CHAPTER VI
MAN IN LIFE AND IN DEATH
It is an axiom in our modem conception of
evolution that the more diverse are the functions of which an organism is capable, the more
complex is its structure. It is therefore in the
order of things that man should have a complexity of structure not found in less developed
organisms. But the complexity of the human
organism revealed to us in anatomy and physiology is only
a small part of the full complexity of man; even what we are told in
modern psychology lays bare but little of the
complexity revealed in Theosophy.
In Fig. 52 are summarized the main facts
about man, as seen in Theosophy.
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At the birth of an individual, we have several elements
which go to build the unit of humanity whom
we call "man". They are as follows:
1. The Ego, the true Soul of man, of whom
in all cases only a part can ever be manifested
in a physical body. This Ego is the Individuality.
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2. A part of the Individuality which is
manifested in a reincarnation, at a given time,
in a particular race, and as either a man or a
woman. This is the Personality.
The relation between the Individuality and
the Personality has been expressed by many
symbols; one, which has been used in the old
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mysteries, is that of a string of pearls, where the
string represents the Individuality, and the
pearls the separate Personalities in successive
incarnations. In Fig. 52 another symbol is
taken. If we take the three-dimensional,
twenty-equal-surfaced geometrical solid,
known as the icosahedron, to represent the
Individuality, then the Personality is equivalent to one of the twenty two-dimensional
triangles which make up the surface of the figure.
All the twenty triangles of the surface, even
when put side by side, will always fail to represent one characteristic of the figure, which is its
third dimension; and conversely, since a
triangle has only two dimensions, and the
solid figure has three, it is possible to separate
an infinity of triangles from each face of the
icosahedron. In a similar fashion, each Personality — as, too, all the Personalities together
which an Ego ensouls at successive rebirths —
fails to reveal certain attributes of the real Ego;
and, also, an Ego can ensoul as many Personalities as his force
is adequate to, without exhausting his true nature as the Ego.
Only one Personality, however, is ensouled
by the Individuality for the purpose of the work
done in any one incarnation.
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3. The Personality (Fig. 52, column 3) at
rebirth takes a Mind or Mental Body, an Astral
Body and a Physical Body.
4. Each of these three bodies has a life and
consciousness of its own, quite distinct fron the
life and consciousness of the Personality who
uses them. ,This "body-consciousness" of each
vehicle is known respectively as the "mental
elemental" of the mind body, the "desire elemental" of the astral body, and the "physical
elemental" of the physical body (column 2).
This "body-consciousness" is the life of the Elemental Essences of mental and astral matter,
and the life of the mineral, vegetable and
anjmal streams of life which make up the physical body (column 4).
5. The physical body, which is provided by
the parents, is the repository of the hereditary
Mendelian genes or "factors" which are in the
parental ancestry; out of these parental genes
such of them are selected, at the building of the
embryo at conception, as are consonant with
the karma of the Individuality, and will be
useful for the work of the Personality.
6. The astral and mental bodies also have
hereditary factors of a kind; but these are not
provided by the parents but by the Ego himself.
The astral and mental bodies with which a
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child is born are replicas of the astral body and
the mental body with which the previous incarnation ended, when the Personality of the
previous life discarded his astral body to enter
the heaven world, and later discarded his
mental body, at the end of his period in the
heaven world.
Man then, when examined in the light of
Theosophy, is a very complex entity, the resultant of the diagonals of many parallelograms
of forces of three worlds; for the purpose of
coherent study, we can well arrange these forces
into three groups:
1. The Individuality, who lives on in the
permanent Causal Body from life to life, and
retains the memories of the experiences of all
his Personalities;
2. The Personality, a more or less partial
representative of the Individuality;
3. The "body consciousness" of each of the
three vehicles, the mental, astral and physical
elementals.
We shall consider first the kinds of body-consciousness. The physical body has a
consciousness which, however limited, is sufficient
for the purposes of its life and functions. This
consciousness knows how to attract the attention of the occupier when there is need for it;
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when the body is tired. it urges the individual
to rest; when it needs food and drink, it creates
in him the desire to eat and drink. When
such physical functions work, it is not the Ego
who wants to eat and drink; but merely the
physical elemental. It is clever enough,
through long ancestral habits of heredity, to
protect itself; when attacked by disease germs,
it marshals its army of phagocytes to kill them;
when wounded, it organizes the cells to heal
when the body is asleep (that is, when the
owner departs in his astral body, and the
physical body is tenantless), it pulls up the
bedclothes to cover itself against the cold, or
turns over to sleep in a new position. In any
event which it thinks threatens its life, it will
instantly do what it can, however limited, to
protect itself; if a shot is fired or a door is
slammed, it jumps back; its consciousness is
not sufficient to distinguish between the danger
revealed by the sound of a shot and the absence
of danger from the slamming of a door.
