CHAPTER VIII

FIRST HUMAN STEPS.

1. THE THIRD LIFE-WAVE.

THE middle of the Third Root-Race had been reached; the nervous apparatus of animal man had been built up to a point at which it needed for its further improve­ment the more direct flow of thought from the spiritual Triad to which it was attached; the Group-Soul had completed its work for these, the higher products of evolution, as the medium by which the life of the Second Logos protected and nourished His infant children; it was now to form the foundation of the causal body, the vessel into which the down-pouring life was, to be received; the term of the ante-natal life of the Monad was touched, and the time was ripe for his birth into the [170] lower world. The mother-life of the Logos had built for him the bodies in which he could now live as a separate entity in the world of forms, and he was to come into direct possession of his bodies and take up his human evolution.

We have seen that the Monads derive their being from the First Logos, and dwell on the anupadaka, the second, plane during the ages over which we have glanced. We have also seen that they appropriated to themselves with the help of different agents the three permanent atoms that represent them as Jivatmas on the third, fourth, and fifth planes, and also those which form the lower triad on the fifth, sixth, and seventh. All the communication of the Monad with the planes below his own has been through the Sutratma, the life-thread, on which the atoms are strung, that life-thread - ­of second plane matter - passing from the atmic atom to the buddhic, from the buddhic to the manasic, and from the manasic re-entering the atmic, thus making the “Triangle of Light” on the higher planes. We have seen further [171] that from the line of this Triangle on the buddhic plane comes forth a thread, the Sutratma of the lower planes, on which the lower triad is strung.

The time has now come for a fuller communication than is represented by this delicate thread in its original form, and it, as it were, widens out. This is but a clumsy way of picturing the fact that the Ray from the Monad glows and increases, assuming more the form of a funnel: “The thread between the Silent Watcher and his shadow becomes stronger an radiant”[59]. This downflow of monadic life is accompanied by much increased flow between the buddhic and manasic perma­nent atoms, and the latter seems to awaken, sending out thrills in every direc­tion. Other manasic atoms and molecules gather round it, and a whirling vortex is seen on the three upper sub-planes of the mental plane. A similar whirling motion is seen in the cloudy mass surrounding the attached mental unit below, enveloped in the remaining layer of the Group-Soul, as already described. The layer is torn [172] asunder, and caught up into the vortex above, where it is disintegrated, and the causal body is formed, a delicate filmy envelope, as the whirlpool subsides. This downflow of life, resulting in the formation of the causal body, is called the Third Life-Wave, and is properly ascribed to the First Logos, since the Monads came forth from Him and represent His triune life.

The causal body once formed, the spiritual Triad has a permanent vehicle for further evolution, and when Consciousness becomes able to function freely in this vehicle, the Triad will be able to control and direct, far more effectively than ever before, the evolution of the lower vehicles.

The earlier efforts to control are not, however, of a very intelligent description, any more than the first movements of the body of the infant show they are directed by any intelligence, although we know that an intelligence is connected with it. The Monad is now, in a very real sense, born on the physical plane, but still he must be regarded as a babe there, and must pass through an immense period of time before [173] his power over the physical body will be anything but infantile.

2. HUMAN DEVELOPMENT.

And this is clearly seen if we look at man as he was in his early days. Those long-perished Lemurians - if we except those entities who had already developed consciousness to a considerable extent, and who took birth in the clumsy Lemurian bodies in order to lead human evolution - were very poorly developed as to their sense organs; those of smell and taste were not developed, but were only in process of building. Their sensitiveness to pleasure and pain was slight.

In the Atlanteans the senses were much more active; sight was very keen and hearing was acute; taste was more developed than among the Lemurians, but was still not highly evolved; coarse and rank foods were found perfectly tolerable and even agreeable, and very highly-flavoured articles of diet, such as decaying meat, were preferred to more delicate viands, which were considered [174] tasteless. The body was not very sensitive to injuries, and severe wounds did not cause much pain, nor were followed by prostration - even extensive lacerations failing to incapacitate the sufferer - and healing very quickly. The remnants of the Lemurian Race now existing, as well as the widely spread Atlantean, still show a relative insensitiveness to pain, and undergo, with very partial disablement, lacerations that would utterly prostrate a fifth Race man. A North American Indian has been reported as fighting on after the side of the thigh had been slashed away, and taking the field again after twelve or fifteen hours. This characteristic of the fourth Race body enables a savage to bear with composure, and to recover from, tortures that would prostrate a fifth Race man from nervous shock.

