Part 1 here.
C. The soul is (and here words limit and distort) a unit of light, colored by a particular ray vibration; it is a vibrating center of energy found within the appearance or form of its entire ray life. It is one of seven groups of millions of lives which in their totality constitute the One Life. From its very nature, the soul is conscious or aware in three directions. It is God-conscious; it is group-conscious; it is self-conscious. This self-conscious aspect is brought to fruition in the phenomenal appearance of a human being; the group-conscious aspect retains the human state of consciousness, but adds to it awareness of its ray life, progressively unfolded; its awareness then is the awareness of love, of quality, of spirit in its relationships; it is God-conscious only potentially, and in that unfoldment lies, for the soul, its own growth upward and outward after its self-conscious aspect is perfected and its group-awareness is recognized. The soul therefore has the following points, or appearances:
Aspirants who are studying and training themselves to live the life of service might be regarded as having reached the point where the line is to be found. To visualize this correctly the sign should be regarded as in rapid revolution, thus producing a turning wheel, which is the wheel of life.
Let me again repeat:
- The soul is the son of God, the product of the union of spirit and matter.
- The soul is an embodiment of conscious mind, the expression, if one might so phrase it, of divine intelligent awareness.
- The soul is a unit of energy, vibrating in unison with one of the seven ray Lives, and colored by a particular ray light.
The personality of the soul is intended to be an embodiment of love, applied with intelligence and producing those “attractive” forms which will serve to express that loving intelligence. The soul in its turn is intended to be the embodiment of divine purpose or will, intelligently applied in the great creative work, which is produced through the power of creative love.
Each son of God can say: I am born of the love of the Father for the Mother, of the desire of life for form. I express, therefore, the love and the magnetic attractiveness of the God nature, and the responsiveness of the form nature, and am consciousness itself, aware of Deity or Life.
Each intelligent point of life can say: I am the product of intelligent will, working through intelligent activity and producing a world of created forms which embody or veil the loving purpose of Deity.
Each vibrating unit of energy can say: I am part of a divine whole, which in its septenary nature expresses the love and life of the One Reality, colored by one of the seven qualities of the love of Deity and responsive to the other qualities.
For our purposes in this treatise, we must grasp the fact that the world of appearances is energized by and vibrating to the world of qualities or values, which world, in its turn, is energized by or vibrating to the world of purpose or of will. Therefore, as is stated in The Secret Doctrine and in A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, the electric fire of will, and the solar fire of love, in cooperation with fire by friction, produce the world of created and creative forms. These proceed under the law of attractive magnetic love towards the evolutionary accomplishment of a purpose at present inscrutable. This purpose remains unknown only on account of the limitations of the “appearance” which is not yet responsive to the quality. When the illusory appearance and the veiled quality of the life are known and comprehended the underlying purpose will emerge with clarity. Indications of this can be dimly sensed and the attribute of this growing awareness can be noted in the tendency of modern thought to speak of patterns and of plans, of blue prints and synthetic formulations of ideas, and in the tracing of historical developments – national, racial, human and psychological. As we read, ponder and study, the dim outlines of the Plan appear, but until the consciousness has transcended all human limitations and has included the subhuman, as well as the superhuman, within its range of contacts, the true Plan cannot be rightly grasped. The will, lying behind the purpose, cannot be understood until the consciousness has transcended even that of the superhuman man, and has become one with the divine.
