The Etheric double, The Astral Body, and The Mental Body

 

In the three preceding volumes of this series, viz., The Etheric double, The Astral Body, and The Mental Body, the life history of each of the three lower vehicles of man has been studied. In these studies, it has been sufficient for us to take each of the three vehicles as we find it actually existing in man, and to examine its methods of functioning, the laws of its growth, its death, and then the formation , from the nucleus provided by the permanent atoms and mental unit, of new vehicles of the same kind, in order that man’s evolution on the three lower planes can be continued.  When we come to study the causal body of man, we enter upon a new phase of our work, and must take a far wider sweep in our purview of man’s evolution. The reason for this is, that whilst the etheric, astral and mental bodies exist for one human incarnation only, i.e.., are distinctly ortal, the causal body persists throughout the whole of man’s evolution, through many incarnations, and is therefore relatively immortal. We say relatively immortal advisedly because, as will be seen in due course, there is a point where a man, having completed his purely normal human evolution, commences his supernormal human evolution, and actually loses the causal body in which he has lived and evolved during the past ages of his growth.