CHAPTER V

GROUP-SOULS.

1. THE MEANING OF THE TERM.

SPEAKING generally, a Group-Soul is a collection of permanent triads, in a triple envelope of monadic essence. This description is true of all Group-Souls functioning on the physical plane, but gives no idea of the extreme complexity of the subject of Group-Souls. For they divide and sub-divide constantly, the contents of each division and sub-division decreasing in number, as evolution goes on, until at last a “Group-Soul” encloses but a single triad, to which it may continue for many births to discharge the protective and nutrient functions of a Group-Soul, while no longer technically describable as one, the “Group” having separated off into its constituent parts. [114]

Seven Group-Souls are to be seen, functioning on the physical plane, before any forms appear. They first show them­selves as vague, filmy forms, one in each stream of the Second Life-Wave, on the mental plane, becoming more clearly out­lined on the astral plane, and yet more so on the physical. They float in the great ocean of matter as balloons might float in the sea. Observing them more closely, we see three separate layers of matter, forming an envelope, which contains innu­merable triads. Before any inmineralisa­tion has taken place, no golden life-web is, of course, visible around these; only the radiant golden threads which connect them with their parent Jivatmas are to be seen, shining with that strange lustre which belongs to their birth-plane. The inner­most of these three layers consists of physical monadic essence; that is, the layer is composed of atoms of the physical plane, ensouled with the life of the Second Logos. At first sight, these innermost layers appear to be identical in the seven Group-Souls; but closer observation reveals that each layer is formed of atoms [115] from only one of the seven Matter-groups before described. Each Group-Soul, therefore, differs in material constitution from all the rest, and the contained triads in each belong to the same matter-group. The second layer of the Group-Soul envelope is composed of astral monadic essence, belonging to the same matter­-group as the first; and the third of units of the fourth sub-plane of mental matter of the same type. This triple envelope is the protector and nourisher of the triads contained within it, veritable embryos, incapable, as yet, of separate independent activity.

The seven Group-Souls soon multiply, division going on continually with the multiplication of distinct sub-types, as the immediate forerunners of the chemical elements appear, to be followed by the elements themselves, and the minerals formed from them. The laws of space, for instance - apart from the specialisation of the contents of the Group-Soul, the permanent triads - may lead to a division of it.

Thus a vein of gold in Australia may [116] lead to the inmineralisation of many such triads within a single envelope, while the laying down of another vein in a distant place, say the Rocky Mountains, may lead to the division of this envelope, and the transfer of part of its contents to America in their own envelope. But the more important causes which bring about sub-divisions will be explained in the course of our study. The Group­-Soul and its contents divide by fission, like an ordinary cell - one becomes two, two four, and so on. All the triads have to pass through the mineral kingdom, the place in which matter reaches its grossest form, and the place where the great wave reaches the limit of its descent, and turns to begin its upward climbing. Here it is that physical consciousness must awaken; life must now turn definitely outwards, and recognise contacts with other lives in an external world.

Now the evolution of each being in these early stages depends chiefly on the cherishing life of the Logos, and partly on the co-operating guidance of the Shining Ones, and partly on its own [117] blind pressure against the limits of its enclosing form. I have compared the evolution through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms to an ante-natal period, and the resemblance is exact. As the child is nourished by the life­-streams of the mother, so does the protective envelope of the Group-Soul nourish the lives within it, receiving and distributing the experiences gathered in. The circulating life is the life of the parent; the young plants, the young animals, the young human beings, are not ready for independent life as yet, but must draw nourishment from the parent. And so these germinating lives in the mineral kingdom are nourished by the Group-Souls, by the envelopes of monadic essence, thrilling with Logic life. A very fair picture of this stage may be seen in the carpel of a plant, in which the ovules gradually appear, becoming more and more independent.

