Section 8

Temporary Bodies. — We cannot leave out of our re- view of man's bodies certain other vehicles that are tem- porary, and may be called artificial, in their character. When a man begins to pass out of the physical body he may use the astral, but so long as he is functioning in that he is limited to the astral world. It is possible, however, for him to use the mind body — that of the Lower Manas — in order to pass into the mental region, and in this he can also range the astral and physical planes without let or hinderance. The body thus used is often called the Mayavi Rupa, or body of illusion, and it is the mind body re-arranged, so to speak, for separate activity. The man fashions his mind body into the like- ness of himself, shapes it into his own image and likeness, and is then in this temporary and artificial body free to traverse the three planes at will and rise superior to the ordinary limitations of man. It is this artificial body that is often spoken of in theosophical books, in which a person can travel from land to land, passing
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also into the world of mind, learning there new truths, gathering new experience, and bringing back to the wak- ing consciousness the treasures thus collected. The ad- vantage of using this higher body is that it is not sub- ject to deception and glamour on the astral plane as is the astral body. The untrained astral senses often mis- lead, and much experience is needed ere their reports can be trusted, but this temporarily formed mind body is not subject to such deceptions; it sees with a true vision, it hears with a true hearing; no astral glamour can overpower, no astral illusion can deceive ; therefore this body is preferably used by those trained for such journeyings, made when it is wanted, let go again when the purpose for which it was made is served. Thus it is that the student often learns lessons that otherwise could not reach him, and receives instructions from which he would otherwise be entirely shut off.
Other temporary bodies have been called by the name of Mayavi Rupa, but it seems better to restrict the term to the one just described. A man may appear at a distance in a body which is really a thought-form more than a vehicle of consciousness, thought clothed in the elemental essence of the astral plane. These bodies are, as a rule, merely vehicles of some particular thought, some special volition, and outside this show no conscious- ness. They need only be mentioned in passing.
The Human Aura. — We are now in a position to understand wliat the human aura, in its fullest sense, really is. It is the man himself, manifest at once on the four planes of consciousness, and according to its de-
velopment is his power of functioning on each ; it is the aggregate of his bodies, of his vehicles of consciousness ; in a phrase, it is the form-aspect of the man. It is thus that we should regard it, and not as a mere ring or cloud surrounding him. Most glorious of all is the spiritual body, visible in Initiates, through which plays the living atmic fire; this is the manifestation of the man on the buddhic plane. Then comes the causal body, his manifestation in the highest mental world, on the arupa levels of the plane of mind, where the individual has his home. Next the mind body, belonging to the lower mental planes, and the astral, etheric, and dense bodies in succession, each formed of the matter of its own region, and expressing the man as he is in each. When the student looks at the human being he sees all these bodies making up the man, showing themselves separately by virtue of their different grades of matter, and thus marking the stage of development at which the man has arrived. As the higher vision is developed the student sees each of these bodies in its full activity. The physical body is visible as a kind of dense crystalli- zation in the center of the other bodies, thq others perme- ating it and extending beyond its periphery, the physical being the smallest. The astral comes next, showing the state of the kamic nature that forms so great a part of the ordinary man, full of his passions, lower appetites, and emotions, differing in fineness, in color, as the man is more or less pure — very dense in the grosser types, finer in the more refined, finest of all if the man be far advanced in his evolution. Then the mind body, poorly
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developed in the majority but beautiful in many, very various in coloring according to the mental and moral type. Then the causal, scarcely visible in most, visible only if careful scrutiny be brought to bear on the man, so slightly is it developed, so comparatively thin is its coloring, so feeble is its activity. But when we come to look at an advanced soul, it is this and the one above it that at once strike the eye as being emphatically the presentation of the man ; radiant in light, most glorious and delicate in coloring, showing hues that no language can describe, because they have no place in earth's spec- trum— hues not only the most pure and beautiful, but entirely different from the colors known on the lower planes, additional ones which show the growth of the man in those higher regions in the loftier qualities and powers that there exist. If the eye be fortunate enough to be blessed with the sight of one of the Great Ones, He appears as this mighty living form of life and color, radiant and glorious, showing forth His nature by His very appearance to the view; beautiful beyond descrip- tion, resplendent beyond imagination. Yet what He is all shall one day become ; that which He is in ac- complishment dwells in every son of man as possibility. There is one point about the aura that I may mention, as it is one of practical utility. We can to a great ex- tent protect ourselves against the incursions of thoughts from outside by making a spherical wall round us from the auric substance. The aura responds very readily to the impulse of thought, and if by an effort of the imagination we picture its outer edge as densified
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into a shell, we really make such a protective wall around us. This shell will prevent the incoming of the drift- ing thoughts that fill the astral atmosphere, and thus will prevent the disturbing influence they exercise over the untrained mind. The drain on our vitality that we sometimes feel, especially when we come into contact with people who unconsciously vampirise their neigh- bors, may also be guarded against by the formation of a shell, and any one who is sensitive and who finds himself very exhausted by such a drain will do wisely thus to protect himself. Such is the power of human thought on subtle matter that to think of yourself as within such a shell is to have it formed around you.