These differences derive largely from the varying developments of the per­manent atom, the nucleus of the physical body. There is, in the fifth Root-Race, a fuller stream of life pouring down, causing the greater internal development of the permanent atom, and increasing as [175] that development proceeds. As evolution goes on, there is an increasing complexity of vibratory powers in the physical per­manent atom, a similar increase in the astral atom, and again in the mental unit. As birth follows birth, and these permanent nuclei are put out on each plane to gather round them the new mental, astral and physical encasements, the more highly developed permanent atoms draw round them the more highly developed atoms on the planes to which they belong, and thus build up a better nervous apparatus through which the ever-increasing stream of con­sciousness can flow. In this way is built up the delicately organised nervous apparatus of the fifth Race man.

In the fifth Race man the internal differentiation of the nervous cells is much increased, and the intercommunica­tions are much more numerous. Speaking generally, the consciousness of the fifth Race man is working on the astral plane, and is withdrawn from the physical body except so far as the cerebro-spinal nervous system is concerned. The control of the vital organs of the body is left to the [176] sympathetic system, trained through long ages to perform this work, and now kept going by impulses from the astral centres other than the ten, without deliberate attention from the otherwise occupied consciousness, although of course sus­tained by it. It is, however, as we shall presently see, quite possible to draw the attention of consciousness again to this part of its mechanism, and to reassume intelligent control of it. In the more highly evolved members of the fifth Race, the main impulses of consciousness are sent down from the lower mental world; and work down through the astral to the physical, and there stimulate the physical nervous activity. This is the keen, subtle, intelligent consciousness, moved by ideas more than by sensations, and showing itself more actively in the mental and emotional brain-centres than in those concerned with sensory and motor pheno­mena.

The sense-organs of the fifth Race body are less active and acute than those of the highest fourth Race in responding to purely physical impacts. The eye, the [177] ear, the touch do not respond to vibra­tions which would affect the fourth Race sense-organs. It is significant, also, that these organs are at their keenest in early childhood, and diminish in sensitive­ness from about the sixth year onward. On the other hand, while less acute in receiving pure sense-impacts, they become more sensitive to sensations intermingled with emotions, and delicacies of colour and of sound, whether of nature or of art, appeal to them more effectively. The higher and more intricate organisation of the sense-centres in the brain and in the astral body seems to bring about increased sensitiveness to beauty of colour, form, and sound, but diminished response to the sensations in which the emotions play no part.

The fifth Race body is also far more sensitive to shock than are the bodies of the fourth and third Races, being more dependent upon consciousness for its upkeep. A nervous shock is far more keenly felt, and entails far greater prostra­tion. A severe mutilation is no longer a question merely of lacerated muscle, of [178] torn tissues, but of dangerous nervous shock; the highly organised nervous system carries the message of distress to the brain centres, and it is sent on from them to the astral body, disturbing and upsetting the astral consciousness. This is followed by disturbance on the mental plane; imagination is aroused, memory stimulates anticipation, and the rush of mental impulses intensifies and prolongs sensations. These again stimulate and excite the nervous system, and its undue excitation acts on the vital organs, causing organic disturbance; hence depression of vitality and slow recovery.

So also in the highly evolved fifth Race body, mental conditions largely rule the physical, and intense anxiety, mental suffering, and worry, producing nervous tension, readily disturb organic processes and bring about weakness or disease. Hence mental strength and serenity directly promote physical health, and when the consciousness is definitely established on the astral or the mental plane, emotional and mental disturbance are far more productive of ill-health than [179] any privations inflicted on the physical body. The evolved fifth Race man lives physically literally in his nervous system.

2. INCONGRUOUS SOULS AND BODIES.

But we should here notice a significant fact, bearing on the all-important question of the relation of the nervous organisation to consciousness. When a human con­sciousness has not yet grown beyond the later Lemurian or earlier Atlantean type, but is born into a fifth Race body, it presents a curious and interest­ing study. (The reasons for such a birth cannot here be enlarged upon; briefly, as the more advanced nations annex the lands occupied by little evolved tribes, and kill them off either directly or indirectly, the people thus summarily evicted from their bodies have to find new habitats; the suitable savage conditions are becoming rarer and rarer, under the ever­-expanding flood of higher races, and they have to take birth under the lowest avail­able conditions, such as the slums of large cities, in families of criminal types. They [180] are drawn to the conquering nation by karmic necessity.) Such persons incarnate in fifth Race bodies of the worst available material. They then show out in these fifth Race bodies the qualities that belong to the earlier fourth or the third; and though they have the physical outer nervous organisation, they have not the internal differentiation in the nervous matter that only comes with the play on physical matter of energies coming from the astral and mental worlds. We observe in them the non-responsiveness to impres­sions from outside, unless the impressions are of a violent order, that marks the low grade of development of the individual consciousness. We notice the falling back into inertia when a violent physical stimulus is absent; the recurrent craving for such violent stimulus when roused by physical necessities; the stirring into faint mental activity under vehement impact on the sense-organs, and the blankness when the sense-organs are at rest; the complete absence of any response to a thought or a high emotion - not a rejection but an un-consciousness of it. Excitement or violence [181] in such a person is caused as a rule by something outside - by something coming before him physically which his dawning mind connects with the possibility of gratifying some passion which he remem­bers, and desires again to feel. Such a person may not be intent on robbery or murder at all, but may be stimulated into either or both by the mere sight of a well-­dressed passer-by who seems likely to have money - money, that means gratification by food, drink, or sex. The stimulus to attack the passer-by is at once given, and will be followed at once by action, unless checked by a physical and obvious danger, such as the sight of a policeman. It is the embodied physical temptation which arouses the idea of committing the crime; a man who plans a crime beforehand is more highly developed; the mere savage commits a crime on the impulse of the moment, unless faced by another physical embodiment, that of a force which he fears. And when the crime is committed, he is impervious to all appeals to shame or remorse; he is susceptible only to terror.

