Theosophical Manual No. 1
The Seven Principles of Man
by
Annie
Besant
Revised
and corrected edition
1909
The Theosophical Publishing Society,
161 New Bond Street, W., London, England
PREFACE
Few words are needed in sending this little book out into the world. It is
the first of a series of Manuals designed to meet the public demand a simple
exposition of Theosophical teachings. Some have complained that our literature
is at once too abstruse, too technical, and too expensive for the ordinary
reader, and it is our hope that the present series may succeed in supplying
what is a very real want. Theosophy is not only for the learned; it is for
all. It may be that among those who in these little books catch their first
glimpse of its teachings, there may be a few who will be led by them to penetrate
more deeply into its philosophy, its science, and its religion, facing its
abstruser problems with the student's zeal and the neophyte's ardour. But these
Manuals are not written for the eager student whom no initial difficulties
can daunt; they are written for the busy men and women of the work-a-day world
and seek to make plain some of the great truths that render life easier to
bear and death easier to face. Written by servants of the Masters who are the
Elder Brothers of our race, they can have no other object than to serve our
fellowmen.
ANNIE BESANT
Inquirers
attracted to Theosophy by its central doctrine of the brotherhood of man,
and by the hopes which it holds out of wider knowledge and of spiritual
growth, are apt to be repelled when they make their first attempt to come
into closer acquaintance with it, by the, to them, strange and puzzling
names which flow glibly from the lips of Theosophists in conference assembled.They
hear a tangle of Âtma-Buddhi, Kâma-Manas, Triad, Devachan, and what not,
and feel at once that for them Theosophy is far too abstruse a study. Yet
they might have become very good Theosophists, had not their initial enthusiasm
been quenched with the douche of Sanskrit terms. In the present
manual the smoking flax shall be more tenderly treated, and but few Sanskrit
names shall be flung in the face of the enquirer. As
a matter of fact, the use of these terms has become general among Theosophists
because the English language has no equivalents for them, and a long and
clumsy sentence has to be used in their stead if the idea is to be conveyed
at all. The initial trouble of learning the names has been preferred to
the continued trouble of using roundabout descriptive phrases – “Kâma”,
for instance, being shorter and more precise than “the passional and emotional
part of our nature”. [Page
2]
Man according
to the Theosophical teaching is a sevenfold being, or, in the usual phrase,
has a septenary constitution. Putting it in another way, man’s nature has
seven aspects, may be studied from seven different points of view, is composed
of seven principles. The clearest and best way of all in which to think of
man is to regard him as one, the Spirit or True Self; this belongs to the
highest region of the universe, and is universal, the same for all; it is
a ray of God, a spark from the divine fire. This is to become an individual,
reflecting the divine perfection, a son that grows into the likeness of his
father. For this
purpose the Spirit, or true Self, is clothed in garment after garment, each
garment belonging to a definite region of the universe, and enabling the
Self to come into contact with that region, gain knowledge of it, and work
in it. It thus gains experience, and all its latent potentialities are gradually
drawn out into active powers. These garments, or sheaths, are distinguishable
from each other both theoretically and practically. If
a man be looked at clairvoyantly each is distinguishable by the eye, and
they are separable each from each either during physical life or at death,
according to the nature of any particular sheath. Whatever words may be used,
the fact remains the same – that he is essentially sevenfold, an evolving
being, part of whose nature has already been manifested, part remaining latent
at present, so far as the vast majority of humankind is concerned. Man’s
consciousness is able to function through as many of these aspects as have
been already evolved in him into activity.
This evolution,
during the present cycle of human development, takes place on five out of
seven planes of [Page
3 ] nature. The two higher planes – the sixth and seventh – will
not be reached, save in the most exceptional cases, by men of this humanity
in the present cycle, and they may therefore be left out of sight for our
present purpose.As, however, some confusion has arisen as to the seven planes
through differences of nomenclature, two diagrams are given at the end of
this treatise showing the seven planes as they exist in our division of the
universe, in correspondence with the vaster planes of the universe as a whole,
and also the subdivision of the five into seven, as they are represented
in some of our literature . A“plane” is merely a condition, a stage, a state;
so that we might describe man as fitted by his nature, when that nature is
fully developed, to exist consciously in seven different conditions, or seven
different stages, in seven different states; or technically, on seven different
planes of being. To take an easily verified illustration: a man may be conscious
on the physical plane, that is, in his physical body, feeling hunger and
thirst, and pain of a blow or cut. But let the man be a soldier in the heat
of battle, and his consciousness will be centred in his passions and emotions,
and he may suffer a wound without knowing it, his consciousness being away
from the physical plane and acting on the plane of passions and emotions:
when the excitement is over, consciousness will pass back to the physical,
and he will “feel” the pain of his wound. Let the man be a philosopher, and
as he ponders over some knotty problem he will lose all consciousness of
bodily wants, of emotions, of love and hatred; his consciousness will have
passed to the plane of intellect, he will be “abstracted”, i.e.., drawn
away from considerations pertaining to his bodily life, and fixed on the
plane [Page 4
] of thought. Thus may a man live on these several planes,
in these several conditions, one part or another of his nature being thrown
into activity at any given time; and an understanding of what man is, of
his nature, his powers, his possibilities, will be reached more easily and
assimilated more usefully if he is studied along these clearly defined lines,
that if he be left without analysis, a mere confused bundle of qualities
and states.
It has also
been found convenient, having regard to man’s mortal and immortal life, to
put these seven principles into two groups – one containing the three higher
principles and therefore called the Triad, the other containing the four
lower, and therefore called the Quaternary. The Triad is the deathless part
of man’s nature, the “spirit” and soul of Christian terminology; the Quaternary
is the mortal part, the “body”, of Christianity.This
division into body, soul and spirit is used by St. Paul, and is recognised
in all careful Christian philosophy, although generally ignored by the mass
of Christian people. In ordinary parlance soul and body make up the man,
and the words soul and spirit are used interchangeably, with much confusion
of thought as the result.This
looseness is fatal to any clear view of the constitution of man, and the
Theosophist may well appeal to the Christian philosopher as against the causal
Christian non-thinker if it be urged that he is making distinctions difficult
to be grasped. No philosophy worthy of the name can be stated even in the
most elementary fashion without making some demand on the intelligence and
the attention of the would be learner, and carefulness in the use of terms
is a condition of all knowledge.[Page
5]
PRINCIPLE
- 1 -
THE DENSE PHYSICAL BODY
The dense
physical body of man is called the first of his seven principles, as it is
certainly the most obvious. Built of material molecules, in the generally
accepted sense of the term – with its five organs of sensation - the five
senses - its organs of locomotion, its brain and nervous system, its apparatus
for carrying on the various functions necessary for its continued existence,
there is little to be said about this physical body in so slight a sketch
as this of the constitution of man . Western science
is almost ready to accept the Theosophical view that the human organism consists
of innumerable “lives”, which build up the cells. H.P.Blavatsky says on this: “Science
has never yet gone so far as to assert with the Occult doctrine that our
bodies, as well as those of animals, plants, and stones, are themselves altogether
built up of such beings [bacteria, etc.]: which, with the exception of the
larger species, no microscope can detect ….The physical and chemical constituents
of all being found to be identical, chemical science may well say that there
is no difference between the matter which composes the ox and that which
forms the man. But the Occult doctrine is far more explicit. It says: Not
only the chemical compounds are the same, but the same infinitesimal invisible lives
compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the daisy, of man and
the ant, of the elephant and [Page
6 ] of the tree which shelters him from the sun. Each particle – whether
you call it organic or inorganic – is a life. Every atom and molecule
in the universe is both life-giving and death-giving to such forms
(Secret Doctrine, vol. I, p. 281, new edition). The microbes thus “build
up the material body and its cells”, under the constructive energy of vitality – a
phrase that will be explained when we come to deal with “life”, as the Third
Principle, and with these microbes as part of it. When the “life” is no longer
supplied the microbes “are left to run riot as destructive agents”, and they
break up and disintegrate the cells which they built, and so the body goes
to pieces.
The purely
physical consciousness is the consciousness of the cells and the molecules.
The selective action of the cells, taking from the blood what they need,
rejecting what they do not need, is an instance of this self consciousness.
The process goes on without the help of our consciousness or volition. Again
that which is called by physiologists unconscious memory is the memory of
the physical consciousness, unconscious to us indeed, until we have learned
to transfer our brain consciousness there. What we feel is not what the cells
feel. The pain of a wound is felt by the brain-consciousness, acting,
as before said, on the physical plane; but the consciousness of the molecule,
as of the aggregation of molecules we call cells, leads it to hurry to the
repair of the damaged tissues – actions of which the brain is unconscious – and
its memory makes it repeat the same act again and again, even when it has
become unnecessary. Hence cicatrices on wounds, scars, callosities, etc.
The student may find many details on this subject in physiological treatises.[Page
7]
The death of the dense physical body occurs when the withdrawal of the controlling
life-energy leaves the microbes to go their own way, and the many lives, no
longer co-ordinated, separate from each other and scatter the particles of
the cells of “the man of dust”, and what we call decay sets in. The body becomes
a whirlpool of unrestrained, unregulated lives, and its form, which resulted
from their correlation, is destroyed by their exuberant individual energy.
Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is
but a prelude to building up of another.[Page 8]
PRINCIPLE
-2-
THE ETHERIC DOUBLE
The Linga
Sharira , the astral body, the ethereal body, the fluidic body, the double,
the wraith, the döppelganger, the astral man – such are a few of the
many names which have been given to the second principle in man’s constitution.
The best name is the Etheric Double, because this term designates the second
principle only, suggesting its constitution and appearance: whereas the other
names have been used somewhat generally to describe bodies formed of some
more subtle matter than that which affects our physical senses, without regard
to the question whether other principles were or were not involved in their
construction. I shall therefore use this name throughout.
The etheric
double is formed of matter rarer or more subtle than that which is perceptible
to our five senses, but still matter belonging to the physical plane, to
which its functioning is confined. It is the state of physical matter which
is just beyond our “solid , liquid and gas”, which form the dense portions
of the physical plane.
This etheric
double is the exact double or counterpart of the dense physical body to which
it belongs, and is separable from it, although unable to go very far away
therefrom. In normal healthy human beings the separation is a matter of difficulty,
but in persons [Page 9] known as physical
or materialising mediums, the ethereal double slips out without any great
effort. When separated from the dense body it is visible to the clairvoyant
as an exact replica thereof, united to it by a slender thread. So
close is the physical union between the two that an injury inflicted on the
etheric double appears as a lesion on the dense body, a fact known under
the name of repercussion. A. d’Assier, in his well known work – translated by
Colonel Olcott, the President-Founder of the Theosophical Society, under
the title of Posthumous Humanity – gives a number of cases (see p.
51-57) in which this repercussion took place.
Separation
of the etheric double from the dense body is generally accompanied by a considerable
decrease in vitality in the latter, the double becoming more vitalised as
the energy in the dense body diminishes. Colonel Olcott says (page 63):
“ When the double is projected by a trained expert, even the body
seems torpid, and the mind in a ‘brown study’ or dazed state; the eyes are
lifeless in expression, the heart and lung actions feeble, and often the
temperature much lowered. It is very dangerous to make any sudden noise or
burst into the room, under such circumstances; for the double, being by instantaneous
reaction drawn back into the body, the heart convulsively contracts, and
death may even be caused.”
In the case of Emilie
Sagée (quoted on page 62-65) the girl was noticed to look pale and exhausted
when the double was visible: “the more distinct the double and more material
in appearance, the really material person was effectively wearied, suffering
and languid; when on the contrary, the appearance of the [Page
10] double weakened, the patient was seen to recover strength.”This
phenomenon is perfectly intelligible to the Theosophical student, who knows that
the etheric double is the vehicle of the life-principle, or vitality, in the
physical body, and that its partial withdrawal must therefore diminish the energy,
with which this principle plays on the denser molecules. Clairvoyants,
such as the Seeress of Prevorst, state that they can see the ethereal arm or
leg attached to a body from which the dense limb has been amputated, and D’Assier
remarks on this: -
“Whilst I was
absorbed in physiological studies, I was often arrested by a singular fact.
It sometimes happens that a person who has lost an arm or leg experiences
certain sensations at the extremities of the fingers and toes. Physiologists
explain this anomaly by postulating in the patient an inversion of sensitiveness
or of recollection, which makes him locate in the hand or the foot the sensation
with which the nerve of the stump is alone affected …I confess that these
explanations seemed to me laboured and have never satisfied me. When I studied
the problem of the duplication of man, the question of amputations recurred
to my mind, and I asked myself if it was not more simple and logical to attribute
the anomaly of which I have spoken to the doubling of the human body, which
by its fluid nature can escape amputation” (loc. Cit., p. 103-104)
.
The etheric
double plays a great part in spiritualistic phenomena. Here again the clairvoyant
can help us. A clairvoyant can see the etheric double oozing out of the left
side of the medium, and it is this which often appears as the “materialised
spirit,” easily moulded into various shapes by the thought-currents of the
sitters, and gaining strength and vitality as the medium sinks into a deep
trance. The Countess Wachtmeister, who is clairvoyant, says she has seen
the same [Page 11] “spirit” recognised
as that of a near relative or friend by different sitters, each of whom saw
it according to his expectations, while to her own eyes it was the mere double
of the medium.So
again, H.P.Blavatsky told me that when she was at the Eddy homestead, watching
the remarkable series of phenomena there produced, she deliberately moulded
the “spirit” that appeared into the likenesses of persons known to herself
and to no one else present, and the other sitters saw the types which she
produced by her own will-power, moulding the plastic matter of the medium’s
etheric double.
Many of the movements of objects that occur at such séances, and at other
times, without visible contact, are due to the action of the etheric double,
and the student can learn how to produce such phenomena at will. They are
trivial enough: the mere putting out of the etheric hand is no more important
than the putting out of the dense counterpart, and neither more or less miraculous.
