The elemental nature of man has long engaged my thoughts, for so soon as I look within myself I am confronted with a mystery. Others admit the same experience. There is in me a morass, or a mountain, or a cold water dash which appalls me, it seems so icy and dead. In it none of my friends do walk; all is frozen and silent. Yet I seem to like the place, for there I can stand alone, alone, alone. When a boy I had often to cross that cold tract, and then I did not want to meet any boys. I wished to go alone, not with despair, but with a grim and terrible pleasure. I could weep and enjoy with another, and drink in their words and their souls, and the next week that cold arctic death came between us. It does so still. What think you, comrades, is that? But the stars still shine overhead, and on the margin flit the shapes of my loved, and I know that I shall either go back to them or meet them on the further side. It is not grim nor ghastly at all but is certainly unseen by the crowd. This mystery rose before me often and surprised me. It knew so much that it wanted to tell me. Soon I found that all my energies were but the play of correlated powers upon the margin of that strange spot. Where did all my life force come from, if not from that? What else had saved my ideals from the degradation of our material mechanical life? Over there in the centre, mist-enfolded, is the tented Self, the watchful god. Only a great tide of love, impersonal, unselfish, divine, can dissolve the lower self and flood us over that arctic desolation. Such love is the aloe flower, and blooms but once a century. Here, on the near side of the mystery, the side nearest the outer man, embedded in his heart, is the lurker, the elemental self.
When first we discover a trace of the soul within ourselves, there is a pause of great joy, of deep peace. This passes. The Soul, or Self, is dual, semi-material, and the material or outer covering is known as the elemental self, the Bhutatma of the Upanishads. As you know, Bhuts or Bhoots are elementals or spirits of a certain lower order. It is this lower self—“human soul”—which feels the effects of past Karma weighing it downwards to each fresh descent into matter, or reincarnation. These effects, in the shape of latent impulses, accompany the higher principles into Devachan, where the spiritual energies work themselves out in time. Those karmic tendencies then germinate in their turn, and impel the soul to their necessary sphere of action,—the earth life—to which it again descends, carrying with it as its germ, the true Self or Buddhi, which may develop so far as to unite with Atma, or Divine Spirit.
Now our bodies, and all the “false I” powers, up to the individual soul, are partial forms in common with the energic centres in the astral light, while the individual soul is total, and according to the power and purity of the form which it inhabits, “waits upon the gods.” All true things must be total, and all totalities exist at once, each in all, and hence the power of the soul to exhibit Truth; hence those sudden gleams from the half awakened soul of which the occultist becomes aware as his consciousness locates nearer and nearer the centre; he draws ever closer to the blaze of Light, until his recognition of it becomes enduring because it is now himself. In the earlier stages this perception is physical as well as mental and cannot be likened to any other sensation. There is a flash, a thrill, a surge, sometimes a fragrant sound, and a True thought is born into the world of the lower man.
It thus follows that only such forms as are total, reveal entire Truth, and those that partake of lower nature, or are partial, receive but a limited view of Truth. These partial forms participate in each other, and exist partially in those that are total. Such partial forms are the energic centres in the astral light, are elementals, such are our astral bodies, and hence the affinity subsisting between all, so that it is only when our consciousness is located in part in the astral body that we perceive things pertaining to the astral plane. The elemental self is a partial form, existing partially in the true Self, with which it can only be really incorporated when entirely purified from all material dross, when it is no more itself, but that other Self, even as the Spirit enters Nirvana. This gross, or false self, is great in its way; it must be known and conquered. Of it the Upanishad says that when “overcome by bright and dark fruits of action he enters on a good or bad birth,” he dwells in the body and “thus his immortal Self is like a drop of water on a lotus leaf, and he himself is overcome by the qualities of nature. Then because he is thus overcome, he becomes bewildered, . . . and he sees not the Creator, the holy Lord, abiding within himself. Carried along by the waves of the qualities, darkened in his imaginations, unstable, fickle, crippled, full of desires, vacillating, he enters into belief, believing ‘I am he,’ ‘this is mine,’ he binds his Self by his self as a bird by a net.” We are told that if this elemental self be attached to sound, touch, outer objects—in a word, to desire and sensation—“it will not then remember the highest place.” When the student thinks that he loves, hates, acts or rejects at will, he is only the manifester or machine, the motor is the elemental Self. It must have sensation, must enjoy through the senses or organs, or it would be extinguished in the higher principles. For this enjoyment it has sought the earth world again. So it casts up clouds and fumes of illusion whereby the man is incited to action, and when he denies it one mode of satisfaction, it inoculates him with a craving for some other. When he forsakes the temptations of the outer life, it assails him with those of the mind or heart, suggests a system to ossify him, a specialty to limit him, emotions to absorb him, evokes a tumult to drown the “still, small voice.” Pride, dogmatism, independence, desire, hope and fear, these and many other qualities are its aids under mock titles. It disturbs the true proportions of all things. It cozens and juggles him beyond belief. Instead of relying upon the great All as himself, developing that faith and standing fixed by the Law, the man increases his confidence in his personal abilities, opens his mind to the thousand cries of self-assertion and puts his trust in this “will o’ the wisp” nature which strives to beguile him from firm ground. This self of death and ashes tells him every hour that he, the man he now knows as himself, is a being of judgment and power. The contrary is true; the first advance to the True must be humbly made, under the fixed belief which later becomes knowledge, that the man as he now appears to himself is to be wholly distrusted and self-examined step by step. As the physical atoms are all renewed in each seven years’ course, so a man has many mental deaths and births in one incarnation, and if he makes steady resistance to the undermining principle of Reversion to Type, carefully testing the essence of motives and thoughts, the very well-spring of deeds, he soon finds that one higher state of consciousness is succeeded by another and still others, in each of which transient conditions he temporarily and illusively lives, until he takes the last stronghold of the lower self and beholding its dissolution, crosses with a supreme effort to where the watchful god awaits him.