These remarks do not, of course, apply [182] to the intelligent criminal, but only to the congenital brutal and obtuse type, the third or fourth Race savage in a fifth Race body.

As the truths of the Ancient Wisdom more and more colour modern thought, they will inevitably, among other things, modify the treatment of the criminal. Such criminals as are here spoken of will not be punished brutally, but will be kept permanently under strict discipline; and will be, as far as is practicable, aided to progress more quickly than would have been possible under the conditions of savage life. But the further consideration of this would lead us too far from our main study, and we must now return to the workings of consciousness on the astral plane, as they show themselves in the higher animals and in the lower human types.

4. DAWN OF CONSCIOUSNESS ON THE ASTRAL PLANE.

We have seen that astral organisation precedes and shapes the physical nervous [183] system, and we have now to consider how this must affect the workings of consciousness. We should expect to find that consciousness on the astral plane will become aware of impacts on its astral sheath in a vague and un-precise way, just as, in the minerals and the plants and the lowest animals, it became aware of impacts on its physical body. This awareness of astral impacts will long precede any definite organisation in the astral sheath, the bridge between the mental and the physical, that will gradually evolve it into an astral body, the independent vehicle of consciousness on the astral plane. And, as we have seen, the first organisation in the astral sheath is a response to impacts received through the physical body, and is related to the physical body in its evolution. This organisation has nothing to do directly with the reception, co-ordination, and understanding of astral impacts, but is engaged in being acted upon by, and re-acting on, the physical nervous system. Consciousness everywhere precedes Self-­consciousness and the evolution of [184] con­sciousness on the astral plane proceeds contemporaneously with the evolution of Self-consciousnesss - to be dealt with pre­sently - on the physical.

The impacts on the astral sheath from the astral plane produce vibratory waves over the whole astral sheath, and the ensheathed consciousness gradually be­comes dimly aware of these surgings, without relating them to any external cause. It is groping after the much more violent physical impacts, and such power of attention as it has evolved is turned on them. The aggregations of astral matter, connected with the physical nervous systems, naturally share in the general surgings of the astral sheath, and the vib­rations caused by these surgings mingle with those coming from the physical body, and affect also the vibrations sent down to it by the consciousness through these aggre­gations. Thus a connexion is established between astral impacts and the sympa­thetic system, and they play a considerable part in its evolution. As the conscious­ness working in the physical body begins slowly to recognise an external world, [185] these impacts from the astral - gradually classified under the five senses as are the impacts from the physical - mingle with those from the physical plane and are not distinguished as being different from them in origin. This recognition is the lower clairvoyance, that which precedes the great evolution of mind. So long as the sympathetic system is acting as the dominant apparatus of consciousness, so long will the origin, astral or physical, of impacts remain as the same to con­sciousness. Even the higher animals - in whom the cerebro-spinal system is well developed, but in whom it is not yet, save in its sense-centres, the chief mechanism of consciousness - fail to distinguish between physical and astral sights, sounds, etc. A horse will leap over an astral body as though it were a physical one; a cat will rub herself against the legs of an astral figure; a dog will growl at a similar appearance. In the dog and the horse there is the dawning of an uneasy sense of some difference, shown by the fear of such appearances often manifested by the dog, and by the timidity of the horse. [186] The nervousness of the horse - despite which he can be trained to face the dangers of a battle-field, and even, as with Arab mares, learn to pick up and carry away his fallen rider through all the alarming surroundings - seems chiefly due to his confusion and bewilderment as to his environment, and his inability to distinguish between what later he will learnedly call “objective realities”, against which he can injure his body, and “delusions”, or “hallucinations”, through which his body can pass unscathed. To him they are all “real”, and the difference of their behaviour alarms him; in the case of an exceptionally intelligent horse the nervousness is often greater, as he evolves a dawning sense of difference in the phenomena themselves, and this at first, not being understood, is yet more disquieting.

