CHAPTER X.

CONQUERING DELUSIONS
As the young student of occultism gets fairly into his work he will find that his viewpoint is gradually chang- ing and that old ideas are being re- placed by newer and truer ones. Ul- timately he will discover that he has been living in the midst of delusions and mistaking them for realities. One part of his work now is to conquer the delusions and come into a realization of the truth that is hidden by outward appearances. To acquire the ability to distinguish between the apparent and the real is a stupendous task, for only when human evolution is finished can such discrimination be perfect. But the searcher for occult truth can take a step that will start him on the way,
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and that is the important thing now. To this end he may begin with an effort to master the illusion that the physical body is himself. We are so used to identifying the self with the body from our very infancy that to separate the two in thought even for a moment is at first nearly impossible, and yet it must be done. To fully realize that the body is as much an instrument of the self as the hand is, or as one's pen is, constitutes one of the first steps in occult progress. We have before us the work of freeing ourselves from delusions and this one that leads us to think of the body as the self is a starting point in the task. When it is accomplished we shall have made a most encouraging forward step that will lead to success in more diffi- cult ones.
There are various ways in which we can gradually acquire the feeling that the body is not at all the self, but only
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a thing we use for our convenience. One useful way is to keep in mind the fact that the body is a mere aggrega- tion of matter that has no permanent relationship to the self; that this aggre- gation of physical matter is constantly changing ; that it is always coming and going and is never the same for even a few days at a time. Some parts of it are replaced with new matter more slowly than others, but within a very few years (the seven years suggested by some physiologists is now said to be much too long for the facts) the entire body will be replaced by new matter. To put it differently, the physical body a person has to-day will, in a short time, have been returned to the ele- ments of which it is composed, while matter that is now widely scattered over the earth will, by that time, be fashioned into the physical body he is yet to have. As a matter of scientific fact, from birth to death we have many
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physical bodies but the process of their coming and going is so gradual and imperceptible that we do not realize it. Nevertheless the quantity of mat- ter that a man uses as a body, in the course of a long life — the matter which the average man regards as himself — will amount to more than a ton. A very little thought will show anybody the folly of identifying that ton of matter as himself! It is only a quan- tity of matter brought together to build a working instrument for the self, as the matter in the pen has been fash- ioned into a different instrument for the use of the self; only, in the case of the body the matter has not all been used at one time. If the student will remember that the self, with all its memories, is unaffected by this con- stant change in the physical body ; that it really has no permanent relationship whatever to the body, which, to the eye of science is but a whirling, shifting
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mass of matter, the delusion that he is the body will begin to lose its power over his mind. Think continually of the body as merely a changing aggre- gation of atoms, forming, reforming, disappearing, while the self is per- manent, enduring and independent, temporarily using the physical body but ready when the time comes to step entirely aside from it, to use it no longer, to return to it no more.
It is not easy to think of the self as separated from the familiar form we know and here the student of Theosophy will be helped by the fact that the astral body is a duplicate of the physical form. Remembering that the astral is a degree nearer reality than the physical region he can think of the astral body as representing the self and thus, in thought, separate himself from the physical body and picture the self with all its attributes and powers being expressed in the higher vehicles, wholly
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independent of the mass of matter called the physical body. Of course he cannot stop there. It is but a be- ginning. The time will come when he must separate the self from the astral body also, and from the mental body as well. The thing he may really do with good results is to go as far up as the causal body in his thought of separating the self from its vehicles. He should always think of these invisible vehicles, or bodies, as being composed of matter that freely interpenetrates the physical body as water saturates a sponge. He should keep it always .in mind that man is a wonderfully complex being and that the various bodies he inhabits are but sections of the complex whole, each playing a distinct part in the total of the life functions. Perhaps it may help him to remember the complexity of the physical body, considered by itself. It, alone, is composed of various grades
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of matter, each of them being a section of the physical body and giving us an outline of it. There is, first, the dense matter of the bones. They are the frame-work for the rest and give us the body in outline, but the skeleton is not the body. Then there is a dif- ferent grade of matter which we call flesh. It also represents the form of the body but it is far from being the whole body. Then we have the nerves. If a diagram of the nervous system were made, with each nerve in its proper place, we should have again a perfect outline of the human form. But these nerves are not the body, — only a 'section of it performing a dis- tinct office. Then there is also the fluid which we call the blood. If it could be suddenly stopped in its circu- lation, instantly frozen, and all of the particles in the capillaries were to re- main where they were at the instant that circulation was suspended while
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all the rest of the matter of the body should, by some magic, vanish, we would still have the human form per- fectly outlined by the blood that cir- culates in it. Yet because the blood outlines the human form it is not the body. It is only another section of the complex whole known as the physi- cal body. It requires all these sec- tions, and requires them all interlaced and performing different functions, to constitute the physical body.
Now, it is no more erroneous to think of any one of these different sections of the body, each with its specific work to do, as being the physi- cal body than to think of any one of the bodies of man as being the man. Just as all these grades of physical matter, each carrying forward its par- ticular set of activities from birth to death, are required to make up the physical body, to constitute the mech- anism through which the man func-
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tions on the physical plane, so are the different bodies through which we function in the various planes required to express the whole range of the ego's activities in the three worlds in which we simultaneously exist. The physical, the astral, the lower mental and the causal bodies, should be thought of as four separable parts or sections of one complex whole, but not as the man himself; the ego, the self, being the in- dividualized portion of the universal consciousness functioning through them all.
Another way in which one can achieve some degree of success in free- ing oneself from delusions is to remem- ber that the physical senses are very unreliable interpreters of facts and that in the simplest of things they mislead us. The physical senses tell us that the earth is stationary and that the sun, as well as the moon, moves about it. We have to fall back upon our reason,
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make mechanical measurements and careful comparisons of various facts, before we can free ourselves from this particular deception of the physical senses; and many people never do get free from it. If we look at a straight log that lies on the bank of a stream with one end submerged in the clear water, the eye reports to us that the log is bent at the point where it enters the water. If two trains are standing side by side and we are on one while the other begins to move slowly the eye falsely reports to the consciousness that our own train is moving. If we cross the first and second fingers of the hand and then roll a marble back and forth across the finger tips the sense of touch falsely informs us that there are two marbles instead of one. Many facts and experiences may be cited to show the utter unreliability of the testimony of the physical senses. The student should keep it steadily in mind that
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just as we are thus misled by the physi- cal senses in these matters so are we deceived by them in other and more important affairs; and just as one may hold the mental picture of the earth be- ing spherical and moving about the sun until the idea of it being flat and sta- tionary becomes unnatural and absurd so can he think the truth about the interpenetrating relationship of the va- rious bodies in which he functions un- til the old delusions disappear and trouble him no longer. The physical body becomes to him in reality an in- strument that he is using, a vehicle in which he is moving about and through which he communicates with others in his daily activities. Slowly but surely this fact becomes established in his con- sciousness, and he has taken an im- portant step in discrimination between the real and the unreal.