Some persons produce such phenomena unconsciously, mere aimless overturnings
of objects, making of noises, and so on: they have no control over their
etheric double, and it just blunders about in their near neighbourhood, like
a baby trying to walk.For the etheric
double, like the dense body, has only a diffused consciousness belonging to
its parts, and has no mentality. Nor does it readily serve as a medium of mentality,
when disjoined from the dense counterpart.
This leads to and interesting point. The centres of sensation are located in
the fourth principle, which may be said to form a bridge between the physical
organs and the mental perceptions; impressions from [Page
12] the physical universe impinge on the material molecules
of the dense physical body, setting in vibration the constituent cells of the
organs of sensations, or our “senses”. These
vibrations, in their turn, set in motion the finer material molecules of the
etheric double, in the corresponding sense organs of its finer matter. From
these vibrations pass to the astral body, or fourth principle, presently to
be considered, wherein are the corresponding centres of sensation.From
these vibrations are again propagated into the yet rarer matter of the lower
mental plane, whence they are reflected back until, reaching the material molecules
of the cerebral hemispheres, they become our “brain consciousness”. This correlated
and unconscious succession is necessary for the normal action of consciousness
as we know it. In
sleep and in trance, natural or induced, the first two and the last stages
are generally omitted, and the impressions start from and return to the astral
plane, and thus make no trace on the brain memory; but the natural or trained
psychic, the clairvoyant who does not need trance for the exercise of his powers,
is able to transfer his consciousness from the physical to the astral plane
without losing grip thereof, and can impress the brain-memory with knowledge
gained on the astral plane, so retaining it for use.
Death means
for the etheric double just what it means for the dense physical body, the
breaking up of its constituent parts, the dissipation of its molecules. The
vehicle of the vitality that animates the bodily organism as a whole, it
oozes forth from the body when the death hour comes, and is seen by the clairvoyant
as a violet light, or violet form, hovering over the dying person, still
attached to the physical body by [Page 13] the
slender thread before spoken of. When the thread snaps, the last breath has
quivered outwards, and the bystanders whisper “He is dead”.
The etheric double, being of physical matter, remains in the neighbourhood
of the corpse, and is the “wraith”, or “apparition”, or “phantom”, sometimes
seen at the moment of death and afterwards by persons near the place where
the death has occurred. It disintegrates slowly pari passu with its
dense counterpart, and its remnants are seen by sensitives in cemeteries and
church yards as violet lights hovering over graves. Here
is one of the reasons which render cremation preferable to burial as a mode
of disposing of the physical enveloped of man; the fire dissipates in a few
hours the molecules which would otherwise be set free only in the slow course of
gradual putrefaction, and thus quickly restores to their own plane the dense
and etheric materials, ready for use once more in the building up of new forms. [Page
14]
PRINCIPLE
-3-
PRÂNA, THE LIFE
All universes,
all worlds, all men, all brutes, all vegetables, all minerals, all molecules
and atoms, all that is, are plunged in a great ocean of life, life
eternal, life infinite, life incapable of increase or diminution. The universe
is only life in manifestation, life made objective, life differentiated.
Now each organism, whether minute as a molecule or vast as a universe, may
be thought of as appropriating to itself somewhat of life, of embodying,
in itself as its own life some of this universal life . Figure a living sponge,
stretching itself out in the water which bathes it, envelops it, permeates
it; there is water, still the ocean, circulating in every passage, filling
every pore; but we may think of the ocean outside the sponge, or of part
of the ocean, appropriated by the sponge, distinguishing them in thought
if we want to make statements about each severally.So each organism is a
sponge bathed in the ocean of life universal, and containing within itself
some of that ocean as its own breath of life. In Theosophy we distinguish
this appropriated life under the name Prâna, breath, and call it the third
principle in man’s constitution.
To speak quite accurately, the “breath of life” – that which the Hebrews
termed Nephesh,
or the breath of life breathed into the nostrils of Adam – is not Prâna only,
but Prâna and the fourth principle conjoined. [Page
15] It is these two together that make the “vital spark” (Secret Doctrine,
vol. 1., page 262), and that are the “breath of life in man, as in beast or
insect, or physical, material life” (Secret Doctrine, vol. 1.,
note to page 263).It is “the breath of animal life in man – the breath of life instinctual
in the animal” (Secret Doctrine, vol. 1., diagram page 262) .
But just now we are concerned with Prâna only, with vitality as the animating
principle in all animal and human bodies. Of this life the etheric double is
the vehicle, acting, so to say, as means of communication, as bridge, between
Prâna and the dense body.
Prâna is
explained in the Secret Doctrine as having for its lowest subdivision
the microbes of science; these are the “invisible lives” that build up the
physical cells (se ante, page 8-9); these are the “countless myriads
of lives” that build the “tabernacle of clay”, the physical bodies (Secret
Doctrine vol. 1, page 245). “Science, dimly perceiving the truth, may
find bacteria and other infinitesimals in the human body, and see in them
only, occasional and abnormal visitors to which diseases are attributed .
Occultism – which
discerns a life in every atom and molecule, whether in a mineral or human
body, in air, fire, or water – affirms that our whole body is built of such
lives; the smallest bacterium under the microscope being to them a comparative
size like an elephant to the tiniest infusoria” (ibid., p. 245). The “fiery
lives” are the controllers and directors of these microbes, these invisible
lives, and “indirectly” build, i.e., build by controlling and directing
the microbes, the immediate builders, supplying the latter with what is necessary,
acting as the life of these lives; the “fiery lives” the synthesis, the essence,
of Prâna, are the “vital constructive energy” that enables the [Page
16] microbes to build the physical cells. One of the archaic
commentaries sums up the matter in stately and luminous phrases: “The worlds,
to the profane, are built up of the known elements. To the conception of
an Arhat, these elements are themselves collectively a divine life; distributively,
on the plane of manifestations, the numberless and countless crores – ( a
crore is ten millions) – of lives. Fire alone is ONE, on the plane of the
One Reality; on that of manifested, hence illusive, being, its particles
are fiery lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other
life that they consume. Therefore they are named the Devourers….Every visible
thing in this universe was built by such lives, from conscious and divine
primordial man, down to the unconscious agents that construct matter…..From
the One Life, formless and uncreate, proceeds the universe of lives (Secret
Doctrine, Vol. I, page 269). As in the universe, so in man, and all these
countless lives, all this constructive vitality, all this is summed up by
the Theosophist as Prâna .[Page 17]
PRINCIPLE
-4-
THE DESIRE BODY
In building
up our man we have now reached the principle sometimes described as the animal
soul, in Theosophical parlance Kâma Rűpa, or the desire-body. It belongs
to in constitution, and functions on, the second or astral plane. It includes
the whole body of appetites, passions, emotions, and desires which come under
the head of instincts, sensations, feelings and emotions, in our Western
psychological classification, and are dealt with as a subdivision of mind. In
Western psychology mind is divided – by the modern school – into three main
groups, feelings, will, intellect. Feelings are again divided into sensations
and emotions , and these are divided and subdivided under numerous heads.
Kâma, or desire, includes the whole group of “feelings”, and might be described
as our passional and emotional nature. All
animal needs, such as hunger, thirst, sexual desire, come under it; all passions,
such as love (in its lower sense), hatred, envy, jealousy. It is the desire
for sentient experience, for experience of material joys – “the lust of the
flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life”. This
principle is the most material in our nature, it is the one that binds us
fast to earthly life. “It is not molecularly constituted matter, least of
all the human body, Sthula Sharîra, that is the grossest of all our ‘principles’ but
verily the middle principle, the real animal centre; whereas our body
is [Page 18] but its shell, the irresponsible
factor and medium through which the beast in us acts all its life” ( Secret
Doctrine, vol. I, p. 280-81).
United to
the lower part of Manas, the mind, as Kâma-Manas, it becomes the normal human
brain-intelligence, and that aspect of it will be dealt with presently. Considered
by itself, it remains the brute in us, the “ape and tiger” of Tennyson, the
force which most avails to keep us bound to earth and to stifle in us all
higher longings by the illusions of sense.
Kâma joined
to Prâna is, as we have seen, the “breath of life,” the vital sentient principle
spread over every particle of the body. It is, therefore, the seat of sensation,
that which enables the organs of sensation to function. We have already noted
that the physical organs of sense, the bodily instruments that come into
immediate contact with the external world, are related to the organs of sensation
in the etheric double (ante p. 14).
But these organs would be incapable of functioning did not Prâna make them vibrant
with activity, and their vibrations would remain vibrations only, motion
on the material plane of the physical body, did not Kâma, the principle
of sensation translate the vibration into feeling. Feeling indeed, is consciousness
on the kâmic plane, and when a man is under the dominion of a sensation or
a passion, the Theosophist speaks of him as on the kâmic plane, meaning thereby
that his consciousness is functioning on that plane.For
instance, a tree may reflect rays of light, that is, ethereal vibrations,
and these vibrations striking on the outer eye will set up vibrations in
the physical nerve-cells; these will be propagated as vibrations to the physical
and on to the astral centres, but [Page 19] there
is no sight of the tree until the seat of the sensation is reached,
and Kâma enables us to perceive.
Matter of
the astral plane – including that called elemental essence – is the material
of which the desire-body is composed, and it is the peculiar properties of
this matter which enable it to serve as the sheath in which the Self can
gain experience of sensation. (The constitution of the elemental essence would
lead us too far from an elementary treatise). The
desire–body, or astral body, as it is often called, has the form of a mere
cloudy mass during the earlier stages of evolution, and is incapable of serving
as an independent vehicle of consciousness. During deep sleep it escapes
from the physical body, but remains near it, and the mind within it is almost
as much asleep as the body. It is, however, liable to be affected by forces
of the astral plane akin to its own constitution, and gives rise to dreams
of a sensuous kind.In
a man of average intellectual development the desire-body has become more
highly organised, and when separated from the physical body is seen to resemble
it is outline and features; even then, however, it is not conscious of its
surroundings on the astral plane, but encloses the mind as a shell, within
which the mind may actively function, while not yet able to use it as an
independent vehicle of consciousness. Only
in the highly evolved man does the desire-body become thoroughly organised
and vitalised, as much the vehicle of consciousness on the astral plane as
the physical body is on the physical plane.
After death,
the higher part of man dwells for awhile in the desire-body, the length of
its stay depending on the comparative grossness or delicacy of its constituents.
When the man escapes from it, it persists for a time as [Page
20] a “shell” and when the departed entity is of a low type,
and during earth life infused such mentality as it possessed into the passional
nature, some of this remains entangled with the shell. It
then possesses consciousness of a very low order, has brute cunning, is
without conscience – an altogether objectionable entity, often spoken of
as a “spook.” It strays about, attracted to all places in which animal desires
are encouraged and satisfied, and is drawn into the currents of those whose
animal passions are strong and unbridled. Mediums
of low type inevitably attract these eminently undesirable visitors, whose
fading vitality is reinforced in their séance rooms, who catch astral reflections,
and play the part of “disembodied spirits” of a low order. Nor is this
all; if at such a séance there be present some man or woman of correspondingly
low development, the spook will be attracted to that person, and may attach
itself to him or to her, and thus may be set up currents between the desire-body
of the living person and the dying desire-body of the dead person, generating
results of the most deplorable kind.
The longer
or shorter persistence of the desire-body as a shell or a spook depends on
the greater or less development of the animal and passional nature in the
dying personality. If during earth-life the animal nature was indulged and
allowed to run riot, if the intellectual and spiritual parts of man were
neglected or stifled, then, as the life-currents were set strongly in the
direction of passion, the desire-body will persist for a long period after
the body of the person is dead. Or
again, if earth-life has been suddenly cut short by accident or by suicide,
the link between Kâma and Prâna will not be easily broken, and the desire-body [Page
21] will be strongly vivified. If, on the other hand, desire
has been conquered and bridled during earth-life, if it has been purified
and trained into subservience to man’s higher nature, then there is but little
to energise the desire-body and it will quickly disintegrate and dissolve
away.
There remains
one other fate, terrible in its possibilities, which may befall the fourth
principle, but it cannot be clearly understood until the fifth principle
has been dealt with.[Page 22]
THE
QUATERNARY, OR FOUR LOWER PRINCIPLES
Diagram
of the Quaternary; transitory and mortal; see Secret Doctrine, Volume
I, page 262 [The etheric double is here named the Linga
Sharira, a name now discarded in consequence of the confusion caused by
employing a well-known term in Hindu philosophy in an entirely new sense.
Before her departure H.P.B. urged her pupils to reform the terminology,
which had been too carelessly put together, and we are trying to carry
out her wish.]
We
have thus studied man, as to his lower nature, and have reached the point
in his path of evolution to [Page 23] which
he is accompanied by the brute. The quaternary, regarded alone, ere it is
affected by contact with the mind, is merely a lower animal; it awaits the
coming of the mind to make it man. Theosophy
teaches that through past ages man was thus slowly built up, stage by stage,
principle by principle, until he stood as a quaternary, brooded over but
not in contact with the Spirit, waiting for that mind which could alone enable
him to progress farther, and to come into conscious union with the Spirit,
so fulfilling the very object of his being.This
aeonian evolution, in its slow progression, is hurried through in the personal
evolution of each human being, each principle which was in the course of
ages successively evolved in man on earth, appearing as part of the constitution
of each man at the point of evolution reached at any given time, the remaining
principles being latent, awaiting their gradual manifestation. The
evolution of the quaternary until it reached the point at which further progress
was impossible without mind, is told in eloquent sentences in the archaic
stanzas on which the Secret Doctrine of H.P. Blavatsky is based (breath is,
the Spirit, for which the human tabernacle is to be built; the gross body is
the dense physical body; the spirit of life is Prâna; the mirror
of its body is the etheric double; the vehicle of desires is Kâma):
-
“The Breath needed a form; the Fathers gave it. The Breath needed a gross body;
the Earth moulded it; The Breath needed the Spirit of Life; the Solar Lhas breathed
into it its form. The Breath needed a Mirror of its Body; ‘We gave it our own’,
said the Dhyânis. The Breath needed a Vehicle of Desires; ‘It has it’, said the
Drainer of Waters. But Breath needs a Mind to embrace the Universe; ‘We [Page
24] cannot give that, ‘said the fathers, ‘I never had it ,‘ said
the Spirit of the Earth. ‘The form would be consumed were I to give it mine,’ said
the Great Fire ….Man remained an empty senseless Bhűta” (phantom).
