Lecture VII
The Larger Consciousness and its Value
Friends: During the whole of the lectures, of which the discourse of to-night is the last, I have taken for granted the existence of a larger consciousness in man than that which we know at the present time as our physical or waking consciousness. Over and over again I have had occasion to allude to it, once or twice I dwelt for a few moments upon it, but I could not interrupt the course of what I had been putting to you by any detailed description of the larger consciousness, or of the instruments of that consciousness, the body or bodies of man. It seemed to me that the work I had been trying to do would remain somewhat imperfect unless I tried to place before you, ere quitting the subjects I had been dealing with, something with regard to this larger consciousness in man; a consciousness which exists in every one of us; which functions intermittently in all of us; which is in course of unfolding in humanity at the present time. And side by side with the unfolding of the consciousness there goes a continual evolution of the bodies in which that consciousness expresses itself, and it is that subject that I want to deal with to-night, trying to put before you clearly and definitely the theory which is studied by Theosophists with regard to this matter, a theory which some of us have proved to be true by our own investigations, and—which is a far more important thing—confirmed by the great Scriptures of the world’s religions, the testimony which has been given to man by seers, by prophets of the highest, the most inspired, order. Sometimes we are inclined to lay more stress on contemporary evidence than on the evidence that comes from the great Scriptures of the world. It seems to me as though that were a little along the line of hiding the sun by holding a plate quite close to the eyes. For it is quite clear, when you come to think of it, that testimony which may be given nowadays by half-developed students cannot in the nature of things be nearly as valuable as that of the great prophets and seers of humanity, embodied, however mystically and allegorically, in the great Bibles of humanity. In fact, the testimony of the modern-day investigator should be checked and governed by those mightier and wider revelations, and it is always a point of satisfaction, a point of confirmation to the modern and partially developed seer when he finds that his own investigations throw light on some of the statements of these Scriptures, and that the Bibles of the race become more illuminating in some of their obscurer passages by the light that he may have been able to gain by his own investigations. I am not, then, pretending for one moment that anything I put to you now is comparable in value with what you might find out for yourselves, if spiritually illuminated, in these great Bibles of religions. But I do think that the investigations of to-day help us to understand those great revelations, though much that is there said is necessarily obscure to us because of the immense difference in knowledge between the speaker and the student; therefore, though we may call our knowledge to-day a farthing light, it may be of value in the deciphering of these great manuscripts of the past, so that even a little knowledge of our own may enable us to go more deeply into those great wells of truth which have come down to us from antiquity, which have been given to us by the Saviours of the world.
In order to make what I have to say clear to you, I shall have to ask you to pardon me if I go in the beginning a little into definition and detail. If you want to study your own body, comparatively simple as that is, you must be willing to learn the difference between a bone and a nerve, between an artery and a vein, and so on through the whole of the more or less familiar terms which the physiologist uses in explaining the anatomy and the physiology of the body. No person can have clear and definite ideas if he is not willing to study the mere nomenclature of that which he wishes to understand; and while it is quite possible to avoid using words of other languages, it is not possible to avoid some demand on the consecutive thought-power of the student if he desires to be anything more than a mere superficial hearer, without any definite understanding of the subjects which he supposes himself to be studying. There is a very good and simple description of man’s constitution in one of the Pauline epistles, where a triple division is given, and a perfectly accurate division, although subdivisions again are possible and practicable; but for my purposes now that division into three, and then certain subdivisions of each, will be sufficient to give you a very clear and definite idea of consciousness in man; and then by your own experience you can decide how much of the larger consciousness comes into your waking consciousness, or how much of you is still without vehicle of expression, still without the power of manifesting in worlds related to our own.
