Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser MysteriesBesant, Annie
Religion
Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries
Besant, Annie
Christianity -- Miscellanea; Mysticism; Theosophy
Man has further "a spiritual body." This is made up of three separable
portions, each portion belonging to one of, and separating off, the
three Persons in the Trinity of the human Spirit. S. Paul speaks of
being "caught up to the third heaven," and of there hearing "unspeakable
words which it is not lawful for a man to utter."[243] These different
regions of the invisible supernal worlds are known to Initiates, and
they are well aware that those who pass beyond the first heaven need the
truly spiritual body as their vehicle, and that according to the
development of its three divisions is the heaven into which they can
penetrate.
The lowest of these three divisions is usually called the Causal Body,
for a reason that will be only fully assimilable by those who have
studied the teaching of Reincarnation--taught in the Early Church--and
who understand that human evolution needs very many successive lives on
earth, ere the germinal soul of the savage can become the perfected
soul of the Christ, and then, becoming perfect as the Father in
Heaven,[244] can realise the union of the Son with the Father.[245] It
is a body that lasts from life to life, and in it all memory of the past
is stored. From it come forth the causes that build up the lower bodies.
It is the receptacle of human experience, the treasure-house in which
all we gather in our lives is stored up, the seat of Conscience, the
wielder of the Will.
The second of the three divisions of the spiritual body is spoken of by
S. Paul in the significant words: "We have a building of God, an house
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."[246] That is the Bliss
Body, the glorified body of the Christ, "the Resurrection Body." It is
not a body which is "made with hands," by the working of consciousness
in the the lower vehicles; it is not formed by experience, not builded
out of the materials gathered by man in his long pilgrimage. It is a
body which belongs to the Christ-life, the life of Initiation; to the
divine unfoldment in man; it is builded of God, by the activity of the
Spirit, and grows during the whole life or lives of the Initiate, only
reaching its perfection at "the Resurrection."
The third division of the spiritual body is the fine film of subtle
matter that separates off the individual Spirit as a Being, and yet
permits the interpenetration of all by all, and is thus the expression
of the fundamental unity. In the day when the Son Himself shall "be
subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in
all,"[247] this film will be transcended, but for us it remains the
highest division of the spiritual body, in which we ascend to the
Father, and are united with Him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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