And so is
the personal man without mind. The quaternary alone is not man, the Thinker,
and it is as Thinker that man is really man.
Yet at this point let the student pause, and reflect over the human constitution,
so far as he has gone. For this quaternary is the mortal part of man, and is
distinguished by Theosophy as the personality. It needs to be very clearly
and definitely realised, if the constitution of man is to be understood, and
if the student is to read more advanced treatises with intelligence. True,
to make the personality human it has yet to come under the rays of
mind, and to be illuminated by it as the world by the rays of the sun. But
even without these rays it is a clearly defined entity, with its dense body,
its etheric double, its life, and its desire body or animal soul. It has passions,
but no reason; it has emotions, but no intellect; it has desires, but no rationalised
will; it awaits the coming of its monarch, the mind, the touch which shall
transform it into man.[Page 25]
PRINCIPLE
-5-
MANAS, THE THINKER, OR MIND
We have
reached the most complicated part of our study, and some thought and attention
are necessary from the reader to gain even an elementary idea of the relation
held by the fifth principle to the other principles in man.
The word
Manas comes from the Sanskrit word man, the root of the verb to think;
it is the Thinker in us, spoken of vaguely in the West as mind. I will ask
the reader to regard Manas as Thinker rather than as mind, because the word
Thinker suggests some one who thinks, i.e., an individual, an entity.
And this is exactly the Theosophical idea of Manas, for Manas is the immortal
individual, the real “ I”, that clothes itself over and over again in transient
personalities, and itself endures for ever. It
is described in the Voice of the Silence in
the exhortation addressed to the candidate for initiation: “Have perseverance
as one who doth for evermore endure. Thy shadows [personalities] live and
vanish; that which in thee shall live for ever, that which in thee knows,
for it is knowledge, is not of fleeting life; it is the man that was, that
is, and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike” (p. 31). H.P.Blavatsky
has described it very clearly in the Key to Theosophy: “Try
to imagine a ‘Spirit’, a celestial being, whether we call it by one name
or another, divine in its essential nature, yet not pure enough to be one [Page
26] with the ALL, and having, in order to achieve this, to
so purify its nature as finally to gain that goal. It
can do so only be passing individually and personally, i.e.,
spiritually and physically, through every experience and feeling that exists
in the manifold or differentiated universe. It has, therefore, after having
gained such experience in the lower kingdoms, and having ascended higher
and still higher with every rung on the ladder of being, to pass through
every experience on the human planes. In
its very essence it is Thought, and is, therefore, called in its plurality Manasaputra, ‘the
Sons of (universal) Mind.’ This individualised ‘Thought’ is what
we Theosophists call the real human Ego, the thinking entity imprisoned
in a case of flesh and bones. This is surely a spiritual entity, not matter [that
is, not matter as we know it, on the plane of the objective universe] – and
such entities are the incarnating Egos that inform the bundle of animal matter
called mankind, and whose names are Manasa or minds” (Key
to Theosophy, p. 183-184).
This idea
may be rendered yet clearer perhaps by a hurried glance cast backward over
man’s evolution in the past. When the quaternary had been slowly built up,
it was a fair house without a tenant, and stood empty awaiting the coming
of the one who was to dwell therein.The name Mânasaputra (the sons of mind)
covers many grades of intelligence, ranging from the mighty “Sons of the
Flame” whose human evolution lies far behind them, down to those entities
who gained individualisation in the cycle preceding our own, and were ready
to incarnate on this earth in order to accomplish their human stage of evolution.
Some superhuman [Page 27] intelligences
incarnated as guides and teachers of our infant humanity, and became founders
and divine rulers of the ancient civilisations. Large numbers of the entities
spoken of above, who had already evolved some mental faculties, took up their
abode in the human quaternary, in the mindless men. These are the reincarnating
Mânasaputra, who became the tenants of the human frames as then evolved on
earth, and these same Mânasaputra, reincarnating age after age, are the Reincarnating
Egos, the Manas in us, the persistent individual, the fifth principle in
man.The remainder
of mankind through successive ages received from the loftier Mânasaputra
their first spark of mind, a ray which stimulated into growth the germ of
mind latent within them, the human soul thus having its birth in time there.
It is these differences of age, as we may call them, in the beginning of
the individual life, of the specialisation of the eternal Divine Spirit into
a human soul, which explain the enormous differences in mental capacity found
in our present humanity.
The multiplicity
of names given to this fifth principle has probably tended to increase the
confusion surrounding it in the minds of many who are beginning to study
Theosophy. Mânasaputra is
what we call the historical name, the name that suggests the entrance into
humanity of a class of already individualised souls at a certain point of
evolution; Manas is the ordinary name, descriptive of the intellectual
nature of the principle; the Individual or the “ I ”, or Ego,
recalls the fact that this principle is permanent, does not die, is the individualising
principle, separating itself in thought from all that is not itself, the Subject in
Western terminology as opposed to the Object; the Higher Ego puts
it into contrast with the Personal Ego, of which [Page
28] something is to be presently said .The Reincarnating
Ego lays stress on the fact that it is the principle that reincarnates
continually, and so unites in its own experience all the lives passed through
on earth. There are various other names, but they will not be met with in
elementary treatises.The
above are those most often encountered, and there is no real difficulty about
them, but when they are used interchangeably, without explanation, the unhappy
student is apt to tear his hair in anguish, wondering how many principles
he has got hold of, and what relation they bear to each other.
We must now
consider Manas during a single incarnation, which will serve as the type
of all, and we will start when the Ego has been drawn – by causes set a-going
in previous earth-lives – to the family in which is to be born the human
being who is to serve as its next tabernacle. (I do not deal here with reincarnation,
since that great and most essential doctrine of Theosophy must be expounded
separately). The Thinker, then, awaits the building of the “house of life” which
he is to occupy; and now arises a difficulty; himself a spiritual entity
living on the mental or third plane upwards, a plane far higher than that
of the physical universe, he cannot influence the molecules of gross matter
of which his dwelling is built by the direct play upon them of his own most
subtle particles.So, he projects part of his own substance, which clothes
itself with astral matter, and then with the help of etheric matter permeates
the whole nervous system of the yet unborn child, to form, as the physical
apparatus matures, the thinking principle in man. This projection from Manas,
spoken of as its reflection, its shadow, its ray, and by many another descriptive
and allegorical [Page 29] name, is
the lower Manas, in contradistinction to the higher Manas – Manas, during
every period of incarnation, being dual.On
this, H.P.Blavatsky says: “Once imprisoned, or incarnate, their (the Manas)
essence becomes dual; that is to say the rays of the eternal divine
Mind, considered as individual entities, assume a twofold attribute which
is (a) their essential, inherent, characteristic, heaven-aspiring mind (higher
Manas), and (b) the human quality of thinking, or animal cogitation, rationalised
owing to the superiority of the human brain, the Kâma-tending or lower Manas” (Key
to Theosophy, p. 184).
We must now
turn our attention to this lower Manas alone, and see the part which it plays
in the human constitution.
It is engulfed
in the quaternary, and we may regard it as clasping Kâma with one hand, while
with the other it retains its hold on its father, the higher Manas. Whether
it will be dragged down by Kâma altogether and be torn away from the triad
to which by its nature it belongs, or whether it will triumphantly carry
back to its source the purified experiences of its earth-life – that is the
life-problem set and solved in each successive incarnation. During earth-life,
Kâma and the lower Manas are joined together, and are often spoken of conveniently
as Kâma-Manas. Kâma supplies, as we have seen, the animal and passional elements;
the lower Manas rationalises these, and adds the intellectual faculties;
and so we have the brain-mind, the brain-intelligence, i.e., Kâma-Manas
functioning in the brain and nervous system, using the physical apparatus
as its organ on the material plane.In
man these two principles are interwoven during life, and rarely act separately, [Page
30] but the student must realise that “Kâma-Manas“ is not
a new principle, but the interweaving of the fourth with the lower part of
the fifth.
As with a
flame we may light a wick, and the colour of the flame of the burning wick
will depend on the nature of the wick and of the liquid in which it is soaked,
so in each human being the flame of Manas set alight the brain and Kâmic
wick, and the colour of the light from that wick will depend on the Kâmic
nature and the development of the brain-apparatus.If
the Kâmic nature be strong and undisciplined it will soil the pure manasic
light, lending it a lurid tinge and fouling it with noisome smoke. If the
brain-apparatus be imperfect or undeveloped, it will dull the light and prevent
it from shining forth to the outer world. As
was clearly stated by H.P.Blavatsky in her article on “Genius”; “What we
call ‘the manifestations of genius’ in a person are only the more or less
successful efforts of that Ego to assert itself on the outward plane of its
objective form – the man of clay – in the matter-of-fact daily life of the
latter. The Egos
of a Newton, an Aeschylus, or a Shakespeare are of the same essence and
substance as the Egos of a yokel, an ignoramus, a fool, or even an idiot;
and the self-assertion of their informing genii depends on the physiological
and material construction of the physical man. No Ego differs from another
Ego in its primordial or original essence and nature. That
which makes of one mortal a great man and of another a vulgar silly person
is, as said, the quality and make-up of the physical shell or casing, and
the adequacy or inadequacy of brain and body to transmit and give expression
to the light of the real inner man; and this aptness or inaptness
is, in its [Page 31] turn, the result
of Karma.Or, to
use another simile, physical man is the musical instrument, and the Ego the
performing artist. The potentiality of perfect melody of sound is in the
former – the instrument – and no skill of the latter can awaken a faultless
harmony out of a broken or badly made instrument. This
harmony depends on the fidelity of transmission, by word and act, to the
objective plane, of the unspoken divine thought in the very depths of man’s
subjective or inner nature. Physical man may – to follow our simile – be
a priceless Stradivarius, or a cheap and cracked fiddle, or again a mediocrity
between the two, in the hands of the Paganini who ensouls him” (Lucifer November,
1889, p.228).
Bearing in
mind these limitations and idiosyncrasies [Limitations and idiosyncrasies
due to the action of the Ego in previous earth-lives, be it remembered ] imposed
on the manifestations of the thinking principle by the organ through which
it has to function, we shall have little difficulty in following the workings
of the lower Manas in man; mental ability, intellectual strength, acuteness,
subtlety – all these are its manifestations; these may reach as far as what
is often called genius, what H.P. Blavatsky speaks of as “artificial genius,
the outcome of culture and of purely intellectual acuteness”. Its nature
is often demonstrated by the presence of Kâmic elements in it, of passion,
vanity and arrogance.
The higher
Manas can but rarely manifest itself at the present stage of human evolution.
Occasionally a flash from those loftier regions lightens the twilight in
which we dwell, and such flashes alone are what the Theosophist calls true
genius; “Behold in every [Page 32] manifestation
of genius, when combined with virtue, the undeniable presence of the
celestial exile, the divine Ego whose jailer thou art, O man of matter.”For
theosophy teaches “that the presence in man of various creative powers” – called
genius in their collectivity – is due to no blind chance, to no innate qualities
through hereditary tendencies – though that which is known as atavism may
often intensify these faculties – but to an accumulation of individual antecedent
experiences of the Ego in its preceding life and lives.For,
omniscient in its essence and nature, it still requires experience, through
its personalities, of the things of earth, earthly on the objective
plane, in order to apply the fruition of that abstract experience to them.
And, adds our philosophy, the cultivation of certain aptitudes through out
a long series of past incarnations must finally culminate, in some one life,
in a blooming forth as genius, in one or another direction” – ( Lucifer November,
1889, p. 229-30). For the manifestation of true genius, purity of life is
an essential condition.
Kâma-Manas
is the personal self of man; we have already seen that the quaternary, as
a whole, is the personality, “the shadow”. and the lower Manas gives the
individualising touch that makes the personality recognise itself as “ I “. It
becomes intellectual, it recognises itself as separate from all other selves;
deluded by the separateness it feels, it does not realise a unity
beyond all that it is able to sense. And
the lower Manas, attracted by the vividness of the material-life impressions,
swayed by the rush of the Kâmic emotions, passions and desires, attracted
to all material things blinded and deafened by the storm voices among which
it is plunged – the lower Manas is apt to forget [Page
33] the pure and serene glory of its birthplace, and to throw
itself into the turbulence which gives rapture in lieu of peace. And,
be it remembered, it is this very lower Manas that yields the last touch
of delight to the senses and to the animal nature; for what is passion that
can neither anticipate nor remember, where is ecstasy without the subtle
force of imagination, the delicate colours of fancy and of dream?
But there
may be chains yet more strong and constraining, binding the lower Manas fast
to the earth. They are forged of ambition, of desire for fame, be it for
that of the statesman’s power, or of supreme intellectual achievement. So
long as any work is wrought for sake of love, or praise, or even recognition
that the work is “mine” and not another’s; so long as in the heart’s remotest
chambers one subtlest yearning remains to be recognised as separate from
all; so long, however grand the ambition, however far reaching the charity,
however lofty the achievement, Manas is tainted with Kâma, and is not pure
as its source.
MANAS
IN ACTIVITY
We have
already seen that the fifth principle is dual in its aspect during each period
of earth-life, and that the lower Manas united to Kâma, spoken of conveniently
as Kâma-Manas, functions in the brain and nervous system of man. We need
to carry our investigation a little further in order to distinguish clearly
between the activity of the higher and of the lower Manas, so that the working
in the mind of man may become less obscure to us that it is at present to
many. [Page 34]
Now the
cells of the brain and nervous system (like all other cells) are composed
of minute particles of matter, called molecules (literally, little heaps).