As the man has advanced on the animal, driving it from every subterfuge, lopping off its hydra heads and searing them with the fire of spiritual wisdom, and stands calm and firm in the equipoise achieved by the strength of his attraction for the True, then it is that the enemy makes a sudden halt upon the psychic plane, and summons to its service the grim battalions of the deadliest warfare ever known to the human race. The Dweller of the Threshold stands revealed, a congeries of materialistic essences expressed from the man’s entire past, a bestial apanage of his lower self, and this lusty huntsman, whose quarry is the soul, shouts a view-halloo to all the nameless devils of its pack and gives and takes no quarter. The conquest of the body, the dispersal of worldly interests are child’s play to this struggle, where the enemy itself is still a sharer in the divine, and is not to be killed but subdued. All the powers of Maya, all the startling vividness of universal illusion are at its disposal. It has for allies the hosts of earth and water, air and fire, terrible apparitions, horrid thoughts incarnate in malodorous flesh and reeking with desire, creatures dragged from the polluted depths of animal existence, sounds hideous and inconceivable, sensations that cast a frigid horror over the palsied mind. The man battles with misty evils that elude the very grasp of thought, he cannot even answer for his own courage, for the foe is within, it is himself, yet not himself, and its surest weapons are forged in the fires of his own heart. Thence too comes his strength, but his perception of that is obscured in this hour. The last stand of gross Matter, the last barricade before Spirit, is here, and over it the conqueror passes to the frontiers of his kingdom. Hereafter, spiritual warfare is appointed him, the ache and turmoil of the flesh are left behind. The pen refuses to deal with this first great contest, the thought falls back from it, and he who faces its issue is a madman indeed, unless he wears the magic amulet.
It should be ever borne in mind that this self of myriad deceptions is the ruler of the astral or psychic plane. Hence that plane is a play-ground of elemental forces most dangerous and entangling to man. Great intellects, pure hearts are bewitched there. Persons of natural psychic powers are easily stayed in this cul de sac, this “no thoroughfare,” especially when those powers are inherited from past lives and have no simultaneous growth with soul in this. They dazzle and blind their possessor. Evil has its greatest momentum on the astral plane. If a man lingers too long he becomes as much intoxicated as is the worldly man with material life, for these too are only senses of a more dazzling order, matter volitalized and more deadly. Its very language, dealing as it does with subtle gradations of color, light, odor and sound, is easily misinterpreted by those who have not obtained the total perception of the illuminated Self. Some think that they have acquired this illumination and steep themselves in psychic enjoyment and action. It is the fickle light of the astral world which floods and bewilders the elemental self. This plane is a necessary experience, a passing trial, not a goal. Only Adepts can fathom its mazes as they look down upon them from above and correctly interpret their bearings. Students must observe and try to control them without acting from them or depending upon them.
So comrades, I say again, procure the magic amulet. It is pure motive. Motive is the polarity of the soul. A polarized ray of light is one so modified by the position of its medium that it is incapable of reflecting or refracting itself in any but one direction. Its polarity depends upon the parallel direction of every molecule of ether constituting the vehicle of the ray. Divergence in one affects the whole. Are you so fixed down in those unfathomed deeps of yours? Do you know to what medium you respond and its position in the Celestial? He who claims to be sure of his motive, he, more than any other, is under the sway of the great magician. How can he be wholly sure when he does not so much as know fully the constitution of the mere outer man? Dares he aver to what the action of his immense and forgotten past has polarized his soul? Can he answer for the essential Motive at its centre when he comes face to face with the mystery at last? The highest keep constant watch over motive. The wise student feeds and increases it. Few indeed have the warrant to “put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.” That warrant is only found at the core of the life, written in the blood of the heart. He who can give up all for All, even to his own salvation, he may confront the elemental self. There is nowhere any safety for him unless his hope is anchored in the unmanifest, his present trust in Karma. If the soul has been deflected, future unselfish motive can in time restore its integrity, whereas to loose the ungoverned soul now is to fall a victim to its lower tendency. Rely on Karma, It is divine. We cannot escape It; we may become It.