Occult Anatomy

Physical Body as a Universal Symbol part 1

This is the first of a Series of six talks on the compound nature of the human being and because of the
factors involved all way along and make a sort of preamble out of this setting the foundation as it was
more or less laid for us by Paracelsus von holenheim. According to Paracelsus, there are 2 books: The
Great Book of the Universe, and the Little Book, which is MAN. To Paracelsus and many other, positions
of that early period, the human body was the most available text for the whole world, for all the things
that happen everywhere, anytime. Because somewhere within the Microcosm, which is MAN, all the
processes of the Macrocosm are unfolded.
George Gallup, the man who did the Gallup Pull, and was a great assembler of information, said
that to him it was utterly inconceivable that the amount of information in the human body is available
to major every other mystery of the Universe.
We have lived with this body to find it mostly creeky and a little uncertain, and do not realise
the tremendous scope of wonders that are taught by the body to help us to chop the Universe and all of
its processes.
It was of course Paracelsus who declared that there were 3 parts to the human body, as there
are 3 parts to the world. There is the SPIRITUAL PART, the invisible (calm?) nature, there is the LOWER
PART, the Body, the physical form, also exists, and is to be found throughout nature. And between these
2, MAN and SPACE, there is a MIDDLE DISTANCE, which has been called the MIND, or the REASONING
FACULTY. So man is Spirit, Mind, Soul and Body.
The Universe is Spirit, Mind, Soul and Body. And these departments or divisions were the basis
of most ancient reasoning and reckoning. But there is an interesting point that I dont think anyone is
making. Ive never seen it made, and Ive never seen a real, definite effort to understand it in the large
and important terms with which it can be involved.
Actually, there are 2 functions in Man that we have to consider: THOUGHT and MEMORY. The
individual is the THINKER who REMEMBERS. Now this is very ordinary, it sounds very simple, but it is the
source of infinite confusion. The Thinker is an entirely different function of the compound human being
from the Digester, or Memorizer. All memorized facts are static. All facts which arise from the direct
observation of reality are, we say, Active. Now the development of the Memory has to a great degree
burdened mankind from the beginning of time. We are depending more and more upon what we
remember, and less and less on the original thinking of which we are capable.
The Thinking is an active process, whatever is thought may be later recorded and put on paper,
or on a cylinder, or stored away in the memory. Memory is a STOREHOUSE. It is of very little use unless
there is something to store in it. And this is where the weakness has been in our modern thinking. When
we go back to the ancients, when life was comparatively simple, and carvings on the walls of caves were
about all the records we had, the factor of THOUGHT was much more dynamic than it is today, because
the native of that time had no memories to fall back upon, there was no previous history of the world in
which he lived. There was no previous account of the adventures of others like himself because he had
no record and no written form to tell him what to do in an emergency. He was gradually forced to a very
positive position: he had to THINK. He had to try to find the answers for himself, by himself. He had to
try to figure out what to do when the cave bear attacked him. He had to find out what to do when he
was stricken by an ailment or suffered from an accident. These things could not be taken out of books.
He could not consult a position. He knew no way to function except through his own personal initiative.
He had, however, one factor in his favour. He was capable of an intimate and immediate religious
reaction. Not knowing what to do, and where to find help, he called upon the Deities, or from the
Spirits, or from the mysteries of the Air to give him advice. And out of this we have the SEERS and the
SYBILS. Those who sought to lead the individual in ways of thoughtfulness before the individual was
really doing any basic thoughtfulness for himself.