These molecules do not touch each other, but are held grouped together by
that manifestation of the Eternal Life which we call attraction. Not being
in contact with each other they are able to vibrate to and fro if set in
motion, and, as a matter of fact, they are in a state of continual vibration
. H.P.Blavatsky points out (Lucifer, October, 1890, p. 92-93) that
molecular motion is the lowest and most material form of the One Eternal
Life. Itself motion as the “Great Breath”, and the source of all motion on
every plane of the universe. In the Sanskrit, the roots of the terms for
spirit, breath, being and motion are essentially the same, and Râma Prâsad
says that “all these roots have for their origin the sound produced by the
breath of animals” – the sound of expiration and inspiration.
Now,
the lower mind, or Kâma-Manas, acts on the molecules of the nervous cells
by motion, and set them vibrating, so starting mind-consciousness on the
physical plane. Manas itself could not affect these molecules ; but its ray,
the lower Manas, having clothed itself in astral matter and united itself to
the kâmic elements, is able to set the physical molecules in motion, and
so give rise to “brain consciousness,” including the brain memory and all
other functions of the human mind, as we know it in its ordinary activity.
These manifestations, “like
all other phenomena on the material plane ... must be related in their
final analysis to the world of vibration,” says H.P.Blavatsky. But, she goes
on to point out , “in their origin they belong to a different and higher
world of harmony”. Their [Page 35] origin
is in the manasic essence, in the ray; but on the material plane, acting
on the molecules of the brain, they are translated into vibrations.
This action
of the Kâma-Manas is spoken of by Theosophists as psychic. All mental
and passional activities are due to this psychic energy, and its manifestations
are necessarily conditioned by the physical apparatus through which it acts.
We have already seen this broadly stated ( ante, p. 29-30), and the rationale of
the statement will now be apparent.If
the molecular constitution of the brain be fine, and if the working of the
specifically kâmic organs (liver, spleen, etc.) be healthy and pure – so
as not to injure the molecular constitution of the nerves which put them
into communication with the brain – then the psychic breath, as it sweeps
through the instrument, awakens in this true Aeolian harp harmonious and
exquisite melodies; whereas if the molecular constitution be gross or poor,
if it be disordered by the emanations of alcohol, if the blood be poisoned
by gross living or sexual excesses, the strings of the Aeolian harp become
too loose or too tense, clogged with dirt or frayed with harsh usage, and
when the psychic breath passes over them they remain dumb or give out harsh
discordant notes, not because the breath is absent, but because the strings
are in evil case.
It will now,
I think, be clearly understood that what we call mind, or intellect, is in
H.P.Blavatsky’s words, “a pale and too often distorted reflection” of Manas
itself, or our fifth principle; Kâma-Manas is “the rational, but earthly
or physical intellect of man, incased in, and bound by, matter, therefore
subject to the influence of the latter”; it is the “lower self, or that [Page
36] which manifesting through our organic system,
acting on this plane of illusion, imagines itself the Ego sum, and
thus falls into what Buddhist philosophy brands as the ‘heresy of separateness.’ It
is the human personality, from which proceeds “the psychic, i.e., ‘terrestrial
wisdom’ at best, as it is influenced by all the chaotic stimuli of the human
or rather animal passions of the living body” (Lucifer, October, 1890,
p.179).
A clear understanding
of the fact that Kâma-Manas belongs to the human personality, that it functions
in and through the physical brain, that it acts on the molecules of the brain,
setting them into vibration, will very much facilitate the comprehension
by the student of the doctrine of reincarnation.That
great subject will be dealt with in another volume of this series, and I
do not propose to dwell upon it here, more than to remind the student to
take careful note of the fact that the lower Manas is a ray from the immortal
Thinker, illuminating a personality, and that all the functions which
are brought into activity in the brain-consciousness are functions correlated
to the particular brain, to the particular personality, in which they occur.The
brain-molecules that are set vibrating are material organs in the man of
flesh; they did not exist as brain molecules before his conception, nor do
they persist as brain molecules after his disintegration. Their functional
activity is limited by the limits of his personal life, the life of the body,
the life of the transient personality.
Now the faulty
of which we speak as memory on the physical plane depends on the response
of these very brain-molecules to the impulse of the lower Manas, and there
is no link between the brains of successive personalities except through
the higher Manas, that sends [Page 37] out
its ray to inform and enlighten them successively. It
follows, then, inevitably, that unless the consciousness of man can rise
from the physical and Kâma-manasic planes to the plane of the higher
Manas, no memory of one personality can reach over to another. The memory
of the personality belongs to the transitory part of man’s complex nature,
and those only can recover the memory of their past lives who can raise their
consciousness to the plane of the immortal Thinker, and can, so to speak,
travel in consciousness up and down the ray which is the bridge between the
personal man that perishes and the immortal man that endures. If,
while we are cased in the human flesh, we can raise our consciousness along
the ray that connects our lower with our true Self, and so reach the higher
Manas, we find there stored in the memory of that eternal Ego the whole of
our past lives on earth, and we can bring back those records to our brain-memory
by way of that same ray, through which we can climb upwards to our “Father”. But
this is an achievement that belongs to a late stage of human evolution, and
until this is reached the successive personalities informed by the manasic
rays are separated from each other, and no memory bridges over the gulf between.
The fact is obvious enough to any one who thinks the matter out, but as the
difference between the personality and the immortal individuality is somewhat
unfamiliar in the West, it may be well to remove a possible stumbling-block
from the student’s path.
Now the
lower Manas may do one of three things; It may rise towards its source, and
by unremitting and strenuous efforts become one with its “Father in heaven,” or
the higher Manas – Manas uncontaminated with [Page
38] earthly elements, unsoiled and pure. Or it may partially
aspire and partially tend downwards, as indeed is mostly the case with the
average man. Or saddest fate of all, it may become so clogged with the kâmic
elements as to become one with them, and be finally wrenched away from its
parent and perish.
Before considering
these three fates, there are a few more words to be said touching the activity
of the lower Manas.
As the lower
Manas frees itself from Kâma, it becomes the sovereign of the lower part
of man, and manifests more and more of its true and essential nature. In
Kâma is desire, moved by bodily needs, and Will, which is the outgoing energy
of the Self in Manas, is often led captive by the turbulent physical impulses.
But the lower Manas, “whenever it disconnects itself, for the time being,
from Kâma, becomes the guide of the highest mental faculties, and is the
organ of the free will in physical man” (Lucifer, October 1890, page
94). But the condition
of this freedom is that Kâma shall be subdued, shall lie prostrate beneath
the feet of the conqueror; if the maiden Will is to be set free, the manasic
St. George must slay the kâmic dragon that holds her captive ; for while
Kâma is unconquered, Desire will be master of the Will.
Again, as
the lower Manas frees itself from Kâma, it becomes more and more capable
of transmitting to the human personality with which it is connected the impulses
that reach it from its source. It is then, as we have seen, that genius flashes
forth, the light from the higher Ego streaming through the lower Manas to
the brain, and manifesting itself to the world. So also, as H.P.Blavatsky
points out, such action may raise a [Page 39] man
above the normal level of human power. “The higher Ego”, she says, “cannot
act directly on the body, as its consciousness belongs to quite another plane
and planes of ideation; the lower self does; and its action and behaviour
depend on its freewill and choice as to whether it will gravitate more towards
its parent (‘the Father in heaven’) or the ‘animal’ which it informs, the
man of flesh. The higher Ego, as part of the essence of the Universal Mind,
is unconditionally omniscient on its own plane, and only potentially so in
our terrestrial sphere, as it has to act solely through its alter ego the
personal self. Now …the former is the vehicle of all knowledge of the past,
the present and the future, and …it is from this fountain head that its ‘double’ catches
occasional glimpses of that which is beyond the senses of man, and transmits
them to certain brain-cells (unknown to science in their functions), thus
making of man a seer, a soothsayer and a prophet” (Lucifer, November,
1890, p. 179).This is the real seership, and on it a few words must be
said presently. It is, naturally, extremely rare, and precious as it is rare.
A “faint and distorted reflection” of it is found in what is called mediumship,
and of this H.P.Blavatsky says: “Now what is a medium? The term medium, when
not applied to things and objects, is supposed to be a person through whom
the action of another person or being is either manifested or transmitted
. Spiritualists believing in communications with disembodied spirits, and
that these can manifest through, or impress sensitives to transmit messages
from them, regard mediumship as a blessing and a great privilege. We Theosophists,
on the other hand, who do not believe in the ‘communion of spirits’, as Spiritualists
do, regard [Page 40] the gift as one
of the most dangerous of abnormal nervous diseases. A medium
is simply one in whose personal Ego, or terrestrial mind, the percentage
of the astral light so preponderates as to impregnate with it his whole physical
constitution. Every organ and cell thereby is attuned, so to speak, and subject
to an enormous and abnormal tension” (Lucifer, November 1890, page 183).
To return
to the three fates spoken of above, any one of which may befall the lower
Manas.
It may rise towards its source and become one with the Father in heaven. This
triumph can only be gained by many successive incarnations, all consciously
directed towards this end. As life succeeds life, the physical frame becomes
more and more delicately attuned to vibrations responsive to the manasic impulses,
so that gradually the manasic ray needs less and less of the coarser astral
matter as its vehicle.“It
is part of the mission of the manasic ray to get gradually rid of the blind
deceptive element which, though it makes of it an actual spiritual entity on
this plane, still brings it into so close contact with matter as to entirely
becloud its divine nature and stultify its intuitions” (Lucifer, November,
1890, p. 182). Life
after life it rids itself of this “blind deceptive element”, until at least,
master of Kâma, and with body responsive to mind, the ray becomes one with
its radiant source, the lower nature is wholly attuned to the higher, and the
Adept stands forth complete, the “Father and the Son”, having become one on
all planes, as they have been always “one in heaven”. For
him the wheel of incarnation is over, the cycle of necessity is trodden. Henceforth
he can incarnate at will, to do any special service to [Page
41] mankind; or he can dwell in the planes round the earth
without the physical body, helping in the further evolution of the globe and
of the race.
It may
partially aspire and partially tend downwards. This is the normal experience
of the average man. All life is a battlefield, and the battle rages in
the lower manasic region, where Manas wrestles with Kâma for empire over
man. Anon aspiration conquers, the chains of sense are broken, and the
lower Manas, with the radiance of its birthplace on it, soars upwards on
strong wings, spurning the soil of earth.But
alas! too soon the pinions tire, they flag, they flutter, they cease to
beat the air; and downwards falls the royal bird whose true realm is that
of the higher air, and he flutters heavily to the bog of earth once more,
and Kâma chains him down.
When the
period of incarnation is over, and the gateway of death closes the road of
earthly life, what becomes of the lower Manas in the case we are considering?
Soon after
the death of the physical body, Kâma-Manas is set free, and dwells for a
while on the astral plane clothed with a body of astral matter. From this
all of the manasic ray that is pure and unsoiled gradually disentangles itself,
and, after a lengthy period spent on the lower levels of Devachan, it returns
to its source, carrying with it such of its life-experiences as are of a
nature fit for assimilation with the Higher Ego. Manas thus
again becomes one during the latter part of the period which intervenes between
two incarnations. The manasic Ego, brooded over by Âtma-Buddhi – the two
highest principles in the human constitution, not yet considered by us – passes
into the devachanic [Page 42] state
of consciousness, resting from the weariness of the life-struggle through
which it has passed. The experiences of the earth-life just closed are carried
into the manasic consciousness by the lower ray withdrawn into its source.
They make the devachanic state a continuation of earth-life, shorn of its
sorrows, a completion of the wishes and desires of earth-life, so far as
those were pure and noble. The poetic phrase that “the mind creates its own
heaven” is truer than many may have imagined, for everywhere man is what
he thinks, and in the devachanic state the mind is unfettered by the
gross physical matter through which it works on the objective plane.The devachanic
period is the time for the assimilation of life experiences, the regaining
of equilibrium, ere a new journey is commenced. It is the day that succeeds
the night of earth-life, the alternative of the objective manifestation.
Periodicity is here, as everywhere else in nature, ebb and flow, throb and
rest, the rhythm of the Universal Life. This devachanic state of consciousness
lasts for a period of varying length, proportioned to the stage reached in
evolution, the Devachan of the average man being said to extend over some
fifteen-hundred years.
Meanwhile,
that portion of the impure garment of the lower Manas which remains entangled
with Kâma gives to the desire-body a somewhat confused consciousness, a broken
memory of the events of the life just closed. If the emotions and passions
were strong and the manasic element weak during the period of incarnation,
the desire-body will be strongly energised, and will persist in its activity
for a considerable length of time after the death of the physical body. It
will also show a considerable amount of consciousness, as much of the [Page
43] manasic ray will have been overpowered by the vigorous
kâmic elements, and will have remained entangled in them. If, on the other
hand, the earth-life just closed was characterised my mentality and purity
rather than by passion, the desire-body, being but poorly energised, will
be a pale simulacrum of the person to whom it belonged, and will fade away,
disintegrate and perish before any long period has elapsed.
The “spook” already
mentioned (ante, p. 20-21) will now be understood. It may show very
considerable intelligence, if the manasic element be still largely present,
and this will be the case with the desire-body of persons of strong animal
nature and forcible though coarse intellect.For
intelligence working in a very powerful kâmic personality will be exceedingly
strong and energetic, though not subtle or delicate, and the spook of such
a person, still further vitalised by the magnetic currents of persons yet
living in the body, may show much intellectual ability of a low type.But
such a spook is conscienceless, devoid of good impulses, tending towards
disintegration, and communications with it can work for evil only, whether
we regard them as prolonging its vitality by the currents which it sucks
up from the bodies and kâmic elements of the living, or as exhausting the
vitality of these living persons and polluting them with astral connections
of an altogether undesirable kind.
