(31) The lesson to the student is that in every man there lie concealed the potentiality of Godhood, and stages less than Godhood though above that of ordinary Manhood; and that in every man also abide the lower phases of manifested existence, even the very lowest of all. The wise man uses the lower, but does not allow the lower to use him; he maintains a positive, masterful mental attitude toward the lower planes of being, while opening himself receptively to the influences of the higher planes of his Self.

(4) Thus man’s an animal; yet not indeed less potent in that he’s partly mortal, but rather doth he seem to be all the more fit and efficacious for reaching Certain Reason, since he has had mortality bestowed on him as well. For it is plain he could not have sustained the strain of both, unless he had been formed out of both natures, so that he could possess the powers of cultivating Earthly things and loving Heaven. X

(10) God could well have created Creatures which should have managed the Beasts, [so] that Man might well have staid in Paradise in the angelical Form; and besides that, there are already, in all the four Elements, Creatures without a Soul; God would well have laid the Labour [or Charge] of Managing the Beasts upon another Generation, which were also 1 earthly. But he saw well that Man would not stand, therefore instantly the Burthen was laid upon him, as Moses also writes of it. Or of the four Elements. 1 1. But if God would have had bestial Men, then he would have created them so in the Beginning, and given them no Commandment, neither should they have been tempted; as indeed the Beasts have no Law.

When the Almighty determined to create mankind to be proved by good and evil, He deputed the angel Gabriel to bring a handful of earth for the purpose of forming Adam's body. Gabriel accordingly girded his loins and proceeded to the Earth to execute the divine commands. But the Earth, being apprehensive that the man so created would rebel against God and draw down God's curse upon her, remonstrated with Gabriel, and besought him to forbear. She represented that Gabriel would at the last day be pre-eminent over all the eight angels who would then support the throne, and that it therefore was only right that he should prefer mercy to judgment. At last Gabriel granted her prayer, and returned to heaven without taking the handful of earth. Then God deputed Michael on the same errand, and the Earth made similar excuses to him, and he also listened to her crying, and returned to heaven without taking a handful. He excused himself to the Almighty by citing the example of the people to whom the prophet Jonah was sent, who were delivered from the threatened penalty in consequence of their lamentation for their sins; and the text, "If He please, He will deliver you from that which ye shall cry to Him to avert." Then God sent the angel Israfil on the same errand, and he also was diverted from the execution of it by a divine intimation. At last God sent 'Izrail, the angel of death, who, being of sterner disposition than the others, resolutely shut his ears to the Earth's entreaties, and brought back the required handful of earth. The Earth pressed him with the argument that God's command to bear away a handful of her substance against her will did not override the other divine command to take pity on suppliants; but 'Izrail would not listen to her, remarking that, according to the canons of theological interpretation, it was not allowable to have recourse to analogical reasoning to evade a plain and categorical injunction. He added, that in executing this injunction, painful though it might be, he was to be regarded only as a spear in the hand of the Almighty. The moral is, that when any of God's creatures do us a harm, we ought to regard them only as instruments of God, who is the Only Real Agent.

(95) For in respect of this light, understanding and government, is man distinguished from the beasts, and is an angel of God; as I shall clearly shew when I write of the creation of man.

(2) So down [to Earth] He sent the Cosmos of this Frame Divine - man, a life that cannot die, and yet a life that dies. And o'er [all other] lives and over Cosmos [too], did man excel by reason of the Reason (Logos) and the Mind. For contemplator of God's works did man become; he marvelled and did strive to know their Author.

(102) But the difference lies in this, that man is made by God himself out of the best kernel or pith of nature, to be his angel and similitude, and God ruleth in man with his holy spirit; so that man can speak, discourse, distinguish and understand all things.

(27) Nay, he will pray that he may never fall from virtue; giving his most strenuous co-operation in order that he may become infallible. For he knows that some of the angels, through carelessness, were hurled to the earth, not having yet quite reached that state of oneness, by extricating themselves from the propensity to that of duality.

(6) For we have a certain Ground of this, in that our Mind can find and conceive all whatsoever is in the Spirit of this World, which no Beast can do: For no Creature can conceive [further or] higher than [what is] in its own Principle, out of which its own Essences are proceeded in the Beginning: But we (that are Men) can certainly conceive [of that which is] in the Principle of God, and also [of that which is] in the anguishing Kingdom of Hell, where the Worm of our Soul in the Beginning in Adam originally is, and this no other Creature can do.

(74) Seeing then that they stood in Heaven in the Time of their Creation, therefore their Quality was also manifold; and all should have been and continued Angels, if the great Fountain Lucifer (from whence they proceeded) had not destroyed them. And so now also every one in his Fall continues in his own Essences, only the second Principle is extinguished in them; and so it is also with the Soul of Man, when the Light of God goes out in it; but so long as that shines therein, it is in Paradise, and eats of the Word of the Lord, of which shall be clearly spoken in its due Place.

