(p. 19)
CHAPTER VI
The Soul’s Memory
THERE IS a way to the discovery of the soul, and it lies through the exercise and cultivation of that faculty which enables one to perceive and transmit and another to recognise and assimilate the noumenal truth underlying phenomena. The existence of this power has already been implicitly indicated in defining the mode of progression of soul; it is the faculty of Intuition. Inasmuch as the soul from the moment of its generation is the real substantial individual, to whom all forms or bodies are but temporary vehicles of expression or channels of experience successively taken up, animated, and laid aside, there resides in the soul as an ineradicable and ever cumulative memory the consciousness born of and distilled from actual experience of things, the comprehension of the essential idea which informs the fact cognised through the senses. Man can only really know and possess that of which he understands the cause and nature as well as the appearance. The mind, functioning as intellect, apprehends the phenomenal through the senses; but the exercise is only completed when the mind, functioning as intuition, comprehends the noumenal through the soul. (1) Duly balanced and attuned, these two modes of the mind together constitute the Reason or Understanding; to which, as opposed to authority and tradition, the appeal of the “Gospel
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of Interpretation,” representing the Gnosis or Divine Science of the Mind, is especially addressed.
“Thus Saith
the Lord”
It is to be noted that intuition – the knowledge born within the soul by virtue of her accumulated store of experience gained through repeated incarnations – is under certain circumstances supplemented by an irradiation of the Holy Spirit, when perception becomes enhanced to universality and the Divine Light of Wisdom, burning within the soul, utters itself in the accents of Revelation. Intuition or Understanding, even to supreme revelation, is indubitably the prerogative of every equilibrated and completed man. But as it can only operate in the outer man, or physical and transient personality, when that has been so purified in thought and deed as to become in accord with the inner man, or spiritual and permanent self, and the will of the individual set steadfastly towards the highest, it is a faculty latent rather than active in the majority of men and but little accredited by them. Phases of its operation have been designated rather than defined as “instinct” – especially noticeable in an elementary form in animals, in whom the peculiarly human faculty of intellect is undeveloped – and “the voice of conscience,” which inherently prompts man to choose what will benefit rather than hurt himself and others, from the recollection of the results of past choice wise and unwise.
It will be apparent that the duality – and trinity – subsisting in Original Substance find their correspondence here as they do throughout every differentiation and mode of that Substance. For intellect and intuition are respectively of masculine and feminine significance, being put forth by the mind as are the attributes centrifugal and centripetal of force – attributes which find their outermost expression in the two sexes of humanity and their sublimation in the Will and
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Love, the Fatherhood and Motherhood, the Life and Substance, of Deity.
NOTES
(19:1) When the intellect predominates to the
practical exclusion of the intuition a masculine era of force, power and
materiality is set up in man or in the world. Such an era is drawing to a close
now in
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