English
The important point is that whatever combination of forces may be recognised as operative in any given case on the physical plane, the counter- partal combination is operative on the astral, and assumes the relatively living aspect which renders it more directly than here amenable to the human will. THE ELEMENTALS. 213 But the astral plane is divided, as we have seen, into seven sub-divisions, Appropriate to each we find special varieties of elemental agency presenting themn- selves for examination, and the distinction just noticed between the elementals of earth, water, air, and fire runs up through them all. Again, there is a mysterious classification of attri- butes, tendencies, or characteristics running through Nature—through all the planes of Nature, the physical included—which is too subtle to be very readily inter- preted, but which may be dimly indicated by saying that every plant, animal, and man, as well as every mineral and every manifestation of Comene agency, is ‘‘on’’ one or other of seven great “ rays’’ proceed- ing in the first instance from exalted regions of spiritual influence, which imagination penetrates, with difficulty. The ray classification has to be taken into accountwsin grouping the elementals. The habits of mind engendered by thinking of the three dimensions of space will enable us to construct in imagination not a tabular view of this triple classi- fication, but a solid figure embracing the three categories. How shall we expand this, however, so as to make it significant of the fact that the same triple classification must be made to run all through the three kingdoms of elementals ? For this we seem in need of a fourth dimension of space. But, at all events, without going beyond the experience of life around us, a living creature may at the same time be a mammal, a quadruped, a pachyderm, and a male, so the elemental varieties, though too complicated to be represented by a diagram 214 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. or even by a solid figure, need not be altogether unman- ageable in thought. So far we have been considering the elemental agencies in their most general or indeterminate aspects as forces rather than entities, and that is the most important idea concerning them, to establish in the mind as the foundation of all maturer conceptions. It is disastrous to run away with the first idea apt to invade the under- standing on the subject, that the elementals are to the astral plane, what its beasts, birds, and reptiles are to the forest. But, none the less, early experience on the astral plane is very likely to support this notion. Forces on the physical plane are always abstract energies associated with matter, but forces on the astral plane, are not only, as has been already said, in some sense alive, they are ready to take shape under the influence of the will, whatever it may be, that directs them, and may be in the same way imbued with a benevolent or malevolent character for the time being, which has no resemblance, as far as any internal consciousness goes, to goodness or badness of disposition, but leads them to be of good or bad efficiency, just as physical plane forces may be of good or bad efficiency. The fire which cooks food directed to a useful end may, directed differently, inflict suffering on a living organism. Gravity which pulls down a clock weight usefully may kill a man standing below if the chain breaks. Elec- tricity may carry good tidings or explode a parcel of dynainite without being in itself good or bad electricity ; and the dynamite may usefully clear a rock out of the path of navigation or blow up a building and mutilate THE ELEMENTALS. 215 the inhabitants. Per se, force is neither good nor evil, and the same idea has to be applied to the considera- tion of elemental beings, called into existence by will power and invested with attributes by conscious inten- tion. Undoubtedly, the astral plane teems with such beings of both good and evil efficiency, and at the first blush it might well be imagined that they constitute the animal life of that plane. But they are entities only in so far as a bucketful of water drawn up out of the sea is a specific volume of water, taking the shape of the interior of the bucket for the time being. If you break the bucket the water falls back into the ocean, neither the better nor the worse for having been detached for a while therefrom. Or it may have gone through various adventures in the meantime. It may have been converted into steam in a boiler, may have driven a ship on her course, or it may have burst from its confinement injuring living beings in the neighbour- hood; it may even have entered into chemical com- binations with other matter and have played an elaborate part on the stage of the earth’s physical manifestation, but still it is so much water all the while, and will ultimately, by some road, return to the ocean from which it came. So with the detached and tem- porarily individualised elemental life or force. The will which moulds it, or the thought energy, operative, perhaps, without any conscious will being at work in the transaction at all, may invest it with a very con- siderable tenacity of separate life and tendency, easily mistaken for inherent purpose. Its very shape may be enduring, unless it comes in contact with some will 216 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. force that breaks it up, and thus we are presented with all the external characteristics of a living astral creature. The horrible or repulsive shapes encountered on the astral plane by rash intruders are of this nature. They may be the creatures of evil or malevolent thought, and though powerless to harm human beings collected enough to oppose a courageous will to their attack, may serously torment or even injure invaders of their territory whose inherent forces are paralysed by terror. Just as real and definitely existing as entities for a times other elemental shapes may be beautiful in appearance and beneficent in action if called into being by thoughts emanating from love and beneficence, but their tenacity of life will depend on the strength and persistence of the will that has called them into being, and when they have fulfilled their mission, or have lost coherence by the relaxation of the will that evoked them, they will resolve themselves again into the ocean of elemental agency to which they belong and be available for any new purpose, good, bad, or indifferent. This part of the explanation may help to supply an (occultly) scientific interpretation for stories connected with the presiding “ gods”’ of some Indian temples— treated of course as empty superstitions by Western intelligence alive to the incredibility of the local belief as crudely stated, and destitute of the occult knowledge which might discern the natural possibility in the back- ground. Elemental agency clothed with form and inspired with purpose by some adequately powerful human will in the first instance, may persist in that shape for long periods of time andy manifest= potencies THE ELEMENTALS. 217 along the line of the original impulse which would easily be mistaken by an ignorant populace, in contact with them, for the supernatural power of a demi-god. At the head of each great division of elemental agencies, beings of a permanent, definite, and very exalted character control or inspire all manifestations of elemental energy within that category. It is hope- less to inquire into the nature and constitution of these beings, except that they are cosmic—the agents of the Lipika. Not belonging to our evolution, they do not belong to our scheme of human evolution and could not, we may well imagine, be described in terms of ordinary human thinking. That such beings exist, however, is a fact which falls in with the great principle to which occult teaching introduces us in many ways, and according to which all laws of nature are the volition of conscious beings standing at some more or less exalted level in the general scheme of things, and exercising will in accordance with the Supreme Will in the background. From the occult point of view there is no such thing as blind force. In its lower manifestations natural force may seem blind—may be pressing along definite channels of activity regardless of impediments in the way; but the original existence of the force is due to an intelligent will. A problem may arise in any mind to which the thoughts here set forth are present, which has to do with the nature of the matter which seems to form the vehicle of elementals having a definite shape and appearance. Is that a vehicle in any true sense of the term as the physical or the astral body under different 218 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. conditions may be the vehicle of human consciousness, or is the apparent vehicle of the elemental force itself of the very nature of the elemental force ? A marble statue or a cloud in still air may have a definite shape, but the outward surface is not of any matter different in its nature from that of the marble or the vapour concerned. In the same way the elemental we see in an animal or human or grotesque shape, may be of homogeneous constitution—so much living elemental force operative in that detached condition and taking external shape from the creative thought that has evoked it. That appears to be the more accurate conception of the two, though not without difficulties for the imagination. We have to remember that the order of evolution in the world around us is through the elemental kingdoms on to the mineral and then on to the higher kingdoms of organised beings. The elemetals are not inhabitants of a ready-made world: they are the foundations or substance of the world.