Looking at human beings around us on every side we may see them in every stage of development, show- ing themselves forth by their bodies according to the point in evolution which they have reached, living on plane after plane of the universe, functioning in region after region, as they develop the corresponding vehicles of consciousness. Our aura shows just what we are; we add to it as we grow in the true life ; we purify it as we live noble and cleanly lives; we weave into it higher and higher qualities.
Is it possible that any philosophy of life should be more full of hope, more full of strength, more full of joy than this? Looking over the world of men with the physical eye only, we see it degraded, miserable, apparently hopeless, as in truth it is to the eye of flesh. But that same world of men appears to us in quite an- other aspect when seen by the higher vision. We see
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indeed the sorrow and the misery, we see indeed the degradation and the shai^e ; but we know that they are transient, that they are temporary, that they belong to the childhood of the race and that the race will outgrow them. Looking at the lowest and vilest, at the most de- graded and most brutal, we can yet see their divine pos- sibilities, we can yet realize what they shall be in the years to come. That is the message of hope brought by Theosophy to the western world, the message of univer- sal redemption from ignorance, and therefore of uni- versal emancipation from misery — not in dream but in reality, not in hope but in certainty. Every one who in his own life is showing the growth is as it were, a fresh realization and enforcement of the message ; everywhere the first-fruits are appearing, and the whole world shall one day be ripe for the harvest, and shall accomplish the purpose for which the Logos gave it birth.
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The Man.
We have now to turn to the consideration of the man himself, no longer studying the vehicles of consciousness but the action of the consciousness on them, no longer looking at the bodies but at the entity who functions in them. By ^'the man" I mean that continuing individual who passes from life to life, who comes into bodies and again leaves them, over and over again, who develops slowly in the course of ages, who grows by the gathering and by the assimilation of experience, and who exists on that higher manasic or mental plane referred to in the last chapter. This man is to be the subject of our study, functioning on the three planes with which we are now familiar — the physical, the astral, and the mental.
Man begins his experience by developing self-con- sciousness on the physical plane ; it is here that appears what we call the "waking consciousness," the conscious- ness with which we are all familiar, which works through the brain and nervous system, by which we reason in the ordinary way, carrying on all logical processes, by which we remember past events of the current incarna- tion, and exercise judgment in the affairs of life. All that we recognize as our mental faculties is the outcome of the man's work through the preceding stages of his pilgrimage, and his self-consciousness here becomes more and more vivid, more and more active, more and more alive, we may say, as the individual develops, as the man progresses life after life.
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If we study a very undeveloped man, we find his self-conscious mental activity to be poor in quality and limited in quantity. He is working in the physical body through the gross and etheric brains ; action is con- tinually going on, so far as the whole nervous system is concerned, visible and invisible, but the action is of a very clumsy kind. There is in it very little discrimina- tion, very little delicacy of mental touch. There is some mental activity, but it is of a very infantile or childish kind. It is occupied with very small things ; it is amused by very trivial occurances; the things that attract its attention are things of a petty character; it is interested in passing objects; it likes to sit at a win- dow and look out at a busy street, watching people and vehicles go by, making remarks on them, overwhelmed with amusement if a well-dressed person tumbles into a puddle or is badly splashed by a passing cab. It has not much in itself to occupy its attention, and therefore it is always rushing outwards in order to feel that it is alive ; it is one of the chief characteristics of this low stage of mental evolution that the man working at the physical and etheric bodies and bringing them into or- der as vehicles of consciousness, is always seeking violent sensations ; he needs to make sure that he is feeling and to learn to distinguish things by receiving from them strong and vivid sensations; it is a quite necessary stage of progress, though an elementary one, and with- out this he would continually be becoming confused be- tween the processes within his vehicle and without it; he must learn the alphabet of the self and the not-self,
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by distinguishing between the objects causing impacts and the sensations caused by impacts, between the stimu- lus and the feeling. The lowest types of this stage may J)e seen gathered at street-Xiorners, lounging idly against a wall, and indulging occasionally in a few ejaculatory remarks and in cackling outbursts of empty laughter. Any one able to look into their brains finds that they are receiving somewhat blurred impressions from pass- ing objects, and that the links between these impressions and others like them are very slight. The impressions are more like a heap of pebbles than a well-arranged mosaic.