Many of these manifestations of the physical
elemental are natural enough, and need not be
interfered with by the consciousness of the
tenant of the body; but sometimes such interference is necessary, as when a duty has to be
performed, and the body is tired and objects,
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and yet must be forced to work, or when there
is a work of danger to be done, and
the elemental, fearing for its life, wants to run away
and yet must be held to its task by the will of
the owner. In children. the physical elemental is most pronounced; when a baby cries
and screams, It is the elemental which manifests its objections (reasonable to it, though
often unreasonable to us), but it is not the Soul
of the baby who screams and cries.
This physical elemental's life and consciousness
is the reservoir of all the experiences of
pleasure and pain of its long line of physical
ancestors; its life was once the life of the desire
elementals of savages of long ago. It has all
kinds of ancestral memories and tendencies, to
which it often reverts, whenever the Ego's
consciousness over it is lessened. It is this
body-consciousness which has been discovered
in the researches of modern psychoanalysts of
the schools of Freud, Jung and Adler, and its
vagaries of consciousness are manifest in our
inconsequential and often meaningless dreams.
The elementals of the astral and mental
bodies consist of the life of the Elemental
Essence. This Elemental Essence is a phase
of the life of the Logos at an earlier stage of
manifestation than even the life of the mineral;
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it is on the "downward arc" of life, and is
"descending into matter", to become, later,
mineral life, and later still, vegetable and
animal life. Its chief need is to feel itself alive,
and in as many new ways as possible; it wants
a variety of vibrations, and the coarser they
are, that is, tending more to materiality, the
better pleased it is. This is that "law in my
members, warring against the law of my
mind", of which St. Paul speaks, the "sin that
dwelleth in me".
The desire elemental likes the astral body to
be roused, to have in fact "a rousing time";
variety, novelty, excitement are what it wants
on its downward arc of life. The mental elemental does not like the mind to be held to one
thought; it is ever restless, and craves as many
varied thought vibrations as it can induce its
owner to give; hence our difficulty in concentration because of this "fickleness of the mind".
But the owner of the astral and mental
bodies, the Ego, is on the upward arc of life;
billions of years ago he lived as the mineral,
the plant and the animal; such experiences
as the mental and desire elementals now
prefer, on their downward arc, are not necessarily what he, the Ego who is on the upward
arc, finds useful for his work in life. Hence
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that continual warfare for mastery between
the Ego and his vehicles, graphically described
by St. Paul; "the good that I would, I do
not; but the evil which I would not, that
I do."
Man's work in life and death and beyond
is to control his vehicles, and use their energies
to accomplish a work mapped out for him by
the Lords of Karma, and acquiesced in by the
Ego. He may succeed or he may fail according to the amount of will-power in the Ego,
and according to his knowledge of how to
exercise it. This battleground of life, this
crucible of experience, is outlined in Fig. 53.
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The Individuality is the "Higher Self", "the
Demon" of Plato; he has three fundamental
attributes, described as Atma, the Spirit;
Buddhi, the Intuition; and Higher Manas, the
Abstract Mind. Will, Wisdom and Activity
also describe this fundamental triplicity of the
Higher Self. The personality is the "Lower
Self", and is composed of the Lower Manas or
the Concrete Mind, the astral or desire nature,
the physical functions, and the three vehicles in
which these activities manifest. The Higher
Self "puts down" a part of himself into incarnation for the work of transforming experiences
into faculty.
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Everything now depends on how much power
of will exists in the Ego, and is being manifested
by him in the control of his vehicles. Where
the will of the Ego dominates the instincts of the
mental, desire and physical elementals, the incarnation is a success; where, on the other hand,
the three elementals gain the upper hand, the
incarnation is so much wasted effort. In the
case of most men, there is neither complete
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domination nor complete slavery; in some
things we succeed in dominating, in others we
fail. What happens in each case, we can see
from the diagram.
The functions of the physical body are
neither good nor evil; it is the body's duty to
eat to live, drink to satisfy thirst. The evil
begins when a natural function is intensified,
by the identification of the desire nature of the
man with the function. When the purely
animal sensations from food and drink are
delighted in by the astral body, the body becomes gluttonous and craves stimulants; at
first the astral body dictates when the cravings
must be indulged in, but after a while the physical elemental makes the astral body its tool.
