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, or _Rupa_.
(2.) Vitality, or _Prana-Jiva_.
(3.) Astral Body, or _Linga-Sarira_.
(4.) Animal Soul, or _Kama-Rupa_.
(5.) Human Soul, or _Manas_.
(6.) Spiritual Soul, or _Buddhi_.
(7.) Spirit, or _Atma_.
The words in italics being equivalents in the Sanscrit 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 Abbé, 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 Sanscrit, 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:
_Atma_, {The Passions and Desires,
_Buddhi_, {Life Principle,
_Manas_, {Astral Body,
{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.
{ Brain,
{ Nerves,
The visible { Blood,
physical { Bones,
man is: { Lymph,
{ Muscles,
{ Organs of Sensation and Action,
{ and Skin,
The unseen { Astral Body,
physical { Passions and Desires,
man is: { 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 forget 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 coördination between nature
and the real organs inside.