ModeratorTN May 5, 2018 at 5:13 pm #7083
From B.P. Wadia’s Studies in the Secret Doctrine: The Eternal Pilgrim
From this original duality springs what man recognizes in himself as his dual nature — lower and higher mind, good and bad moral nature, the mortal body and the immortal Self. Further, the student of Occultism traces to this prototypal Dual Force, the dual power of the Secret Wisdom, the white and black magic. (Cf. II, 364.) When we begin to analyse the content of our own brain, mind, and consciousness, we come to recognize that there is in us that which is ourself, which is indestructible because indivisible. In reference to the body itself we know that we can exist without arms and legs, without the ratiocination and memory of the brain, without eyes, ears, nose, deprived of touch and taste; that if only the heart kept on functioning and retained its slender connection with the brain on the one hand and the solar plexus on the other, the body could live on. In the body itself there are parts which in perishing kill not the body, but there are others — in fact three connected with three primary centres — any one of which destroyed would result in the destruction of the whole. Divide the heart and the heart is destroyed and the body dies. Take another aspect: in spite of the constant changes which are continuously taking place in the body, the identity of the body, its design and structure, survives; death, the great Change, differs from the millions of bodily changes in this that it changes the mould and the design of the body. Turn for a moment to our psychological transformations: in feelings and emotions we notice changes and differences; we love and hate by turn; we love and cease loving the same person in course of time; our sympathies and antipathies act in a similar fashion. Further, in knowledge and ignorance, in our ideas and thoughts on men and things, changes occur; still more, moods of aspiration and exaltation as of depression alternate. Now, like the heart in the body, we find that through all the changes of feeling and thought, the man who feels and thinks remains intact. However great the identification between himself and these processes, it is temporary; soon or late man knows himself other and higher than his thoughts, feelings, actions, his head, heart and hands. That which in the midst of all changes, changes not, that is the Self, immortal, indestructible, indivisible.
Man is certainly no special creation, and he is the product of Nature’s gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and thinks in man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution — is the “Eternal Pilgrim,” the Protean differentiation in space and time of the One Absolute “unknowable.” (S.D. II, 728.)