Many students look upon the Higher Triad as a mysterious and almost unknowable terrain. Much is written about the personality, about kamic human nature, and the astral body. But how little we find, except in the scattered hints of our Teachers, to give us any definite picture of the Higher Triad and its vital relation to daily living.
If, however, we bring together from various sources even a few of these many hints a more definite outline begins to shape itself. We suddenly find ourselves standing at the frontier of a new country. It is a region whose hidden valleys and shadowy foothills lead the vision to the uplands of morning and the pinnacled splendor of the Mystic Mountains of the East.
Now whence and what is our Buddhic principle? We are told that we derive our seven principles from the seven great principles of the Cosmos. This of course does not mean that we are like seven passive cups into which are poured a portion of each of the Cosmic Principles themselves.
A closer study of The Secret Doctrine and Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy leads us to see the Universe as a close-knit organism made up of seven ranges of beings. These seven ranges of beings are the seven principles of the Cosmos. Each of these ranges has its own particular kind of life-atoms. The life-atoms of the highest are so far beyond our understanding that we cannot even conceive of what they are. But we know a good deal about the life-atoms of the lowest of the seven because they are the informing entities behind our own and the Earth's physical atoms. And those other inconceivably high spiritual life-atoms cluster together, much as physical atoms do, to form the bodies, or more accurately the vehicles, which clothe each of the three highest principles of the Cosmos.
But we are studying only our Buddhic principle and its derivations. So let us confine ourselves as far as possible to the Buddhic hierarchy of our Universe. At the heart of this hierarchy dwells the Primordial or Adi-Buddhi, from which all the other Buddhic beings of that hierarchy stem. At the beginning of a Cosmic period of evolution when the moment comes for the appearance or emanation of the second Cosmic principle all these Buddhic essences or beings are thrown off by the central or Adi-Buddhi. They form its vehicles, its spiritual, psychological, and substance-vehicles with each its own organism of corresponding life-atoms.
From certain of the highest of these almost inconceivably high Buddhic entities proceeds in due course the emanation of Mahat, the so-called Universal Mind. But Mahat is no abstraction. Mahat is itself a great range or hierarchy, the sum of all Manasic or egoic entities in the Universe. These are all solar gods, of various ranges of intelligence and power. And each in similar fashion is clad in its appropriate vehicle of solar life-atoms.
It is from some of the lower ranges of these Buddhic and Manasic solar energies that man derives his Buddhi-Manas. That, again, does not mean that these Buddhic and Manasic essences of ours are poured into us by higher beings. It means that my Buddhi and your Buddhi are as it were life-atoms belonging to the vehicles of certain ranges of these Buddhic and Manasic solar gods. It is I believe in this sense that we are, as Dr. de Purucker has told us, "bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh" of the Universe.
Thus we see whence we derive our spiritual heredity. We are divine. In our innermost we are life-atoms of the gods. The Inner God at the apex and center of our consciousness is a living part, an emanation, a life-atom, of the Solar Hierarchy. But we are not yet that Inner God. We are still but human souls. But the human soul is the vehicle on this earth of that Inner God. We can even so think and live that the psychological life-atoms which form the apparatus of the human soul may be transmuted into the solar essence. And even our physical atoms may be made as if transparent to the light of the divinity within. It is all a matter of the right kind of emotional and thought vibrations, as we have often been told by our Teachers.
Just here it is interesting to bring together a fact established by science with a fact stated on page 50 of Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy. We are told by science that the sun is made of radiant matter and that the life of its every atom consists in spending itself in the radiation of solar energy. In the passage referred to from Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy it is stated that the sun is "physical matter in its sixth state" — that is, in its Buddhic state. The nucleus of the Sun, "a particle or a solar atom of primal matter-stuff, or spirit-stuff, is matter in the seventh state counting upwards . . ."
Thus the Sun in its activity is essentially Buddhic — giving itself ceaselessly for all the beings in its solar hierarchy in the spiritual and magnetic energies which keep its dependent ranges of beings in balance and health.
This is the foundation of all Buddhi-magic, this essential activity and law of sacrifice of our Father-Sun. And if we would know the spiritual Sun within ourselves we must learn to practise for ourselves this same magic. It begins with impersonal love; with, "the calm, unbroken forgetfulness of the lower self for all time," as W. Q. Judge expressed it. It will mean never doing or saying anything, or feeling or thinking anything at the expense of others. It means no criticism, no cankering hard feelings or corroding resentments. It implies first the desire and then the power to give without measure and to expect for one's self nothing.
And what does this magic develop in us in place of the fugitive rewards of ordinary personal life? First of all, peace of heart. Such peace that once a man has glimpsed it he will never again be satisfied until he has entered permanently into the heart of that blessed impersonal silence. For that man will be healed of all fevers, the swelled head of praise and the bitter pain of resented criticism and personal injuries. Fear will depart from him, for his spiritual possessions are himself and cannot be taken from him. No loss will be possible to him. For he will realize himself consciously united to all he loves and will never know the sorrow of ordinary personal bereavement. And the only failure that can afflict him and the only suffering he can truly feel will be the failures and the sufferings of that humanity to whose welfare he has dedicated himself.