his control, he is able to use it for better expression of
himself.
How,
then, shall we, the living men, try to train our vehicles of consciousness
in order that they may serve as better instruments? We are not now
studying the physical development of the vehicle, but its training by the
consciousness that uses it as an instrument of thought. The man decides
that in order to make more useful this [98] vehicle
of his, to the improvement of which physically he has already directed his
attention, he must train it to answer promptly and consecutively to the
impulses he transmits to it; in order that the brain may respond
consecutively, he will himself think consecutively, and so sending to the
brain sequential impulses he will accustom it to work sequentially by
linked groups of molecules, instead of by haphazard and unrelated
vibrations. The man initiates, the brain only imitates, and unconnected,
careless thinking sets up the habit in the brain of forming unconnected
vibratory groups. The training has two stages; the man, determining that
he will think consecutively, trains his mental body to link though to
thought and not to alight anywhere in a casual way; and then, by thinking
thus, he trains the brain which vibrates in answer to his thought. In this
way the physical organisms - the nervous and the etheric systems - get
into the habit of working in a systematic way, and when their owner wants
them, they respond promptly and in an orderly fashion; when he require
them they are ready to his hand. Between such a trained vehicle of
consciousness and one that is untrained, there is the kind of difference
that there is between the tools of a careless workman, who leave them
dirty and blunt, unfit for use, and those of the man who makes his tools
ready, sharpens them and cleans them, so that when they are wanted they
are [99] ready
to his hand and he can at once use them for the work demanding his
attention. Thus should the physical vehicle be ready always to answer to
the call of the mind.
The
result of such continued working on the physical body will be by no means
exhausted in the improved capacity of the brain. For every impulse sent to
the physical body has had to pass through the astral vehicle, and has
produced an effect upon it also. For, as we have seen, astral matter is
far more responsive to thought-vibrations than is physical, and the effect
on the astral body of the course of action we have been considering is
proportionally great. Under it the astral body assumes a definite outline,
a well-organized condition, such as has already been described. When a man
has learned to dominate the brain, when he has learned concentration, when
he is able to think as he likes and when he likes, a corresponding
development takes place in what - if he be physically conscious of it - he
will regard as his dream-life. His dreams will become vivid,
well-sustained, rational, even instructive. The man is beginning to
function in the second of his vehicles of consciousness, the astral body,
is entering the second great region or plane of consciousness, and is
acting there in the astral vehicle apart from the physical. Let us for a
moment consider the difference between two men both
"wide-awake," i.e., functioning in the [100] physical
vehicle, one of whom is only using his astral body unconsciously as a
bridge between the mind and the brain, and the other of whom is using it
consciously as a vehicle. The first sees in the ordinary and very limited
way, his astral body not yet being an effective vehicle of consciousness;
the second uses the astral vision, and is no longer limited by physical
matter; he sees through all physical bodies, he sees behind well as in
front, walls and other "opaque" substances are to him
transparent as glass; he sees astral forms and colours also, auras,
elementals, and so on. If he goes to a concert he sees glorious symphonies
of colours as the music swells; to a lecture, he sees the speaker's
thoughts in colour and form, and so gains a much more complete
representation of his thoughts than is possible to one who hears only the
spoken words. For the thoughts that issue in symbols as words go out also
as coloured and musical forms, and clothed in astral matter impress
themselves on the astral body. Where the consciousness is fully awake in
that body, it receives and registers the whole of these additional
impressions, and many persons will find, if they closely examine
themselves, that they do catch from a speaker a good deal more than the
mere words convey, even though they may not have been aware of it at the
time when they were listening. Many will find in their memory more than
the speaker uttered; sometimes a kind [101] suggestion
continuing the thought, as though something rose up round the words and
made them mean more than they meant to the ear. This experience shows that
the astral vehicle is developing, and as the man pays attention to his
thinking and unconsciously uses the astral body, it grows and becomes more
and more organized.
The
"unconsciousness" of people during sleep is due either to the
undevelopment of the astral body, or to the absence of connecting
conscious links between it and the physical brain. A man uses his astral
body during his waking consciousness, sending mind-currents through the
astral to the physical brain; but when the physical brain is not in active
use, the brain through which the man is in the habit of receiving
impressions from without, he is like David in the armor which he had not
proved: he is not so receptive to impressions coming to him only through
the astral body, to the independent use of which he is not yet accustomed.
