The Journey of the Monads: Understanding Life's Complexity
Some students have read that when an individual is so evil, that when he dies he enters into an animal. That is not correct. You must understand that a human being is a composite being. He is composed of a group of consciousness centers, called a Monad, each one of which has its own destiny and follows its own path, after death or through the ages. Therefore, when karmic destiny falls heavily upon anyone of these monadic centers, that monadic center rises or falls, as the case may be, to the sphere towards which its impulses impel it, towards which its attractions draw it. Therefore, do not confuse the astral-vital monad of the man with the human monad of the man. When we speak of a 'lost soul' we obviously mean a human soul, the human monad.
Consider the inverse idea. After death the astral monad has one destiny for itself, the human monad has its devachanic (heavenly) interlude, the spiritual monad has its peregrinations through the spheres, the Divine Monad re-enters the bosom of the divine. The answer lies therein only inverted. That which goes to the Planet of Death, sometimes called the Eighth Sphere or Mara, is the degenerate lost human soul. It is the VITAL-ASTRAL SOUL, which thus abandoned not only by its spiritual part but by its human soul part, enters the beast and the plant kingdoms.
The astral soul is the vehicle of vital, life-energy called prana. It is but slightly less material than is the physical body. It is the container of all the energies descending from the higher parts of the human constitution by means of the pranic stream. The astral body precedes in time the physical body, and is the pattern around which the physical body is molded, atom by atom.
A monad in the beginning of a world, projects from itself a Ray, and it does so because of the karman of a past universe impelling it to manifest once more all the seeds, the karmic seeds, that it carries within itself. This ray passes through manifold experiences in substance and matter, building up slowly through the ages an ego; and should this ego--sprung from its Monadic parent and therefore having in its turn its parent's qualities: being of its parent's blood,--should this ego choose the 'left-hand path', it then begins to 'descend', and this descent is towards the Eighth Sphere, the sphere of absolute matter and spiritual death, which means that when the Black Magician reaches the Eighth sphere the remaining faint glimmering of the Monadic Ray has been withdrawn; and there remains naught but a soul-shell, which falls apart into its component atoms, atoms which are withdrawn into the womb of Nature with the rapidity of lightning, once that the last flickering gleam of the Monadic Ray has gone. The Monadic Ray is withdrawn into its Monadic parent and remains there resting in its Nirvana for aeons and aeons.
Meanwhile the Monad sends forth another ray. What really once was is not destroyed. But the evolutionary work must begin again and be done all over again. A new ego must be builded up. New peregrinations and transmigrations through the lower kingdoms of Nature must follow before a new ego, a fit temple for the Monadic divinity, is again builded. And what has been said takes no account of the terrific agony and psychic pain that accompany the descent of the Black Magician on the downward path.
The difference in which the terms ego and soul are used is as follows; Soul is the sentient, sensitive, living vehicle or veil, itself of living substance, with which the Ego surrounds itself during any embodiment, as in the case of of a human's reincarnation on earth.
The ego is the accumulated fund of conscious evolutionary experience gained during the continuously succeeding and repetitive embodiments of a Monad in the manifested worlds. And Monadic Essence is virtually equivalent to the term 'god,' there being as many gods as there are Monads.
What is a Monad? A monad is a spiritual entity which to us humans is indivisible; it is a divine-spiritual life-atom, but indivisible because its essential characteristic, we humans conceive it, is homogeneity; while that of the physical atom, above which our consciousness soars, is divisible, is a composite heterogeneous particle.
Monads are eternal, unitary, individual, life-centers, consciousness-centers, deathless, during any solar manvantara1, therefore ageless, unborn, undying. Consequently, each one such--and their number is infinite--is the center of the ALL, for the Divine or the ALL is THAT which has its center everywhere, and its circumference or limiting boundary nowhere.
Monads are spiritual-substantial entities, self-motivated, self-impelled,, self-conscious,, in infinitely varying degrees, the ultimate elements of the universe. These monads engender other monads as one seed will produce multitudes of other seeds; so up from each such monad springs a host of living entities in the course of illimitable time, each such monad being the fountain-head or parent, in which all others are involved, and from which they spring.
Every monad is a seed, wherein the sum-total of powers appertaining to its divine origin are latent, that is to say unmanifested, and evolution consists in the growth and development of all these seeds or children-monads, whereby the universal Life expresses itself in innumerable beings.
As the monad descends into matter, or rather as its ray-- one of other innumerable rays proceeding from it--is propelled into matter, it secretes from itself and then excretes on each one of the seven planes through which it passes, its various vehicles, all overshadowed by the Self, the same Self in you and in me, in plants and in animal, in fact in all that is and belongs to that hierarchy. This is the One Self, the Supreme Self or Paramatman of the hierarchy. It illumines and follows each individual monad and all the latter's hosts of rays -- or children monads. Each such monad is a spiritual seed from the previous manvantara, which manifests as a monad in this manvantara; and this monad through its rays throw out from itself by secretion and then excretion all its vehicles.
These vehicles are, first, the spiritual ego, the reflection or copy in miniature of the monad itself, but INDIVIDUALIZED through the manvantaric evolution, "bearing" or "carrying" as a vehicle the monadic ray. The latter cannot directly contact the lower planes, because it is of the monadic Essence itself, the latter a still higher ray of the infinite Boundless composed of infinite multiplicity in unity.
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