(6) But how can that higher soul have sense-perception?

It is the perception of what falls under perception There, sensation in the mode of that realm: it is the source of the soul's perception of the sense-realm in its correspondence with the Intellectual. Man as sense-percipient becomes aware of that correspondence and accommodates the sense-realm to the lowest extremity of its counterpart There, proceeding from the fire Intellectual to the fire here which becomes perceptible by its analogy with that of the higher sphere. If material things existed There, the soul would perceive them; Man in the Intellectual, Man as Intellectual soul, would be aware of the terrestrial. This is how the secondary Man, copy of Man in the Intellectual, contains the Reason-Principles in copy; and Man in the Intellectual-Principle contained the Man that existed before any man. The diviner shines out upon the secondary and the secondary upon the tertiary; and even the latest possesses them all- not in the sense of actually living by them all but as standing in under-parallel to them. Some of us act by this lowest; in another rank there is a double activity, a trace of the higher being included; in yet another there is a blending of the third grade with the others: each is that Man by which he acts while each too contains all the grades, though in some sense not so. On the separation of the third life and third Man from the body, then if the second also departs- of course not losing hold on the Above- the two, as we are told, will occupy the same place. No doubt it seems strange that a soul which has been the Reason-Principle of a man should come to occupy the body of an animal: but the soul has always been all, and will at different times be this and that.

Pure, not yet fallen to evil, the soul chooses man and is man, for this is the higher, and it produces the higher. It produces also the still loftier beings, the Celestials , who are of one Form with the soul that makes Man: higher still stands that Man more entirely of the Celestial rank, almost a god, reproducing God, a Celestial closely bound to God as a man is to Man. For that Being into which man develops is not to be called a god; there remains the difference which distinguishes souls, all of the same race though they be. This is taking "Celestial" in the sense of Plato.

When a soul which in the human state has been thus attached chooses animal nature and descends to that, it is giving forth the Reason-Principle- necessarily in it- of that particular animal: this lower it contained and the activity has been to the lower.

(2) It is of this Soul especially that we read "All Soul has care for the Soulless"- though the several Souls thus care in their own degree and way. The passage continues- "Soul passes through the entire heavens in forms varying with the variety of place"- the sensitive form, the reasoning form, even the vegetative form- and this means that in each "place" the phase of the soul there dominant carries out its own ends while the rest, not present there, is idle.

Now, in humanity the lower is not supreme; it is an accompaniment; but neither does the better rule unfailingly; the lower element also has a footing, and Man, therefore, lives in part under sensation, for he has the organs of sensation, and in large part even by the merely vegetative principle, for the body grows and propagates: all the graded phases are in a collaboration, but the entire form, man, takes rank by the dominant, and when the life-principle leaves the body it is what it is, what it most intensely lived.

This is why we must break away towards the High: we dare not keep ourselves set towards the sensuous principle, following the images of sense, or towards the merely vegetative, intent upon the gratifications of eating and procreation; our life must be pointed towards the Intellective, towards the Intellectual-Principle, towards God.

Those that have maintained the human level are men once more. Those that have lived wholly to sense become animals- corresponding in species to the particular temper of the life- ferocious animals where the sensuality has been accompanied by a certain measure of spirit, gluttonous and lascivious animals where all has been appetite and satiation of appetite. Those who in their pleasures have not even lived by sensation, but have gone their way in a torpid grossness become mere growing things, for this lethargy is the entire act of the vegetative, and such men have been busy be-treeing themselves. Those, we read, that, otherwise untainted, have loved song become vocal animals; kings ruling unreasonably but with no other vice are eagles; futile and flighty visionaries ever soaring skyward, become highflying birds; observance of civic and secular virtue makes man again, or where the merit is less marked, one of the animals of communal tendency, a bee or the like.

(41) Therefore in this World all Things are given into Man's Power, because he is an eternal Spirit, and all other Creatures [are] no other than a Figure in the Wonders of God; and therefore Man ought well to consider himself, what he speaks, does, and purposes, in this World; for all his Works follow after him, and he has them eternally before his Eyes, and lives in them. Except it be, that he is again new regenerated out of Evil and Falshood, through the Blood and Death of Christ, in the Water and the Holy Spirit, and then he breaks forth out of the hellish and earthly Image, into an angelical [Image,] and comes into another Kingdom, into which its Untowardness [or Vices] cannot follow, and that [Untowardness, Contrariety, or Vice] is drowned in the Blood of Christ, and the Image of God is renewed out of the earthly and hellish.

