English
As we shall realise more fully later on, the growth of the spiritual individuality is, in fact, the purpose of human life, and thus the Higher Self may in one case be back- ward in its development, in another very greatly pro- gressed ; but in any case where it may be advanced to any considerable degree, it must enjoy a certain degree of consciousness on the spiritual plane whenever the incarnate being, in which it is manifest on the earth plane, is plunged in profound slumber. For most people, however, belonging to the normal development of the present race, the physical brain is not organised finely enough to reflect the spiritual consciousness of the inner Ego during ordinary periods of waking. At the best, sleep will sometimes be found morally refreshing. Worries and temptations that may have been oppresive overnight will seem to have diminished in power or importance in the morning, and where such ameliorations of feeling are very marked, one may fairly assume that the influence of the Higher Self, restored during sleep to a fuller consciousness than usual, has had something to do with the sensa- tion experienced. It is only in the case of persons psychically and spiritually advanced beyond the normal Stage of progress that the Higher Self consciousness is remembered. That it is so remembered in some cases, is most assuredly the fact. At a stage of development I0o0 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. considerably short of that which would take a human being out of the range of physical attraction altogether, people may lead, as it were, a double life, fully conscious of and remembering in daily life the spiritual life of their deep sleep or trances. This possibility it is which points to the sublimest achievements of mesmerisim ; for a person so gifted may he able to converse, while in a mesmeric trance, with a waking incarnate friend, conversing from the point of view of the true spiritual consciousness. But some intermediate possibilities may also be considered. It may happen that a person with some psychic faculties—with the bodily consciousness of the spiritual plane partially but imperfectly developed, may perceive the Higher Self, as it were, but have the impression, in their waking remembrance, that they have been conversing with some being external to themselves. They do not realise, so to speak, that they are beholding the other end of the curve through Nature, which constitutes in its entirety their own complete individuality. As the Higher Self would, by the hypothesis, be manifesting thoughts of a kind that had not fully passed into incarnation, there might seem to be a complete interchange of ideas between itself and its incarnate phase, as though two persons were concerned. In a still less distinctly understood relationship with the Higher Self, the incarnate man would regard its promptings as nothing more than what is generally called the voice of conscience. The theory we are considering harmonises very well with the treatment of this world in which we live as a phenomenal world of illusion, though the, THE HIGHER SELF. IOI meaning of that doctrine of Oriental philosophy is often grotesquely misconceived. The intention of the doctrine is not that the earthly plane of existence, with all its countless attributes, has no existence, but that the idea of its permanence and self-sufficing completeness which sometimes fills the incarnate con- sciousness, is a delusion. The spiritual world, of which it is the emanation, is more real—if the phrase inay pass current—than the world of transitory material conditions, but that material world is not alleged to be a delusion in the sense of being a deception. The highest consciousness of Man einbraces its phenomena— the manifestations of Nature which it embodies—as well as the phenomena of superior planes of existence ; and in the vast and perfectly balanced design of Nature the physical plane is as much a necessity of the whole scheme as any other. But a comprehension of the doctrine of the Higher Self shows the relations between the physical life and the plane of the spiritual conscious- ness in a way which may well teach us to forego the terrible mistake of living altogether for the sake of the lower consciousness. ‘The region of Nature, in which the permanent Ego is thus seen to be rooted, is immeasurably more important to it than that in which its transitory blossoms appear for a brief space to wither and fall to pieces, while the plant recovers energy for sending forth a fresh flower. Supposing flowers only were perceptible to ordinary senses, and their roots existed in a state of Nature intangible and invisible to us, philosophers in such a world who divined that there er such things as roots in another plane of existence 102 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. would be apt to say of the flowers, These are not the real plants; they are of no relative importance, merely illusive phenomena of the moment. The Higher Self doctrine is also recommended by its correspondence with that inbreathing and outbreathing of Brahm, which symbolises natural phenomena on the macrocosmic scale, and therefore probably fits in likewise with the microscomic scale. Physical incarna- tion is the outbreathing of the soul; the death of the body is associated with its inbreathing. The Karmic progress of the soul, as depicted by the first simple conception of its passage backwards and forwards between the planes of spirit and matter, is in no way interfered with by the permanent existence of the Higher Self on the spiritual plane. No essential idea to which that broad statement of the case gives rise is discountenanced by the more advanced and elaborate theory. [or instance, let us consider the case of an incarnate being regarding Nature from the point of view of the physical plane on which his conscious- ness seems to him to be altogether concentrated in his waking life, and clinging earnestly to the hope of retaining his present personal consciousness after death. This hope, unqualified by spiritual knowledge, has in a pre-eminent degree moulded the creeds of exoteric religions. People say, very reasonably as far as that one idea goes: “If I do not remember my present life in the next that I may lead, there is no ‘I’ left in the transaction at all—I do not obtain any immortality or survival.” Nor does the esoteric doctrine put aside or rebuke this very natural aspiration. In its simplest THE HIGHER SELF. 103 form it certainly tells us: ‘‘ You will eventually wear out, get tired of and be done with your present per- sonality, as you have got rid of many others in the past, but you will not be violently torn from it. When you pass after death into the astral and then into the spiritual planes of existence you will still be your present self, remembering all that is essential in your present life, and finding, if all goes well, on the spiritual levels of Nature a much freer scope for the development of all that may be noblest and best in your present life than you can possibly hope for in the body. It is only when these phases of consciousness have vibrated to the last possible echo of the forces you have engendered during life, and when the spiritual soul is once more colourless as regards definite recollections, that it will return through the Lethe of a fresh incarnation to the experiences of an altogether fresli personality.’”’ But now let us see how this view of the matter is affected by the doctrine of the Higher Self. Its essential idea is preserved, according to that doctrine, as completely as by means of the most materialistic statement of which the case is susceptible. The Higher Self may be regarded as dominating the lower or earthly personality with very different degrees of completeness in different people, and this considera- tion would show that personalities deeply attached to their own earthly consciousness would represent souls in which the lower elements were largely in the ascen- dant. The reunion of higher and lower selves in such cases, after death, would probably mean the saturation of the higher by the lower in a commanding degree. to4 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. But in truth, after a soul has just been going through a complete span of earthly life, the lower elements can hardly fail, on reunion, to have so much to do with the completely restored consciousness as to determine the colour of the compound for the time being. And this infusion of the last personality through the Higher Self or saturation of the Higher Self therewith fully meets aspirations we may feel in the direction of a personal survival after death. We need not regard that aspiration as either blame- worthy or misleading. For all men below certain exalted levels of spiritual perfection, which we need not at present consider, a survival of the personality is alike required on abstract grounds of justice and common sense ; and as a part of our primary conception of the esoteric doctrine we shall be, in the spiritual condition, in no sense less ourselves for feeling our personality expanded by a large super-addition of spiritual consciousness. And it will be to the gradual reassertion of the supremacy of the spiritual conscious- ness that we must look forward as constituting the fading out of the personality which is either dreaded or longed for by people in the flesh, according to the degree of their psychic advancement, but which will, probably, be no more a source of regret to the Higher Self in its actual occurrence than—on the poor plane of our physical analogies—the digestion of the day’s dinner is a source of regret for a healthy man at night, That dinner may have played its part in the nutrition of the body.