It is natural enough for a primitive savage to
gorge and be a glutton; but when a civilized
man allows a purely physical function to
hypnotize his desire nature, he is for the time
reverting to the savage. The process of reversion is well illustrated in the Japanese proverb
about drunkenness:
First the man takes a drink:
Then the drink takes a drink;
Then the drink takes the man.
But where the will is dominant, then, from
the physical functions, permanent qualities are
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developed by the Ego of self-control and purity.
It is of great use to the Ego to have perfect
control over the physical body, so that the
body's technique may be fully and swiftly
under the Ego's control in the work in life.
Rational and pure diet, perfect health, control
over muscle and limb, through exercise and
games, are invaluable in transforming physical
functions into self-control and purity.
In exactly a similar way, it is natural for the
astral body to desire; it is natural that the astral
body should object to offensive smells or to
discords in sound, and be pleased at harmonious surroundings and agreeable tones. The
desire nature of the astral body provides a
delicate instrument of cognition. Evil begins
when the desire elemental dominates and dis-possesses the Ego for the time. A natural
desire then becomes a craving, and the astral
body gets out of control. When a man loses
his temper, so that for the time he is not showing a soul's attributes, but those of a wild beast,
he has for the time reverted to an early stage
of evolution, dragged thereto by the astral
body which he cannot control.
What we have to understand is that we
are not the habits of the desire elemental of the
astral body, but are to search out, for our soul's
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purpose, such aptitudes in it as are useful to us.
Sometimes, through suffering, we discover for
ourselves this duality in us; an American girl of
thirteen whom I knew so discovered it. One
day she came home from school almost crying
because her playmates had been teasing her;
and when her mother asked her if they had
hurt her, she replied: "N-no, but they made
my feelings feel bad." When we realize that
we are not the feelings of the astral body but
possess them, just as we might possess a tennis
racket or a motor car, then we shall know
exactly how much freedom to give to the
feelings.
On the reverse side of the picture, the feelings of our astral body, when controlled, can be
made most sensitive and delicate, and can be
transformed into wonderful revelations of the
soul's affection and sympathy; the astral body
then becomes a fine instrument upon which we
can play, so as to throw the invisible world
around us into waves of inspiring and purifying
emotions.
What has been said above, about the desire
elemental of the astral body, applies with even
greater force to the mental elemental of the
mind body. The mental body has, as its
natural function, that of responding to thought;
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and thought, when exercised by the Ego, is a
means of discovering the world in which he
lives. Concrete thought weighs and measures
the universe; the function of abstract thought is
to transform all experiences of the mental and
lower bodies into eternal concepts which can be
incorporated into the soul's nature.
But very few of our thoughts are of this nature,
for two reasons: first, that the mental elemental
often clings to past thoughts of ours, and insists on thinking them, despite our attempts
to control it; and secondly, that what we think
is less our own creation, and more what is supplied to us by others. Of the former type are
prejudices, which are in reality thoughts which
were once useful to us in our work in life, though
not necessarily true; they become later no
longer useful, and we are better without them,
but the mental elemental retains the strength
which we instilled into them, and, the better
to gain its end, hypnotizes us into believing
that they are still our true thoughts. The
prejudices which men have as to the superiority of race, creed, sex, caste, class or color,
are largely of this nature.
Of the second type are the thoughts of other
people, which are being continually poured
into the world's mental atmosphere, and which,
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impinging on our mental bodies, draw out of us
automatically a response of like thoughts.
When such thoughts seek admittance, we need
to take care that we give welcome only to those
which are useful for our soul's work, and that
we rigorously exclude all others.
Certain thoughts of both these types sometimes behave like the "malignant growths"
which appear in the human body as tumors
and cancers. Some thoughts make definite
centers in the mental body, and gather round
them similar thoughts, and absorb their vitality; they then become distinctly malignant
mental growths of the mind body. Just as a
tumor in the brain, in the beginning, will
produce only a slight ache, but afterwards, as
it grows larger, will derange many functions
of the body, so too is it with these malignant
mental growths; at first they are hardly evident, except perhaps as unreasonable
phantasies and worries; later, they grow and produce
definite mental diseases, like phobias of various
kinds and insanity.
