When the spirit has made its choice, it descends into the second
heaven where it is instructed by the Angels and Archangels how to build an archetype of the
body which it will later inhabit upon earth. Also here we note the operation of the great
law of justice which decrees that we reap what we sow. If our tastes are coarse and sensual,
we shall build an archetype which will express these qualities; if we are refined and of
aesthetic taste, we shall build an archetype correspondingly refined, but no one can obtain
a better body than he can build. Then, as the[pg 185]architect who builds a house in which he afterwards lives, will suffer
discomfort if he neglects to properly ventilate it, so also the spirit feels disease in a
poorly constructed body, and as the architect learns to avoid mistakes and remedy the
short-comings of one house when building another, so also the spirit which suffers from
defects in its body, learns in time to build better and better vehicles.
In the Region of Concrete Thought, the spirit also draws to
itself materials for a new mind. As a magnet draws iron filings but leaves other substances
alone, so also each spirit draws only the kind of mind-stuff which it used in its former
life, plus that which it has learned to use in its present post-mortem state. Then it
descends into the Desire World where it gathers material for a new desire body such as will
express appropriately its moral characteristics, and later it attracts a certain amount of
ether which is built into the mold of the archetype constructed in the second heaven and
acts as cement between the solids, liquids and gaseous material from the bodies of parents
which forms the dense physical body of a child, and in due time the latter is brought to
birth. [pg 186]
Birth
and Child Life.
It must not be imagined, however, that when the little body of a
child has been born, the process of birth is completed. The dense physical body has had the
longest evolution, and as a shoemaker who has worked at his trade for a number of years is
more expert than an apprentice and can make better shoes and quicker, so also the spirit
which has built many physical bodies produces them quickly, but the vital body is a later
acquisition of the human being. Therefore we are not so expert in building that vehicle.
Consequently it takes longer to construct that from the materials not used up in making the
lining of the archetype, and the vital body is not born until the seventh year. Then the
period of rapid growth commences. The desire body is a still later addition of composite
man, and is not brought to birth until the fourteenth year when the desire nature expresses
itself most strongly during so-called “hot” youth, and the
mind, which makes man man, does not come to birth until the twenty-first year. In law that
age is recognized as the earliest time he is fitted to exercise a franchise. [pg 187]
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