Chapter XII.

EVOLUTION OF FORMS. 49
forms enduring for a time and then disintegrating. The outpoured life, or Monad, evolved through these kingdoms and reached in due course the physi- cal plane, where it began to draw together the ethers and hold them in filmy shapes, in which life-currents played and into which the denser materials were builded, forming the first minerals. In these are beautifully shown — as may be seen by reference to any book on crystallurgy — the numerical and geo- metrical lines on which forms are constructed, and from them may be gathered plentiful evidence that life is working in all minerals, although much "cribbed, cabined, and confined.** The fatigue to which metals are subject is another sign that they are living things, but it is here enough to say that the occult doctrine so regards them, knowing the already-mentioned processes by which life has been involved in them. Great stability of form having been gained in many of the minerals, the evolving Monad elaborated greater plasticity of form in the vegetable kingdom, combining this with stability of organization. These characteristics found a yet more balanced expression in the animal world, and reached their culmination of equilibrium in man, whose physical body is made up of constituents of most unstable equilibrium, thus giving great adap- tability, and yet which is held together by a combin- ing central force which resists general disintegra- tion even under the most varied conditions.
Man's physical body has two main divisions : the dense body, made of constituents from the three 4
50 THE ANCIENT WISDOM.
lower levels of the physical plane, solids, liquids, and gases ; and the etheric double, violet-gray or blue-gray in color, interpenetrating the dense body and composed of materials drawn from the four higher levels. The general function of the physical body is to receive contacts from the physical world, and send the report of them inwards, to serve as materials from which the conscious entity inhabit- ing the body is to elaborate knowledge. Its etheric portion has also the duty of acting as a medium through which the life-currents poured out from the sun can be adapted to the uses of the denser particles. The sun is the great reservoir of the electrical, mag- netic, and vital forces for our system, and it pours out abundantly these streams of life-giving energy. They are taken in by the etheric doubles of all minerals, vegetables, animals, and men, and are by them thansmuted into the various life-energies needed by each entity.* The etheric doubles draw in, specialize, and distribute them over their physical counterparts. It has been observed that in vigorous health much more of the life-energies are trans- muted than the physical body requires for its own support, and that the surplus is rayed out and is taken up and utilized by the weaker. What is tech- nically called the health aura is the part of the etheric double that extends a few inches from the
* When thus appropriated the life is called Prana, and it be- comes the life-breath of every creature. Prana is but a name for the universal life while it is taken in by an entity and is supporting its separated life.
MAKING OP PHYSICAL BODY. 51
whole surface of the body and shows radiating lines, like the radii of a sphere, going outwards in all di- rections. These lines droop when vitality is dimin- ished below the point of health, and resume their radiating character with renewed vigor. It is this vital energy, specialized by the etheric double, which is poured out by the mesmerizer for the res- toration of the weak and for the cure of disease, al- though he often mingles with it currents of a more rarefied kind. Hence the depletion of vital energy shown by the exhaustion of the mesmerizer who prolongs his work to excess.
Man's body is fine or coarse in its texture accord- ing to the materials drawn from the physical plane for its composition. Each subdivision of matter yields finer or coarser materials ; compare the bodies of a butcher and of a refined student ; both have solids in them, but solids of such different qualities. Fur- ther, we know that a coarse body can be refined, a refined body coarsened. The body is constantly changing; each particle is a life, and the lives come and go. They are drawn to a body consonant with themselves, they are repelled from one discordant with themselves. All things live in rhythmical vibra- tions, all seek the harmonious and are repelled by dissonance. A pure body repels coarse particles be- cause they vibrate at rates discordant with its own ; a coarse body attracts them because their vibrations accord with its own. Hence if a body changes its rates of vibration, it gradually drives out of it the con- stituents that cannot fall into the new rhythm, and
52 THS ANCIENT WISDOM.
fills Up their places by drawing in from external na- ture fresh constituents that are harmonious. Nature provides materials vibrating in all possible ways, and each body exercises its own selective action.
In the earlier building of human bodies this selec- tive action was due to the Monad of form, but now that man is a self-conscious entity he presides over his own building. By his thoughts he strikes the keynote of his music, and sets up the rhythms that are the most powerful factors in the continual changes in his physical and other bodies. As his knowledge increases he learns how to build up his physical body with pure food, and so facilitates the tuning of it. He learns to live by the axiom of purification: "Pure food, a pure mind, and constant memory of God." As the highest creature living on the physical plane, he is the vicegerent of the Locos thereon, responsible, so far as his powers extend, for its order, peace, and good government; and this duty he cannot discharge without these three re- quisites.
