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Soular

SongOfSaltSongOfSalt
edited 2011-10-02 23:25:27 in General
Who, then, becomes a spirit?

He who is on that level here and now.

And who becomes a god?

Again, he who is one 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 hat 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 your presiding spirit' are true, then; for by our life we elect our own loftier.

But how does this spirit come to be the dominant 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 of the new birth strives to gain control, and if it succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn, possesses a guiding spirit (its next higher): 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 Main 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 a Intellectual Cosmos, 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.

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