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A Treatise on White Magic - Rule Ten - Astral Energy and Fear
Astral Energy and Fear

The subject now to be considered is of most practical application for it concerns the astral body - the body in which a man is pre-eminently polarized and of which he is more potently conscious than of any other body. The etheric body is really below the threshold of consciousness. Human beings remain unaware of the passage of forces through this vehicle and the nearest they get to the recognition of it is when they speak in terms of vitality or lack of vitality. The physical body makes its presence felt when something goes wrong or through the gratification of one or other of the appetites. The situation is however different in connection with the astral body for there is the vehicle of experience for the majority, and few there are who do not pass the greater part of their conscious life, recording the reactions of that body and vibrating between the two poles of happiness and misery, of satisfaction or non-satisfaction, of assurance or doubt, of courage or of fear. This really means that the inherent force and life of the emotional sentient vehicle govern the life-expression and mould the experience of the incarnated soul. Therefore, it is of value to us to understand something of what those forces are, where they come from, and how they act and react on the man. There lies his battleground and there also lies his field of victory.

To begin with, it is advisable to bear in mind that all astral energy is part of the astral energy of the solar system and that therefore:

  1. The sentient body of a human being is an atom of substance in the sentient body of the planetary Logos.
  2. The sentient body (a term I much prefer to the term astral, and which I shall continue to use) of the [294] planetary Logos is an aspect - not an atom - of the sentient body of the solar Logos.
  3. This in its turn is influenced by, and is a channel for sentient forces, emanating from vast centers of energy outside our solar system altogether.

If this is borne in mind it becomes apparent that man, being but a tiny fragment of a vaster whole which in its turn is incorporated into a still vaster vehicle, is the meeting ground of forces greater and more diversified than his brain is capable of recognizing. Hence the complexity of his problem and hence all the possibilities growing out of those expansions of consciousness which we call initiation. Every stream of energy pouring through his body of desire and of sentient reaction, is but a pathway leading him to wider and ever widening contacts and realizations. Here also lies the safeguard for the majority of human beings, in the fact that they possess as yet an apparatus inadequate for the registering and recording of those infinite possibilities which these avenues of realization offer. Until the mental apparatus is sufficiently awakened and controlled it would not be possible for man to interpret rightly and utilize correctly the information which his body of sensitive response could, but fortunately does not yet, convey to him.

Apart from the constant circulation through his astral body of planetary and solar and cosmic energies, every human being has appropriated, out of the greater Whole, enough of the astral energy wherewith to construct his own individual and separate astral body, responsive to his peculiar note, colored by his peculiar quality, and limiting him or not according to his point on the ladder of evolution.

This constitutes his astral ring-pass-not, defining the limits of his emotional response to life experience, [295] embodying in its quality the range of his desire life, but being at the same time capable of tremendous expansion, development, adjustment and control under the impulse of the mental body and of the soul. It is subject also to vibratory activity as the result of the interplay between it and the physical plane life experience, and thus the great wheel of experience is set in motion and will persist until the four Noble Truths of the Buddha are understood and realized.

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