Section 5

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_ It is very possible that many will say, on reading these statements, that Theosophy is a revival of medizval super- stitions and will lead to imaginary terrors. Theosophy explains medizval superstitions, and shows the natural facts on which they were founded and from which they drew their vitality. If there are planes in nature other than the physical, no amount of reasoning will get rid of them and belief in their existence will constantly re- appear; but knowledge will give them their intelligible place in the universal order, and will prevent superstition by an accurate understanding of their nature, and of the laws under which they function. And let it be remem- bered that persons whose consciousness is normally on the physical plane can protect themselves from undesir- able influences by keeping their minds clean and their wills strong. We protect ourselves best against disease by maintaining our bodies in vigorous health ; we cannot guard ourselves against invisible germs, but we can pre- vent our bodies from becoming suitable soil for the growth and development of the germs. Nor need we deliberately throw ourselves in the way of infection. So also as regards these malign germs from the astral plane. We can prevent the formation of kama-manasic soil in which they can germinate and develop, and we need not go into evil places, nor deliberately encourage receptivity and mediumistic tendencies. A strong active will and a pure heart are our best protection.
There remains the third possibility for Kama-Manas, to which we must now turn our attention, the fate spoken of earlier as “terrible in its consequences, which may befall the kamic principle.”
It may break away from tts source, made one with Kama instead of with the higher Manas. ‘This is, fortunately, a rare event, as rare at one pole of human life as the
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complete re-union with the higher Manas is rare at the other. But still the possibility remains and must be stated.
The personality may be so strongly controlled by Kama that, in the struggle between the kamic and manasic elements, the victory may remain wholly with the former. The lower Manas may become so enslaved that its essence may be frayed thinner and thinner by the con- stant rub and strain, until at last persistent yielding to the promptings of desire bears its inevitable fruit, and the slender link which unites the higher to the lower Manas, the “silver thread that binds it to the Master,” snaps in two. Then, during earth-life, the lower qua- ternary is wrenched away from the Triad to which it was linked, and the higher nature is severed wholly from the lower. The human being is rent in twain, the brute has broken itself free, and it goes forth unbridled, carrying with it the reflections of that manasic light which should have been its guide through the desert of life. A more dangerous brute it is than its fellows of the unevolved animal world, just because of these fragments in it of the higher mentality of man. Such a being, human in form but brute in nature, human in appearance but without human truth, or love, or justice—such a one may now and then be met with in the haunts of men, putrescent while still living, a thing to shudder at with deepest, if hopeless, compassion. What is its fate after the funeral knell has tolled ?
Ultimately, there is the perishing of the personality that has thus broken away from the principles that can alone give it immortality. But a period of persistence lies before it.
The desire-body of such a one is an entity of terrible potency, and it has this unique peculiarity, that it is
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able under certain rare conditions to reincarnate in the world of men. It is not a mere “spook” on the way to disintegration; it has retained, entangled in its coils, too much of the manasic element to permit of such natural dissipation in space. It is sufficiently an independent entity, lurid instead of radiant, with manasic flame rendered foul instead of purifying, as to be able to take to itself a garment of flesh once more and dwell as man with men. Such a man—if the word may be indeed applied to the mere human shell with brute interior—passes through a period of earth-life the natural foe of.all who are still normal in their humanity. With no instincts save those of the animal, driven only by passion, never even by emotion, with a cunning that no brute can rival, a deliberate wickedness that plans evil in fashion unknown to the mere frankly natural impnlses of the animal world, the reincarnated entity touches ideal vileness. Such soil the page of human history as the monsters of iniquity that startle us now and again into a wondering cry, “ Is this a human being ?” Sinking lower with each successive incarnation, the evil force gradually wears itself out, and such a personality perishes, separated from the source of life. It finally ' disintegrates, to be worked up into other forms of living things, but as a separate existence it is lost. It is a bead broken off the thread of life, and the immortal Ego that incarnated in that personality has lost the experience of that incarnation, has reaped no harvest from that life- sowing. Its ray has brought nothing back, its life-work for that birth has been a total and complete failure, whereof nothing remains to weave into the fabric of its own eternal Self.
SuBTrLe ForMS oF THE FourTH AND FirTH PRINCIPLES.
The student will already have fully realized that “an astral body” is a loose term that may cover a variety of different forms. It may be well at this stage to sum up the subtle types sometimes inaccurately called aoe that belong to the fourth and fifth principles.
