But when the Angel-man entered his mind, all this was changed. He "knew Good from Evil." To his mind of manasa had been added the Spirit—the Atma-Buddhi's Consciousness of the three Spiritual planes. He has become "as one of us," said the Angel- men of the firmament, of Heaven. He now held the seven planes and was a creator. Each thought and desire that, when an animal only, fell harmless, now created on the pranic and etheric world. Soon beside him, at his left hand (figuratively) there grew up a second etheric or astral body, that of his desires; and his prakritic body was no longer the product of the astral body on his right hand. It was the joint product of the left-hand Kamic astral body he had created, and the right hand normal astral body. He was no longer in harmony with the Radiance. He could no longer face it. He had created discord—Sin.
The pretty legend of the two "Angels," one on the right hand and one on the left, has its physical basis in this truth, but, of course, as a matter of actual fact, the normal and abnormal astral bodies are in mechanical union. It is the Kamic self-made astral body that remains from one incarnation to another, producing in joint action with a new normal astral body, a new physical body for the Inner-Self, or Angel taking the pilgrimage through the lower world.
All the Angel-men did not enter the animal men on the pranic etheric-prakritic globes; only a few. It was a pilgrimage through matter in which those who make it are meeting many adventures, but the legends are many, and have no place in the physics, although the legends are all founded on the facts of the physics.
Of the number of monads, willing to undertake the pilgrimage, only a few of those within the kinetic belt of the manasic globe have reached the pranic. Only a few of those within the pranic kinetic belts reached the etheric. And of all who have reached this earth, only a few may win their way back before the great day Be-With-Us.
The problem of man, and his relations to the universe, are an entirely different line of study from that of the Spiritual Monad, the over-soul of every prakritic atom. Each prakritic atom has what may be called a soul, its three-fold astral cause; and an over-soul, or the three-fold spiritual archetype, or causeless cause.
Every combination of these atoms, whether a knife, a leaf, an animal, an earth, a sun, or a star, has this soul and oversoul.
Once the idea of what is meant by these terms becomes clear, the difficulty in understanding them vanishes. The study of man is physical in its lower branches; metaphysical only in its highest and last analysis. The study of the Monad is metaphysical from start to finish. The two studies are apt to be confused, because metaphysically they are often joined for study, the teacher taking it for granted that the pupil fully understands the simple and easy physics of the problem of humanity.
This, in crude and bold outline, is the story of creation to the fall of man according to the ancient physics, translated into the words and phrases of modern physics. The latter, in the latest discoveries of modern science, seem to have stolen a shive from the ancient loaf in the expectation that it would not be detected. Each and every step forward that modern science has made in the past twenty years, each and every discovery of every kind in the physical field, has been but the affirmative of some ancient doctrine taught in the temples of the East before "Cain took unto himself a wife."
Chapter Ten
The Septenary World