Nor should
it be forgotten that, without attending séance-rooms at all, living persons
may come into objectionable contact with these kâmic spooks. As already mentioned,
they are attracted to places in which the animal part of man is chiefly catered
for; drinking houses, gambling saloons, brothels – all these places are [Page
44] full of the vilest magnetism, are very whirlpools of
magnetic currents of the foulest type. These
attract the spooks magnetically, and they drift to such psychic maelstroms
of all that is earthly and sensual. Vivified by currents so congenial to
their own, the desire-bodies become more active and potent; impregnated with
the emanations of passions and desires which they can no longer physically
satisfy, their magnetic current reinforce the similar currents in the live
persons, action and reaction continually going on, and the animal natures
of the living become more potent and less controlled by the will as they
are played on by these forces of the kâmic world. Kâma-loka
(from loka, a place, and so the place for Kâma) is a name often
used to designate that plane of the astral world to which these spooks belong,
and from this ray forth magnetic currents of poisonous character, as from
a pest-house float out germs of disease which may take root and grow in the
congenial soil of some poorly vitalised physical body.
It is very
possible that many will say, on reading these statements, that Theosophy
is a revival of mediaeval superstitions and will lead to imaginary terrors.
Theosophy explains mediaeval superstitions, and shows the natural facts on
which they were founded and from which they drew their vitality. If
there are planes in nature other than the physical, no amount of reasoning
will get rid of them and belief in their existence will constantly reappear;
but knowledge will give them their intelligible place in the universal order,
and will prevent superstition by an accurate understanding of their nature,
and of the laws under which they function.And
let it be remembered that persons whose [Page 45] consciousness
is normally on the physical plane can protect themselves from undesirable
influences by keeping their minds clean and their wills strong. We protect
ourselves best against disease by maintaining our bodies in vigorous health;
we cannot guard ourselves against invisible germs, but we can prevent our
bodies from becoming suitable soil for the growth and development of the
germs. Nor need
we deliberately throw ourselves in the way infection. So also as regards
these malign germs from the astral plane. We can prevent the formation of
Kâma-manasic soil in which they can germinate and develop, and we need not
go into evil places, nor deliberately encourage receptivity and mediumistic
tendencies. A strong active will and a pure heart are our best protection.
There remains
the third possibility for Kâma-Manas, to which we must now turn our attention,
the fate spoken of earlier as “terrible in its consequences, which may befall
the kâmic principle”.
It may break away from its source made one with Kâma instead of with the
higher Manas. This is fortunately, a rare event, as rare at one pole of human
life as the complete re-union with the higher Manas is rare at the other. But
still the possibility remains and must be stated.
The personality
may be so strongly controlled by Kâma that, in the struggle between the kâmic
and manasic elements, the victory may remain wholly with the former. The
lower Manas may become so enslaved that its essence may be frayed and thinner
and thinner by the constant rub and strain, until at last persistent yielding
to the promptings of desire bears its inevitable fruit, and the slender link
which unites the higher to [Page 46] the
lower Manas, the “silver thread that binds it to the Master”, snaps in two.Then,
during earth-life, the lower quaternary is wrenched away from the Triad to
which it was linked, and the higher nature is severed wholly from the lower.
The human being is rent in twain, the brute has broken itself free, and it
goes forth unbridled, carrying with it the reflections of that manasic light
which should have been its guide through the desert of life . A more dangerous
brute it is than its fellows of the unevolved animal world, just because
of these fragments in it of the higher mentality of man. Such a being, human
in form but brute in nature, human in appearance but without human truth,
or love or justice – such a one may now and then be met with in the haunts
of men, putrescent while still living, a thing to shudder at with deepest,
if hopeless compassion. What is its fate after the funeral knell has tolled?
Ultimately,
there is the perishing of the personality that has thus broken away from
the principles that can alone give it immortality. But a period of persistence
lies before it.
The desire-body of such a one is an entity of terrible potency, and it has
this unique peculiarity, that it is able under certain rare circumstances to
reincarnate in the world of men.It is not a mere “spook” on the way to disintegration;
it has retained, entangled in its coils , too much of the manasic element to
permit of such natural dissipation in space. It is sufficiently an independent
entity, lurid instead of radiant, with manasic flame rendered foul instead
of purifying, as to be able to take to itself a garment of flesh once more
and dwell as man with men. Such a man – if the word [Page
47] may indeed be applied to the mere human shell with brute
interior – passes through a period of earth-life the natural foe of all who
are still normal in their humanity. With no instincts save those of the animal,
driven only by passion, never even by emotion, with a cunning that no brute
can rival, a deliberate wickedness that plans evil in fashion unknown to the
mere frankly natural impulses of the animal world, the reincarnated entity
touches ideal vileness.Such
soil the page of human history as the monsters of iniquity that startle us
now and again into a wondering cry, “Is this a human being?” Sinking lower
with each successive incarnation, the evil force gradually wears itself out,
and such a personality perishes separated from the source of life. It
finally disintegrates, to be worked up into other forms of living things, but
as a separate existence, it is lost. It is a bead broken off the thread of
life, and the immortal Ego that incarnated in that personality has lost the
experience of that incarnation, has reaped no harvest from that life-sowing.
Its ray has brought nothing back, its lifework for that birth has been a total
and complete failure, whereof nothing remains to weave into the fabric of its
own eternal Self. [Page 48]
SUBTLE
FORMS OF THE FOURTH AND FIFTH PRINCIPLE
The student
will already have fully realised that “an astral body” is a loose term that
may cover a variety of different forms. It may be well at this stage to sum
up the subtle types sometimes inaccurately called the astral that belong
to the fourth and fifth principles.
During life
a true astral body may be projected – formed, as its name implies, of astral
matter – but, unlike the etheric double, dowered with intelligence, and able
to travel to a considerable distance from the physical body to which it belongs.
This is the desire-body, and it is, as we have seen, a vehicle of consciousness.
It is projected by mediums and sensitives unconsciously, and by trained students
consciously.It can travel with the speed of thought to a distant place, can
there gather impressions from surrounding objects, can bring back those impressions
to the physical body. In the case of a medium it can convey them to others
by means of the physical body still entranced, but as a rule when the sensitive
comes out of trance, the brain does not retain the impressions thus made
upon it, and no trace is left in the memory of the experiences thus acquired.
Sometimes, but this is rare, the desire-body is able sufficiently to affect
the brain by the vibrations it set up, to leave a lasting impression thereon,
and then the sensitive is able to recall the knowledge acquired during trance.
The student learns to impress on his brain the knowledge gained in the desire-body,
his will being active while that of the medium is passive.[Page
49]
This desire-body
is the agent unconsciously used by clairvoyants when their vision is not
merely the seeing in the astral light. This astral form does then really
travel to distant places, and may appear there to persons who are sensitive
or who chance for the time to be in an abnormal nervous condition. Sometimes
it appears to them – when very faintly informed by consciousness – as a vaguely
outlined form, not noticing its surroundings. Such a body has appeared near
the time of death at places distant from the dying person, to those who were
closely united to the dying by ties of the blood, of affection, or of hatred.
More highly energised, it will show intelligence and emotion, as in some
cases on record, in which dying mothers have visited their children residing
at a distance, and have spoken in their last moments of what they had seen
and done. The desire-body
is also set free in many cases of disease – as is the etheric double – as
well as in sleep and in trance. Inactivity of the physical body is a condition
of such astral voyagings.
The desire-body seems also occasionally to appear in séance-rooms, giving
rise to some of the more intellectual phenomena that takes place. It
must not be confounded with the “spook” already sufficiently familiar to the
reader, the latter being always the kâmic or Kâma-Manasic remains of some dead
person, whereas the body we are now dealing with is the projection of an astral
double from a living person.
A higher
form of subtle body, belonging to Manas, is that known as the Mâyâvi Rűpa,
or “body of illusion”. The Mâyâvi Rűpa is a subtle body formed by the consciously
directed will of the Adept or disciple; it may, or may not, resemble the
physical body, the form given [Page 50] to
it being suitable to the purpose for which it is projected. In
this body the full consciousness dwells, for it is merely the mental body
rearranged. The Adept or disciple can thus travel at will, without the burden
of the physical body, in the full exercise of every faculty, in perfect self-consciousness.
He makes the Mâyâvi Rűpa visible of invisible at will – on the physical plane – and
the phrase often used by chelâs and others as to seeing an Adept “in his
astral”, means that he was visited by them in his Mâyâvi Rűpa. If
he so chose, he can make it, indistinguishable from a physical body, warm
and firm to the touch as well as visible, able to carry on a conversation,
at all points like a physical human being. But the power thus to form the
true Mâyâvi Rűpa is confined to Adepts and chelâs; it cannot be done by the
untrained student, however psychic he may naturally be, for it is a manasic
and not a psychic creation, and it is only under the instruction of his Guru
that the chelâ learns to form and use the “body of illusion”.
THE
HIGHER MANAS
The immortal
Thinker itself, as will by this time have become clear to the reader, can
manifest itself but little on the physical plane at the present stage of
human evolution. Yet we are able to catch some glimpses of the powers resident
in it, the more as in the lower Manas we find those powers “cribbed, cabined
and confined” indeed, but yet existing. Thus we have seen (p. 37) that the
lower Manas “is the organ of the freewill in physical man”. Freewill resides
in Manas itself, [Page 51] in Manas
the representative of Mahat, the Universal Mind. From Manas comes the feeling
of liberty, the knowledge that we can rule ourselves – really the knowledge
that the higher nature in us can rule the lower, let that lower nature rebel
and struggle as it may. Once
let our consciousness identify itself with Manas instead of with Kâma, and
the lower nature becomes the animal we bestride, it is no longer the “I”. All
its plungings, its struggles, its fights for mastery, are then outside us,
not within us, and we rein it in and hold it as we rein in a plunging steed
and subdue it to our will.
On this question
of freewill I venture to quote from an article of my own that appeared in
the Path –
“Unconditioned will, alone can be absolutely free: the unconditioned and the
absolute are one: all that is conditioned must, by virtue of that conditioning,
be relative and therefore partially bound. As that will evolves the universe,
it becomes conditioned by the laws of its own manifestation. The manasic entities
are differentiations of that will, each conditioned by the nature of its manifesting
potency, but, while conditioned without, it is free within its own sphere of
activity, so being the image in its own world of the universal will in the universe.
Now as this will, acting on each successive plane, crystalises itself more and
more densely as matter, the manifestation is conditioned by the material in which
it works, while, relatively to the material, it is itself free.So
at each stage the inner freedom appears in consciousness, while yet investigation
shows that, that freedom works within the limits of the plane of manifestation
on which it is acting, free to work upon the lower, yet hindered as to manifestation
by the unresponsiveness of the lower to its impulse. [Page
52] Thus the higher Manas, in whom resides free will, so far
as the lower quaternary is concerned – being the offspring of Mahat, the third
Logos, the Word, i.e., the Will in manifestation – is limited in its manifestation
in our lower nature by the sluggishness of the response of the personality to
its impulses. In the
lower Manas itself – as immersed in that personality - resides the will with
which we are familiar, swayed by passions, by appetites, by desires, by impressions
coming from without, yet able to assert itself among them all, by virtue of its
essential nature, one with that higher Ego of which it is the ray.It
is free, as regards all below it, able to act on Kâma and on the physical body,
however much its full expression may be thwarted and hindered by the crudeness
of the material in which it is working. Were the will the mere outcome of the
physical body, of the desires and passions, whence could arise the sense of the “ I “ that
can judge, can desire, can overcome? It
acts from a higher plane, is royal as touching the lower whenever it claims the
royalty of birthright, and the very struggle of its self-assertion is the best
testimony to the fact that in its nature it is free. And so, passing to lower
planes, we find in each grade this freedom of the higher as ruling the lower,
yet, on the plane of the lower, hindered in manifestation . Reversing the
process and starting from the lower, the same truth becomes manifest. Let a man’s
limbs be loaded with fetters, and crude material iron will prevent the manifestation
of the muscular and nervous force with which they are instinct: none the less
is that force present, though hindered for the moment in its activity. Its strength
may be shown in its very efforts to break the chains that bind it there, [Page
53] is no power in the iron to prevent the free giving out of
the muscular energy, though the phenomena of motion may be hindered. But while
this energy cannot be ruled by the physical nature below, its expenditure is
determined by the kâmic principle; passions and desires can set it going, can
direct and control it. The muscular and nervous energy cannot rule the passions
and desires, they are free as regards it, it is determined by their interposition.Yet
again Kâma may be ruled, controlled, determined by the will; as touching the
manasic principle it is bound, not free, and hence the sense of freedom in choosing
which desire shall be gratified, which act performed. As the lower Manas rules
Kâma, the lower quaternary takes its rightful position of subserviency to the
higher triad, and is determined by a will it recognises as above itself, and,
as it regards itself, a will that is free. Here in many a mind will spring the
question, ‘And what of the will of the higher Manas; is that in turn determined
by what is above it, while it is free to all below? But we have reached a point
where the intellect fails us, and where language may not easily utter that which
the Spirit senses in those higher realms. Dimly only can we feel that there ,
as everywhere else, "the truest freedom must be in harmony with law, and
that voluntary acceptance of the function of acting as channel of the Universal
Will must unite into one perfect liberty and perfect obedience”.
This is truly
an obscure and difficult problem, but the student will find much light fall
on it by following the lines of thought thus traced.
Another power
resident in the higher Manas and manifested on the lower planes by those
in whom the higher Manas is consciously master, is that of creation [Page
54] of forms by the will. The Secret Doctrine says: “Kriyashakti”.
The mysterious power of thought which enables it to produce external, perceptible,
phenomenal results by its own inherent energy. The ancient held that any
idea will manifest itself externally if one’s attention is deeply concentrated
upon it. Similarly
an intense volition will be followed by the desired results” (vol.