Further, he may learn to use it independently on the astral plane, and yet
not know that he has been using it when he returns to the physical -
another stage in the slow progress of the man - and he thus begins to
employ it in its own world, before he can make connection between that
world and the world below. Lastly, he makes those connections and then he
passes in full consciousness from the use of one vehicle to-the use of the
other, and is free of[102] the
astral world. He has definitely enlarged the area of his waking
consciousness to include the astral plane, and while in the physical body
his astral senses are entirely at his service, he may be said to be living
at one and the same time in the two worlds, there being no break, no gulf
between them, and he walks the physical world as a man born blind, whose
eyes have been opened.
In
the next stage of his evolution, the man begins to work consciously on the
third, or mental plane; he has long been working on this plane, sending
down from it all the thoughts that take such active form in the astral
world and find expression in the physical world through the brain. As he
becomes conscious in the mind body, in his mental vehicle, he finds that
when he is thinking he is creating forms; he becomes conscious of the
creative act, though he has long been exercising the power unconsciously.
The reader may remember that in one of the letters quoted in the Occult
World, a Master speaks of everyone as making thought-forms but draws the
distinction between the ordinary man and the Adept, that the ordinary man
produces them unconsciously, while the Adept produces them consciously.
(The word Adept is here used in a very wide sense to include Initiates of
various grades far below that of a "Master".) At this stage of a
man's development his powers of usefulness very largely increase, for when
he can consciously create and direct a thought-form - an [103] artificial
elemental, as it is often called - he can use it to do work in places to
which, at the moment, it may not be convenient for him to travel in his
mind body. Thus he can work at a distance as well as at hand, and increase
his usefulness; he controls these thought-forms from a distance, watching
and guiding them as they work, and making them the agents of his will. As
the mind body develops, and the man lives and works in it consciously, he
knows all the wider and greater life he lives on the mental plane; while
he remains in the physical body and is conscious through that of his
physical surroundings, he is yet wide-awake and active in the higher
world, and he does not need to put the physical body to sleep in order to
enjoy the use of the higher faculties. He habitually employs the mental
sense, receiving by it impressions of every kind from the mental plane, so
that all the mental workings of others are sensed by him as he senses
their bodily movements.
When
the man has reached this stage of development - a relatively high one,
compared with the average, though low when compared with that to which he
aspires - he functions then consciously in his third vehicle, or mind
body, traces out all he does in it, and experiences its powers and its
limitations. Of necessity, also, he learns to distinguish between this
vehicle he uses and himself; then he feels the illusory character of the
personal "I", the "I" of the mind body and not [104] of
the man, and he consciously identifies himself with the individuality that
resides in that higher body, the causal, which dwells on the loftier
mental planes, those of the arūpa world. He finds that he, the man, can
withdraw himself from the mind body, can leave it behind, and, rising
higher, yet remain himself; then he knows the many lives are in verity but
one life, and that he, the living man, remains himself through all.
And
now as to the links - the links between these different bodies. They exist
at first without coming into the consciousness of the man. They are there,
otherwise he could not pass from the plane of the mind to that of the
body, but he is not conscious of their existence, and they are not
actively vivified, they are almost like what are called in the physical
body rudimentary organs. Every student of biology knows that rudimentary
organs are of two kinds: one kind affords the traces of the stages through
which the body has passed in evolution, while the other gives hints of the
lines of future growth. These organs exist but they do not function; their
activity in the physical body is either of the past or of the future, dead
or unborn. The links which I venture by analogy to call rudimentary organs
of the second kind, connect the dense and etheric bodies with the astral,
the astral with the mind body, the mind body with the causal. They exist,
but they have to be brought into activity; that is, [105] they
have to be developed, and, like their physical types, they can only be
developed by use. The life-current flows through them, the mind-current
flows through them, and thus they are kept alive and nourished; but they
are only gradually brought into functioning activity as the man fixes his
attention on them and brings his will to bear on their development. The
action of the will begins to vivify these rudimentary links, and, step by
step, very slowly perhaps, they begin to function; the man begins to use
them for the passage of his consciousness from vehicle to vehicle.
