THE RIDDLE OF LIFE/PART 4
CHAPTER
IV
MAN
AND HIS MORTAL BODIES
THE
worlds in which man is evolving as he treads the circle of births and deaths
are three: the physical world, the astral or intermediate world and the mental
or heavenly world. In these three he lives from birth to death in his waking
day-life; in the two latter he lives from birth to death in his sleeping
night-life, and for a while after death; into the last he occasionally, but
rarely, enters in his sleeping night-life, in high trance, and in it he spends
the most important part of his life after death, the period spent there
lengthening as he evolves.
The
three bodies in which he functions in these worlds are all mortal; they are
born and they die. They improve life after life, becoming more and more worthy
to serve as the instruments of the unfolding spirit. They are copies in denser
matter of the undying spiritual bodies, which are unaffected by birth and
death, and from the clothing of the spirit in the higher worlds, wherein he
lives as the spiritual man, while he lives here as the man of flesh, the
'carnal' man. These undying spiritual bodies are that of which St Paul speaks:
'We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved we have a
building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in
this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is
from heaven' (2 Cor., V. 1, 2). These are the immortal bodies, and they will be
dealt with in another chapter of this series.
The
three mortal bodies are: the physical, the astral and the mental, and they are
related severally to the three worlds above-named.
THE
PHYSICAL BODY
This
is at present the most highly-developed body of man, and the one with which we
are all familiar. It consists of solid, liquid, gaseous and etheric matter, the
first three exquisitely organised into cells and tissues, these being built
into organs which enable the consciousness to become aware of the outside
world, and the latter possessing vortices through which forces pour. As the
etheric part of the body separates at death from the solid, liquid and gaseous
parts, the physical body is often subdivided into dense and etheric; the former
is composed of the organs which receive and act; the latter is the medium of
the life-forces and their transmitter to its dense comrade. Any tearing of the
etheric part from the dense body during physical life is unwholesome; it is
torn out by anaesthetics, and slips out, undriven, in some peculiar
organisations, generally termed 'mediumistic'; apart from its denser comrade it
is helpless and unconsious, a drifting cloud with force-centres, useless when
there is nothing to which it can transmit the forces playing through it, and
subject to manipulation by outside entities, who can use it as a matrix for
materialisation. It cannot go far from the dense part of the body, since the
latter would perish if disconnected from it; when disconnection occurs the
dense part 'dies'—i.e., loses the inpouring of the vital forces which sustain
its activities—even then the etheric part, or etheric double, hovers near its
life-partner, and is the 'wraith', or 'shade', sometimes seen after death, drifting
over graves. The physical body as a whole is man's medium for communication
with the physical world, and it is sometimes called, for this reason, the 'body
of action'. It receives also vibrations from the subtler worlds, and when it is
able to reproduce these it 'feels' and 'thinks', its nervous system being
organised to reproduce these in physical matter. As the viewless air, strongly
vibrating, throws the denser water into ripples, as the viewless light throws
the rods and cones of the retina into activity, so does the viewless matter of
the subtler worlds throw into responsive vibrations the denser matter of our
physical body, both etheric and dense. As evolution proceeds, and the physical
body evolves—i.e., appropriates finer and finer combinations of matter from the
outside world—it becomes responsive to more and more rapid vibratory waves, and
the man becomes more and more 'sensitive'. Racial evolution largely consists in
this ever-increasing sensitiveness of the nervous system to outside impacts;
for health, the sensitiveness must remain within limits of elasticity—i.e., the
system must immediately regain its normal condition after distortion—if this
condition be present, such sensitiveness is on the crest of the evolutionary
wave, and makes possible the manifestation of genius; if it be not present, if
equilibrium be-not swiftly and spontaneously restored, then the sensitiveness
is unhealthy and mischievous, leading to degeneration, and finally, if
unchecked, to madness.
THE
ASTRAL BODY
The
development of this body differs enormously in different persons, but in all it
is the body which yields the experience of pleasure and pain, which is thrown
into action by passion, desire and emotion, and in which reside the centres of
our sense-organs—of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. If the passion,
desire and emotion are low, sensual, animal, then its matter is coarse, its
vibrations consequently are comparatively slow, and its colours are dark and
unattractive—browns, dark reds and greens, and their combinations, lit from
time to time with flashes of scarlet. (See Plate II, which illustrates the
astral body of a savage: brown-red indicates sensuality and greed; grey-green
indicates deceit and cunning; brown indicates selfishness; scarlet on left of
head indicates anger; yellow round head indicates intelligence; grey-blue above
head indicates primitive religious feeling—fetish worship, etc.; touches of
deep rose colour indicate beginning of love.) As evolution goes on the matter
becomes finer, and the colours clearer, purer and more brilliant. (See Plate
IV, the developed astral body: green indicates sympathy and adaptability; rose
indicates love; blue indicates religious feelings; yellow indicates
intelligence; violet above head indicates spirituality. These plates are not
fanciful, but were drawn by an artist to the descriptions given by clairvoyant
investigators.)