I, p. 312). Here is the secret of true “magic”. and as the subject is an
important one, and as Western science is beginning to touch its fringe, a
separate section is devoted to its consideration farther on, in order not
to break the connected outline here given on principles.
Again
we have learned from H.P.Blavatsky that Manas, or the higher Ego, as “part
of the essence of the Universal Mind, is unconditionally omniscient on its
own plane”, when it has fully developed self-consciousness by its evolutionary
experiences, and “is the vehicle of all knowledge of the past and present,
and the future”. When
this immortal entity is able through its ray, the lower Manas, to impress
the brain of a man, that man is one who manifests abnormal qualities, is
a genius or seer. The conditions of seership are thus laid down: -
“The
former [the visions of the true seer] can be obtained by one of two means:
(a) on the condition of paralysing at will the memory and
the instinctual independent action of all the material organs and even cells
in the body of flesh, an act which, when once the light of the higher Ego has
consumed and subjected for ever the passional nature of the personal lower
Ego, is easy, but requires an adept; (b) of being a reincarnation of one who,
in a previous birth, had attained through extreme purity of life and efforts
in the right direction [Page 55] almost
to a Yogi-state of holiness and saintship. There is also a third possibility
of reaching in mystic visions the plane of the higher Manas; but it is only
occasional, and does not depend on the will of the seer, but on the extreme
weakness and exhaustion of the material body through illness and suffering.
The Seeress of Prevorst was an instance of the latter case; and Jacob Boehme
of our second category” (Lucifer, November, 1890, p. 183).
The reader
will now be in a position to grasp the difference between the workings of
the higher Ego and of its ray. Genius, which sees instead of arguing,
is of the higher Ego; true intuition is one of its faculties. Reason, the
weighing and balancing quality which arranges the facts gathered by observation,
balances them one against the other, argues from them, draws conclusions
from them – this is the exercise of the lower Manas through the brain apparatus;
its instrument is ratiocination; by induction it ascends from the known
to the unknown, building up a hypothesis; by deduction it descends again
to the known, verifying its hypothesis by fresh experiment.
Intuition,
as we see by its derivation, is simply insight – a process as direct and
swift as bodily vision. It is the exercise of the eyes of the intelligence,
the unerring recognition of a truth presented on the mental plane. It sees
with certainty, its vision is unclouded, its report unfaltering. No proof
can add to the certitude of its recognition, for it is beyond and above the
reason . Often our
instincts, blinded and confused by passions and desires, are miscalled intuitions,
and a mere kâmic impulse is accepted as the sublime voice of the higher
Manas. Careful and prolonged self-training is necessary, ere the voice
can be recognised with certainty, but of [Page 56] one
thing we may feel very sure: so long as we are in the vortex of the personality,
so long as the storms of desires and appetites howl around us, so long as
the waves of emotion toss us to and fro, so long the voice of the higher
Manas cannot reach our ears. Not in the fire or the whirlwind, not in the
thunderclap of the storm, comes the mandate of the higher Ego: only when
there has fallen the stillness of a silence that can be felt, only when the
very air is motionless and the calm is profound, only when the man wraps
his face in a mantle which closes his ears even to the silence that is of
earth, then only sounds the voice that is stiller than the silence, the voice
of his true Self.
On this H.
P. Blavatsky has written in Isis Unveiled: “Allied to the physical
half of man’s nature is reason, which enables him to maintain his supremacy
over the lower animals, and to subjugate nature to his uses. Allied to
his spiritual part is his conscience, which will serve as his unerring
guide through the besetment of the senses; for conscience is that instantaneous
perception between right and wrong which can only be exercised by the spirit,
which, being a portion of the divine wisdom and purity, is absolutely pure
and wise.Its promptings
are independent of reason, and it can only manifest itself clearly when
unhampered by the baser attractions of our dual nature. Reason being a
faculty of our physical brain, one which is justly defined as that of deducing
inferences from premises, and being wholly dependent on the evidence of
other senses, cannot be a quality pertaining directly to our divine spirit.
The latter knows – hence all reasoning, which implies discussion and argument,
would be useless. So an entity which, if it must be considered as a direct
emanation from the [Page 57] eternal
Spirit of wisdom, has to be vied as possessed of the same attributes as
the essence of the whole of which it is part. Therefore
it is with a certain degree of logic that the ancient Theurgists maintained
that the rational part of a man’s soul (spirit) never entered wholly into
the man’s body, but only overshadowed him more or less through the irrational
or astral soul, which serves as an intermediary agent, or a medium between
spirit and body.The
man who has conquered matter sufficiently to receive the direct light from
his shining Augoeides, feels truth intuitionally; he could not err
in his judgement, notwithstanding all the sophisms suggested by cold reason,
for he is illuminated. Hence prophesy, vaticination, and the so-called
divine inspiration, are simply the effects of this illumination from above
by our own immortal spirit” (Volume I, page 305-306).
This Augoeides,
according to the belief of the Neo-Platonists, as according to the Theosophical
teachings, “sheds more or less its radiance on the inner man, the astral
soul” (Volume, page 315) i.e.., in the now accepted terminology,
on the Kâma-Manasic personality or lower Ego. (In
reading Isis Unveiled, the student has to bear in mind the fact that
when the book was written, the terminology was by no means even as fixed
as it is now; in Isis Unveiled is the first modern attempt to translate
into Western language the complicated Eastern ideas, and further experience
has shown that many of the terms used to cover two or three conceptions
may with advantage be restricted to one and thus rendered precise. Thus
the “astral
soul” must be understood in the sense given above.) Only
as this lower Ego becomes pure from all breath of passion, as the lower Manas
frees itself from Kâma, can the “shining one” impress [Page
58] it; H.P. Blavatsky tells how initiates meet this higher
Ego face to face. Having spoken of the trinity in man, Âtma-Buddhi-Manas,
she goes on: “It is when this trinity, in anticipation of the final triumphant
reunion beyond the gates of corporeal death, became for a few seconds a
unity, that the candidate is allowed, at the moment of the initiation,
to behold his future self. Thus
we read in the Persian Desatir of the ‘resplendent one’; in the Greek
philosopher-initiates of the Augoeides – the self-shining ‘blessed vision
resident in the pure light’; in Porphyry, that Plotinus was united to his ‘god’ six
times during his lifetime, and so on” (Isis Unveiled, Volume II, pages
114-115).
This trinity
made into unity, again, is the “Christ” of all mystics. When in the final
initiation, the candidate has been outstretched on the floor or altar stone
and has thus typified the crucifixion of the flesh, or lower nature, and
when from this “death” he has “risen again” as the triumphant conqueror over
sin and death, he then, in the supreme moment, sees before him the glorious
presence and becomes “one with Christ,” is himself the Christ. Thenceforth
he may live in the body, but it has become his obedient instrument; he is
united with his true Self, Manas made one with Âtma-Buddhi, and through
the personality which he inhabits he wields his full powers as an immortal
spiritual intelligence. While he was still struggling in the toils of the
lower nature, Christ, the spiritual Ego, was daily crucified in him; but
in the full Adept Christ has arisen triumphant, lord of himself and of
nature. The long pilgrimage of Manas is over, the cycle of necessity is
trodden, the wheel of rebirth ceases to turn, the Son of man has been made
perfect by suffering. [Page
59]
So long
as this point has not been reached, “the Christ” is the object of aspiration.
The ray is ever struggling to return to its source, the lower Manas ever
aspiring to re-become one with the higher. While this duality persists the
continual yearning towards reunion felt by the noblest and purest natures
is one of the most salient facts of the inner life, and it is this which
clothes itself as prayer, as inspiration, as “seeking after God,” as the
longing for union with the divine. “My
soul is athirst for God, for the living God”, cries the eager Christian,
and to tell him that this intense longing is a fancy and is futile to make
him turn aside from you as one who cannot understand, but whose insensibility
does not alter the fact. The Occultist recognises in this cry the inextinguishable
impulse upwards of the lower Self to the higher from which it is separated,
but the attraction of which it vividly feels. Whether
the person pray to the Buddha, to Vishnu, to Christ, to the Virgin, to the
Father, it matters not at all; these are questions of mere dialect, not of
essential fact. In all the Manas united to Âtma-Buddhi is the real object
, veiled under what name the changing time or race may give; at once the
ideal humanity and the “personal God”, the “God Man” found in all religions, “God
incarnate”, the “Word made flesh”, “the Christ who must be born in each",
with whom the believer must be made one.
And this
leads us on to the last planes with which we are concerned, the planes of
Spirit, using that much abused word merely as the opposite pole to matter;
here only very general ideas can be grasped by us, but it is necessary none
the less to try to grasp these ideas if we are to complete, however poorly
our conception of man. [Page 60]
PRINCIPLES
-6- and -7-
ÂTMA – BUDDHI, THE SPIRIT
As the
completion of the thought of the last section, we will look at Âtma-Buddhi
first in its connection with Manas, and will then proceed to a somewhat more
general view of it as the “Monad.” The clearest and best description of the
human trinity, Âtma-Buddhi-Manas, will be found in the Key
to Theosophy, in which H.P.Blavatsky gives the following definitions:-
THE
HIGHER SELF is |
Atma, the
inseparable ray of the Universal and ONE SELF. It is the God above,
more than within us. Happy the man who succeeds in saturating his inner
Ego with it |
THE
SPIRITUAL
divine EGO is |
the
spiritual soul, or Buddhi, in close union with Manas, the
mind-principle, without which it is no EGO at all, but only the Atmic
Vehicle. |
THE
INNER
or HIGHER EGO is |
Manas, the
fifth principle, so called, independently of Buddhi. The mind-principle
is only the Spiritual Ego when merged into one with Buddhi .. It is the
permanent individuality or the reincarnating Ego. (Page 175-176 |
Âtmâ must
then be regarded as the most abstract part of man’s nature, the “breath” which
needs a body for its manifestation. It is the one reality, that which manifests
on all planes, the essence of which all our [Page
61] principles are but aspects. The one Eternal Existence,
wherefrom are all things, which embodies one of its aspects in the universe,
that which we speak of as the One Life – this Eternal Existence rays forth
as Âtmâ, the very Self alike of the universe and of man; their innermost
core, their very heart, that in which all things inhere. In itself incapable
of direct manifestation on lower planes, yet That without which no lower
planes could come into existence, It clothes Itself in Buddhi, as Its vehicle,
or medium of further manifestation. “Buddhi is the faculty of cognising,
the channel through which divine knowledge reaches the Ego, the discernment
of good and evil, also divine conscience, and the spiritual Soul, which is
the vehicle of Âtmâ” (Secret Doctrine, Volume I, page 2). It is
often spoken of as the principle of spiritual discernment. But Âtma-Buddhi, a universal
principle, needs individualising ere experience can be gathered and self-consciousness
attained. So the mind-principle is united to Âtma-Buddhi, and the human
trinity is complete. Manas becomes the spiritual Ego only when merged in Buddhi;
Buddhi becomes the spiritual Ego only when united to Manas; in the
union of the two lies the evolution of the Spirit, self-conscious on all
planes. Hence Manas strives upward to Âtma-Buddhi, as the lower Manas strives
upward to the higher, and hence, in relation to the higher Manas, Âtma-Buddhi,
or Âtma, is often spoken of as “the Father in Heaven”, as the higher Manas
is itself thus described in relation to the lower. (See ante page 40) The
lower Manas gathers experience to carry it back to its source; the higher
Manas accumulates the store throughout the cycle of reincarnation; Buddhi
becomes assimilated with the higher Manas; [Page 62] and
these, permeated with the Âtmic light, one with that True Self, the trinity
becomes a unity, the Spirit is self-conscious on all planes, and the object
of the manifested universe is attained.
But no
words of mine can avail to explain or to describe that which is beyond explanation
and beyond description. Words can but blunder along on such a theme, dwarfing
and distorting it. Only by long and patient meditation can the student hope
vaguely to sense something greater than himself, yet something which stirs
at the innermost core of his being.As
to the steady gaze directed at the pale evening sky, there appears after
while, faintly and far away, the soft glimmer of a star, so to the patient
gaze of the inner vision there may come the tender beam of the spiritual
star, if but as a mere suggestion of a far off world.Only
to a patient and persevering purity will that light arise, and blessed beyond
all earthly blessedness is he who sees but the palest shimmer of that transcendent
radiance.
With
such ideas as to “Spirit”, the horror with which Theosophists shrink from
ascribing the trivial phenomena of the séance-room to “spirits” will be readily
understood. Playing on musical boxes, talking through trumpets, tapping people
on the head, carrying accordions round the room – these things may be all
very well for astrals, spooks and elementals, but who can assign them to “spirits”,
who has any conception of Spirit worthy of the name? Such vulgarisation
and degradation of the most sublime conceptions as yet evolved by man are
surely subjects for the keenest regret, and it may well be hoped that ere
long these phenomena will be put in their true place, as evidence that
the materialistic [Page
63] views of the universe are inadequate, instead of being
exalted to a place they cannot fill as proofs of Spirit. No
physical, no intellectual phenomena are proofs of the existence of Spirit.
Only to the spirit can Spirit be demonstrated. You cannot prove a proposition
in Euclid to a dog; you cannot prove Âtma-Buddhi to Kâma and the lower
Manas. As we climb, our view will widen, and when we stand on the summit
of the Holy Mount the planes of Spirit shall lie before our opened vision.[Page
64]
THE MONAD
IN EVOLUTION
Perhaps a slightly
more definite conception of Atmâ-Buddhi may be obtained
by the student, if he considers its work in evolution as the Monad. Now Atmâ-Buddhi
is identical with the universal Over-soul , "itself
an aspect of the Unknown Root", the One Existence. When manifestation
begins the Monad is "thrown downwards into matter", to propel
forward and force evolution (See Secret Doctrine, Volume 2, page
115); it is the mainspring, so to speak, of all evolution, the impelling
force at the root of all things. All the principles we have been studying
are mere "variously
differentiated aspects" of Atmâ, the One Reality manifesting in
our universe; it is in every atom, "the root of every atom individually
and of every form collectively", and all the principles are fundamentally
Atmâ on different planes. The stages of its evolution are very clearly
laid down in Five Years of Theosophy, pages 273 et seq. There
we are shown how it passes through the stages termed elemental, "nascent
centres of forces", and reaches the mineral stage; from this it passes
up through vegetable, animal, to man, vivifying every form. As we are taught
in the Secret Doctrine: "The well-known Kabbalistic aphorism
runs:
“A stone becomes
a plant; the plant a beast; the beast, a man; the man, a spirit; and the
spirit, a god.”