That division, as all of you will at once know, is Spirit, Soul, Body. It is curious how indefinite the mass of Christian people are with regard to the meaning of the first two terms, Spirit and Soul. I am not quarreling with the fact that different definitions may sometimes be given; I am quarrelling with the fact that most Christians have no definition at all; that they use the words interchangeably; that they constantly talk of man as a duality, always using the word body; sometimes using the word Spirit, and sometimes soul, for all that which they exclude from the body. Thus you hear people talking about spirits manifesting in various ways; sometimes you hear about the human soul and its immortality, and so on. But a clear, distinct definition of what is Spirit, what is soul—that for the most part is wanting among even the students of theology. Let us see if it be not possible to define them in a way which may at least be clear. You may, of course, differ with the division for the reason that you may think some other dividing line is better; I am concerned chiefly, for the moment, with giving you a clear definition, and then you may correct or amend it according to your own thought or your own knowledge. The definition will, of course, govern me in all that I say to-night. First of all, then: What is Spirit? Spirit is a germ of Divinity unfolding itself gradually in human evolution, appropriating certain kinds of matter which it gradually organises into an instrument for self-expression—we may shorten that by saying a germ of Divinity encased in matter. That germ of Divinity, as you might naturally expect, shows out in itself the triple division of its Divine parent. Just as you find God, manifesting in a universe, ever manifesting three supreme attributes, sometimes personified into what is called a Trinity, so you would naturally expect to find in the germ that which you find in the parent—that the triple nature of Divinity should show itself out in the triple nature of the Spirit which is man. And that is so. You find Spirit showing itself forth in full Divinity, taking for a moment the Christian names as most familiar, in the form of Power in the Father, in the form of Wisdom in the Son, in the form of creative Activity in the Holy Spirit. If you will take those names for the time as being most familiar to your own thought, and therefore introducing nothing of difficulty to you—if you will remember those accepted ideas for the time, and translate them into terms of consciousness, limited, because these are not all fully unfolded in man, you will be able readily to distinguish in man’s spiritual nature, and even more distinctly for the moment in the lower reflexion of that with which I will deal presently—you will be able to distinguish the threefold division, and so to obtain, as it were, a clear picture of your own spiritual nature. That which in Divinity we call Power, the Will by which the worlds exist, shows itself out in our own spiritual nature as Will. The Wisdom which upholds the worlds shows itself out in the human Spirit also as the pure and compassionate Reason, which is the Wisdom, the Christ, in man. The third, creative Activity, shows itself in intellect, the highest, the noblest form of creative Activity—the intellect, the pure intellect in man is the third reflexion in man of the creative Activity of God. And if you link what may be less familiar with the familiar, it will be very easy for you to keep the thread of that which I desire to put before you. Think first of all, then, that the Spirit, the germ of Divinity in man, has to show out in the gradual unfolding of its hidden powers these three supreme attributes with which you are familiar in the thought of Divinity itself.
Then, passing from that highest part of our nature to what S. Paul calls the soul, what is the Soul in relation to the Spirit? It is the temporary reflexion in grosser matter of the eternal Spirit; the image of that which is the eternal object; the reflexion in the mirror of a world of that eternal life which passes from world to world, unfolding, but is never subject to the transitoriness which marks the ever-changing worlds. The soul in man is the Spirit working in grosser matter; and hence in our own natures, so familiar to us—for now we come into a region that psychological science deals with and tries to define and understand—we have, when we look at our own consciousness, the soul, the reflexion of the Spirit in grosser matter. We have the mind reflecting the pure intellect with all its activities—imagination, judgement, reason—all these powers of the mind. Then we find a part of our nature that we call the emotional; there we have the reflexion of that pure and compassionate Wisdom that I spoke of which shows itself in the lower worlds by Love, the highest and loftiest of the emotions, the root whence all virtues spring. For the same principle of unity which expresses itself as Wisdom in the spiritual world expresses itself as Love, which draws the separated lives together in the world where matter has overcome Spirit, where Spirit is blinded by matter. The unity that the Spirit knows the soul seeks by Love, which is the attribute that draws toward unity, and that which in the spiritual world is known, in the lower world is sought by this exquisite attribute of the soul. And that which in the higher world we call Will becomes Desire in the lower. For the difference between Will and Desire is that Will is self-determined, whereas Desire is determined by the attractiveness of objects outside the consciousness. You are moved by Desire when some pleasure attracts you, some pain repels you, when your activity goes along the road that is determined by an outer attraction, an outer repulsion; you are moved by Will, the spiritual attribute, when the whole of your inner nature, drawn up to a single point, self-determined, sends that nature along the road that within yourself you have chosen, whether it leads to pleasure or pain, whether it leads to gain or loss in the lower world. Will is determined from the spiritual Self; Desire is guided and stimulated by objects in the lower world. Hence that which is Will in the Spirit is Desire in the soul. And so you find the soul represented by these three well-known attributes: Mind, with all its powers; Emotion, the root emotion being love; Desire, the reflexion of the determining power in this lower world.
