(110) For when the new spirit in the brain is well settled, then it goeth to its mother again, into the heart; and then it stands as a perfect spirit or will, or as a newborn person, which, in man, is called the soul.

(15) Again: "The World Soul is born, and awakens into manifestation." The World Soul awakens into active manifestation from the very moment of its birth. Finding within itself the impelling urge of the Will-to-Live and of Expression, it proceeds at once, along the lines of elementary Instinct to prepare for manifestation of higher and more complex forms of life and action.

(36) Behold! thy spirit or thy soul is generated from or out of thy astral birth or geniture, and is the third birth in thee, just as an apple upon a tree is the third birth or geniture of the earth, and has not its vegetation in, from, or within the earth, but from above the earth; and if it were a spirit, as thy soul is, it would not suffer the earth any more to tie or bind it to corruption.

(109) For there the spirit or the thoughts become a whole creaturely person again, through the affecting or proving of all powers, which in man I call the animated or soulish birth.

(34) It is just such a birth as is in man; the body is even the father of the soul, for the soul is generated out of the power of the body, and when the body stands in the anguishing birth or geniture of God, as the stars do, and not in the fierce hellish birth, then the soul of man qualifieth, mixeth or uniteth with the pure Deity, as a member in or of his body.

(72) And though the child be in the mother's house, and the mother nourish the child with her food, and the child could not live without the mother, yet both the body and the spirit, which are generated out of the seed of the mother, are the child's proper own, and it retaineth its corporeal right to itself.

(52) But now no spirit can subsist in its perfection without a body, for as soon as it departeth from the body it loseth its government or dominion. For the body is the mother of the spirit, in which the spirit is generated, and in which it receiveth its strength and power. The spirit is and remaineth a spirit when it is separated and departed from the body, but it loseth its rule, dominion or government.

(14) Thus also we know, that the Soul is a Spirit, generated out of God the Father, in the Throne and Entrance out of the recomprehended [or reconceived] Will, out of the Darkness into the Light, to the generating of the Heart of God; and that [Soul] is free to elevate itself above mit in the Will, or in the Meekness in the Will of the Father, to comprehend and incline itself to the Birth of the Heart of God the Father.

(50) [Note three sorts of births or genitures in man] The flesh signifieth, 1. The outward birth or geniture, which is the house of death. 2. The second birth or geniture in man is the astral, in which the life stands, and wherein love and wrath wrestle the one with the other; and thus far man himself knoweth himself; for the astral birth generateth the life in the outermost, that is, in the dead flesh. 3. The third birth is generated between the astral and the outermost, and that is called the animated or soulish birth or geniture, or the soul, and is as large as the whole man.

(14) First, the body is out of all the powers of the Father, and in those powers is the light of God the Son; now the powers of the Father and of the Son, which are in an angel creaturely, generate an understanding spirit, which riseth up in that angel.

(18) . . . . After the Paternal Conception I the Soul reside, a heat animating all things. . . . . For he placed The Intelligible in the Soul, and the Soul in dull body, Even so the Father of Gods and Men placed them in us.

(139) For the outermost birth is nature, and that ought not to reach back into the heart of God, neither can it, but it is the body, in which the qualifying or fountain spirits generate themselves, and shew forth and manifest their birth or geniture by their fruits.

(100) For its birth also has a beginning out of all powers, and therefore with its light and heat it is again one spirit and heart in the whole body of this world.

(19) The World Soul, at the Dawn of the Cosmic Day, may be said to be like a dreamer freshly awakened from a deep sleep, and striving to regain consciousness of himself. It does not know what it is, nor does it know that it is but an Idea of the Eternal Parent. If it could express its thought in words it would say that it has always been, but had been asleep before that moment. It feels within itself the urge toward expression and manifestation, along unconscious and instinctive lines—this urge being a part of its nature and character and implanted into it by the content of the Idea of the Eternal Parent which brought it into being. Like the newborn babe, it struggles for breath and begins to move its limbs. And as it struggles and moves, there comes to it a response from all of its nature, and its active life begins. And here we leave the World Soul, for the moment, struggling for breath and striving to move its limbs (figuratively speaking, of course). Its future is related in the succeeding Aphorisms.

(3) What, then, is the spirit ?

The Spirit of here and now.

And the God?

The God of here and now.

Spirit, God; This in act within us, conducts every life; for, even here and now, it is the dominant of our Nature.

That is to say that the dominant is the spirit which takes possession of the human being at birth?

No: the dominant is the Prior of the individual spirit; it presides inoperative while its secondary acts: so that if the acting force is that of men of the sense-life, the tutelary spirit is the Rational Being, while if we live by that Rational Being, our tutelary Spirit is the still higher Being, not directly operative but assenting to the working principle. The words "You shall yourselves choose" are true, then; for by our life we elect our own loftier.

But how does this spirit come to be the determinant of our fate?