(12) But seeing it was his Will also in this Throne, in the eternal Element, to have Creatures that should be instead of the fallen Devils, and possess the Place [of them] in the Heaven in Paradise, therefore he created Man out of the Element.

(6) But that God said, Thou shalt turn to Earth from whence thou wast taken, that is also very true; but the Understanding is [hidden] in the Word, and the earthly Vail hangs before it, we must look under the Vail. For Adam was taken out of the Earth, not out of the four Productions of the Elements, [but he was] an Extract out of the Element, which qualified [or mingled] with the Earth. But when he fell into the four Elements, then he became Earth, as also Fire, Air, and Water. And now what should the bestial Man do [with] the heavenly paradisical Fruit? He could not a eat of it; and therefore God does not cast his heavenly Kingdom to Beasts and Swine, but it belongs to Angels.

(25) For no one of the gods in heaven shall come down to the earth, o'er-stepping heaven's limit; whereas man doth mount up to heaven and measure it; he knows what things of it are high, what things are low, and learns precisely all things else besides. And greater thing than all; without e'en quitting earth, he doth ascend above. So vast a sweep doth he possess of ecstasy. For this cause can a man dare say that man on earth is god subject to death, while god in heaven is man from death immune. Wherefore the dispensation of all things is brought about by means of there, the twain - Cosmos and Man - but by the One.

(2) So, then, [man] hath his place in the more blessed station of the Midst; so that he loves [all] those below himself, and in his turn is loved by those above. He tills the Earth. He mingles with the Elements by reason of the swiftness of his mind. He plunges into the Sea’s depths by means of its profundity. He puts his values on all things. Heaven seems not too high for him; for it is measured by the wisdom of his mind as though it were quite near. No darkness of the Air obstructs the penetration of his mind. No density of Earth impedes his work. No depth of Water blunts his sight. [Though still] the same [yet] is he all, and everywhere is he the same.

(2) When God breathed the pure breath of life into the body of Adam, which was only earth and water, he wished that the hosts of angels should not know about it, and not even suspect it. So he said to them: 'Prostrate yourselves before

Adam, O Celesdal Spirits! ' All of them then bowed themselves down on the earth, and when they were bowed down, God breathed the breath of life into Adam and none of them was aware of the secret that God wished to hide. That is, none but Iblis, who said to himself, 'No one shall see me bend the knee. Even if my head falls from my body, it will not be as bad as doing what God wishes. I know very well that it is not just a question of Adam being on the earth, so I don't intend to bow my head down and not see the secret.' So instead of bowing down, Iblis watched, and saw the secret. Afterwards God said: 'O you who were lying in wait, you have stolen my secret, and for this I shall bring about your death, for I do not wish any other being to know about it. 'Tien an earthly king hides treasure he kills the person who saw it being hid. You are this person.'

'Lord,' said Iblis, 'grant a respite, for I am your servant; and tell me how I can expiate my sin?' 'Since you ask,' said God, 'I will grant you a respite; nevertheless, from this moment I shall put on your neck the collar of malediction and I impose on you the name of liar and slanderer, so that everyone will be on guard against you until the day of resurrection.'

Iblis said: ''Tiat have I to fear from your malediction since this pure treasure has been manifested to me? If malediction comes from you so does mercy. Where there is poison there is also an antidote. You curse some creatures and bless others. Now that I have transgressed I am the creature of your malediction.'

If you cannot discover and understand the secret of which I speak, it is not because it does not exist but because you do not seek rightly. If you make a distinction between the things which come from God you are not a man on the path of the spirit. If you consider yourself honoured by the diamond and humiliated by the stone, God is not with you. Note well, you should not love the diamond and detest the

stone, for both come from God. If your mistress in a moment of frenzy throws a stone at you, that is better than a jewel from another woman.

On the way of self-perfection a man must not loiter for an instant. If he should stop for a moment working on himself he will slip back.