Will or the energy of life are synonymous terms and are an abstraction, existing apart from all form expression. The will-to-be emerges from outside the solar system altogether. It is the all-pervading energy of God which informs with a fraction of itself the solar system, and yet remains outside. Plan and purpose concern the emanating energies of that central Life and involve duality – will or the life urge plus attractive magnetic love which, in its turn, is the response of the vibrating universal substance to the impact of the energy of will. This initial activity precedes the creative process of form building; and the play of the divine will on the ocean of space, matter, or etheric substance produced the first differentiation into the major rays, and their mutual interplay produced the minor four rays. Thus the seven emanations, the seven potencies and the seven rays came into manifestation. They are the seven breaths of the one Life, the seven basic energies; they streamed forth from the center formed by the impact of the will of God on divine substance, and divided into seven streams of force. The radius of the influence of these seven streams determined the extent or scope of activity of a solar system and “outlined” the limits of the form of the incarnated cosmic Christ. Each of these seven streams or emanations of energy was colored by a divine quality, an aspect of love, and all of them were needed for the ultimate perfecting of the latent and unrevealed purpose.
The will of Deity colored the stream of energy units which we call by the name of the Ray of Will or Power, the first ray, and the impact of that stream on the matter of space insured that the hidden purpose of Deity would inevitably and eventually be revealed. It is a ray of such dynamic intensity that we call it the ray of the Destroyer. It is not as yet functioning actively. It will come into full play only when the time comes for the purpose to be safely revealed. Its units of energy in manifestation in the human kingdom are very few. As I earlier said, there is not a true first ray type in incarnation as yet. Its main potency is to be found in the mineral kingdom, and the key to the mystery of the first ray is to be found in radium.
In the vegetable kingdom the second ray is peculiarly active, producing among other things the magnetic attractiveness of flowers. The mystery of the second ray is found to be hidden in the significance of the perfume of flowers. Perfume and radium are related, being emanatory expressions of ray effects upon differing groupings of material substance. The third ray is, in its turn, peculiarly related to the animal kingdom, producing the tendency to intelligent activity which we note in the higher domestic animals. The correspondence to radioactivity and to emanatory perfumes which we found in the mineral and vegetable kingdoms, we here call devotion, the characteristic of the attractive interplay between the domestic animals and man. Devotees of personalities might more rapidly transmute that devotion into its higher correspondence – love of principles – if they realized that they were only displaying an animal emanation.
The desire of the Deity expresses itself through the second Ray of Love-Wisdom. Desire is a word which has been prostituted to cover the tendency of humanity to crave material things or those pleasures which bring satisfaction to the sensuous nature. It is applied to those conditions which will satisfy the personality, but in the last analysis, desire is essentially love. This desire expresses itself by attractiveness, by its capacity to draw to itself and into the radius of its influence that which is loved. It is the bond of coherence, and is that principle of magnetic cohesion which lies behind all creative work and which produces the emergence into the light of manifestation of those forms or appearances through which it is possible to satisfy desire. This second ray is pre-eminently the ray of applied consciousness, and works through the creation and development of those forms which are found throughout the universe. They are essentially mechanisms for the development of responsiveness or awareness; they are sensitive machines, responsive to an enveloping environment. This is true of all forms, from that of a crystal to that of a solar system. They have been created in the great process of satisfying desire and of providing the media of contact which will guarantee a progressive satisfaction. In the human family, the effect of this dual interplay of Life (desiring satisfaction) and of form (providing the field of experience) is a consciousness which is striving towards a love of the formless instead of desire for form, and the wise adaptation of all experience to the process of transmuting desire into love. Hence this ray is, par excellence, the dual ray of the solar Logos Himself, and hence colors all manifested forms, directing all consciousness in all forms in all kingdoms of nature, and in all fields of development; it carries the life through the range of forms in that basic search or urge for the attainment of bliss through the satisfaction of desire. This urge and the interaction of the pairs of opposites produced the varying types of conscious reaction to experience which, in their main stages, we call consciousness, animal consciousness, and allied differentiating phrases.
This second ray is the ray of Deity Itself, and is colored by distinctive aspects of desire or love. They produce the totality of the manifested appearances, animated by the Life Which determines the quality. The Father, Spirit or Life, wills to seek the satisfaction of desire. The Mother or matter meets the desire and is attracted also by the Father. Their mutual response initiates the creative work, and the Son is born, inheriting from the Father the urge to desire or love, and from the Mother the tendency actively to create forms. Thus, in the language of symbolism, have the form worlds come into being, and through the evolutionary work the process is going forward of satisfying the desire of spirit. Thus in the two major rays of Will and Love we have the two main characteristics of the divine nature, which lie latent behind all the myriad of forms. The aeons will see these two energies steadily dominating all appearance and driving the created world on to a full display of the divine nature. This is true of gods and men.
But in the same way in which the Father contributes to the Son the divine qualities of will and love, so the Mother contributes much also, and the initial duality is increased and the qualities are enhanced by the addition of a quality inherent in matter itself, – the quality or Ray of Intelligent Activity. This is the third of the divine attributes and completes, if I may so express it, the equipment of the appearing forms, and predisposes all creation to an intelligent appreciation of the true goal of desire and to an intelligent use of the technique of form building in order to reveal divine purpose. The Knower (man) is the custodian of that wisdom which will enable him to further the divine plan and bring the will of God to fruition. The field of knowledge is so constituted that it vibrates with intelligent response to the slowly emerging will. Knowledge itself is that which knows its own ends and works towards those ends through the process of experiment, expectation, experience, examination and exaltation which produces a final exit. Words such as these are synthetic symbols, conveying a cosmic story in terms of constructive brevity.
Thus the three rays of Will, Love and Intelligence produce appearance, donate quality and, through the life principle which is the underlying aspect of unity, ensure continuity of growth until such time as the will of God has evidenced itself as power, has attracted to itself the desired, has with wisdom utilized the experience of a gradually growing satisfaction, and has intelligently applied the gain of experience to the production of forms more sensitive, more beautiful and more fully expressive of the quality of the life.
Each of these rays is dual in time and space, though only the second ray is dual when they are regarded from the standpoint of the final abstraction. In their temporary duality can be seen, for each of them, the interplay which we call cause and effect.
- Ray I – Will, dynamically applied, emerges in manifestation as power.
- Ray II – Love, magnetically functioning, produces wisdom.
- Ray III – Intelligence, potentially found in substance, causes activity.
The result of the interplay of these three major rays can be seen in the activity of the four minor rays. The Secret Doctrine speaks of the Lords of Knowledge and of Love, and also of the Lords of Ceaseless Devotion. We might, in order more clearly to understand the mystical significance of these names, point out that the dynamic persistent will of the Logos expresses itself through the Lords of Ceaseless Devotion. Here devotion is not the quality to which I referred earlier in this treatise, but is the persistent directed one-pointed will of God, embodied in a Life which is that of the Lord of the first ray. The Lords of Love and of Knowledge are the two great Lives Who embody or ensoul the Love-Wisdom and the creative Intelligence aspects of the two major rays. These three are the sum total of all forms or appearances, the givers of all qualities, and the emerging Life aspect behind the tangible manifestations. They correspond, in the human family, to the three aspects of Personality, Soul and Monad. The Monad is dynamic will or purpose, but remains unrevealed until after the third initiation. The Monad is Life, the sustaining force, a Lord of persevering and ceaseless devotion to the pursuit of a seen and determined objective. The soul is a Lord of love and wisdom, whilst the personality is a Lord of knowledge and of intelligent activity. This use of terms involves the realization of an achieved goal. It is not true of the present stage as regards expression, for this is the intermediate stage. None are as yet working with full intelligent activity, though some day each will do so. None are as yet manifesting Lords of love, but they sense the ideal and are striving towards its expression. None are as yet Lords of ceaseless will and none realize as yet the plan of the monad nor the true goal towards which all are striving. Some day all will. But potentially every human unit is all these three, and some day the appearances which were called personalities, that mask or veil reality, will fully reveal the qualities of Deity. When that time comes, the purpose for which all creation waits will burst upon the awakened vision, and we shall know the true meaning of bliss, and why the morning stars sang together. Joy is the strong basic note of our particular solar system.
Part 3 here.