During life a true astral body may be needa formed, as its name implies, of astral matter—but, unlike the etheric double, dowered with intelligence, and able to travel to a considerable distance from the physical body to which it belongs. This is the desire-body, and it is, as we have seen, a vehicle of consciousness. It is projected by mediums and sensitives unconsciously, and by trained students consciously. It can travel with the speed of thought to a distant place, can there gather impressions from surrounding objects, can bring back those impressions to the physical body. In the case of a medium it can convey them to others by means of the physical body still entranced, but as a rule when the sensitive comes out of trance, the brain does not retain the impressions thus made upon it, and no trace is left in the memory of the experiences’ thus acquired. Sometimes, but this is rare, the desire-body is able sufficiently to affect the brain by the vibrations it sets up, to leave a lasting impression thereon, and then the sen- sitive is able to recall the knowledge acquired during trance. The student learns to impress on his brain the
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knowledge gained in the desire-body, his will being active while that of the medium is passive.
This desire-body is the agent unconsciously used by clairvoyants when their vision is not merely the seeing in the astral light. This astral form does then really travel to distant places, and may appear there to persons who are sensitive or who chance for the time to be in an abnormal nervous condition. Sometimes it appears to them—when very faintly informed by consciousness—as a vaguely outlined form, not noticing its surroundings. Such a body has appeared near the time of death at places distant from the dying person, to those who were closely united to the dying by ties of blood, of affection, or of hatred. More highly energized, it will show intel- ligence and emotion, as in some cases on record, in which dying mothers have visited their children residing at a distance, and have spoken in their last moments of what they had seen and done. The desire-body is also set free in many cases of disease—as is the etheric double —as well as in sleep and in trance. Inactivity of the physical body is a condition of such astral voyagings.
The desire-body seems also occasionally to appear in séance-rooms, giving rise to some of the more intellectual phenomena that take place. It must not be confounded with the “spook,” already sufficiently familiar to the reader, the latter being always the kamic or kama-manasic remains of a dead person, whereas the body we are now dealing with is the projection of an astral double from a living person.
A higher form of subtle body, belonging to Manas, is that known as the Mayavi Rapa, or “ body of illusion.” The Mayavi Ripa is a subtle body formed by the con- sciously directed will of the Adept or disciple; it may, or may not, resemble the physical body, the form given to
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it being suitable to the purpose for which it is projected. In this body the full consciousness dwells, for it is merely the mental body rearranged. The Adept or disciple can thus travel at will, without the burden of the physical body, in the full exercise of every faculty, in perfect self- consciousness. He makes the Maydvi Rupa visible or invisible at will—on the physical plane—and the phrase often used by chelas and others as to seeing an Adept ‘‘in his astral,” means that he has visited them in his Mayavi Ripa. If he so choose, he can make it in- distinguishable from a physical body, warm and firm to the touch as well as visible, able to carry on a conversa- tion, at all points like a physical human being. But the power thus to form the true Mayavi Ripa is confined to Adepts and chelas; it cannot be done by the untrained student, however psychic he may naturally be, for it is a manasic and not a psychic creation, and it is only under the instruction of his Guru that the chela learns to form and use the “ body of illusion.”
Tue HiGHER MANAS.
The immortal Thinker itself, as will by this time have become clear to the reader, can manifest itself but little on the physical plane at the present stage of human evolution. Yet we are able to catch some glimpses of the powers resident in it, the more as in the lower Manas we find those powers “ cribbed, cabined and con- fined” indeed, but yet existing. Thus we have seen (p. 37) that the lower Manas ‘is the organ of the freewill in physical man.” Freewill resides in Manas itself, in Manas the representative of Mahat, the Universal Mind. From Manas comes the feeling of liberty, the knowledge
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that we can rule ourselves—really the knowledge that the higher nature in us can rule the lower, let that lower nature rebel and struggle as it may. Once let our con- sciousness identify itself with Manas instead of with Kama, and the lower nature becomes the animal we bestride, it is no longer the “J.” All its plungings, its struggles, its fights for mastery, are then outside us, not within us, and we rein it in and hold it as we rein ina plunging steed and subdue it to our will.
