In Search of the Miraculous

"That man can have several bodies," he said, "must be understood as an idea, as a principle. But it does not apply to us. We know we have the one physical body and we

know nothing else. It is the physical body that we must study. Only, we must

remember that the question is not limited to the physical body and that there are people

who may have two, three, or more bodies. But it makes no difference to us personally

either one way or another. Someone like Rockefeller in America may have a great

many millions, but his millions do not help me if I have nothing to eat. It is the same

thing in this connection. Everyone must think of himself;

it is useless and senseless to rely on others or to console oneself with thoughts of what others possess."

"How is one to know if a man has an 'astral body'?" I asked.

"There are definite ways of knowing that," answered G. "Under certain conditions the 'astral body' can be seen; it can be separated from the physical body and even

photographed at the side of the physical body. The existence of the 'astral body' can be

still more easily and simply established by its functions. The 'astral body' has definite functions which the physical body cannot have. The presence of these functions

indicates the presence of the 'astral body.' The absence of these functions shows the

absence of the 'astral body.' But it is too early to speak of this now. All our attention must be concentrated on the study of the physical body. It is necessary to understand

the structure of the human machine. Our principal error is that we think we have one

mind. We call the functions of this mind 'conscious'; everything that does not enter this mind we call 'unconscious' or 'subconscious.' This is our chief error. Of the conscious

and the unconscious we will speak later. At this moment I want to explain to you that

the activity of the human machine, that is, of the physical body, is controlled, not by

one, but by several minds, entirely independent of each other, having separate

functions and separate spheres in which they manifest themselves. This must be

understood first of all, because unless this is understood nothing else can be

understood."

After this G. went on to explain man's various functions and centers controlling

these functions in the way they are set out in the psychological lectures.

These explanations, and all the talks connected with them, took a fairly long time,

while at almost every talk we returned to the fundamental ideas of man's

mechanicalness, of the absence of unity in man, of man's -having no choice, of his

being unable to do, and so on. There is no possibility of giving all these talks in the

way they actually took place. For

this reason I collected all the psychological and all the cosmological material in two

separate series of lectures.

In this connection it must be noted that the ideas were not given us in the form in

which they are set out in my lectures. G. gave the ideas little by little, as though

defending or protecting them from us. When touching on new themes for the first

time he gave only general principles, often holding back the most essential.

Sometimes he himself pointed out apparent discrepancies in the theories given, which

were, in fact, precisely due to these reservations and suppressions. The next time, in

approaching the same subject, whenever possible from a different angle, he gave

more. The third time he gave still more. On the question of functions and centers for

instance. On the first occasion he spoke of three centers, the intellectual, the emotional, and the moving, and tried to make us distinguish these functions, find

examples, and so on. Afterwards the instinctive center was added, as an independent

and self-supporting machine. Afterwards the sex center. I remember that some of his

remarks arrested my attention. For instance, when speaking of the sex center he said it

practically never worked independently because it was always dependent on other

centers, the intellectual, the emotional, the instinctive, and the moving. Then in

speaking of the energy of centers he often returned to what he called wrong work of

centers and to the role of the sex center in this work. He spoke a great deal about how

all centers rob the sex center of its energy and produce with this energy quite wrong

work full of useless excitement and, in return, give to the sex center useless energy

with which it was unable to work.

I remember his words.

"It is a very big thing when the sex center works with its own energy, but it happens very seldom."

I recollect another remark which afterwards proved a ground for much wrong

reasoning and many wrong conclusions. This was that the three centers of the lower

story: the instinctive, the moving, and the sex centers, work, in relation to each other, in the order of three forces—and that the sex center, in normal cases, acts as

neutralizing force in relation to the instinctive and moving centers acting as active and passive forces.