(22) V. The Human Soul The Human Soul is distinguished from the Animal Soul not only by its special aptitude for intellectual reasoning, and voluntary choice and action, but also by its consciousness of itself—of the "I am I." This distinction has been fully explained in previous chapters of this book, and need not be gone into in further detail at this place. The following paragraph, however, quoted from a writer, may prove of interest in the consideration of this phase of the general subject before us. The writer says: "Among the lower animals there is very little of what may be called Self Consciousness. In fact, the consciousness of the lowest forms of animal life is little more than mere sensation. Life in the early stages of animal life is almost automatic. The mentation there is almost entirely along subconscious lines, and the mental operations are only those which are concerned with the physical life of the animal—the satisfaction of its primitive wants. After a bit, this primitive consciousness developed into what psychologists call 'simple consciousness,' which is an awareness' of outside things, and an apprehension of them as things.' But there is no self-consciousness manifested at this point. The animal does not think of its hopes and fears, its aspirations, its plans, its thoughts, and then compare them with like thoughts of others of its kind. It cannot indulge in abstract thinking, or use symbols of thought. It simply takes things for granted and asks no questions. It does not seek to find answers to perplexing general questions, for it does not know that such questions exist. With the advent of Self-Consciousness, man begins to form a conception of the 'I'. He begins to compare himself with others, and to reason about the result thereof. He takes mental stock of himself, and draws conclusions from what he finds in his mind. He begins to think for himself, to analyze, to classify, to separate, to deduce, to form judgments. He begins to create for himself, and is no longer a mere mental automaton." Another writer has said concerning the evolution of the consciousness of man: "For some hundreds of years, upon the general plane of self-consciousness, an ascent, to the human eye gradually, but from the point of view of cosmic evolution rapid, has been made. In a race, large-brained, walking erect, gregarious, brutal, but king of all other brutes, man in appearance but not in fact, was from the highest simple consciousness born the basic human faculty, Self Consciousness, and its twin, Language. From these and what went with these, through suffering, toil, and war; through bestiality, savagery, barbarism; through slavery, greed, effort; through conquest infinite, through defeats overwhelming, through struggle unending; through ages of aimless semi-brutal existence; through subsistence on berries and roots; through the use of the casually found stone or stick; through life in deep forests, with nuts and seeds, and on the shores of waters, with mollusks, crustaceans, and fish for food; through that greatest, perhaps, of human victories, the domestication and subjugation of fire; through the invention and art of bow and arrow; through the taming of animals and the breaking of them to labor; through the long learning which led to the cultivation of the soil; through the abode brick and the building of houses therefrom; through the smelting of metals and the slow birth of the arts which rest upon these; through the slow making of alphabets and the evolution of the written word; in short, through thousands of centuries of human life, of human aspiration, of human growth, sprang the world of men and women as it stands before us and within us today with all its achievements and possessions." A writer on the subject of the evolution of the soul has well given the following words of warning: "The awakening of the intellect in man does not necessarily make him a better being. While it is true that the unfolding of a higher faculty gives an upward tendency to man, it is also true that some men are so closely wrapped in the folds of the animal sheath—so steeped in the material side of things—that the awakened intellect only tends to give them increased powers to gratify their low desires and inclinations. Man, if he chooses, may excel the beasts in bestiality—he may descend to depths of which the beast never would have thought. The beast is governed solely by instinct, and his actions, so prompted, are perfectly natural and proper, and the animal is not to be blamed for following the impulses of his nature. But man, in whom intellect has unfolded, knows that it is contrary to his highest nature to descend to the level of the beasts—yea, lower by far. He adds to the brute desires the cunning and intelligence which have come to him, and deliberately prostitutes his higher principle to the task of carrying out the magnified animal propensities. Very few animals abuse their desires—it is left for some men to do so. The higher the degree of intellect unfolded in a man, the greater the depths of low passions, appetites, and desires possible to him. He may actually create new brute desires, or rather, build edifices of his own upon the brute foundations. It is unnecessary for us to state that all occultists know that such a course will bring certain consequences in its train, which will result in the soul having to spend many weary years in retracing its steps over the backward road it has trodden. Its progress has been retarded, and it will be compelled to retravel the road to freedom, in common with the beastlike natures of undeveloped creatures whose proper state of the journey it is, having an additional burden in the shape of the horror of a consciousness of its surroundings, whereas its beast-companions have no such consciousness and suffer not therefrom. If you can imagine the feeling of a cultured, civilized man being compelled to dwell among the African Bushmen for many years, with a full recollection of his past living in civilization, you may form a faint idea of the fate in store for one who deliberately sinks his higher powers to the accomplishment of low ends and desires. But even for such a soul there is escape—in time." The Human Soul occupies a place of great trials and struggles between two conflicting forces. On the one hand is the force of the lower animal nature, striving to pull it downward into the plane of the Animal Soul and urging him to employ his newly awakened intellectual powers on the lower plane. On the other hand is the awakening forces of the higher spiritual nature, striving to draw him upward into a consciousness of his relationship to the All, and urging him to open his intellect to the inflow of the higher vibrations of spiritual consciousness and to turn his faculties to the carrying out of the dictates of the higher portion of himself.

(49) In thinking of Man, we must remember that primitive human beings—little removed from the apes—are as much Man as is the highest individual of the race today, or as will be his still higher descendant of tomorrow. And we must not forget that the Plane of Human Consciousness is closely linked to, and blended with, the Plane of Animal Consciousness, at one of its sides. The best scientific, and the best occult teaching hold that the man and the ape descended from some common ancestral form in the long ages past; the common ancestor was the trunk from which the Man branch sprung on one side and the ape branch sprung on the other.