For the sake of a clear conception, we may glance rapidly forward over the changes through which the Group-Soul passes, as its contents evolve, before going [118] into details. During the mineral evolution, the habitat of the Group-Soul may be said to be that of its densest envelope, the physical; its most active working is on the physical plane. As its contents pass on­wards into the vegetable kingdom, and ascend through it, the physical envelope slowly disappears - as though absorbed by the contents for the strengthening of their own etheric bodies - and its activity is transferred to the astral plane, to the nourishing of the astral bodies of the contained triads. As these develop yet further and pass into the animal kingdom, the astral envelope is similarly absorbed, and the activity of the Group-Soul is transferred to the mental plane, and it nourishes the inchoate mental bodies and shapes them gradually into less vagueness of outline. When the Group-Soul contains but a single triad, and has nourished this into readiness for the reception of the third outpouring, what is left of it disintegrates into matter of the third sub-plane, and becomes a constituent part of the causal body formed by the downpouring from above meeting the upward-drawn column [119] from below - to use the graphic water­spout simile. Then is the re-incarnating Ego born into independent manifestation; the guarded ante-natal life is over.

2. THE DIVISION OF THE GROUP-SOUL.

It is on the physical plane that con­sciousness must first evolve into Self-consciousness, must become aware of an external world that makes impacts upon it, and must learn to refer those impacts to an external world, and to realise as its own the changes which it undergoes in consequence of those impacts. By prolonged experiences it will learn to identify with itself the feeling of pleasure or pain that follows the impact, and to regard as not itself that which touches its external surface. It will thus make its first rough distinction of “Not-I” and “I”. As experience increases, the “I” will retreat ever inwards, and one veil of matter after another will be relegated outwards as belonging to the “Not-I”; but while its connotations change, this fundamental distinction [120] between subject and object will ever remain. “I” is the willing, thinking, acting consciousness; while the “Not-I” is all as to which it wills, about which it thinks, and on which it acts. We shall have to consider later the way in which consciousness becomes Self-conscious­ness, but at present we are concerned only with its expression in forms, and the part played by the forms.

This consciousness awakens on the physical plane, and its expression is the permanent atom. In this it lies sleeping: “It sleeps in the mineral”; and therein some awakening into lighter slumber must take place, so that it may be roused out of this deep dreamless sleep, and become sufficiently active to pass on into the next stage: “It dreams in the vegetable”.

Now the Second Logos, acting in the envelope of the Group-Souls, energises the permanent physical atoms and, by the mediation of the Shining Ones, as we have seen, plunges them into the various conditions offered by the mineral kingdom, where each attaches to itself many mineral particles. At once here we see a large [121] variety of possible impacts, leading to a variety of experiences, and so presently to lines of cleavage in a Group-Soul. Some will be whirled high in air, to fall in torrents of burning lava; some will be exposed to arctic cold, others to tropic heat; some will be crushed and sheathed in molten metal in the bowels of the earth; some will be in the sand tossed roughly by rushing billows. Infinite variety of external impacts will shake and strike and burn and freeze, and in vague answers of sympa­thetic vibrations will the deep-slumbering consciousness respond. When any per­manent atom has reached a certain responsiveness, or when a mineral form, i.e., the particles to which a permanent atom has attached itself, is broken up, the Group-Soul draws that atom from its encasement. All the experiences acquired by that atom - and that means the vibrations it has been forced to execute - ­remain as powers of vibrating in particular ways, or as “vibratory powers”. That is the outcome of its life in a form. The permanent atom, losing its embodiment and remaining for a while naked, as it [122] were, in its Group-Soul, and continuing to repeat these vibrations, to go over within itself its life-experiences, sets up pulses which run through the envelope of the Group-Soul and are thus conveyed to other permanent atoms; thus each affects and helps all the others while remaining itself. The permanent atoms which have had experiences similar in character will be more strongly affected by each other than will be those whose experiences have been very different, and thus there will be a certain segregation going on within the Group-Soul, and presently a filmy separating wall will grow inwards from the envelope, and divide these segregated groups from each other; and so there will be an ever-increasing number of Group­-Souls with contents showing an ever­-increasing distinction of consciousness, while sharing fundamental characteristics.

