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The intellectual-soul is simply called the ego, because it partakes of the nature of the ego, and in a certain sense is the ego, not yet conscious of its spiritual nature. We thus have seven divisions of man: physical body; etheric or vital body; astral body; Ego; Spirit-Self; Life-Spirit; Spirit-Man.
This conception of the gift that Christ has to bestow upon men, as being the very life-spirit that dwelt in His manhood, and made and kept it pure, is the highest thought that we can have of what the gospel does for us. You do not understand its meaning if you content yourself with thinking of it as simply the means of escape from wrath.
By means of this transformation, are formed on a lower level, the sentient-soul, the rational- or intellectual-soul, and the consciousness-soul: on a higher level of human existence, are formed the Spirit-Self, the Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man.
This is the primary value of education: it is not that books are important, but that men are the men who have swayed history and books tell of such men. Not the library is inspirational, but the life-spirit of mankind, bound up in even dusty papyrus-rolls, or set on clay-tablets of four thousand years ago. He who would serve his times politically must first understand, so far as may be, all times.
From the relation between them it results that the same principle which shows itself in the individual mind as Will, becomes in the universal mind a Law of Tendency; and the direction of this tendency must always be to life-givingness, because the universal mind is the undifferentiated Life-spirit of the universe.
His religious experiences, as well as many others, are stamped upon the etheric body, making it into the Life-Spirit. In the ordinary course of life this happens more or less unconsciously; so-called initiation, on the contrary, consists in man’s being directed by occult science to the means through which he may quite consciously take in hand this work on the Spirit-Self and Life-Spirit.
It might be objected: “Why then is there no perception during sleep of the developed Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man?” For this reason that the ego is chained to the physical body between birth and death.
Occult science denotes this second principle of the spirit the Life-Spirit. When, however, these powers express themselves as the Life-Spirit, they are interpenetrated by the ego. Man’s intellectual development, the purification and ennobling of his feelings and of the manifestations of his will, are the measure of the degree in which he has transformed the astral body into the Spirit-Self.
Whatever portion of the Far East we examine we find its mental history to be the same story with variations. However unlike China, Korea, and Japan are in some respects, through the careers of all three we can trace the same life-spirit. It is the career of the river Jordan rising like any other stream from the springs among the mountains only to fall after a brief existence into the Dead Sea.
And between the etheric body and the Spirit-Man they have all the principles described in this treatise which are also found in man: the astral body, ego, Spirit-Self, and Life-Spirit. Just as our earth is surrounded by an atmosphere, so too was Saturn; only in this case the “atmosphere” was of a spiritual nature. It really consisted of the beings just named and some others.
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