The savage, living more in the cere­bro-spinal system, distinguishes between the physical and the astral phenomena, though the latter to him are as “real” as the physical: he relates them to another world, to which he relegates [187] all things that do not behave in the way he considers normal. He does not know that, with regard to these, he is conscious through the sympathetic and not through the cerebro-spinal system; he is conscious of them - that is all. The Lemurians and early Atlanteans were almost more conscious astrally than they were physically. Astral impacts, throwing the whole astral sheath into waves, came through the sense-centres of the astral to the sympathetic centres in the physical body, and they were vividly aware of them. Their lives were dominated by sensations and passions more than by intellect, and the special apparatus of the astral sheath, the sympathetic system, was then the dominant mechanism of consciousness.

As the cerebro-spinal system became elaborated, and more and more assumed its peculiar position as the chief apparatus of consciousness on the physical plane, the attention of consciousness was fixed more and more on the external physical world, and its aspect of activity, as the concrete mind, was brought into greater [188] and greater prominence. The sympathetic system became subordinate, and its indica­tions were less and less regarded, sub­merged under the flood of the coarser and heavier physical impacts from without. Hence a lessening of astral consciousness and an increase of intelligence, though there still remains in almost every one a vague sense of non-understood impressions received from time to time.

At the present stage of evolution this lower form of clairvoyance is still found among human beings, but in persons of very limited intellect; they have little idea as to its rationale, and little control over its exercise. Attempts to increase it are apt to cause nervous disturbances of a very refractory kind, and these attempts are against the law of evolution, which works ever forward towards a higher end, and does not move backwards. As the law cannot be changed, attempts to work against it only cause disturbance and disease. We cannot revert to the con­dition in which the sympathetic system was dominant, save at the cost of health, and of the higher intellectual evolution. [189] Hence the serious danger of following many of the directions now published broadcast, to meditate on the solar plexus, and other sympathetic centres.

The practices, a few of which have come over to the West, are systematised into Hatha Yoga in India. Control over the involuntary muscles is regained, so that a man can reverse peristaltic action, inhibit the beating of the heart, vomit at will, and so on. Much time and trouble must be wasted ere the perform­ance of such feats becomes possible, and at the end the man has only brought back to the control of the will muscles which have long since been handed over by it to the sympathetic system. As that handing-over was done by a gradual turning away of attention, so is it by a concentration of attention on the parts concerned that the earlier achievement is reversed. As such performances impose upon the ignorant, who regard them as evidences of spiritual greatness, they are often practised by men who desire power, and are unable to obtain it in a more legitimate way. Moreover, [190] they are the easiest form of Hatha Yoga; and are more easily cultivated, and cost far less suffering, than holding an arm extended till it withers, or lying on a bed of spikes.

When the cerebro-spinal system is thrown temporarily into abeyance, the impulses from the astral sheath through the sympathetic system make themselves felt in consciousness. Hence “lucidity” in trance, self-induced or imposed, the power of reading in the astral by the use of crystals, and other similar devices. The partial or complete suspension of the action of consciousness in the higher vehicle causes it to direct attention on the lower.

It may be well to add here, to prevent misconception, that the higher clairvoy­ance follows, instead of preceding, the growth of mind, and cannot appear until the organisation of the astral body, in con­tradistinction to the astral sheath, has been carried to a considerable height. When this is effected by the play of intellect and the perfecting of the physical intellectual apparatus, then the true astral senses [191] before mentioned, called the chakras, or wheels, from their whirling appearance, are gradually evolved. These develop on the astral plane, as astral senses and organs, and are built and controlled from the mental plane, as were the brain-centres from the astral. Consciousness is then working on the mental plane and building its astral mechanism, as before it worked on the astral plane, building its physical mechanism. But now it works with far greater power and greater understanding, having unfolded so many of its powers. Further, it shapes centres in the physical body from the sympathetic and cerebro­spinal systems, to act as physical plane apparatus for bringing into the brain­-consciousness the vibrations from the higher planes. As these centres are vivified, knowledge is “brought through”, i.e., is available for the use of conscious­ness working in the physical nervous system. This, as said, is the higher clair­voyance, the intelligent and self-directed exercise of the powers of consciousness in the astral body.

In this upward-climbing, then, the [192] powers of consciousness are awakened on the physical plane, and are then severally awakened on the astral and the mental. The astral and mental sheaths must be highly evolved ere they can be farther developed into the subtle body, acting independently on the higher planes, and then building for itself the necessary apparatus for the exercise of these higher powers in the physical world. And even here when the apparatus is ready, built by pure thought and pure desire, it must be vivified on the physical plane by the fire of Kundalini, aroused and directed by the consciousness working in the physical brain. [193]