Now the responses of consciousness to external stimuli in the mineral kingdom are far greater than many quite realise, and some of them are of a nature which shows that there is a dawning of conscious­ness also in the astral permanent atom. [123] For chemical elements exhibit distinct mutual attractions, and chemical marital relationships are continually disorganised by the intrusion of couples, one or other of which has a stronger affinity for one of the partners in the earlier marriage than the original mate. Thus a hitherto mutually faithful couple, forming a silver salt, will suddenly prove faithless to each other if another couple, hydro-chloric acid, enters their peaceful household; and the silver will pounce upon the chlorine and take her to wife, preferring her to his former mate, and set up a new household as silver chloride, leaving the deserted hydrogen to mate with his own forsaken partner. Wherever these active interchanges go on there is a slight stir in the astral atom, in consequence of the violent physical vibra­tions set up by the violent wrenching apart, and formation, of intimate ties, and vague internal thrillings appear. The astral must be roused from the physical, and consciousness on the physical plane will long take the lead in evolution. Still, a little cloud of astral matter is drawn round the permanent astral atom by these [124] slight thrillings, but it is very loosely held, and seems to be quite unorganised. There does not seem to be any vibration in the mental atom at this stage.

After ages of experience in the mineral kingdom, some of the permanent atoms will be ready to pass into the vegetable king­dom, and will be distributed by the agency of the Shining Ones over the vegetable world. It is not to be supposed that every blade of grass, every plant, has a perma­nent atom within it, evolving to humanity during the life of this system. Just as in the mineral kingdom, so here; the vegetable kingdom forms the field of evolution for these permanent atoms, and the Shining Ones guide them to habitat after habitat, so that they may experience the vibrations that affect the vegetable world, and again store up these as vibra­tory powers in the same fashion as before. The principles of interchange and of con­sequent segregation work out as before, and the Group-Souls in each stream of evolution become more numerous, and more different in their leading characteristics. [125]

At our present stage of knowledge, the laws according to which permanent atoms in a Group-Soul are plunged into the kingdoms of nature are by no means clear. Many things seem to indicate that the evolution of the mineral, vegetable, and the lowest part of the animal kingdom belong more to the evolution of the earth itself than to that of the Jivatmas representing the Monads who are evolving within the Solar System, and who come, in due course, to this earth to pursue their own evolution by utilising the conditions it affords. Grass and small plants of every kind seem to be related to the earth as a man’s hairs are related to his body, and not to be connected with the Monads, represented by Jivatmas in our five-fold universe. The life in them, holding them together as forms, appears to be that of the Second Logos, and the life in the atoms and molecules com­posing them to be that of the Third Logos, appropriated and modified by the Planetary Logos of our system of Chains, and further appropriated and modified by the Spirit of the Earth­ - [126] an entity wrapped in great obscurity. These kingdoms offer a field for the evolution of the Jivatmas truly, but do not exist, apparently, wholly for this purpose. We find permanent atoms scattered through the mineral and vege­table kingdoms, but are unable to pierce to the reasons which govern their distri­bution. A permanent atom may be found in a pearl, in a ruby, in a diamond; many may be found scattered through veins or ore, and so on. On the other hand much mineral does not seem to contain any. So with short-lived plants. But in plants of long continuance, such as trees, per­manent atoms are constantly found. But here again, the life of the tree seems to be more closely related to the Deva­ evolution than to the evolution of the consciousness to which the permanent atom is attached. It is rather as though advantage were taken of the evolution of life and consciousness in the tree for the benefit of the permanent atom; it seems to live there more as a parasite, profiting by the more highly evolved life in which it is bathed. The fact is that our [127] knowledge on these points is extremely frag­mentary so far.

There is more activity perceptible in the astral permanent atom during the course of the accumulation of vegetable experiences by the physical, and it attracts round itself astral matter which is arranged by the Shining Ones in a rather more definite way. In the long life of a forest tree, the growing aggregation of astral matter develops itself in all directions as the astral form of the tree, and the consciousness attached to the permanent atoms shares, to some extent, that of its surroundings, experiencing through that astral form the vibrations causing massive pleasure and discomfort, these vibrations being the result of those set up in the physical tree by sunshine and storm, wind and rain, cold and heat. With the perishing of such a tree, the permanent astral atom retreats to its Group-Soul, now established on the astral plane, with a rich store of experiences, shared in the manner before described.