In
the physical body there are nervous centres, little groups of nervous
cells, and both impacts from without and impulses from the brain pass
through these centres. If one of these is out of order, then at once
disturbances arise and physical consciousness is disturbed. There are
analogous centres in the astral body, but in the undeveloped man they are
rudimentary and do not function. These are links between the physical and
the astral bodies, between the astral and the mind bodies, and as
evolution proceeds they are vivified by the will, setting free and guiding
the "serpent-fire", called Kundalini in Indian books. The
preparatory stage for the direct action that liberates Kundalini is the
training and purifying of the vehicles, for if this be not thoroughly
accomplished, the fire is a destructive instead of a vivifying energy.
That is why we have laid [106] so
much stress on purification and urge it as a necessary preliminary for all
true Yoga.
When
a man has rendered himself fit to safely receive assistance in the
vivifying of these links, such assistance comes to him as a matter of
course from those who are ever seeking opportunity to aid the earnest and
the unselfish aspirant. Then, one day, the man finds himself slipping out
of the physical body while he is wide-awake, and without any break in
consciousness he discovers himself to be free. When this has occurred a
few times the passage from vehicle to vehicle becomes familiar and easy.
When the astral body leaves the physical in sleep, there is a brief period
of unconsciousness, and even when the man is functioning actively on the
astral plane he fails to bridge over that unconsciousness on his return.
Unconscious as he leaves the body, he will probably be unconscious as he
re-enters it; there may be full and vivid consciousness on the astral
plane, and yet a complete blank may be all that represents it in the
physical brain. But when the man leaves the body in waking consciousness,
having developed the links between the vehicles into functional activity,
he has bridged the gulf; for him it is a gulf no longer, and his
consciousness passes swiftly from one plane to the other, and he knows
himself as the same man on both.
The
more the physical brain is trained to answer to the vibrations from the
mind body, the more is the [107] bridging
of the gulf between day and night facilitated. The brain becomes more and
more the obedient instrument of the man, carrying on its activities under
the impulses from his will, and like a well-broken horse answering to the
lightest touch of hand or knee. The astral world lies open to the man who
has thus unified the two lower vehicles of consciousness, and it belongs
to him with all its possibilities, with all its wider powers, its greater
opportunities of doing service and of rendering help. Then comes the joy
of carrying aid to sufferers who are unconscious of the agent though they
feel the relief, of pouring balm into wounds that then seem to heal of
themselves, of lifting burdens that become miraculously light to the
aching shoulders on which they pressed so heavily.
More
than this is needed to bridge over the gulf between life and life; to
carry memory through day and night unbrokenly merely means that the astral
body is functioning perfectly, and that the links between it and the
physical are in full working order. If a man is to bridge over the gulf
between life and life he must do very much more than act in full
consciousness in the astral body, and more than act consciously in the
mind body; for the mind body is composed of the materials of the lower
planes of the mānasic world, and reincarnation does not take place from
them. The mind body disintegrates in due course, like the astral and
physical [108] vehicles,
and cannot carry anything across. The whole question on which memory of
past lives turns is this: Can the man, or can he not, function on the
higher planes of the mānasic world in his causal body? It is the causal
body that passes from life to life: it is in the causal body that
everything is stored; it is in the causal body that all experience
remains, for into it the consciousness is drawn up, and from its plane is
the descent made into rebirth. Let us follow the stages of the life out of
the physical world, and see how far the sway of King Death extends. The
man draws himself away from the dense part of the physical body; it drops
off him, goes to pieces, and is restored to the physical world; nothing
remains in which the magnetic link of memory can inhere. He is then in the
etheric part of the physical body, but in the course of a few hours he
shakes that off, and it is resolved into its elements. No memory, then,
connected with the etheric brain will help him to bridge the gulf. He
passes on into the astral world, remaining there till he similarly shakes
off his astral body, and leaves it behind as he had left the physical; the
"astral corpse," in its turn, disintegrates, restores its
materials to the astral world, and breaks up all that might serve as basis
for the magnetic links necessary for memory. He goes onward in his mind
body and dwells in the rūpa levels of Devachan, living there for hundreds
of years, working up faculties, enjoying [109] fruit.