In studying the way in which the physical and etheric brains become vehicles of consciousness, we have to run back to the early development of the Ahamkara, or ' ' I-ness, ' ' a stage that may be seen in the lower animals around us. Vibrations caused by the impact of external objects are set up in the brain, transmitted by it to the astral body, and felt by the consciousness as sensations, before there is any linking of these sensations to the objects that caused them, this linking being a definite mental action — a perception. When perception begins the consciousness is using the physical and etheric brains as a vehicle for itself, by means of which it gathers knowledge of the external world. This stage is long past in our humanity, of course, but its fleeting repeti- tion may be seen when the consciousness takes up a new brain in coming to rebirth; the child begins to 'Hake notice," as the nurses say, that is, to relate a sensation arising in itself to an impression made upon its new
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sheath, or vehicle, by an external object, and thus to "notice" the object, to perceive it.
After a time the perception of an object is not nec- essary in order that the picture of that object may be present to the consciousness, and it finds itself able to recall the appearance of an object when it is not con- tacted b}^ any sense ; such a memoried perception is an idea, a concept, a mental image, and these make up the store which the consciousness gathers from the outside world. On these it begins to work, and the first stage of this activity is the arrangement of the ideas, the pre- liminary to ''reasoning" upon them. Reasoning begins by comparing the ideas with each other, and then by inferring relations between them from the simultaneous or sequential happening of two or more of them, time after time. In this process the consciousness has with- drawn within itself, carrying with it the ideas it has made out of perceptions, and it goes on to add to them something of its own, as when it infers a sequence, re- lates one thing to another as cause and effect. It be- gins to draw conclusions, even to forecast future hap- penings when it has established a sequence, so that when the perception regarded as ''cause" appears the per- ception regarded as "effect" is expected to follow. Again, it notices in comparing its ideas that many of them have one or more elements in common, while their remaining constitutents are different, and it proceeds to draw these common characteristics away from the rest and to put them together as the characteristics of a class, and then it groups together the objects that pos-
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sess these, and when it sees a new object which possesses them it throws it into that class ; in this way it gradual- ly arranges into a cosmos the chaos of perceptions with which it began its mental career, and infers law from the orderly succession of phenomena, and the types it finds in nature. All this is the work of the consciousness in and through the physical brain, but even in this working we trace the presence of that which the brain does not supply. The brain merely receives vibrations ; the consciousness working in the astral body changes the vibrations into sensations, and in the mental body changes the sensations into perceptions, and then carries on all the processes which, as just said, transform the chaos into cosmos. And the consciousness thus working is, further, illuminated from above with ideas that are not fabricated from materials supplied by the physical world, but are reflected into it directly from the Uni- versal Mind. The great ''laws of thought" regulate all thinking, and the very act of thinking reveals their pre- existence, as it is done by them and under them, and is impossible without them.
It is unnecessary almost to remark that all these earlier efforts of consciousness to work in the physical vehicle are subject to much error, both from imperfect perception and from mistaken inferences. Hasty in- ferences, generalizations from limited experience, viti- ate many of the conclusions arrived at, and the rules of logic are formulated in order to discipline the think- ing faculty, and to enable it to avoid the fallacies into which it constantlv falls while untrained. But none
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the less the attempt to reason, however imperfectly, from one thing to another, is a distinct mark of growth in the man himself, for it shows that he is adding some- thing of his own to the information contributed from outside. This working on the collected materials has an effect on the physical vehicle itself. When the mind links two perceptions together, it also sets up — as it is causing corresponding vibrations in the brain — a link between the sets of vibrations from which the percep- tions arose. For as the mind body is thrown into activi- ty, it acts on the astral body, and this again on the etheric and dense bodies, and the nervous matter of the latter vibrates under the impulses sent through; this action shows itself as electrical discharges, and magnetic currents play between molecules and groups of mole- cules, causing intricate inter-relations. These leave what we may call a nervous track, a track along which another current will run more easily than it can run, say, athwart it, and if a group of molecules that were concerned in a vibration should be again made active by the consciousness repeating the idea that was im- pressed upon them, the disturbance there set up readily runs along the track formed between it and another group by a previous linking, and calls that other group into activity, and it sends up to the mind a vibration which, after the regular transformations, presents itself as an associated idea. Hence the great importance of association, this action of the brain being sometimes ex- ceedingly troublesome, as when some foolish or ludic- rous idea has been linked with a serious or a sacred one.