The transmutation of the experiences into
eternal concepts, which is gained through right
thinking, feeling and acting, is only partly
accomplished during the life on earth and in
the astral world after death; the task is
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continued when the individual begins his life
in the heaven world. There, under the most
ideal and congenial surroundings, with the
power to create all such happiness as he longs
for, and above all with the wonderful aid of the
Mind of the Logos playing upon his mental
body and causing it to grow, the man lives
his period in the heaven world. He develops
his will and transforms all his experiences
into eternal concepts, and into faculties which
more and more reflect his hidden Divine
Nature.
This work which man does during his period,
"in Heaven" naturally depends upon the
strength of his aspirations, and upon the
amount of capacity with which he sets to work
upon the work of transmutation. These facors determine how long he is "in Devachan",
growing there through happiness. In Fig. 54
we have a table giving a general average for
various types of Egos.
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When the death of
the physical body takes place, the man lives
in the astral world for a while; afterwards
he passes to the lower heaven, to live there
"in Devachan". At the end of Devachan,
the mental body, the last remnant of the
Personality, is cast aside, and the Ego is once
more fully himself, with all his energies, in the
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higher heaven. After a period, brief or long,
dimly conscious or fully aware of the process
of rebirth, the Ego once more puts down a
part of himself into incarnation to become the new Personality.
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We see from the diagram that the degenerate, low type of human being lives about
five years in the astral world and, having no
spiritual qualities needing Devachan for their
growth, returns at once into incarnation. The
terms artisan, farmer, merchant are used to describe general types; and doctor is
used to represent professional men in general. But a
farmer or a merchant may be a highly cultivated man and belong really to a higher type
of Ego than is represented by his occupation.
The cultured man, who is definitely idealistic
and who makes sacrifices for the sake of his
ideals, has a consciously active life as the Individuality in the higher heaven. The man
consecrated to service under the guidance of a
Master of the Wisdom, should he "take his
Devachan", will have so purified his astral
nature before death that he need have no life
in the astral world at all; he will pass at once
into his Devachan.
We see from the diagram that the period
between incarnations may vary from five years
to twenty-three centuries. When a child dies,
he, too, has his short astral life and his short
Devachan before return to birth again; the
period between his death and rebirth may vary
from a few months to several years, according
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to the age and the mental and emotional nature
of the child.
Many of the facts already mentioned, about
the hidden nature of man and his finer vehicles,
are restated in the next diagram, Fig. 55.
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In the first column we have the seven planes of the
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solar system; in the second we have the four
bodies which man now uses. It will be seen
from the third and fourth columns that man
exists, in his highest nature, as the "Monad",
on the four planes higher than the mental
plane, but that he has as yet no vehicle or
instrument of cognition and action in them.
For all general purposes of study, the soul of
man is the Individuality in the causal body.
The Individuality creates a Personality for the
purpose of incarnation, and the Personality has
three vehicles, the mental, astral and physical
bodies. Each of these three lower bodies represents one aspect of the Ego; and since the
Ego in the causal body gives the fundamental
tone or temperament for the incarnation, we,
may think of the Ego and his three lower vehicles as forming a chord of temperamental,
tones, the Chord of the Man. But the Individuality in the causal body is only a partial
representation of all his qualities; behind his
Higher Manas or Abstract Mind exists the
Buddhi, the Divine Intuition, and behind that,
the Atma or the indomitable Spirit of God in
man. But the Atma, Buddhi and Manas are
themselves reflections of still higher attributes
of the Monad, "the Son in the bosom of the
"Father", The fundamental note of the Life
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of the Logos gives the dominant tone for the
Monad, and the three attributes of the Monad,
on the Adi, Anupadaka and higher Nirvanic
planes, make the "Chord of the Monad".
The Monad then creates the Individuality;
the tone of the Monad being then the dominant, it and the tones represented by the
Atma, Buddhi and Manas make the "Chord
of the Augoeides". When next the Individuality creates the Personality, the "mask",
we have the "Chord of the Man".
* * * *
Man's work in life and in death is to discover
what he is, what is the world, and what is the
Logos "in whom we live, and move, and have
our being". Ages of experience and action are
required before he begins. to grasp this "Wisdom of God in a mystery", and to understand
"God's Plan, which is Evolution". Yet this is
his eternal work — to know, in himself and in
others, the clod, the brute and the God. All
life is a workshop where he is taught his work;
and many are the instructors who come to help
him. These are the religions and the philosophies, the sciences and the arts of his time.
Instructors too, unwelcome for the most part,
are the sufferings which are his lot. But most
welcome of all his instructors can be the
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Hidden Wisdom known as Theosophy, which
reveals God's Plan with such a fascination to
the mind, and with such an inspiration to the
heart, as have not yet been found in any other
revelation.
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