Therefore we have THOUGHT, which is the process of examination, and we have MEMORY. Now
if we apply this to the human body, we will find that the thought is still working in the laboratory, and
the other, the memory, is in hundreds of volume of recorded research. Now these hundreds of volumes
sound very very important, but one of the things we have discovered in the course of time, is that all
these volumes put together do not give us the immediate answers that we want for the problems of
daily living. We have got to think today in order to survive, and all the books in the world cannot bestow
salvation upon us, because these books are memories. Memories have come and arise from the past,
and our problems arise right now, here. We have to use new agencies of thought, we have to use the
mind like we have never used it before if we want to solve the problems of our time. The only thing the
memory can bestow is a certain amount of consolation, a lead or two as to where in the past something
similar may have occurred. But if we go back to the past to that something that may have occurred, you
will find the situation so basically difficult and different that we do not find the answers there that we
are seeking now. Science, therefore, is a great recorder of knowledge. But in the last analysis science is
also hopelessly defendant upon original thought. And thought is the problem we are all working with
very closely and very sincerely today. Now lets see what all this means in terms of the human being. We
know the individual, everyone living in this world, has the capacity to think. And to think is to give an
expression to a basic mental principle within ourselves. This basic mental principle is not infalible. It
does not mean that we can forget everything else and play by thinking. But it means that this mental
faculty is indispensable in an effort to understand the physical phenomenon of life. It cannot solve
problems beyond itself, but it is very necessary to achieve the immediate information we need for daily
living. So we try to figure out how to do some original thinking. Now, original thinking means that we
have to have a disciplined mind. It cannot drift around in the vagueries of uncertainty. We cannot have a
mind laidened with superstition, and expect to serve us in time of emergency. There is tremendous
importance therefore in mental training, in mental organisation, and the preparation of the mind
through education of the mind for the responsibilities of personal decision.
In the present educational system we have virtually no mental training. In there we are
depending upon text books which are nothing but memory, what somebody else said long ago. You give
that to the children of today and expect them to find the answers to their problems. These answers are
not there. They are in Spirit, perhaps, theyre in substance or in symbolism partly expressed, but the
average young person today does not know how to take memories and to transform them into dynamic
immediate decisions. Now, working with this problem, and working with the memory factor that is so
very, very, important, we then come to learn a very interesting, and I think a very profitable conclusion.
Today, we are working to get our way out of a complicated situation. We are seeking more and more
answers to the basic problems of life. So what have we done? We have finally (to crown) everything
else, invented a computer. And what is a computer? It is nothing but mechanical memory. The computer
cannot answer any question that has not already been answered. It cannot come to any conclusion
which cannot be gained or brought back from previous conclusions. The computer is not a Thinker. It is a
Rememberer. We can put great volumes of statistics into the computer, and they will come out in a bit
more orderly way, but all the conclusions in the world will not teach us how to get out of debt, because
it cannot create Thought. It cannot take ideas and transform them into immediate active reality. It can
give us all kind of hunches and suggestions and opinions and beliefs, but they are all based up on
something that was known before. Something that existed in the time when the Chinese priests were
shaking their oracle gongs. So we have here a new way of remembering. And it probably is going to take
over very heavily our educational system. But what is it done, what are we going to have? Are we
actually going to have an answer to everything other than maybe a more efficient way of doing
something weve been doing all the time. We cannot expect the computer to think. And we laughingly
believe that it thinks. We like to hope that it could think. If it only think for us we might be out of
trouble, because weve never been able to think for ourselves. This is really a dissolutioning and
discouraging discovery. But at the present time we are very carefully educating people for the problems
of computerization. We are going to be able to feed all kinds of facts into the instrument, and its going
to come out with all kinds of answers. But these answers are not going to be the (yarn?) the sphere of
the physical information that we pour into the computer. Now if we poured into the computer all that
we know about man, we would probably come out with some rather complicated findings. We would
realise that probably none of us have ever thought of all that is thinkable about the humans fate. We
would also find a certain number of facts, which are in themselves very important. Facts have to be
there, but facts are also static, unless the mind renders them dynamic. The mind has to put life into
facts. It has to take the facts and use them to accomplish a specific purpose, or the fact is not useful. So
we can get all kinds of facts, for instance we can be told all by a computer, that we should love each
other, but that does not end the war. We can be told by the computer that it is perfectly possible to do a
better job at bookkeeping than we do now. This can be accepted and will prove to be true. So we will
accept the fact about the bookkeeping, but we know that we have no answer about the war. All of these
thing remind us that no instrument that man develops of himself can be more enlightened than the
person that develops it.
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