The ‘spark’ animates
all the kingdoms in turn before it enters into and informs divine man,[Page
65] between whom and his predecessor, animal man, there is
all the difference in the world….The Monad…is first of all, shot down by the law
of evolution into the lowest form of matter – the mineral. After a
sevenfold gyration incased in the stone, or that which will become mineral and
stone in the Fourth Round, it creeps out of it, say as a lichen. Passing thence,
through all the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal matter,
it has now reached the point in which it has become the germ, so to speak, of
the animal, that will become the physical man” (Vol. I, pages 266-267).
It
is the Monad, Âtma-Buddhi, that thus vivifies every part and kingdom of nature,
making all instinct with life and consciousness, one throbbing whole. “Occultism
does not accept anything inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed
by science, ‘ inorganic substance,’ means simply that the latent life, slumbering
in the molecules of so-called ‘inert matter,’ is incognisable. All
is life and every atom of even mineral dust is a life, though beyond our
comprehension and perception, because it is outside the range of the laws
known to those who reject Occultism “(Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, pages
268-69). And again: “Everything in the universe, throughout all its kingdoms,
is conscious, i.e.., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind
and on its own plane of perception. We
men must remember that simply because we do not perceive any signs
of consciousness which we can recognise, say in stones, we have no right
to say that no consciousness exists there. There is no such thing as either ‘dead’ or ‘blind’ matter,
as there is no ‘blind’ or ‘unconscious’ law” (page 295). [Page
66]
How many
of the great poets, with the sublime intuition of genius, have sensed this
great truth! To them all nature pulses with life; they see life and love
everywhere, in suns and planets as in the grains of dust, in rustling leaves
and opening blossoms, in dancing gnats and gliding snakes. Each
form manifests as much of the One Life as it is capable of expressing, and
what is man that he should despise the more limited manifestations, when
he compares himself as a life-expression, not with the forms below him, but
with the possibilities of expression that soar above him in infinite heights
of being, which he can estimate still less than the stone can estimate him?
The student
will readily see that we must regard this force at the centre of evolution
as essentially one. There is but one Âtma-Buddhi in our universe,
the universal Soul, everywhere present, immanent in all, the One Supreme
Energy whereof all varying energies or forces are only differing forms.As
the sunbeam is light or heat or electricity according to its conditioning
environment, so is Âtma all-energy, differentiating on different planes. “As
an abstraction, we will call it the One Life; as an objective and evident
reality, we speak of a septenary scale of manifestation, which begins at
the upper rung with the one unknowable causality, and ends as Omnipresent
Mind and Life immanent in every atom of matter” (Secret Doctrine,
Volume I, page 163).
Its evolutionary
course is very plainly outlined in a quotation given in the Secret Doctrine,
and as students are very often puzzled over this unity of the Monad, I subjoin
the statement. The subject is difficult, but it could not, I think, be more
clearly put than it is in these sentences:- [Page
67]
“Now
the monadic or cosmic essence (if such a term be permitted) in the mineral,
vegetable, and animal, though the same throughout the series of cycles from
the lowest elemental up to the Deva kingdom, yet differs in the scale of
progression. It would be very misleading to imagine a Monad as a separate
entity trailing its slow way in a distinct path through the lower kingdoms,
and after incalculable series of transformations flowering into a human being;
in short, that the Monad of a Humboldt dates back to the Monad of an atom
of hornblende . Instead of saying a ‘Mineral Monad,’ the more correct phraseology
in physical science, which differentiates every atom, would of course have
been to call it ‘the Monad manifesting in that form of Prakriti called the
mineral kingdom.’ The atom, as represented in the ordinary scientific hypothesis,
is not a particle of something, animated by a psychic something, destined
after aeons to blossom as a man. But it is a concrete manifestation of the
universal energy which itself has not yet become individualised; a sequential
manifestation of the one universal Monad The ocean of matter does not divide
into its potential and constituent drops until the sweep of the life-impulse
reaches the stage of man-birth. The tendency towards segregation into individual
Monads is gradual, and in the higher animals comes almost to the point. The
Peripatetics applied the word Monad to the whole Kosmos in the pantheistic
sense; and the Occultists, while accepting this thought for convenience sake,
distinguish the progressive stages of the evolution of the concrete from
the abstract by terms of which the ‘mineral, vegetable, animal, Monad,’ etc.,
are examples. The term merely means that the tidal wave of spiritual [Page
68] evolution is passing through that arc of its circuit.The ‘Monadic
Essence’ begins imperfectly to differentiate towards individual consciousness
in the vegetable kingdom. As the Monads are un-compounded things, as correctly
defined by Leibnitz, it is the spiritual essence which vivifies them in their
degrees of differentiation, which properly constitutes the Monad – not the
atomic aggregation, which is only the vehicle and the substance through which
thrill the lower and the higher degrees of intelligence” (vol. I, p. 201).
The
student who reads and weighs this passage will, at the cost of a little
present trouble, save himself from much confusion in days to come. Let
him first realise clearly that the Monad – “the spiritual essence” to which alone in strict accuracy
the term Monad should be applied – is one all the universe over,
that Âtma-Buddhi
is not his, nor mine, nor the property of anybody in particular, but the
spiritual essence energising in all. So
is electricity one all the world over; though it may be active in
his machine or in mine, neither he nor I can call it distinctly our electricity.
But – and here arise confusion – when Âtma-Buddhi energises in man, in whom
Manas is active as an individualising force, it is often spoken of as though
the “atomic aggregation” were a separate Monad, and then we have “Monads,” as
in the above passage.This
loose way of using the word will not lead to error if the student will
remember that the individualising process is not on the spiritual plane,
but Âtma-Buddhi as
seen through Manas seems to share in the individuality of the latter.
So if you hold pieces of variously coloured glass in your hand you may see
through them a red sun, a blue sun, a yellow sun, and so on. None the less
there is only [Page 69] the one
sun shining down upon you, altered by the media through which you look
at it. So we often meet the phrase “human Monads”; it should be “the Monad manifesting
in the human kingdom”; but this somewhat pedantic accuracy would be likely
only to puzzle a large number of people, and the looser popular phrase will
not mislead when the principle of the unity on the spiritual plane is grasped,
any more than we mislead by speaking of the rising of the sun. “The
Spiritual Monad is one, universal, boundless, and impartite, whose rays,
nevertheless, form what we, in our ignorance, call the ‘ individual Monads’ of
men” (Secret Doctrine, Vol. I ,p. 200).
Very beautifully and poetically is this unity in diversity put in one of the
Occult Catechisms in which the Guru questions the Chela:-
“Lift
thy head, O Lanoo; dost thou see one or countless lights above thee,
burning in the dark midnight sky?”
“I
sense one Flame, O Gurudeva; I see countless undetached sparks
burning in it.”
“Thou
sayest well. And now look around and into thyself. That light which
burns inside thee, dost thou feel it different in any wise from
the light that shines in thy brother-men?”
“It is in no way different,
though the prisoner is held in bondage by Karma, and though its outer garments
delude the ignorant into saying, ‘thy soul’ and ‘my
soul’” (Secret Doctrine, vol., I, p.145).
There ought not to be any serious difficulty now in grasping the stages of human
evolution; the Monad, which has been working its way as we have seen, reaches
the point at which the human form can be built up on [Page
70] earth; an etheric body and its physical counterpart are
then developed, Prâna specialised from the great ocean of life, and Kâma evolved,
all these principles, the lower quaternary, being brooded over by the Monad,
energised by it, impelled by it, forced onward by it towards continually increasing
perfection of form and capacity for manifesting the higher energies in Nature.
This was animal, or physical man, evolved through two and a half Races. But the
Monad and the lower quaternary could not come into sufficiently close relation
with each other; a link was yet wanting. “The Double Dragon [the Monad] has no
hold upon the mere form. It is like the breeze where there is no tree or branch
to receive and harbour it. It cannot affect the form where there is no agent
of transmission, and the form knows it not” – (Secret Doctrine, vol.
II, p. 60).Then, at the middle point just reached, in the middle, that is,
of the Third race, the lower Mânasaputra stepped in to inhabit the dwellings thus prepared
for them, and to form the bridge between animal man and the Spirit, between the
evolved quaternary and the brooding Âtma-Buddhi, to begin the long cycle
of reincarnation which is to issue in the perfect man.
The “monadic inflow,” or the evolution of the Monad, from
the animal into the human kingdom, continued through the Third Race on to the
middle of the Fourth, the human population thus continually receiving fresh
recruits, the birth of souls thus continuing through the second half of the
Third race and the first half of the Fourth. After this, the “central turning
point” of the cycle of evolution, “no more Monads can enter the human kingdom.
The door is closed for this cycle” (Secret Doctrine, vol. I, p. 205). Since
then [Page 71] reincarnation has
been the method of evolution, this individual reincarnation of the immortal
Thinker in conjunction with Âtma-Buddhi replacing the collective indwelling of Âtma-Buddhi
in lower forms of matter.
According to Theosophical teachings, humanity has now reached
the Fifth Race, and we are in the fifth sub-race thereof, mankind on this globe
in the present stage having before it the completion of the Fifth race, and
the rise, maturity and decay of the Sixth and Seventh Races. But during all
the ages necessary for this evolution, there is no increase in the total number
of reincarnating Egos; only a small proportion of these are reincarnated at
any special time on our globe, so that the population may ebb and flow within
very wide limits, and it will have been noticed that there is a rush of birth
after a local depopulation has been caused by exceptional mortality. There
is room and to spare for all such fluctuations, having in view the difference
between the total number of reincarnating Egos and the number actually incarnated
at a given period.
LINES
OF PROOF FOR AN UNTRAINED ENQUIRER
It is
natural and right that any thoughtful person brought face to face with assertions
such as those put forth in the preceding pages, should demand what proof
is forthcoming to substantiate the propositions laid down. A reasonable person
will not demand full and complete proof available to all comers, without
study and without painstaking. He will admit that the advanced theories of
a science cannot be demonstrated to one ignorant of its first principles,
and he will be [Page 72] prepared to find that very much
will have been alleged which can only be proved to those who have made some
progress in their study. An essay on the higher mathematics, on the correlation
of forces, on the atomic theory, on the molecular constitution of chemical
compounds, would contain many statements the proofs of which would only be
available for those who had devoted time and thought to the study of the
elements of the science concerned; and so an unprejudiced person, confronted
with the Theosophical view of the constitution of man, would readily admit
that he could not expect complete demonstration until he had mastered the
elements of the Theosophical science.
None the less are there general proofs available in every
science which suffice to justify its existence and to encourage study of its
more recondite truths; and in Theosophy it is possible to indicate lines of
proof which can be followed by the untrained enquirer, and which justify him
in devoting time and pains to a study which gives promise of a wider and deeper
knowledge of himself and of external nature than is otherwise attainable.
It is
well to say at the outset that there is no proof available to the average
enquirer of the existence of the three higher planes of which we have spoken.
The realms of Spirit, and of the higher mind are closed to all save those
who have evolved the faculties necessary for their investigation. Those who
have evolved these faculties need no proof of the existence of those realms;
to those who have not, no proof of their existence can be given. That there
is something above the astral and the lower levels of the mental plane
may indeed be proved by the flashes of genius, the lofty intuitions, that
from time to time lighten the darkness [Page 73] of
our lower world; but what that something is, only those can say whose inner
eyes have been opened, who see where the race as a whole is still blind.
But the lower planes are susceptible to proof, and fresh proofs are accumulating
day be day. The Masters of Wisdom are using the investigators and thinkers
of the Western world to make “discoveries” which tend to substantiate the
outposts of the Theosophical position, and the lines which they are following
are exactly those which are needed for the finding of natural laws which
will justify the assertions of Theosophists with regard to the elementary “powers” and “phenomena” to
which such exaggerated importance has been given. If it is found that we
have undeniable facts which establish the existence of planes other than
the physical on which consciousness can work; which establish the existence
of senses and powers of perception other than those with which we are familiar
in daily life; which establish the existence of powers of communication
between intelligences without the use of mechanical apparatus, surely,
under these circumstances, the Theosophist may claim that he has made out
a prima
facie case for further investigation of his doctrines.
Let
us then, confine ourselves to the lower planes of which we have spoken
in the preceding pages, and the four lower principles in man which are
correlated with these planes. Of these four, we may dismiss one, that of
Prâna, as none
will challenge the fact of the existence of the energy we call “life”; the
need of isolating it for purposes of study may be challenged, and in very
truth the plane of Prâna, or the principle of Prâna, runs through all other
planes, all other principles, interpenetrating all and binding all in one.
There [Page 74] remain for our study
the physical plane, the astral plane, the lower levels of the manasic plane.
Can we substantiate these by proofs which will be accepted by those who are
not yet Theosophists? I think we can.
First, as regards the physical plane. We need here to notice
how the senses of man are correlated with the physical universe outside him,
and how his knowledge of that universe is bounded by the power of his organs
of sense to vibrate in response to vibrations set up outside him. He can hear
when the air is thrown into vibrations into which the drum of his ear can also
be thrown; if the vibration be so slow that the drum cannot vibrate in answer,
the person does not hear any sound; if the vibration be so rapid that the drum
cannot vibrate in answer, the person does not hear any sound. So true is this,
that the limit of hearing in different persons varies with this power of vibration
of the drums of their respective ears; one person is plunged in silence, while
another is deafened by the keen shrilling that is throwing into tumult the
air around both. The same principle holds good for sight; we see so long as
the light waves are of a length to which our organs of sight can respond; below
and beyond this length we are in darkness, let the ether vibrate as it may.