It is not when the life is ended that it conducts us here or there; it operates during the lifetime; when we cease to live, our death hands over to another principle this energy of our own personal career.

That principle strives to gain control, and if it succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn, possesses a guiding spirit : if on the contrary it is weighed down by the developed evil in the character, the spirit of the previous life pays the penalty: the evil-liver loses grade because during his life the active principle of his being took the tilt towards the brute by force of affinity. If, on the contrary, the Man is able to follow the leading of his higher Spirit, he rises: he lives that Spirit; that noblest part of himself to which he is being led becomes sovereign in his life; this made his own, he works for the next above until he has attained the height.

For the Soul is many things, is all, is the Above and the Beneath to the totality of life: and each of us is an Intellectual Kosmos, linked to this world by what is lowest in us, but, by what is the highest, to the Divine Intellect: by all that is intellective we are permanently in that higher realm, but at the fringe of the Intellectual we are fettered to the lower; it is as if we gave forth from it some emanation towards that lower, or, rather some Act, which however leaves our diviner part not in itself diminished.

(4) But the Soul of Man, which is enlightened with the holy Spirit of God, (which in the second Principle proceeds from the Father and the Son in the holy Heaven, that is, in the true divine Nature which is called God;) this Soul sees even into the Light of God, into the same second Principle of the holy divine Birth, into the heavenly Essence: But the syderial Spirit wherewith the Soul is clothed, and also the elementary [Spirit] which i rules the Source, or Springing and Impulsion of the Blood, they see no further than into their Mother, whence they are, and wherein they live.

(90) In thy heart, in thy veins, and in thy brain, thou hast thy spirit; and all the powers which move in thy heart, in thy veins, and in thy brain, wherein thy life consisteth, signify God the Father.

(2) To resume: there is from the first principle to ultimate an outgoing in which unfailingly each principle retains its own seat while its offshoot takes another rank, a lower, though on the other hand every being is in identity with its prior as long as it holds that contact.

In the case of soul entering some vegetal form, what is there is one phase, the more rebellious and less intellectual, outgone to that extreme; in a soul entering an animal, the faculty of sensation has been dominant and brought it there; in soul entering man, the movement outward has either been wholly of its reasoning part or has come from the Intellectual-Principle in the sense that the soul, possessing that principle as immanent to its being, has an inborn desire of intellectual activity and of movement in general.

But, looking more minutely into the matter, when shoots or topmost boughs are lopped from some growing thing, where goes the soul that was present in them? Simply, whence it came: soul never knew spatial separation and therefore is always within the source. If you cut the root to pieces, or burn it, where is the life that was present there? In the soul, which never went outside of itself.

No doubt, despite this permanence, the soul must have been in something if it reascends; and if it does not, it is still somewhere; it is in some other vegetal soul: but all this means merely that it is not crushed into some one spot; if a Soul-power reascends, it is within the Soul-power preceding it; that in turn can be only in the soul-power prior again, the phase reaching upwards to the Intellectual-Principle. Of course nothing here must be understood spatially: Soul never was in space; and the Divine Intellect, again, is distinguished from soul as being still more free.

Soul thus is nowhere but in the Principle which has that characteristic existence at once nowhere and everywhere.

If the soul on its upward path has halted midway before wholly achieving the supreme heights, it has a mid-rank life and has centred itself upon the mid-phase of its being. All in that mid-region is Intellectual-Principle not wholly itself- nothing else because deriving thence , yet not that because the Intellectual-Principle in giving it forth is not merged into it.

There exists, thus, a life, as it were, of huge extension, a total in which each several part differs from its next, all making a self-continuous whole under a law of discrimination by which the various forms of things arise with no effacement of any prior in its secondary.

But does this Soul-phase in the vegetal order, produce nothing?

It engenders precisely the Kind in which it is thus present: how, is a question to be handled from another starting-point.

(35) Behold, thou reasonable Soul, to thee I speak, and not to the Body, thou only apprehendest it:- When the Birth is thus continually generated, then every Form has a Center to the Regeneration; for the whole divine Essence [or Substance] stands in continual and in eternal P Generating (but unchangeably) like the Mind of Man, the Thoughts being continually generated out of the Mind, and the Will and Desiring out of the Thoughts. Out of the Will and Desirousness [is] the Work [generated] which is made a Substance, in the Will, and then the Mouth and Hands, go on to perform what was substantial in the Will.

(5) God created the soul after the image of His highest perfection. He issued forth from the treasure-house of the everlasting Fatherhood in which He had rested from all eternity. Then the Son opened the tent of His everlasting glory and came forth from His high place to fetch His Bride, whom the Father had espoused to Him from all Eternity, back to that heaven from which she came. Therefore He came forth rejoicing as a bridegroom and suffered the pangs of love. Then He returned to His secret chamber in the silence and stillness of the everlasting Fatherhood. As He came forth from the Highest, so He returned to the Highest with His Bride, and revealed to her the hidden treasures of His Godhead.