But from this mind body also he withdraws when the time is ripe, taking
from it to carry on into the body that endures the essence of all that he
has gathered and assimilated. He leaves the mind body behind him, to
disintegrate after the fashion of his denser vehicles, for the matter of
it - subtle as it is from our standpoint - is not subtle enough to pass
onward to the higher planes of the mānasic world. It has to be shaken
off, to be left to go back into the materials of its own region, once more
a resolution of the combination into its elements. All the way up the man
is shaking off body after body, and only on reaching the arūpa planes of
the mānasic world can he be said to have passed beyond the regions over
which the disintegrating sceptre of Death has sway. He passes finally out
of his dominions, dwelling in the causal body over which Death has no
power, and in which he stores up all that he has gathered. Hence its very
name of causal body, since all causes that affect future incarnations
reside in it. He must then begin to act in full consciousness on the
arūpa levels of the mānasic world in his causal body ere he can bring
memory across the gulf of death. An undeveloped soul, entering that lofty
region, cannot keep consciousness there; he enters it, carrying up all the
germs of his qualities; there is a touch, a flash of consciousness
embracing past and future, and the dazzled Ego sinks downwards towards
rebirth. He [110] carries
the germs in this causal body and throws outward on each plane those that
belong to it; they gather to themselves matters severally befitting them.
Thus on the rūpa levels of the lower mānasic world the mental germs draw
round them the matter of those levels to form the new mind body, and the
matter thus gathered shows the mental characteristics given to it by the
germ within it, as the acorn develops into an oak by gathering into it
suitable materials from soil and atmosphere. The acorn cannot develop into
a birch or a cedar, but only into an oak, and so the mental germ must
develop after its own nature and none other. Thus does Karma work in the
building of the vehicles, and the man has the harvest of which he sowed
the seed. The germ thrown out from the causal body can only grow after its
kind, attracting to itself the grade of matter that belongs to it,
arranging that matter in its characteristic form, so that it produces the
replica of the quality the man made in the past. As he comes into the
astral world, the germs are thrown out that belong to that world, and they
draw round themselves suitable astral materials and elemental essences.
Thus reappear the appetites, emotions and passions belonging to the desire
body, or astral body, of the man, reformed in this fashion on his arrival
on the astral plane. If, then, consciousness of past lives is to remain,
carried through all these processes and all these worlds it must exist
in [111] full
activity on that high plane of causes, the plane of the causal body.
People do not remember their past lives because they are not yet conscious
in the causal body as a vehicle; it has not developed functional activity
of its own. It is there, the essence of their lives, their real
"I", that from which all proceeds, but it does not yet actively
function: it is not yet self-conscious, though unconsciously active, and
until it is self-conscious, fully self-conscious, the memory cannot pass
from plane to plane and therefore from life to life. As the man advances,
flashes of consciousness break forth that illumine fragments of the past,
but these flashes need to change to a steady light ere any consecutive
memory can arise.
It
may be asked: Is it possible to encourage the recurrence of such flashes?
Is it possible for people to hasten this gradually growing activity of
consciousness on the higher planes? The lower man may labour to this end,
if he has patience and courage; he may try to live more and more in the
permanent self, to withdraw thought and energy more and more, so far as
interest is concerned, from the trivialities and impermanences of ordinary
life. I do not mean that a man should become dreamy, abstracted and
wandering, a most inefficient member of the home and of society; on the
contrary, every claim that the world has on him will be discharged, and
discharged the more perfectly because of the greatness [112] of
the man who is doing it; he cannot do things as clumsily and imperfectly
as the less developed man may do them, for to him duty is duty, and as
long as anyone or anything has a claim upon him, the debt must be paid to
the uttermost farthing; every duty will be fulfilled as perfectly as he
can fulfill it, with his best faculties, his best attention. But his
interest will not be in these things, his thoughts will not be bound to
their results; the instant that the duty is performed and he is released
his thought will fly back to the permanent life, will rise to the higher
level with upward-striving energy, and he will begin to live there and to
rate at their true worthlessness the trivialities of the worldly life. As
he steadily does this, and seeks to train himself to high and abstract
thinking, he will begin to vivify the higher links in consciousness and
bring into this lower life the consciousness that is himself.
