Course VIII - Teaching 1: Beyond the Man
Man is not an automaton merely handled by chemical actions and reactions of his physiological state.
Behind visible and invisible forms of his cells, molecules and tissues, there are heat, magnetism, emotions, ideas and, above all, a spiritual and true being.
The human physical and soul body is not all in man; a moving and life-giving force, his source and support, is a vast field still entirely unknown. The science has painstakingly tried to attain it, with certain results.
Hypnotism, suggestion, magnetism, psychoanalysis and somato-therapy are the result of efforts made by scientists attempting further knowledge.
And this quest of the spiritual part in the individual being is as strenuous as wise and sensible men verify that the man goes on to suffer despite biological and microbial breakthroughs, progress in medicine and surgery, and asepsis and antibiotics.
Man is composed of physical body, soul body and spiritual body. The emotional and understanding soul is a mere vehicle of the Spirit, and the man cannot find his true happiness as he does not authenticate this fundamental truth.
Each man contains one spark of the Eternal Divinity, like the Sun reflected on each drop of dew.
The Spirit is God’s glow in man.
In his essence, man is a Spiritual Entity predestined to immortality by its higher nature, but since this Spiritual Entity works on several manifestation planes –both soul plane and material plane– he is in possession and determined by a free will.
A man may be good or bad and, if he wants, can make efforts or stop. In short, he is self-contained.
These inherent active qualities corroborated by the Spiritual Entity are the human soul that is visible and noticeable through the aspect and outer works of men.
The spirit is ever what it is, while soul may be pure or impure.
Man has been determined to become a perfect image of the Divine but his soul is continuously out of tune and stained by his contradictory senses that are his means to develop.
Here are means of the soul for its own purification and perfection: the gift of its strenuous will and the gift of the Divine Grace.
An individual thinks and feels, and discerns between one thought and the other, and between one emotion and the other by using his gift of the strenuous will. And by means of the gift of the Divine Grace and Higher Assistance, he knows the Spirit’s light and his positive past experiences, and is guided by those who have traveled through the Good Way of Salvation.
