Rosicrucian Society ™

The reason for the rudimentary state of this vehicle is, that it has been added to the human constitution more recently than the bodies previously mentioned. Evolution of form may be likened to the manner in which[pg 131]the juices in the snail first condense into flesh and later become a hard shell. When our present visible body first germinated in the spirit, it was a thought-form, but gradually it has become denser and more concrete until it is now a chemical crystallization. The vital body was next emanated by the spirit as a thought-form and is in the third stage of concretion which is etheric. The desire body is a still later acquisition. That also was a thought form at its inception, but has now condensed to desire stuff, and the mind, which we have only recently received, is still but a mere cloudy thought form.

Arms and limbs, ears and eyes are not necessary to use the desire body, for it can glide through space more swiftly than wind without such means of locomotion as we require in this visible world.

When viewed by spiritual sight, it appears that there are in this desire body a number of whirling vortices. We have already explained that it is a characteristic of desire stuff to be in constant motion, and from the main vortex in the region of the liver thereis a constant outwelling flow which radiates towards the periphery of this egg-shaped body and returns to the center through a[pg 132]number of other vortices. The desire body exhibits all the colors and shades which we know and a vast number of others which are indescribable in earthly language. Those colors vary in every person according to his characteristics and temperament and they also vary from moment to moment as passing moods, fancies or emotions are experienced by him. There is however in each one a certain basic color dependent upon the ruling star at the moment of his birth. The man in whose horoscope Mars is peculiarly strong usually has a crimson tint in his aura, where Jupiter is the strongest planet the prevailing tint seems to be a bluish tone, and so on with the other planets.

There was a time in the earth's past history when incrustation was not yet complete, and human beings of that time lived upon islands here and there, amid boiling seas. They had not yet evolved eyes or ears, but a little organ: the pineal gland, which anatomists have called the third eye, protruded through the back of the head and was a localised organ of feeling, which warned the man when he came too near a volcanic crater and thus enabled him to escape destruction. Since then the cerebral hemispheres have covered[pg 133]the pineal gland, and instead of a single organ of feeling, the whole body inside and out is sensitive to impacts, which of course is a much higher state of development.