A
man is one and the same man on whatever plane he may be functioning, and
his triumph is when he functions on all the five planes in unbroken
consciousness. Those whom we call the Masters, the "Men made
perfect," function in Their waking consciousness, not only on the
three lower planes, but on the fourth plane - that plane of unity spoken
of in the Māndūkyopanishad as the Turīya, and on that yet
above it, the plane of Nirvana. In them evolution is completed, this cycle
has been trodden to its close, and what they are, all in time [113] shall
be who are climbing slowly upwards. This is the unification of
consciousness; the vehicles remain for use, but no longer are able to
imprison, and the man uses any one of his bodies according to the work
that he has to do.
In
this way matter, time and space are conquered, and their barriers cease to
exist for the unified man. He has found in climbing upwards that there are
less and less barriers in each stage: even on the astral plane, matter is
much less of a division than it is down here, separating him from his
brothers far less effectually. Traveling in the astral body is so swift
that space and time may be said to be practically conquered, for although
the man knows he is passing through space it is passed through so rapidly
that its power to divide friend from friend is lost. Even that first
conquest sets at nought physical distance. When he rose to the mental
world he found another power his; he thought of a place: he was there; he
thought of a friend: the friend was before him. Even on the third plane
consciousness transcends the barriers of matter, space and time, and is
present anywhere at will. All things that are seen are seen at once, the
moment attention is turned to them; all that is heard is heard at a single
impression; space, matter and time, as known in the lower worlds, have
disappeared, sequence no longer exists in the "eternal now." As
he rises yet higher, [114] barriers
within consciousness also fall away, and knows himself to be one with
other consciousness other living things; he can think as they think, feel
as they feel, know as they know. He can make their limitations his for the
moment, in order that he can understand exactly how they are thinking, and
yet have his own consciousness. He can use his own great knowledge for the
helping of the narrower and more restricted thought, identifying himself
with it in order gently to enlarge its bounds. He takes on altogether new
functions in nature when he is no longer divided from others, but realizes
the Self that is one in all and sends down his energies from the plane of
unity. With regard even to the lower animals he is able to feel how the
world exists to them, so that he can give exactly the help they need, and
can supply the aid after which they are blindly groping. Hence his
conquest is not for himself but for all, and he wins wider powers only to
place them at the service of all lower in the scale evolution than
himself; in this way he becomes self-conscious in all the world; for this
he learns to be responsive to every cry of pain, to every throb of joy or
sorrow. All is reached, all is gained, and the Master is the man "who
has nothing more to learn." By this we mean not that all possible
knowledge is at any given moment within His consciousness, but that so far
as this stage of evolution is concerned there is nothing that to [115] Him
is veiled, nothing of which He does not become fully conscious when He
turns His attention to it; within this circle of evolution of everything
that lives - and all things live - there is nothing He cannot understand,
and therefore nothing that He cannot help.
That
is the ultimate triumph of man. All that I have spoken of would be
worthless, trivial, were it gained for the narrow self we recognize as
self down here; all the steps, my reader, to which I have been trying to
win you would not be worth the taking did they set you at last on an
isolated pinnacle, apart from all the sinning, suffering selves, instead
of leading you to the heart of things, where they and you are one. The
consciousness of the Master stretches itself out in any direction in which
He sends it, assimilates itself with any point to which He directs it,
knows anything which He wills to know; and all this in order that He may
help perfectly, that there may be nothing that He cannot feel, nothing
that He cannot foster, nothing that He cannot strengthen, nothing that He
cannot aid in its evolution; to Him the whole world is one vast evolving
whole, and His place in it is that of a helper of evolution; He is able to
identify Himself with any step, and at that step to give the aid that is
needed. He helps the elementary kingdoms to evolve downwards, and, each in
its own way, the evolutions of the minerals, plants, animals and men, and
He helps them all as Himself. [116] For
the glory of His life is that all is Himself and yet He can aid all, in
the very helping realizing as Himself that which He aids.
The
mystery how this can be gradually unfolds itself as man develops, and
consciousness widens to embrace more and more while yet becoming more
vivid, more vital, and without losing knowledge of itself. When the
point has become the sphere, the sphere finds itself to be the point;
each point contains everything and knows itself one with every other
point; the outer is found be only the reflection of the inner; the
Reality is the One Life, and the difference an illusion that is
overcome. [117]
Copyright © 2003-2009 Ronald B. Tiggle, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
Revised: August 22, 2009
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