During the stages of evolution that lead up to and include the Probationary Path, the first division of the spiritual body—the Causal Body—develops rapidly, and enables the man, after death, to rise into the second heaven. After the Second Birth, the birth of the Christ in man, begins the building of the Bliss Body "in the heavens." This is the body of the Christ, developing during the days of His service on earth, and, as it develops, the consciousness of the "Son of God" becomes more and more marked, and the coming union with the Father illuminates the unfolding Spirit.
In the Christian Mysteries—as in the ancient Egyptian, Chaldean, and others—there was an outer symbolism which expressed the stages through which the man was passing. He was brought into the chamber of Initiation, and was stretched on the ground with his arms extended, sometimes on a cross of wood,
sometimes merely on the stone floor, in the posture of a crucified man. He was then touched with the thyrsus on the heart—the "spear" of the crucifixion—and, leaving the body, he passed into the worlds beyond, the body falling into a deep trance, the death of the crucified. The body was placed in a sarcophagus of stone, and there left, carefully guarded. Meanwhile the man himself was treading first the strange obscure regions called "the heart of the earth," and thereafter the heavenly mount, where he put on the perfected bliss body, now fully organised as a vehicle of consciousness. In that he returned to the body of flesh, to re-animate it. The cross bearing that body, or the entranced and rigid body, if no cross had been used, was lifted out of the sarcophagus and placed on a sloping surface, facing the east, ready for the rising of the sun on the third day. At the moment that the rays of the sun touched the face, the Christ, the perfected Initiate or Master, re-entered the body, glorifying it by the bliss body He was wearing, changing the body of
flesh by contact with the body of bliss, giving it new properties, new powers, new capacities, transmuting it into His own likeness. That was the Resurrection of the Christ, and thereafter the body of flesh itself was changed, and took on a new nature.
This is why the sun has ever been taken as the symbol of the rising Christ, and why, in Easter hymns, there is constant reference to the rising of the Sun of Righteousness. So also is it written of the triumphant Christ: "I am He that liveth and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death."[251] All the powers of the lower worlds have been taken under the dominion of the Son, who has triumphed gloriously; over Him death no more has power, "He holdeth life and death in His strong hand."[252] He is the risen Christ, the Christ triumphant.
The Ascension of the Christ was the Mystery of the third part of the spiritual
body, the putting on of the Vesture of Glory, preparatory to the union of the Son with the Father, of man with God, when the Spirit re-entered the glory it had "before the world was."[253] Then the triple Spirit becomes one, knows itself eternal, and the Hidden God is found. That is imaged in the doctrine of the Ascension, so far as the individual is concerned.
The Ascension for humanity is when the whole race has attained the Christ condition, the state of the Son, and that Son becomes one with the Father, and God is all in all. That is the goal, prefigured in the triumph of the Initiate, but reached only when the human race is perfected, and when "the great orphan Humanity" is no longer an orphan, but consciously recognises itself as the Son of God.
Thus studying the doctrines of the Atonement, the Resurrection, and the Ascension, we reach the truths unfolded concerning them in the Lesser Mysteries, and we begin to understand the full truth of the apostolic teaching that Christ was
not a unique personality, but "the first fruits of them that slept,"[254] and that every man was to become a Christ. Not then was the Christ regarded as an external Saviour, by whose imputed righteousness men were to be saved from divine wrath. There was current in the Church the glorious and inspiring teaching that He was but the first fruits of humanity, the model that every man should reproduce in himself, the life that all should share. The Initiates have ever been regarded as these first fruits, the promise of a race made perfect. To the early Christian, Christ was the living symbol of his own divinity, the glorious fruit of the seed he bore in his own heart. Not to be saved by an external Christ, but to be glorified into an inner Christ, was the teaching of esoteric Christianity, of the Lesser Mysteries. The stage of discipleship was to pass into that of Sonship. The life of the Son was to be lived among men till it was closed by the Resurrection, and the glorified Christ became one of the perfected Saviours of the world.