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THE
OF
THEOSOPHY
A
Definitive Work on Theosophy
By
William
Quan Judge
CHAPTER 4
Septenary Constitution of Man
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
scepticism,
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 Rupa.
2 Vitality
Prana-Jiva.
3 Astral
Body Linga- Sarira.
4 Animal
Soul Kama-Rupa
5
Human SoulManas.
6
Spiritual SoulBuddhi.
7
Spirit 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:
1 REAL
MANATMA
2 BUDDHI
3 MANAS
4 LOWER
VEHICLESTHE PASSIONS and DESIRES
5 LIFE
PRINCIPLE
6 ASTRAL
BODY
7 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 co-ordination between nature and
the real organs inside.
______________________
THE
OF
THEOSOPHY
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