The
Scott Memorial,
A
familiar
Theosophy
an
outstanding introductory work on
Theosophy by a Student of
Katherine Tingley entitled “Elementary Theosophy”
Katherine
Tingley
1847
– 1929
Founder
& President of the
Point
Loma Theosophical Society 1896 -1929
She
and her students produced a series of informative
Theosophical
works in the early years of the 20th century
ELEMENTARY
By
A Student of Katherine Tingley
Chapter 3
Body and Soul
If we now
turn to Paul's description of man as a compound of body, soul, and spirit, we can
more easily understand what he meant.
By soul he
seems to have meant the same as we do the man himself with his will and power
of choice; by body, not only the casement of flesh, but all the impulses
arising from it which tend to pull the man downward; and by spirit, the divine
part.
The body
made up of millions of little living cells congregated into various organs,
which should all work harmoniously together is an animal, the highest of all
the animals. It is the highest because of the development of its brain; and
because of that it is a fit tenement for the soul, the man himself. Thus the
soul contacts, in the body, the highest sort of matter-life. In order that it
may do that, that it may have that experience, is, according to Theosophy, one
of the reasons why it enters the body and shares the body's life from birth to
death.
In order
to understand its entry, let us imagine a countryman suddenly set down for the
first time in the midst of a thronging city. People are hurrying in every
direction; there are a thousand sounds at once, voices, the feet of horses, the
roar of vehicles.
Accustomed
to the quiet of the country, the man would be dazed by so much activity; he
would hardly know himself. His usual current of thoughts would be broken up. It
would seem to him as if he would never find his way through the maze of
streets. Altogether it would be a sort of new birth for him, the confused
beginning of a new life.
In the
eyes of a new-born infant we can sometimes see signs of a similar bewilderment.
The soul is just then beginning to enter the little body. The body is alive
with the intense life of all its millions of active cells and organs.
Besides
all the growth and activity that is going on in the body itself, the senses are
opening and stirring and bringing in all the new sights and sounds of the outer
world. Is it not natural that in all this rush of new experiences, the soul
should forget itself and the world it has just left?
To return
to the illustration. After a while, beginning to understand his new
surroundings, the man would begin to take pleasure in them and be absorbed in
them. Laying aside all his old country habits and thoughts, he would enter
thoroughly into the new life of the city. He would become accommodated to its
ways and dive into the rushing stream of its business and activities.
His nature
might seem to change altogether and in a few years he might have lost all trace
and almost all memory of having lived the quiet life of the country. And so
again with the soul. During the first few years of its new life, after the
first confusion has worn away, it becomes thoroughly absorbed in the life of
the body.
Its
pleasures are those of the body; its aims are mostly to get more of these
pleasures; its thoughts and feelings are all occupied with the world of which
its body is a part. It thinks of the body as itself and of itself as the body.
The higher
life it had before birth is quite forgotten. And as it grows older into manhood
or womanhood and the strain of our modern competitive life begins to be felt,
its absorption into the world becomes completer. All its ambitions may be
directed to getting things for the body's comfort and luxury. Its forgetfulness
of the other life may be so complete as to lead to disbelief in it altogether,
to materialism. At best, the memory of the other life is so vague that there
are no details, no clear picture. It is so vague that we do not know that it is
memory and call it faith. And for a reason which the man therefore cannot give
to himself, but which is really this faith-memory, he accepts the accounts of
the higher life which some one of the various religious creeds gives him. But
curiously enough, though all the creeds speak of the soul entering a higher
life after death, some of them say nothing of the soul leaving the same higher
life at birth.
We can see
now why the body is sometimes spoken of as the enemy of the soul. It tends to
drown the soul's memories, the soul's knowledge of itself. It often paralyzes
the will, substituting for the will some passion of its own -- for example, to
get money or position. Such people are really slaves, not masters; though they
only know their slavery when they try to free themselves, when they try to use
their will to conquer the master passion.
We must
remember that though the body is an animal, it is an animal which has become
humanized through the presence of a human soul in its midst. The soul lights up
in it a higher intelligence than it could ever have gotten as a simple animal.
And so it has
thoughts and aims which are not possible to any of the simpler creatures below
man. If the soul yields to it constantly, never asserting its will, letting
itself be carried upon every wind of passion, the man may reach a point at
which he gives not a single sign of being a soul at all.
Some of
these people are mere sensualists, the utter slaves of some degrading passion.
But they may be highly intelligent, cruel, selfish and ambitious, without the
slightest care for the welfare of any other person. The animal has won the
battle of that life, and after death the soul's key to its own proper world is
too rusty for use.
It is by
resisting passions, by resisting selfishness, and cultivating compassion and
brotherliness, by constant aspirations, and by trying to live the life of the
higher nature, that the soul comes while in the body to a knowledge of itself
and its immortality.
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