Elementary Theosophy

by a Student

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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