Section 3

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Earth. ‘The form would be consumed were | to give it mine, said the Great Fire...... Man remained an empty senseless Bhita’”* (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 realized, if the constitution of man is to be understood, and if the student is to read more advanced treatises with intelli- gence. True, to make the personality human it has yet to come under the rays of mind, and to be illumi- nated 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 rationalized will; it awaits the coming of its monarch, the mind, the touch which shall transform it into man.
PrincipLe V. 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 prin- ciples 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, 7.¢., an individual, an entity. And this is exactly the Theosophical idea of Manas, for Manas is the im- mortal individual, the real “I,” that clothes itself over and over again in transient personalities, and itself en- dures for ever. It is described in the Voce 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 thée shall live for ever, that which in thee knows, for it is knowledge, is not of fleet- ing 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
a
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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 by passing individually and personally, 1.¢., spiritually and physically, through every experience and feeling that exists in the manifold or differentiated unti- verse. It has, therefore, after having gained such ex- perience 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. It its very essence it is Thought, and is, there- fore, called in its plurality Manasaputra, ‘the Sons of (universal) Mind.’ This idividualized ‘Thought’ is what we Theosophists call the veal human Ego, the thinking entity imprisoned in a case of flesh and bones. This is surely a spiritual entity, not matter,“ 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, pp. 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 Manasaputra (the sons of mind) covers many grades of intelligences, ranging from the mighty “Sons of the Flame” whose human evolution lies far behind them, down to those entities who gained individualization 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 intelli-
gy That is, not matter as we know it, on the plane of the objec- tive universe.
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gences incarnated as guides and teachers of our infant humanity, and became founders and divine rulers of the ancient civilizations. 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 Manasaputra, who bécame the tenants of the human frames as then evolved on earth, and these same Mana- saputra, reincarnating age after age, are the Re- incarnating Egos, the Manas in us, the persistent in- dividual, the fifth principle in man. The remainder of mankind through successive ages received from the loftier Manasaputra 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 specialization 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 surround- ing it in the minds of many who are beginning to study Theosophy. Madnasaputvad is what we may call the historical name, the name that suggests the entrance into humanity of a class of already individualized 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 individu- alizing 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 something is to
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be presently said; the Reincarnating Ego lays stress on the fact that it is the principle that reincarnates con- tinually, 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. [he 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 incarna- tion, 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 ex- pounded separately.) The Thinker, then, awaits the build- ing 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 builded by the direct play upon them of his own most subtle particles. So he projects part of his own sub- stance, 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 name, is the lower Manas, in contradistinction to the higher Manas—Manas, during
a)
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 vays of the eternal divine Mind, considered as individual entities, assume a two-fold attribute which is (a) their essential, inherent, characteristic, heaven-aspiring mind (higher Manas), and () the human quality of thinking, of animal cogitation, rationalized owing to the superior- ity of the human brain, the Kama-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 Kama with one hand, whilst with the other it retains its hold on its father, the higher Manas. Whether it will be dragged down by Kama 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, Kama and the lower Manas are joined together, and are often spoken of conveniently as Kama- Manas. Kama supplies, as we have seen, the animal and passional elements ; the lower Manas rationalizes these, and adds the intellectual faculties ; and so we have the brain-mind, the brain-intelligence, 7.c.. Kama-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, but the student must realize that “ Kama-Manas” is not a new principle, but the interweaving of the fourth with the lower part of the fifth.
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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 sets alight the brain and kamic wick, and the colour of the light from that wick will depend on the kamic nature and the development of the brain-apparatus. If the kamic nature be strong and undisciplined it will soil the pure manasic light, lending it a lurid tinge and foul- ing 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 genu depends on the physiological and material construc- tion 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 cumey man; and this aptness or inaptness is, in its 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
ie
Be!
faultless harmony. out of -a.broken or badly made instru- ment. This harmony-depends’ on. the fidelity of. trans- mission, 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 for November, 1889, p- 228).
Bearing in mind these limitations and idiosyncrasies* imposed on the manifestations of the thinking prin- ciple 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 manifes- tations; 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 kamic 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 lighténs the twilight in which we dwell, and such flashes alone are what the Theosophist calls true genius ; “ Behold in every mani- festation of genius, when combined with virtue, the un- deniable presence of the celestial exile, the divine Ego whose jailer thou art, O man of matter.” For Theo- sophy teaches “that the presence in man of various creative powers—called genius in their collectivity— is
* Limitations and idiosyncrasies due to the action of the Ego in previous earth-lives, be it remembered
32 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 philo- sophy, the cultivation of certain aptitudes throughout a long series of past incarnations must finally. culminate, in some one life, in a blooming forth as genius, in one or another direction.” (Luctfer for November, 1889, pp. 229- 230). For the manifestation of true genius, purity of life is an essential condition.
Kama-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 individualizing touch that makes the personality recognise itself as “I.” It becomes intellectual, it re- cognises itself as separate from all other selves; deluded by the separateness it feels, it does,not realize 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 kamic 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 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
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of imagination, the delicate colours of fancy and of dream?
But there may be chains yet more strong and con- ‘straining, binding the lower Manas fast to 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 recognized as separate from all; so long, however grand the ambition, however far-reaching the charity, however lofty the achievement, Manas is tainted with Kama, and is not pure as its source.
Manas 1N 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 Kama, spoken of conveniently as Kama-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 of the mind in man may become less obscure to us than it is at present to many.
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,
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as a matter of fact, they are in a state of continual vibration. H. P. Blavatsky points out (Luczfer, October, 1890, pp. 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 Rama Prasad says that “all these roots have for their origin the sound produced by © the breath of animals’ Pate sound ‘of expiration and inspiration.