The Ten Stages of Soul Consciousnes

III. The Five Groups of Souls
( The Ten Stages of Soul Consciousness )
[.....]

We enter, therefore, upon a brief consideration of a subject that, to the ordinary psychologist and student who is not familiar with the occult teaching and terms, will sound fanciful and unintelligent. The reason for this is that we are considering the origin of the souls which are expressing themselves through human beings, of the selves who are functioning through form and are therefore intangible and –scientifically speaking– non-provable. They are only to be inferred by those who can accept inference, deduction and conclusions which cannot be demonstrated, with the type of human equipment now in use. Modern psychology, speaking generally, regards the soul in one or another of the following ways:

1. Either non-existent, the only obvious and provable thing being the intelligent mechanism.

2. As being the sum total of the conscious reactions of the cells of the body — the sentiency of the organism, in other words.

3. As a gradually evolving self, conveying life and, as time elapses, awareness; it is regarded as being conditioned by the body and as a product of the evolution of that [Page 202] body during the ages. It does not, however, exist in the lower types of human beings, and it possibly possesses immortality, but that is not provable and may not be posited as a fact.

4. As a definite Self, an entity, informing a body, functioning at various levels of human consciousness, and having continuity, immortality and potentiality.

The occult teaching accepts all these hypotheses as correct, but as relative in time and space, and as having reference to different forms of divine life and to differing aspects of those forms. It is with the occult teaching, right or wrong, that we are at present engaged, and our premises and conclusions can be stated in the following propositions:

[...1-4...]

5. These souls, cycling through various forms of life in the long evolutionary process arrive eventually at full, self-conscious existence. By this we mean that they are self-determined, self-conditioned, and self-aware. They are also conscious of and responsive to their environment.

6. Once this conscious awareness is achieved, then progress becomes more rapid. It should be borne in mind that many human beings are not thus aware. The groupings which arise out of this awareness (limiting our ideas entirely to those within the radius of the human family) can be expressed as follows:

[TEN STAGES]

1. The souls who live but whose consciousness sleeps. These are the dormant human beings whose intelligence is of such a low order, and their awareness of themselves and of life is so dim and nebulous, that only the lowest forms of human existence come into this category. Racially, nationally, and tribally they do not exist as pure types, but occasionally such a person emerges in the slums of our great cities. They are like a "throw back" and never appear among what are called the natural savages, or the peasantry.

2. The souls who are simply aware of physical plane life and of sensation. These people are slow, inert, inarticulate, bewildered by their [Page 204] environment, but they are not bewildered, as are the more advanced and emotional types, by events. They have no sense of time or of purpose; they can seldom be trained along any mental line, and they very rarely exhibit skill in any direction. They can dig and carry, under direction; they eat, sleep and procreate, following the natural instincts of the animal body. Emotionally, however, they are asleep, and mentally they are totally unawakened. These too are relatively rare, though several thousands of them can be found upon our planet. They can be recognised through their complete incapacity to respond to emotional and mental training and culture.

3. The souls who are beginning to integrate and who are emotionally and psychically alive. In them, of course, the animal nature is awake and the desire nature is becoming rampant. These people are to be found in all races to a small extent.... These are child souls, and though the mental equipment is there and some of them can be trained to use it, the preponderance of the life emphasis is entirely upon physical activity as it is motivated by the desire for satisfaction of some kind, and by a shallow "wish-life" or desire nature, almost entirely oriented towards the physical life. These souls are the modern correspondences to the old Lemurian cultures.

4. The souls who are primarily emotional. The mind nature is not functioning strongly, and only rarely does it swing into activity, and the physical body is slipping steadily into the realm of the unconscious. In every race and nation there are millions of such souls in existence. They may be regarded as the modern Atlanteans.

5. Those souls who can now be classed as intelligent human beings, capable of mental application, if trained, and showing that they can think when need arises. They are still, nevertheless, predominantly emotional. They constitute the bulk of modern humanity at this time. They are the average citizens of our modern world, — good, well-intentioned, capable of intense emotional activity, with the feeling nature almost over-developed, and oscillating between the life of the senses and that of the mind. They swing between the poles of experience. Their lives are spent in an astral turmoil, but they have steadily increasing interludes wherein the mind can momentarily make itself felt, and thus at need effect important decisions. These are the nice good people, who are, nevertheless, largely controlled by the mass consciousness, because they are relatively unthinking. They can be regimented and standardised with facility by orthodox religion and government and are the "sheep" of the human family.

6. The souls who think, and who are minds. These are steadily increasing in number and gaining in power as our educational processes and our scientific discoveries bring results, and expand human awareness. They constitute the cream of the human family, and are the people who are achieving success in some department of human life. They are writers, artists, thinkers in various fields of human knowledge and aspiration, politicians, religious leaders, scientists, skilled workers and artisans, and all those who, though in the front rank, yet take ideas and propositions and work with them for the ultimate benefit of the human family. They are the world aspirants, and those who are beginning to get the ideal of service into their consciousness.

7. Those souls whose sense of awareness on the physical plane is now of such an order that they can pass on to the Probationary Path. They are the mystics, conscious of duality, torn between the pairs of opposites, but who are yet unable to rest until they are polarised in the soul. These are the sensitive, struggling people, who long for release from failure and from existence in the world today. Their mind natures are alive and active but they cannot yet control them as they should and the higher illumination remains as yet a joyous hope and final possibility.

8. Souls whose intelligence and love nature is becoming so awakened and integrated that they can begin to tread the Path of Discipleship [disciplined heart & mind]. They are the practical mystics, or the occultists, of modern times.

9. The souls who are initiate into the mysteries of the kingdom of God. These are souls who are not only conscious of their vehicles of expression, the integrated personality, and conscious also of themselves as souls, but they know, past all controversy, that there is no such thing as "my soul and your soul," but simply "the Soul". They know this not only as a mental proposition, and as a sensed reality, but also as a fact in their own consciousness.

10. The souls who have achieved release from all the limitations of the form nature and who dwell eternally in the consciousness of the One Soul, withdrawn from identification with any aspiration of the form life, no matter how highly developed. They can and do use the form at will for the purposes of the general good. These are the Masters of Life, the perfected adepts. Higher than this we need not go, except by inference. A detailed analysis is not, however, in order, owing to the limitations of men's minds. The above is only a wide generalisation, and the various groupings shade into each other in a bewildering way. The varieties of intermediate types are myriad, but this analysis will serve as a skeleton structure upon which to build.

7. In the development of the [human] race at this time, we can now study the types, the qualities of these souls, the apparatus of response which they must use, and the nature of the mechanism of contact which they have constructed in order to enable them to function in the world as we know it today [ personality construct / soul-infused personality / antahkarana — PK]. Science and religion together are producing that latest of the sciences which we call psychology. For this, the time is now ripe. (Esoteric Psychology II, pp.201-208)

[NOTA BENE]
Soul contact —
If the patient is not at the stage in evolution ... where he can contact his own soul, the work of the healer is rendered inevitably futile. The sphere of action, therefore, of the spiritual healer is strictly limited to those who have faith. Faith, however, is the "evidence of things not seen" [ the inner world and inner life of the spiritual student — PK ]; that evidence is largely lacking in the majority. Faith is not wishful thinking or an engineered hope. It is evidence of a well-grounded conviction. (Esoteric Healing, p. 525)

Inspiration: Alice A. Bailey, Treatise on the Seven Rays - Esoteric Psychology II, pp. 201-208. NY: Lucis Trust.
www.lucistrust.org/en/publications_store

Peter Kubaska & SEVENSUNS/AWE @ TS in Boston — 1967/1987 to 2022