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various egos and their related vehicle-souls on the inferior planes, all growing constantly more dense, as the planes of matter gradually thicken downwards and become more compact, into which the monadic ray penetrates until the final soul, which is the physical body, the general vehicle or bearer or carrier of them all. Our teachings give to every animate thing a soul -- not a human soul, or a divine soul, or a spiritual soul -- but a soul corresponding to its own type. What it is, what its type is, actually comes from its soul; hence we properly may speak of the different beasts as having one or the other, a "duck soul," an "ostrich soul," a "bull" or a "cow soul," and so forth. The entities lower than man -- in this case the beasts, considered as a kingdom, are differentiated into the different families of animals by the different souls within each. Of course behind the soul from which it springs there are in each individual entity all the other principles that likewise inform man; but all these higher principles are latent in the beast. Speaking generally, however, we may say that the soul is the intermediate part between the spirit which is deathless and immortal on the one hand and, on the other hand, the physical frame, entirely mortal. The soul, therefore, is the intermediate part of the human constitution. It must be carefully noted in this connection that soul as a term employed in the esoteric philosophy, while indeed meaning essentially a "vehicle" or "sheath," this vehicle or sheath is nevertheless an animate or living entity much after the manner that the physical body, while being the sheath or vehicle of the other parts of man's constitution, is nevertheless in itself a discrete, animate, personalized being. (See also Vahana) http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/ocglos/og-s.htm (7 of 13) [8/13/2002 9:07:01 AM] The Occult Glossary by G. de Purucker - S Soulless Beings "We elbow soulless men in the streets at every turn," wrote H. P. Blavatsky. This is an actual fact. The statement does not mean that those whom we thus elbow have no soul. The significance is that the spiritual part of these human beings is sleeping, not awake. They are animate humans with an animate working brain-mind, an animal mind, but otherwise "soulless" in the sense that the soul is inactive, sleeping; and this is also just what Pythagoras meant when he spoke of the "living dead." They are everywhere, these people. We elbow them, just as H. P. Blavatsky says, at every turn. The eyes may be physically bright, and filled with the vital physical fire, but they lack soul; they lack tenderness, the fervid yet gentle warmth of the living flame of inspiration within. Sometimes impersonal love will awaken the soul in a man or in a woman; sometimes it will kill it if the love become selfish and gross. The streets are filled with such "soulless" people; but the phrase soulless people does not mean "lost souls." The latter is again something else. The term soulless people therefore is a technical term. It means men and women who are still connected, but usually quite unconsciously, with the monad, the spiritual essence within them, but who are not self-consciously so connected. They live very largely in the brain-mind and in the fields of sensuous consciousness. They turn with pleasure to the frivolities of life. They have the ordinary feelings of honor, etc., because it is conventional and good breeding so to have them; but the deep inner fire of yearning, the living warmth that comes from being more or less at one with the god within, they know not. Hence, they are "soulless," because the soul is not working with fiery energy in and through them. A lost soul, on the other hand, means an entity who through various rebirths, it may be a dozen, or more or less, has been slowly following the "easy descent to Avernus," and in whom the threads of communication with the spirit within have been snapped one after the other. Vice will do this, continuous vice. Hate snaps these spiritual threads more quickly than anything else perhaps. Selfishness, the parent of hate, is the root of all human evil; and therefore a lost soul is one who is not merely soulless in the ordinary theosophical usage of the word, but is one who has lost the last link, the last delicate thread of consciousness, connecting him with his inner god. He will continue "the easy descent," passing from human birth to an inferior human birth, and then to one still more inferior, until finally the degenerate astral monad -- all that remains of the human being that once was -- may even enter the body of some beast to which it feels attracted (and this is one side of the teaching of transmigration, which has been so badly misunderstood in the Occident); some finally go even to plants perhaps, at the last, and will ultimately vanish. The astral monad will then have faded out. Such lost souls are exceedingly rare, fortunately; but they are not what we call soulless people. If the student will remember the fact that when a human being is filled with the living spiritual and intellectual fiery energies flowing into his brain-mind from his inner god, he is then an insouled being, he will readily understand that when these fiery energies can no longer reach the brain-mind and manifest in a man's life, there is thus produced what is called a soulless being. A good man, honorable, loyal, compassionate, aspiring, gentle, and true-hearted, and a student of wisdom, is an "insouled" man; a buddha is one who is fully, completely insouled; and there are all the intermediate grades between. http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/ocglos/og-s.htm (8 of 13) [8/13/2002 9:07:01 AM] The Occult Glossary by G. de Purucker - S Space Our universe, as popularly supposed, consists of space and matter and energy; but in theosophy we say that space itself is both conscious and substantial. It is in fact the root of the other two, matter and energy, which are fundamentally one thing, and this one fundamental thing is SPACE -- their essential and also their instrumental cause as well as their substantial cause -- and this is the reality of being, the heart of things. Our teaching is that there are many universes, not merely one, our own home-universe; therefore are there many spaces with a background of a perfectly incomprehensible greater SPACE inclosing all -- a space which is still more ethereal, tenuous, spiritual, yes, divine, than the space-matter that we know or rather conceive of, which in its lowest aspect manifests the grossness of physical matter of common human knowledge. Space, therefore, considered in the abstract, is BEING, filled full, so to say, with other entities and things, of which we see a small part -- globes innumerable, stars and planets, nebulae and comets. But all these material bodies are but effectual products or results of the infinitudes of the invisible and inner causal realms -- by far the larger part of the spaces of Space. The space therefore of any one universe is an entity -- a god. Fundamentally and essentially it is a spiritual entity, a divine entity indeed, of which we see naught but what we humans call the material and energic aspect -- behind which is the causal life, the causal intelligence. The word is likewise frequently used in theosophical philosophy to signify the frontierless infinitudes of the Boundless; and because it is the very esse of life-consciousness-substance, it is incomparably more [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |