369. Esoteric Psychology - Volume I - 12. Section One - CHAPTER III - Ten Basic Propositions Question 5. What is the meaning of: Sentiency; Consciousness or Awareness; The Energy of Light? - A. BAILEY

Section One - CHAPTER III - Ten Basic Propositions

Question 5.  What is the meaning of: Sentiency; Consciousness or Awareness; The Energy of Light?

We shall now consider our last question, and I shall indicate to you, in general terms,—necessarily limited by the inadequacy of language,—the significance of the outstanding soul qualities:

a. Sentiency, or sensitive response to contact, and by that means the subsequent growth in knowledge.

b. Consciousness, awareness of environment, and the development of instruments whereby consciousness may be increasingly developed.

c. Light, or radiation, the effect of the interplay between the life and the environment.

The first point that I seek to make is a difficult one to grasp for those beneath the rank of initiate or accepted disciple of the higher stages.  The soul is that factor in matter (or rather that which emerges out of the contact between spirit and matter) which produces sentient response and what we call consciousness in its varying forms; it is also that latent or subjective essential quality which makes itself felt as light or luminous radiation.  It is the "self-shining from within" which is characteristic of all forms.  Matter, per se, and in its undifferentiated state, prior to being swept into activity through the creative process, is not possessed of soul, and does not therefore possess the qualities of response and of radiation.  Only when,—in the creative and evolutionary process,—these two are brought into conjunction and fusion does the soul appear and give to these two aspects of divinity the opportunity to manifest as a trinity and the chance to demonstrate sentient activity and magnetic radiatory light.  As all that we shall posit in this treatise is to be approached from the angle of human evolution, it might be stated that only when the soul aspect is dominant is the response apparatus (the form nature of man) fulfilling its complete destiny, and only then does true magnetic radiation and the pure shining forth of light become possible.  Symbolically, in the early stages of human evolution, [131] man is, from the angle of consciousness, relatively unresponsive and unconscious, as is matter in its early stages in the formative process.  The achievement of full awareness is of course the goal of the evolutionary process.  Again symbolically speaking, the unevolved man emits or manifests no light.  The light in the head is invisible, though the clairvoyant investigators would see the dim glow of the light within the elements which constitute the body, and the light hidden in the atoms which constitute the form nature.

As evolution proceeds, these dim points of "dark light" intensify their glow; the light within the head flickers at intervals during the life of the average man, and becomes a shining light as he enters upon the path of discipleship.  When he becomes an initiate, the light of the atoms is so bright, and the light in the head so intense (with a paralleling stimulation of the centres of force in the body), that the light body appears.  Eventually this body of light becomes externalised and of greater prominence than the dense tangible physical body.  This is the body of light in which the true son of God consciously dwells.  After the third initiation, the dual light becomes accentuated and takes on a still greater brilliancy through the blending with it of the energy of spirit.  This is not really the admission or the re-combining of a third light, but the fanning of the light of matter and the light of the soul into a greater glory through the Breath of the spirit.  Something anent this light has been earlier indicated in A Treatise on Cosmic Fire.  Study it and seek to understand the significance of this process.  In the understanding of these aspects of light comes a truer perspective as to the nature of the fires in the human expression of divinity.

It must never be forgotten that the soul of all things, the anima mundi, as it expresses itself through all the four kingdoms in nature, is that which gives to our planet its light in [132] the heavens.  The planetary light is the sum total of the light, dim and uncertain, to be found in all atoms of radiatory and vibratory matter or substance, which compose all forms in all kingdoms.  Added to this, there is, within the planet and also within each kingdom in nature, the correspondence to the etheric body with its centres of radiant energy, found underlying or "substanding" the outer physical form.  Man's etheric body is a corporate part of the planetary etheric body, and constitutes its most refined and most highly developed aspect.  As the aeons pass away there is a growing intensity of light radiating forth from our planet.  This does not necessarily mean that a dweller on Neptune would see our planet glowing with an increasingly brighter light, though this does happen in a few cases in the universe.  But it means that, from the standpoint of a clairvoyant vision, the etheric planetary body will grow in vivid radiation and glory as that radiation expresses more and more the true light of the soul.

The soul is light essentially, both literally from the vibratory angle, and philosophically from the angle of constituting the true medium of knowledge.  The soul is light symbolically, for it is like the rays of the sun, which pour out into the darkness; the soul, through the medium of the brain, causes revelation.  It throws its light into the brain, and thus the way of the human being becomes increasingly illumined.  The brain is like the eye of the soul, looking out into the physical world; in the same sense the soul is the eye of the Monad, and in a curious and occult sense, the fourth kingdom in nature constitutes on our planet the eye of the planetary Deity.  The brain is responsive to the seven senses:

1. Hearing	5. Smell
2. Touch	6. The mind, the common-sense
3. Sight	7. The intuition or the synthetic sense.
4. Taste

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Through these seven senses contact with the world of matter and of spirit becomes possible.  The seven senses are, in a peculiar way, the physical plane correspondences of the seven rays, and are closely related to and governed by them all.  The following tabulation will be found suggestive.  That is all that it is intended to be:

1. Hearing	7th Ray	Magic	The Word of Power.
2. Touch	1st Ray	Destroyer	The Finger of God.
3. Sight	3rd Ray	Vision	The Eye of God.
4. Taste	6th Ray	Idealism	The Desire of Nations.
5. Smell	4th Ray	Art	The Beauty of Revelation.
6. The Intellect	5th Ray	Mind	The Knowledge of God.
7. The Intuition	2nd Ray	Love-Wisdom	Understanding of God.

Through the Words of Power the worlds came into ordered being, and the Lord of the Ray of Ceremonial Magic brings about the organisation of the divine organism.

Through the application of the Finger of God in its directing and forceful work, we have the cyclic destruction of forms, so that the manifestation of Deity may grow in power and beauty.  Thus the Lord of Power or Will performs the task of destruction, thereby bringing beauty into being and the revelation of God's will and His beneficent purpose.

By means of the Eye of God light shines forth upon the way of the sun, the path of the planets, and the path of man.  The Lord of Adaptability and the Intellect brings into expression and into objectivity the intelligent working out of the divine idea and Plan.

When the "Desire of all nations" shall come, and the Cosmic Christ shall stand revealed, all men and all creatures shall occultly [134] "taste" or share in that great happening, and the Lord of the Ray of Devotion and Idealism shall see the consummation of His work and be "satisfied."

Also the Lord of the fourth Ray of Harmony, Beauty and Art will add His share to the great creative work, and it will be found that, in the elusive following to its source of that mysterious revelation which we call beauty, there will be expressed that subtle quality of which "smell," in the animal sense, is the symbol.  The great search and the esoteric "following of the scent" will come to an end.  This fourth ray is pre-eminently the way of the seeker, the searcher and the sensitive reflector of beauty.  The Jewish nation has a close relation to this fourth ray and to the fourth root race, and hence their eminence at this time in the world of art, and hence the magnitude of their endless symbolic wandering and searching.

When the Knowledge of God shall shine forth universally (and this is not the knowledge of, or awareness of a great Being but the expression through human instrumentality of the divine omniscience), then will the Lord of Concrete Science, Who is the embodiment of the fifth principle of mind, see His work brought to a conclusion.  He stimulates the sense of awareness in humanity and nurtures the consciousness aspect in the subhuman kingdoms, producing the response, therefore, of matter to spirit, and bringing about the interpretation of that to which there has been a sentient rapport.

The intuition is literally the synthetic and immediate grasp of the truth, as it essentially exists, and the Lord of the second ray will bring to a conclusion the entire evolutionary process through the development in humanity of that perfect insight which will make every human being a complete and intelligent cooperator with the Plan.

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A close study of these ray forces in relation to the creative work and the furthering of the Plan (in so far as we can, at this time, grasp it) will reveal how closely the entire building-wrecking-rebuilding process is tied up with the question of the three qualities of the soul, sentiency, consciousness and awareness, and will demonstrate how the problem of light, with which I have just been dealing, has a definite relation to our ability to interpret and comprehend these three qualities.

Consciousness, in the esoteric teaching, concerns the response of the form aspect in the three subhuman kingdoms:

1. To the world of living, vibratory and magnetic forms, in which each form is immersed.  Every form, through its radiation, affects every other form, and according to the quality of the form and according to its evolutionary status, so will be its response to its environment.

2. To the subjective world of forces which we call the etheric world.  All forms in all four kingdoms thus respond in some degree and manner.

3. To the world of quality, or of desire intent.  All forms in all kingdoms respond, en masse, to the urge or the desire aspect of divinity which lies at the root of the entire evolutionary process.  This is recognised as an incentive and is more or less self-directed in the human family; it is blindly followed by the forms in the other kingdoms, who respond according to the nature of their response mechanisms to these varying urges.

When we deal with the inflow of mental energy and with the forces emanating from the fifth plane of mind (higher mind, lower mind and the egoic intelligent entity) we enter more entirely into the domain of human evolution itself, and the vague word "consciousness" could well be superseded by the word "awareness."  In varying degree man is aware, but [136] only man is aware that he is aware.  His response apparatus responds to, and is influenced by, all the contacts to which the subhuman forms respond, but he is also aware of himself, and his response mechanism is capable of reacting, not only to external stimuli but to contacts emanating from within himself, from the Self so called, and also from the worlds of introspection and of mystical vision which seem sealed to all subhuman forms of life.

In the larger picture, with which we are not to occupy ourselves in this treatise, the planet constitutes the response apparatus of a superhuman Life, and that Life responds consciously to impacts emanating from the solar system as a whole, and from certain constellations (embodied Lives) with which our solar system is linked.  Similarly the solar Logos functions through the medium of that gigantic response apparatus which is bounded by the ring-pass-not of a solar system.  Each form, from that of the tiniest atom to that of a vast constellation, is an embodiment of a life, which expresses itself as consciousness, awareness, and responsive sentiency through the medium of some type of response mechanism.  Thus we have the establishing of a universe of lives, interacting and interrelated, all of them conscious, some of them self-conscious, and others group-conscious, but all grounded in the universal mind, all possessing souls, and all presenting aspects of the divine Life.

Life, quality, appearance remain thus the primal triplicity. Appearance is objective, and forms have been studied scientifically, analysed and classified, for ages.  Now we are introverting and introspecting, and have the commencement of a cycle wherein the world of quality and of meaning will be subjected to a similar investigation and classification.  This will result in the giving of new values to life, to an enriching of our understanding, and will produce, as a result, the growth and substitution of the intuition for the intellect.

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May I urge upon all to live more continuously in the world of meaning and less in the world of appearances?  It is a truer world and less full of illusion.  When the understanding is developed, when men have learnt to see below the surface and have cultivated true vision, then we shall have the steady emergence of the quality of the soul in all forms and the relative subsiding into the background of the power of the form nature.  It is this world of meaning which it is the privilege of humanity to reveal, and all true esoteric students should be pioneers in this field.