The physical body, thus composed of elements drawn from all the subdivisions of the physical plane, is fitted to receive and to answer impressions from it of every kind. Its first contacts will be of the simplest and crudest sorts, and as the life within it thrills out in answer to the stimulus from with- out, throwing its molecules into responsive vibra- tions, there is developed all over the body the sense of touch, the recognition of something coming into contact with it. As specialized sense-organs are de-
s^nsj: organs develop. 53
veloped to receive special kinds of vibrations, the value of the body increases as a future vehicle for a conscious entity on the physical plane. The more impressions it can answer to, the more useful does it become; for only those to which it can answer can reach the consciousness. Even now there are myriads of vibrations pulsing around us in physical nature from the knowledge of which we are shut out because of the inability of our physical vehicle to receive and vibrate in accord with them. Unimag- ined beauties, exquisite sounds, delicate subtleties, touch the walls of our prison house and pass on un- heeded. Not yet is developed the perfect body that shall thrill to every pulse in nature as the oeolian harp to the zephyr.
The vibrations that the body is able to receive it transmits to physical centres, belonging to its highly complicated nervous system. The etheric vibrations which accompany all the vibrations of the denser physical constituents are similarly received by the etheric double, and transmitted to its corresponding centres. Most of the vibrations in the dense matter are changed into chemical, heat, and other forms of physical energy; the etheric give rise to magnetic and electric action, and also pass on the vibrations to the astral body, whence, as we shall see later, they reach the mind. Thus information about the external world reaches the conscious entity en- throned in the body, the Lord of the body, as he is sometimes called. As the channels of informa- tion develop and are exercised, the conscious entity
54 the: ancient wisdom.
grows by the materials supplied to his thought by them, but so little is man yet developed that even the etheric double is not yet sufficiently harmonized to regularly convey to the man impressions received by it independently of its denser comrade, or to im- press them on his brain. Occasionally it succeeds in doing so, and then we have the lowest form of clairvoyance, the seeing of the etheric doubles of physical objects, and of things that have etheric bodies as their lowest vesture.
Man dwells, as we shall see, in various vehicles, physical, astral, and mental, and it is important to know and remember that as we are evolving upwards, the lowest of the vehicles, the dense physical, is that which consciousness first controls and rationalizes. The physical brain is the instrument of conscious- ness in waking life on the physical plane, and con- sciousness works in it — in the undeveloped man — more effectively than in any other vehicle. Its po- tentialities are less than those of the subtler vehicles, but its actualities are greater, and the man knows himself as "I" in the physical body ere he finds himself elsewhere. Even if he be more highly de- veloped than the average man, he can only show as much of himself down here as the physical organism permits, for consciousness can manifest on the physi- cal plane only so much as the physical vehicle can carry.
The dense and etheric bodies are not normally separated during earth life ; they normally function together, as the lower and higher strings of a single
dre:am-consciousne;ss 55
instrument when a chord is struck, but they also carry on separate though co-ordinated activities. Under conditions of weak health or nervous excite- ment the etheric double may in great part be ab- normally extruded from its dense counterpart; the latter then becomes very dully conscious, or en- tranced, according to the less or greater amount of the etheric matter extruded. Anaesthetics drive out the greater part of the etheric double, so that con- sciousness cannot affect or be affected by the dense body, its bridge of communication being broken. In the abnormally organized persons called medi- ums, dislocation of the etheric and dense bodies easily occurs, and the etheric double, when ex- truded, largely supplies the physical basis for ''ma- terializations."
In sleep, when the consciousness leaves the physi- cal vehicle which it uses during waking life, the dense and etheric bodies remain together, but in the physical dream-life they function to some extent in- dependently. Impressions experienced during wak- ing life are reproduced by the automatic action of the body, and both the physical and etheric brains are filled with disjointed fragmentary pictures, the vibrations as it were, jostling each other, and caus- ing the most grotesque combinations. Vibrations from outside also affect both, and combinations often set up during waking life are easily called into ac- tivity by currents from the astral world of like na- ture with themselves. The purity or impurity of waking thoughts will largely govern the pictures
56 TH^ ANCIKNT WISDOM
arising in dreams, whether spontaneously set up or induced from without.
At what is called death, the etheric double is drawn away from its dense counterpart by the es- caping consciousness ; the magnetic tie existing be- tween them during earth life is snapped asunder, and for some hours the consciousness remains en- veloped in this etheric garb. In this it sometimes appears to those with whom it is closely bound up, as a cloudy figure, very dully conscious and speech- less— the wraith. It may also be seen, after the conscious entity has deserted it, floating over the grave where its dense counterpart is buried, slowly disintegrating as time goes on.
When the time comes for rebirth, the etheric double is built in advance of the dense body, the latter exactly following it in its ante-natal develop- ment. These bodies may be said to trace the limi- tations within which the conscious entity will have to live and work during his earth life, a subject that will be more fully explained in Chapter IX., on Karma.