When you come down into everyday life you find the whole of these make up your waking consciousness, showing itself out in the denser matter of the brain; in your waking consciousness you know the working of the mind; in your waking consciousness you know the working of the emotions; in your waking consciousness you know the working of desire; so that the waking consciousness, the limited, the conditioned, the smaller consciousness, is that which is within the limitations of your brain or physical body, but is none other than the larger consciousness which shows itself in the subtler worlds as soul, in the spiritual world as Spirit. If you realise clearly that outlining, with its subdivisions, you will find that consciousness is a unit, and the differences are differences of the material in which it is working rather than in itself. The triple division is the only one, whether you look at it in the brain, in the subtle body, in the matter of the world where the Spirit rules. Everywhere consciousness is one, expressing itself in three modes, by three qualities, but everywhere a unit, yourself, the reality within you.
What is Body? For there is a third factor in S. Paul’s definition of man. Naturally the body also has in it the same triple differentiation as the consciousness. And so we find a spiritual body, the clothing of the Spirit in the highest worlds of consciousness. We find also what S. Paul, again, calls a natural body. There is a natural body, he says, and there is a spiritual body. But that natural body divides itself into two—the subtle body in which the soul is working; the dense body in which the waking consciousness is working, the reflexion of the highest. Those two naturally go together, and might well be classed roughly as the single natural body, for it is transitory, impermanent, belongs to the three worlds of change—the physical world, the intermediate, and the heavenly; has a certain life through which it passes in the three worlds, and then gives back its elements to the worlds to which they respectively belong. Whereas the spiritual body is a relatively permanent thing, lasts through the whole of the long life of the individual, passes through birth after birth, death after death, knows neither birth nor death in its own nature, passes through them, but is not affected by them—the spiritual individuality, the real man, is eternal in his own nature, and has a permanent clothing of the matter of the spiritual world, unfolding his powers, organising his matter, but remaining ever the same in essence, the consciousness ever living in those worlds, the matter the same, only becoming more and more definitely organised. In that spiritual body remains the memory of all the experiences through which you have passed; in that spiritual body resides your true individuality, that knows neither birth nor death; in that spiritual body which is ever yours all the experiences of the past are gathered up, and part of those experiences is put forth, birth after birth, in order that the soul may clothe itself in new bodies for new experiences and new developments. So that the part of you that lasts is the Spirit in the spiritual body; the part of you that changes, the soul in the temporary body, whether you take the subtler or the denser parts.
Supposing you accept that definition of man in his triple division, it will be easy enough then to follow out step by step what the higher consciousness is as apart from the lower, the larger as apart from the smaller. You will start with the great conception of a living Spirit coming down into denser and denser matter, with the object of acquiring that matter and subduing it to his own purposes, appropriating it, wrapping himself up in it, and temporarily blinded by the veil, but a veil that he is going to turn into an instrument, so that by it he may know all the worlds, and come into contact with every portion of the universe. For that he appropriates the matter of every world; for that he wraps himself round in these material garments; and working upon these, he turns them to his own purposes, shapes them by his own will, moulds them in order that he may use them for that which he desires to effect—contact with matter, the condition of his becoming master of the worlds; and by making matter his servant and his instrument, all the worlds become open before him, and he can function in any one of them. That the pure spiritual being cannot do. He can only function in worlds of the Spirit, those lofty eternal regions where Divinity itself resides and manifests without the blinding effect of the denser matter that we wear. But just as Divinity emanates these coarser forms of matter in order that the spiritual germs may be sown therein, and therein gain the experience by which their powers will be unfolded from within; just as Deity is manifest in matter, so must the germs of Deity grow therein, until matter is subject to them as it is to the Father of light, whence they come.