Theos-Talk Archives (March 1996 Message tl00040)

~THE OCEAN OF THEOSOPHY~

CHAPTER IV

RESPECTING THE NATURE OF man there are two ideas current in the
religious circles of Christendom. One is the teaching and the
other the common acceptation of it; the first is not secret, to
be sure, in the Church, but it is so seldom dwelt upon in the
hearing of the laity as to be almost arcane for the ordinary
person. Nearly everyone says he has a soul and a body, and there
it ends. What the soul is, and whether it is the real person or
whether it has any powers of its own, are not inquired into, the
preachers usually confining themselves to its salvation or
damnation. And by thus talking of it as something different from
oneself, the people have acquired an underlying notion that they
are not souls because the soul may be lost by them. From this
has come about a tendency to materialism causing men to pay more
attention to the body than to the soul, the latter being left to
the tender mercies of the priest of the Roman Catholics, and
among dissenters the care of it is most frequently put off to
the dying day. But when the true teaching is known it will be
seen that the care of the soul, which is the Self, is a vital
matter requiring attention every day, and not to be deferred
without grievous injury resulting to the whole man, both soul
and body.

The Christian teaching, supported by St. Paul, since upon him,
in fact, dogmatic Christianity rests, is that man is composed of
body, soul, and spirit. This is the threefold constitution of
man, believed by the theologians but kept in the background
because its examination might result in the readoption of views
once orthodox but now heretical. For when we thus place soul
between spirit and body, we come very close to the necessity for
looking into the question of the soul's responsibility, since
mere body can have no responsibility. And in order to make the
soul responsible for the acts performed, we must assume that it
has powers and functions. From this it is easy to take the
position that the soul may be rational or irrational, as the
Greeks sometimes thought, and then there is but a step to
further Theosophical propositions. This threefold scheme of the
nature of man contains, in fact, the Theosophical teaching of
his sevenfold constitution, because the four other divisions
missing from the category can be found in the powers and
functions of body and soul, as I shall attempt to show later on.
This conviction that man is a septenary and not merely a duad,
was held long ago and very plainly taught to every one with
accompanying demonstrations, but like other philosophical tenets
it disappeared from sight, because gradually withdrawn at the
time when in the east of Europe morals were degenerating and
before materialism had gained full sway in company with
skepticism, its twin. Upon its withdrawal the present dogma of
body, soul, spirit, was left to Christendom. The reason for that
concealment and its rejuvenescence in this century is well put
by Mme. H.P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. In answer to the
statement, "we cannot understand how any danger could arise from
the revelation of such a purely philosophical doctrine as the
evolution of the planetary chain," she says:

The danger was this: Doctrines such as the Planetary chain or
the seven races at once give a clue to the sevenfold nature of
man, for each principle is correlated to a plane, a planet, and
a race; and the human principles are, on every plane, correlated
to the sevenfold occult forces, those of the higher planes
being of tremendous occult power, the abuse of which would cause
incalculable evil to humanity. A clue which is, perhaps, no clue
to the present generation, especially the Westerns, protected
as they are by their very blindness and ignorant materialistic
disbelief in the occult; but a clue which would, nevertheless,
be very real in the early centuries of the Christian era, to
people fully convinced of the reality of occultism and entering
a cycle of degradation which made them ripe for abuse of occult
powers and sorcery of the worst description.

Mr. A.P. Sinnett, at one time an official in the Government of
India, first outlined in this century the real nature of man in
his book Esoteric Buddhism, which was made up from information
conveyed to him by H.P. Blavatsky directly from the Great Lodge
of Initiates to which reference has been made. And in thus
placing the old doctrine before western civilization he
conferred a great benefit on his generation and helped
considerably the cause of Theosophy. His classification was:

(1) The Body, or Rupa
(2) Vitality, or Prana-Jiva
(3) Astral Body, or Linga-Sharira
(4) Animal Soul, or Kama-Rupa
(5) Human Soul, or Manas
(6) Spiritual Soul, or Buddhi
(7) Spirit, or Atma
The words in italics being equivalents in the Sanskrit language
adopted by him for the English terms. This classification stands
to this day for all practical purposes, but it is capable of
modification and extension. For instance, a later arrangement
which places Astral body second instead of third in the category
does not substantially alter it. It at once gives an idea of
what man is, very different from the vague description by the
words "body and soul," and also boldly challenges the
materialistic conception that mind is the product of brain, a
portion of the body. No claim is made that these principles were
hitherto unknown, for they were all understood in various ways
not only by the Hindus but by many Europeans. Yet the compact
presentation of the sevenfold constitution of man in intimate
connection with the septenary constitution of a chain of globes
through which the being evolves, had not been given out. The
French Abbe, Eliphas Levi, wrote about the astral realm and the
astral body, but evidently had no knowledge of the remainder of
the doctrine, and while the Hindus possessed the other terms in
their language and philosophy, they did not use a septenary
classification, but depended chiefly on a fourfold one and
certainly concealed (if they knew of it) the doctrine of a chain
of seven globes including our earth. Indeed, a learned Hindu,
Subba Row, now deceased, asserted that they knew of a sevenfold
classification, but that it had not been and would not be given
out.

Considering these constituents in another manner, we would say
that the lower man is a composite being, but in his real nature
is a unity, or immortal being, comprising a trinity of Spirit,
Discernment, and Mind which requires four lower mortal
instruments or vehicles through which to work in matter and
obtain experience from Nature. This trinity is that called
Atma-Buddhi-Manas in Sanskrit, difficult terms to render in
English. Atma is Spirit, Buddhi is the highest power of
intellection, that which discerns and judges, and Manas is Mind.
This threefold collection is the real man; and beyond doubt the
doctrine is the origin of the theological one of the trinity of
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  The four lower instruments or
vehicles are shown in this table:
Atman,   The Passions and Desires,
Buddhi,  Life Principle,
Manas,   Astral Body,
         Physical Body

These four lower material constituents are transitory and
subject to disintegration in themselves as well as to separation
from each other. When the hour arrives for their separation to
begin, the combination can no longer be kept up, the physical
body dies, the atoms of which each of the four is composed begin
to separate from each other, and the whole collection being
disjointed is no longer fit for one as an instrument for the
real man. This is what is called "death" among us mortals, but
it is not death for the real man because he is deathless,
persistent, immortal. He is therefore called the Triad, or
indestructible trinity, while they are known as the Quaternary
or mortal four.

This quaternary or lower man is a product of cosmic or physical
laws and substance. It has been evolved during a lapse of ages,
like any other physical thing, from cosmic substance, and is
therefore subject to physical, physiological, and psychical laws
which govern the race of man as a whole. Hence its period of
possible continuance can be calculated just as the limit of
tensile strain among the metals used in bridge building can be
deduced by the engineer. Any one collection in the form of man
made up of these constituents is therefore limited in duration
by the laws of the evolutionary period in which it exists. Just
now, that is generally seventy to one hundred years, but its
possible duration is longer. Thus there are in history instances
where ordinary persons have lived to be two hundred years of
age; and by a knowledge of the occult laws of nature the
possible limit of duration may be extended nearly to four
hundred years.

The visible physical man is:

Brain, Nerves, Blood, Bones, Lymph, Muscles, Organs of Sensation
and Action, and Skin.
The unseen physical man is:
Astral Body, Passions and Desires, Life Principle (called Prana
or Jiva).
It will be seen that the physical part of our nature is thus
extended to a second department which, though invisible to the
physical eye, is nevertheless material and subject to decay.
Because people in general have been in the habit of admitting to
be real only what they can see with the physical eye, they have
at last come to suppose that the unseen is neither real nor
material. But they forgot that even on the earth plane noxious
gases are invisible though real and powerfully material, and
that water may exist in the air held suspended and invisible
until conditions alter and cause its precipitation.

Let us recapitulate before going into details. The Real Man is
the trinity of Atma-Buddhi-Manas, or Spirit and Mind, and he
uses certain agents and instruments to get in touch with nature
in order to know himself. These instruments and agents are found
in the lower Four, or the Quaternary, each principle in which
category is of itself an instrument for the particular
experience belonging to its own field, the body being the
lowest, least important, and most transitory of the whole
series. For when we arrive at the body on the way down from the
Higher Mind, it can be shown that all of its organs are in
themselves senseless and useless when deprived of the man
within. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smelling do not
pertain to the body but to the second unseen physical man, the
real organs for the exercise of those powers being in the Astral
Body, and those in the physical body being but the mechanical
outer instruments for making the coordination between nature and
the real organs inside.

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