The ant can see where we are blind, because its eye can receive and respond
to etheric vibrations more rapid than we can sense.
All this suggests to any thoughtful person the idea that
if our senses could be evolved to more responsiveness, new avenues of knowledge
would be opened up even on the physical plane; this realised, it is not difficult
to go a step farther, and to conceive that [Page 75] keener
and subtler senses might exist which would open up, as it were, a new universe
on a plane other than the physical.
Now this conception is true, and with the evolution of the
astral senses the astral plane unfolds itself, and may be studied as really,
as scientifically, as the physical universe can be. These astral senses exist
in all men, but are latent in most, and generally need to be artificially forced,
if they are to be used in the present stage of evolution. In a few persons
they are normally present and become active without any artificial impulse.
In very many persons they can be artificially awakened and developed. The condition,
in all cases, of the activity of the astral senses is the passivity of the
physical, and the more complete passivity on the physical plane the greater
the possibility of activity on the astral.
It
is noteworthy that Western psychologists have found it necessary to investigate
what is termed the “dream consciousness”, in order
to understand the workings of consciousness as a whole. It is impossible
to ignore the strange phenomena which characterise the workings of consciousness
when it is removed from the limitations of the physical plane, and some
of the most able and advanced of our psychologists do not think these workings
to be in any way unworthy of the most careful and scientific investigation.
All such workings are, in Theosophical language, on the astral plane, and
the student who seeks for proof there is an astral plane may here find
enough and to spare. He will speedily discover that the laws under which
consciousness works on the physical plane have no existence on the astral.
E.g., the laws of space and time, which are [Page 76] here
the very conditions of thought, do not exist for consciousness when its
activity is transferred to the astral world. Mozart hears a whole symphony
as a single impression, “as in a fine and strong dream” (Philosophy of Mysticism,
Du Prel, vol. I, p. 106), but has to work it out in successive details
when he brings it back with him to the physical plane. The dream of the
moment contains a mass of events that would take years to pass in succession
in our world of space and time. The drowning man sees his life history
in a few seconds. But it is needless to multiply instances.
The astral
plane may be reached in sleep or in trance, natural or induced, i.e.., in
any case in which the body is reduced to a condition of lethargy. It is
in trance that it can best be studied, and here our enquirer will soon
find proof that consciousness can work apart from the physical organism,
unfettered by the laws that bind it while it works on the physical plane.
Clairvoyance and clairaudience are among the most interesting of the phenomena
that here lie for investigation.
It is not necessary here to give a large number of cases of clairvoyance,
for I am supposing that the enquirer intends to study for himself. But I
may mention the case of Jane Rider, observed by Dr. Belden, her medical
attendant, a girl who could read and write with her eyes carefully covered
with wads of cotton wool, coming down from to the middle of the cheek (Isis Revelata, vol.
1, page 37); of a clairvoyant observed by Schelling who announced the death
of a relative at a distance of 150 leagues, and stated that the letter containing
the news of the death was on its way (ibid., vol. 2, pages 89-92);
of Madame Lagrandré, who diagnosed [Page 77] the
internal state of her mother, giving a description that was proved to be correct
by the post-mortem examination (Somnolism and Psychism, Dr. Haddock,
pages 54-56); of Emma, Dr. Haddock’s somnambule, who constantly diagnosed
diseases for him (ibid., chap. 7). Speaking generally, the clairvoyant can see
and describe events which are taking place at a distance, or under circumstances
that render physical sight impossible. How is this done? The facts are
beyond dispute. They require explanation. We say that consciousness can work
through senses other than the physical, senses unfettered by the limitations
of space which exist for our bodily senses, and cannot by them be transcended.
Those who deny the possibility of such working on what we call the astral plane
should at least endeavour to present a hypothesis more reasonable than ours.
Facts are stubborn things, and we have here a mass of facts proving the existence
of conscious activity on a superphysical plane, of sight without eyes, hearing
without ears, obtaining knowledge without physical apparatus. In default of
any other explanation, the Theosophical hypothesis holds the field.
There
is another class of facts: that of etheric and astral appearances, whether
of living or dead persons, wraiths, apparitions, doubles, ghosts, etc.,
etc. Of course the omniscient person of the end of the nineteenth century
will sniff with lofty disdain at the mention of such silly superstitions.
But sniffs do not abolish facts, and it is a question of evidence. The
weight of evidence is enormously on the side of such appearances, and in
all ages of the world human testimony has borne witness to their reality.
The enquirer whose demand for proof I have in view may well set to work
to gather [Page
78] first hand evidence on this head. Of course if he is
afraid of being laughed at he had better leave the matter alone, but if
he is robust enough to face the ridicule of the superior person he will be amazed at the
evidence which he will collect from persons who have themselves come into contact
with astral forms. “Illusions! hallucinations! “ the superior person will
say. But calling names settles nothing. Illusions to which the vast majority
of the human race bears witness are at least worthy of study, if human
testimony is to be taken as of any worth. There must be something which
gives rise to this unanimity of testimony in all ages of the world, testimony
which is found today among civilised people, amid railways and electric
lights, as well as among barbarous races.
The
testimony of millions of Spiritualists to the reality of etheric and astral
forms cannot be left out of consideration. When all cases of fraud and
imposture are discounted there remain phenomena that cannot be dismissed
as fraudulent, and that can be examined by any persons who care to give
time and trouble to the investigation. There is no necessity to employ
a professional medium; a few friends well know to each other, can carry
on their search together; and it is not too much to say that any half-dozen
persons, with a little patience and perseverance, may convince themselves
of the existence of forces and of intelligences other than those of the
physical plane. There
is danger in this research to any emotional, nervous, and easily influenced
natures, and it is well not to carry the investigations too far, for the
reasons given on the previous pages. But there is no readier way of breaking
down the unbelief in the existence of anything [Page 79] outside
the physical plane than trying a few experiments, and it is worth while to
run some risk in order to effect this breaking down.
These
are but hints as to lines that the enquirer may follow, so as to convince
himself that there is a state of consciousness such as we label “astral”. When he has collected evidence enough to make such a state
probable to him, it will be time for him to be put in the way of serious study.
For real investigation of the astral plane, the student must develop in himself
the necessary senses, and to make his knowledge available while he is in the
body, he must learn to transfer his consciousness to the astral plane without
losing grip of the physical organism, so that he may impress on the physical
brain the knowledge acquired during his astral voyagings. But for this he will
need to be not a mere enquirer but a student, and he will require the aid and
guidance of a teacher. As to finding that teacher, “when the pupil is ready
the teacher is always there”.
Further proofs of the existence of the astral plane are, at the present
time, most easily found in the study of mesmeric and hypnotic phenomena. And here,
ere passing to these, I am bound to put in a word of warning. The use of mesmerism
and hypnotism is surrounded by danger. The publicity which attends on all scientific
discoveries in the West has scattered broadcast knowledge which places within
the reach of the criminally disposed powers of the most terrible character,
which may be used for the most damnable purposes. No good man or woman will
use these powers, if he finds that he possesses them, save when he utilises
them purely for human service, without personal end in view, and when he is
very sure that he is not by [Page 80] their
means usurping control over the will and the actions of another human being.
Unhappily the use of these forces is as open to the bad as to the good, and
they may be, and are being, used to most nefarious ends. In view of these new
dangers menacing individuals and society, each will do well to strengthen the
habits of self-control and of concentration of thought and will, so as to encourage
the positive mental attitude as opposed to the negative, and thus to oppose
a sustained resistance to all influences coming from without. Our loose habits
of thought, our lack of distinct and conscious purpose, lay us open to the
attacks of the evil-minded hypnotiser, and that this is a real, not a
fancied, danger has been already proved by cases that have brought the
victims within grasp of the criminal law. It may be hoped that ere long
such hypnotic malpractices may be brought within the criminal code.
While
thus in the attitude of caution and of self-defence, we may yet wisely study the experiments made public to the world, in our
search for preliminary proofs of the existence of the astral plane. For here
Western science is on the very verge of discovering some of those “powers” of
which Theosophists have said so much, and we have the right to use in
justification of our teachings all the facts with which that science may
supply us.
Now,
one of the most important classes of these facts is that of thoughts rendered
visible as forms. A hypnotised person, after being awakened from trance
and being apparently in normal possession of his senses, can be made to see
any form conceived by the hypnotiser. No word need be spoken, no touch given;
it suffices that the hypnotiser should clearly image to himself [Page
81] some idea, and that idea becomes a visible and tangible
object to the person under his control. This experiment may be tried in
various ways; while the patient is in trance, “suggestion” may be used; that is,
the operator may tell him that a bird is on his knee, and on awaking from
the trance he will see the bird and will stroke it (Etudes Cliniques
sur la Grande Hystérie, Richet, p. 645); or that he has a lampshade between
his hands, and on awaking he will press his hands against it, feeling resistance
in the empty air (Animal Magnetism, translated from Binet and Féré,
page 213); scores of these experiments may be read in Richet or in Binet
and Féré. Similar results may be effected without “suggestion”, by pure
concentration of the thought; I have seen a patient thus made to remove a
ring from a person’s finger, without word spoken or touch passing between
hypnotiser and hypnotised.
The literature of mesmerism and hypnotism in English, French, and German
is now very extensive, and it is open to every one. There may be sought the evidence
of this creation of forms by thought and will, forms which, on the astral
plane, are real and objective. Mesmerism and hypnotism set the intelligence
free on this plane, and it works thereon without the hindrance normally imposed by
the physical apparatus; it can see and hear on that plane, and sees thoughts
as things. Here, again, for real study, it is necessary to learn how thus
to transfer the consciousness while retaining hold of the physical organism;
but for preliminary inquiry it suffices to study others whose consciousness
is artificially liberated without their own volition. This reality of thought
images on a superphysical plane is a fact of the very highest importance,
especially in its bearing on [Page 82] reincarnation;
but it is enough here to point to it as one of the facts which go to show the prima
facie probability of the existence of such a plane.
Another
class of facts deserving study is that which includes the phenomena of
thought-transference, and here we reach the lower levels of the mental,
or manasic, plane. The Transactions of the Psychical Research
Society contain a large number of interesting experiments on this subject,
and the possibility of the transference of thought from brain to brain without
the use of words, or of any means of ordinary physical communication, is on
the verge of general acceptance. And two persons, gifted with patience, may
convince themselves of this possibility, if they care to devote to the effort
sufficient time and perseverance. Let them agree to give, say, ten minutes
daily to their experiment, and fixing on the time, let each shut himself up
alone, secure from interruption of any kind. Let one be the thought projector,
the other the thought-receiver, and it is safer to alternate these positions,
in order to avoid risk of one becoming permanently abnormally passive. Let
the thought projector concentrate himself on a definite thought and the will
to impress it on his friend; no other idea than the one must enter his mind;
his thought must be concentrated on the one thing, “one–pointed” in the
graphic language of Patanjali. The thought-receiver, on the other hand,
must render his mind a blank, and must merely note the thoughts that drift
into it. These he should put down as they appear, his only care being to
remain passive, to reject nothing, to encourage nothing. The thought-projector,
on his side, should keep a record of the ideas he tries to send, and at
the end of six months the two records should be [Page 83] compared. Unless
the persons are abnormally deficient in thought and will, some power of communication
will by that time have been established between them: and if they are at all
psychic they will probably also have developed the power of see in each other
in the astral light.
It
may be objected that such an experiment would be wearisome and monotonous.
Granted. All first hand investigations into natural laws and forces are
wearisome and monotonous. That is why nearly every one prefers second-hand
to first-hand knowledge; the “sublime patience of the investigator” is
one of the rarest gifts. Darwin would perform an apparently trivial experiment
hundreds of times to substantiate one small fact . The supersensuous domains
certainly do not need for their conquest less patience and less effort
than the sensuous. Impatience never yet accomplished anything in the questioning
of nature, and the would-be student must, at the very outset, show the
tireless perseverance which can perish but cannot relinquish its hold.
Finally,
let me advise the inquirer to keep his eyes open for new discoveries, especially
in the sciences of electricity, physics, and chemistry. Let him read
Professor Lodge’s address to the British Association at
Cardiff in the autumn of 1891 and Professor Crookes’ address to the Society
of Electrical Engineers in London the following November. He will there
find pregnant hints of the lines along which Western science is preparing to
advance, and he will perchance begin to feel that there may be something in
H.P.Blavatsky’s statement that the Masters of Wisdom are preparing to give
proofs that will substantiate the Secret Doctrine.
[Page
84]
The
Seven Planes and the principles functioning thereon |
7 |
x |
|
6 |
x |
|
5 |
Atmâ.
Spirit |
Spiritual |
4 |
Buddhi.
Spiritual Soul |
3 |
Manas.
Human Soul. |
Mental |
2 |
Kâma.
Astral or Desire-Body |
Astral |
1 |
Prâna.
Etheric Double. Dense Physical Body |
Physical |
[Page 85]
Another
Division according to the Principles
|
|
7 |
Atmâ |
Spiritual |
|
6 |
Buddhi |
|
5 |
Higher
Manas |
Mental |
Principles
closely interwoven during earth life.
Sometimes
called high Psychic Plane |
4 |
Lower
Manas |
3 |
Kâma |
Astral |
|
2 |
Prâna.
Etheric Double |
Physical |
|
1 |
Dense
Physical Body |
[Page 86]
Another
Division also according the Principles
|
7 |
Atmâ |
Spiritual |
6 |
Buddhi |
5 |
Manas |
Mental |
4 |
Kâma |
Astral |
3 |
Prâna |
Physical |
2 |
Etheric
Double |
1 |
Dense
Physical Body |
These
two latter divisions are matters of convenience in classification. The first
diagram gives the planes themselves as they exist in nature.
-------------------------
|