Further, as the consciousness becomes more responsive in the astral, it sends little [128] thrills downwards to the physical plane, and these give rise to feelings felt as though in the physical, but really derived from the astral. Where there has been a long separate life, as in a tree, the permanent mental unit will also begin to attract round itself a little cloud of mental matter, and on this the recurrence of seasons will slowly impress itself as a faint memory, which becomes inevitably a faint anticipation.[45]

At last some of the permanent physical atoms are ready to pass on into the animal kingdom, and once more the agency of the Shining Ones guides them into animal forms. During the later stages of their evolution in the vegetable world, it appears to be the rule that each triad - physical and astral atoms and mental unit - shall have a prolonged experience in a single form, so that some thrills of mental life may be experienced, and the triad may thus be prepared to profit by the wandering life of the animal. But it also appears that in some cases the passage into the animal [129] kingdom is made at an earlier stage, and that the first thrill in the mental unit occurs in some of the stationary forms of animal life, and in very lowly animal organisms.

In the lowest types of animals conditions similar to those described as existing in the mineral and vegetable kingdoms also appear to prevail. Microbes, amaebae, hydrae, etc., etc., only show a permanent atom as a visitor, now and again, and obviously in no way depend upon it for life and growth, nor do they break up when the permanent atom is withdrawn. They are hosts, not bodies formed around a permanent atom. And it is noteworthy that, at this stage, the golden life-web in no way represents the organisation of the host’s body, but merely acts as rootlets act in the soil, attaching particles of soil to themselves and sucking there­from nourishment. The permanent atoms in the animal kingdom have received and stored up many experiences, before they are used by the Shining Ones as centres round which forms are to be built.

Needless to say that in the animal [130] kingdom, the permanent atoms receive far more varied vibrations than in the lower kingdoms, and consequently differentiate more quickly, the number of triads in the Group-Souls diminishing rapidly as this differentiation proceeds, and the multipli­cation of Group-Souls therefore going on with increasing rapidity. As the period of individuality approaches, each separate triad becomes possessed of its own envelope, obtained from the Group-Soul, and takes on successive embodiments as a separate entity, though still within the enveloping case of protecting and nourish­ing monadic essence.

Large numbers of the higher animals in a state of domestication have reached this stage, and have really become separate re-incarnating entities, although not as yet possessing a causal body - ­the mark of what is usually called individualisation. The envelope derived from the Group-Soul serves the purpose of a causal body, but consists only of the third layer, as previously indicated, and is therefore composed of molecules derived from the fourth grade of mental [131] matter, that which corresponds to the coarsest ether of the physical plane. Following the analogy of human ante­-natal life, we see that this stage corresponds with its last two months. A seven-months’ babe may be born and may survive, but it will be stronger, healthier, more vigorous, if it profits for yet another two months by its mother’s shielding and nourishing life. So is it better for the normal development of the Ego that it should not too hastily burst the envelope of the Group-Soul, but should still absorb life through it, and strengthen from its constituents the finest part of its own mental body. When that body has reached its limit of growth under these shielded conditions, the envelope disintegrates into the finer molecules of the sub-plane above it, and becomes, as above said, part of the causal body.

It is the knowledge of these facts that has sometimes caused occultists to warn people who are very fond of animals not to be exaggerated in their affection, nor to show it in unwise ways. [132] The growth of the animal may be unhealthily forced, and its birth into individuality be hastened out of due time. Man, in order to fill rightly his place in the world, should seek to under­stand nature and work with her laws, quickening indeed their action by the co-operation of his intelligence, but not quickening it to the point whereat growth is made unhealthy and its product frail and “out of season”. It is true that the Lord of Life seeks human co-opera­tion in the working out of evolution, but the co-operation should follow the lines which His Wisdom has laid down. [133]