THE RIDDLE OF LIFE/PART 3
CHAPTER
III
MAN
AND HIS WORLDS
MAN
is a spiritual intelligence, who has taken flesh with the object of gaining
experience in worlds below the spiritual, in order that he may be able to master
and to rule them, and in later ages take his place in the creative and
directing Hierarchies of the universe.
There
is a universal law that a consciousness can only know that which it can
reproduce; one consciousness can know another in proportion as it is able to
reproduce within itself the changes in that other. If a man feels pain when
another man feels it, happiness when the other feels it, anxiety, confidence,
etc., with the other, at once reproducing his moods, that man knows the other.
Sympathy—feeling together—is the condition of knowledge. But consciousness
works in bodies; we are clothed, not naked; and these bodies are composed of
matter. Consciousness may affect consciousness, but how can consciousness
affect these bodies?
There
is another law, that a change in consciousness is at once accompanied with a
vibration in the matter near it, and each change has its own answering
vibration, as a musical sound and a particular length and thickness of string
invariably go together. In a solar system all the separated consciousnesses are
part of the consciousness of the divine LORD of the system, and all the matter
of the system is His Body—'in Him we live and move and have our being. He has
formed this matter and related it to Himself, so that it answers everywhere by
innumerable kinds of vibrations to the innumerable changes in His
consciousness, each to each. Over His whole vast kingdom his consciousness and
His matter answer each other in perfect and perpetual harmony and inviolable
relation.
Man
shares with the divine LORD this relation, but in an elementary and feeble way;
to the changes in his consciousness answer vibrations in the matter around him,
but this is only perfect and complete, at first, in the super-spiritual worlds,
where he exists as an emanation from the LORD; there—every vibration of matter
is answered by a change in his consciousness, and he knows that world, his
birthplace and his home. But in worlds of matter denser than that lofty region
he is as yet a stranger; the vibrations of that denser matter, though all
around him, do not affect him, are to him non-existent, as the waves which
carry messages by wireless telegraphy do not affect us in this world, and are
to our senses non-existent. How then can he grow to the likeness of his divine
Parent, to whom every vibration has a message, who can set up any willing
vibration in matter by a change in consciousness, who is conscious and active
at every point of His system?
The
answer comes in the words: involution and evolution. He must involve himself in
matter, attract to himself an encasement of matter, draw round himself
materials from all the worlds—spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical;
this is the involving of spirit in matter—involution—sometimes called the descent
of spirit into matter, sometimes the fall of man. Then, having acquired this
encasement, he must slowly try to understand the changes in himself—in his own
consciousness—the surging, confusing, bewildering changes that come and go
without any will of his, due to the vibrations set up in this material
encasement of his by vibrations in the larger world around him, and that force
upon his consciousness unsought changes and moods. He has to disentangle these,
to refer them to their proper origins, to learn through these the existence and
the details of the surrounding worlds, to organise his own appropriated
matter—his bodies—into more and more complex, receptive and discriminative
agents, to admit to or shut out from these bodies at will the vibrations that hurtle
round them outside, and at last, through them, to impress the changes in his
consciousness on external nature, and thus to become its ruler instead of its
slave. This is evolution, the ascent of the spirit through matter, its
unfolding within a material encasement, drawn from the various worlds which
form its environment, the permeation with its own life of the matter it
appropriates, thus rendering it the docile servant of spirit, and redeeming it
from its cruder uses to the service of the liberated Sons of God.
This
material encasement, drawn from the different worlds, must be gradually
organised, by impacts from without and answers from within, into a 'body', or a
vehicle of consciousness. It is organised from below upwards, or from denser to
finer, the materials from each world being organised separately, as a means of
receiving communications from, and acting upon its own world. The physical
material is first drawn into a fairly compact mass, and the organs which carry
on life-processes, and those of the senses, are first slowly evolved; the
wonderful and complicated physical body is evolved through millions of years,
and is still evolving; it puts man into touch with the physical world around
him, which he can see, hear, touch, taste and smell, and in which he can bring
about changes by the use of his brain and nerves, directing and controlling his
muscles, hands and feet. This body is not perfect, for there is still much in
the physical world around it to which it cannot answer—forms, like atoms, which
it cannot see, sounds which it cannot hear, and forces which it cannot
perceive, till they have brought about effects by moving large masses of matter
big enough for it to see. He has made delicate instruments to help his senses
and to increase their perceptive range—telescopes and microscopes to help the
eye, microphones to help the ear, galvanometers to find out forces which escape
his senses. But presently the evolution of his .own body will bring all his
physical world within his ken.
Now
that the physical body is highly organised, the next finer material, the
astral, is being similarly evolved, and is bringing man gradually into touch
with the astral—the emotional, passional, desire—world around him. Most of the
people of the advanced races are becoming slightly conscious of astral impacts,
while some are distinguishing them clearly. Premonitions, warnings, conscious
touch with the 'dead', etc., all are affections of the astral body from the
astral world. They are vague and dim because of the poor organisation possessed
by this body at present, but those who have forced its evolution are free of
the astral world, as everyone is of the physical.
The
third state of matter, the mental, is also in course of organisation, and is
putting man into touch with the intellectual world around him. As the mental
body evolves the man comes into conscious relation with mental currents, with
the minds of others near and distant 'living' and 'dead'.
The
spiritual worlds still remain after this for man to conquer, and they have
their appropriate body, the 'spiritual body' of which St. Paul speaks. This
organisation of matter to be the servant of spirit is the part assigned to man
in the great workshop of the worlds, and when the human stage is over there is
nothing in the solar system which he is incapable of knowing and affecting. He
came forth from the divine LORD pure indeed, but ignorant and useless outside
the subtle region of his birth; he returns, after his long pilgrimage, a wise
and strong Son of God, ready to bear his part throughout the ages of the future
as a minister of the divine Will in ever-widening fields of service.
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