I hold, therefore, that man possesses, now and here, the structure of a Spiritual Body; and that the “growth of the soul” and our status and relation to the soul, and our status and relation to the life after death on the spiritual plane, depend very largely on the character and integrity of this spiritual body, the “house we have builded.”
The whole of life, therefore, here, is what gestation of the infant body is before birth. When the child is born it is a separate personality, a distinct individuality.
There has been woven into its organism a distinct and synchronous correspondence with that of the mother.
During gestation it has passed through every plane of organic life, from amœba, or mollusk, to man.
It is thus in touch with every phase and quality of life. It epitomizes them all, transcends them all, and may co-ordinate them all.
On the other hand, the individual intelligence of the child, a distinct and separate unity, is in vital, spiritual, and synchronous relation to that of the mother that enfolds it.
It is either building or rejuvenating a new spiritual body, as the “essential form” of the physical, organic, chemical, and kinetic or magnetic body.
What we call “Life,” or “Vitality,” runs like a “dominant chord” in the harmonic scale of the whole. Each part, organ, and function is related to every other and to the whole by definite vibrations and the laws of harmony.
If, from the beginning, it is an “unwelcome child,” the higher and subtler elements of the mother’s nature, and all her emotions are turned against it, are discordant and not constructive and harmonic.
Discord is thus ingrained at the foundations and woven into the “subtle body” of the child.