We
are using this body throughout our waking hours, and in educated and refined
people it has reached a fairly high stage of evolution. Its finer matter is
closely in touch with the coarser matter of the mental body, and the two are
constantly working together, acting and reacting on each other. To gain a
definite idea of these changes in the astral body the reader should turn to
Plates I and III, which depict the influence of love and hate. Plate III illustrates some of the effects seen in the
astral body of the man in love: the ordinary appearance of the astral body is
transformed inasmuch as another human being has, for the time, become the
centre of his world. Selfishness, deceit and anger have vanished, and an
immense increase in the crimson colour of love is observable. Other undesirable
changes there are, but it is an opening of the golden gates for the one who
experiences it, and it is his fault if they close again. Plate I shows the
terrible effects upon the astral body of intense anger: the whole organism is
suffused by the black hue of malice and ill-will, which expresses itself in
coils or vortices of thunderous blackness, from which fiery arrows of anger
dart out, seeking to injure the one for whom the anger is felt—a tremendous and
truly awful spectacle.
In
sleep the astral body slips out of the physical, in company with the mental and
higher bodies, and in the class of people just mentioned the consciousness
functions in it during the hours of sleep of the physical body. We learn much
during our sleep, and the knowledge thus gained slowly filters into the
physical brain, and is occasionally impressed upon it as a vivid and
illuminative dream. For the most part the consciousness in the astral world
concerns itself little with the happiness there, being chiefly interested in
its own exercise in thought and feeling; but it is possible to turn it
outwards, and to gain knowledge of the astral world. Communication with friends
who have lost their physical bodies by death is constantly carried on there,
and the memory may be brought back into waking consciousness, thus bridging the
gulf otherwise made by death.
Premonitions,
presentiments, the sensing of unseen presences and many allied experiences are
due to the activity of the astral body and its reaction on the physical; their
ever-increasing frequency is merely the result of its evolution among educated
people. In a few generations it will be so generally developed that it will
become as familiar as the physical body. After death we live for some time in
the astral world in the astral body used during our life on earth, and the more
we learn to control and use it wisely now the better for us after death.
THE
MENTAL BODY
This
body, of finer material than the astral as the astral is finer than the
physical, is the body which answers by its vibrations to our changes of
thought. Every change in thought makes a vibration in our mental body, and
this, transmitted by the astral to the physical, causes activity in the nervous
matter of our brains. This activity in the nervous cells causes many electrical
and chemical changes in them, but it is the thought activity which causes these,
and not the changes which produce thought, as the materialists of the
nineteenth century imagined.
The
mental body, like the astral, varies much in different people; it is composed
of coarser or of finer matter, according to the needs of the more or less
unfolded consciousness connected with it. In the educated it is active and
well-defined; in the undeveloped it is cloudy and inchoate. Its matter, drawn
from the mental plane, is that of the heaven-world, and it is continuously active,
for man thinks in his waking consciousness when out of the physical body in
sleep, and after death, and lives wholly in thought and emotion when he leaves
the astral world behind him, and passes into heaven. As this is the body in
which long centuries will be passed in the heaven-world, it is only rational to
try to improve it as much as possible here. The means are study, thought, the
exercise of good emotions, aspiration (prayer) and beneficent endeavours, and,
above all, regular and strenuous meditation. The using of these will mean a
rapid evolution of the mental body, and an immense enrichment of the heavenly
life. Evil thoughts of all kinds befoul and injure it, and, if persisted in,
will become veritable diseases and maimings of the mental body, incurable
during its period of life.
Such
are man's three mortal bodies: he casts off the physical at death, the astral
when ready to enter the heaven-world. When he has finished his heaven life his
mental body also disintegrates, and he is a spirit clad in his immortal bodies.
And descending for rebirth a new mental body is formed and a new astral,
conformable to his character, and these attach themselves to his physical body,
and he enters by birth on a new period of mortal life.
NEXT CHAPTER
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