On this question of freewill I venture to quote from an article of my own that appeared in the Path :—
‘Unconditioned will alone can be absolutely free : - the unconditioned and the absolute are one: all that is con- ditioned must, by virtue of that conditioning, be relative and therefore partially bound. As that will evolves the universe, it becomes conditioned by the laws of its own manifestation. The manasic entities are differentiations of that will, each conditioned by the nature of its mani- festing potency, but, while conditioned without, it is free within its own sphere of activity, so being the image in its own world of the universal will in the universe. Now as this will, acting on each successive plane, crys- tallizes itself more and more densely as matter, the manifestation is conditioned by the material in which it works, while, relatively to the material, it is itself free. So at each stage the inner freedom appears in con- sciousness, while yet investigation shows that that free- dom works within the limits of the plane of manifestation on which it is acting, free to work upon the lower, yet hindered as to manifestation by the unresponsiveness of the lower to its impulse. Thus the higher Manas, in whom resides freewill, so far as the lower quaternary is concerned—being the offspring of Mahat, the third Logos, the Word, ic., the Will in manifestation—is
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limited in its manifestation in our lower nature by the sluggishness of the response of the personality to its impulses; in the lower Manas itself—as immersed in that personality - resides the will with which we are familiar, swayed by passions, by appetites, by desires, by impressions coming from without, yet able to assert itself among them all, by virtue of its essential nature, one with that higher Ego of which it is the ray. It is free, as regards all below it, able to act on Kama and on the physical body, however much its full expression may be thwarted and hindered by the crudeness of the material in which it is working. Were the will the mere outcome of the physical body, of the desires and passions, whence could arise the sense of the ‘I’ that can judge, can desire, can overcome? It acts from a higher plane, is royal as touching the lower whenever it claims the royalty of birthright, and the very struggle of its self- assertion is the best testimony to the fact that in its nature it is free. And so, passing to lower planes, we find in each grade this freedom of the higher as ruling the lower, yet, on the plane of the lower, hindered in manifestation. Reversing the process and starting from the lower, the same truth becomes manifest. Let a man’s limbs be loaded with fetters, and crude material iron will prevent the manifestation of the muscular and nervous force with which they are instinct: none the less is that force present, though hindered for the moment in its activity. Its strength may be shown in its very efforts to break the chains that bind it: there is no power in the iron to prevent the free giving out of the muscular energy, though the phenomena of motion may be hindered. But while this energy cannot be ruled by the physical nature below it, its expenditure is deter- mined by the kamic principle: passions and desires can
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set it going, can direct and control it. The muscular and nervous energy cannot rule the passions and desires, they are free as regards it, it is determined by their interposition. Yet again Kama may be ruled, controlled, determined by the will; as touching the manasic prin- ciple it is bound, not free, and hence the sense of free- dom in choosing which desire shall be gratified, which act performed. As the lower Manas rules Kama, the lower quaternary takes its rightful position of sub- serviency to the higher triad, and is determined by a will it recognises as above itself, and, as regards itself, a will that is free. Here in many a mind will spring the question, ‘And what of the will of the higher Manas; is that in turn determined by what is above it, while it is free to all below ?? But we have reached a point where the intellect fails us, and where language may not easily utter that which the Spirit senses in those higher realms. Dimly only can we feel that there, as everywhere else, the truest freedom must be in harmony with law, and that voluntary acceptance of the function of acting as channel of the Universal Will must unite into one perfect liberty and perfect obedience.”’
This is truly an obscure and difficult problem, but the student will find much light fall on it by following the lines of thought thus traced.
Another power resident in the higher Manas and manifested on the lower planes by those in whom the higher Manas is consciously master, is that of creation of forms by the will. The Secret Doctvine says: «‘ Kriya- shakti. The mysterious power of thought which enables it to produce external, perceptible, phenomenal results by its own inherent energy. The ancients held that any” idea will manifest itself externally if one’s attention be
deeply concentrated upon it. Similarly an intense volition
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will be followed by the desired results.” (vol. i., p. 312). Here is the secret of all true ‘‘ magic,” and as the subject is an important one, and as Western science is beginning to touch its fringe, a separate section is devoted to its consideration farther on, in order not to break the con- nected outline here given of the principles.
Again, we have learned from H. P. Blavatsky that Manas, or the higher Ego, as “part of the essence of the Universal Mind, is unconditionally omniscient on its own plane,’’ when it has fully developed self-con- sciousness by its evolutionary experiences, and “is the vehicle of all knowledge of the past and present, and the future.” When this immortal entity is able through its ray, the lower’ Manas, to impress the brain of a man, that man is one who manifests abnormal qualities, is a genius or a seer. The conditions of seership are thus laid down :—
“ The former [the visions of the true seer] can be ob- tained by one of two means: (a) on the condition of paralyzing at will the memory and the instinctual inde- pendent action of all the material organs and even cells in the body of flesh, an act which, when once the light of the higher Ego has consumed and subjected for ever the passional nature of the personal lower Ego, is easy, but requires an adept; and (b) of being a reincarnation of one who, in a previous birth, had attained through extreme purity of life and efforts in the right direction almost to a Yogi-state of holiness and saintship. There is also a third possibility of reaching in mystic visions the plane of the higher Manas; but it is only occasional, and does not depend on the will of the seer, but on the extreme weakness and exhaustion of the material body through illness and suffering. The Seeress of Prevorst was an instance of the latter case; and Jacob Boehme