The Seven Human Powers - Chapter 1

The heart is the dwelling place of that which is the essence of the universe... If you draw aside the veils of the stars and the spheres, you will see that all is one with the Essence of your own pure soul.

—Farid al-Din Attar

Many stories are told about Nasrudin, the wise fool of Sufi tales. Some of them are traditional and ancient, and some have a contemporary flavor, undoubtedly invented more recently. In one story of the latter sort, Nasrudin goes to the bank to cash a check. The teller asks him for identification. So Nasrudin whips out a mirror from his pocket, looks into it, and says, "Oh, yeah, that's me, all right."

We are often like Nasrudin. In our times, we are under the admonition inscribed at the entrance to the shrine of the Delphic oracle: "Know thyself." But if someone asks us who we are, we are likely to say something like, "I'm a teacher," or "a business person," or "an American," or "a liberal." We tend to look superficially at a reflection of ourselves in our accomplishments and role in the world, at what we do rather than what we are in our innermost being. Like Nasrudin, we say, "Oh, yeah, that's me."

Our century has seen unprecedented development in knowledge about the psyche, our inner being. We know that there are aspects of our inner life of which we are not conscious. We know the almost insuperable strength of automatic habits formed by conditioning. We are becoming aware of the powerful connection of our bodies with our thoughts, attitudes, and emotions, especially with regard to health. We are learning about extrasensory perception, by which people know things they have had no opportunity to learn through the usual channels. We have even glimpsed states of consciousness in which superhuman feats are possible and states of meditation in which profound alterations of mental and bodily functions have been measured. Psychology has unearthed a wealth of information that helps us know and understand ourselves.

Yet there are still depths and layers within us that psychology is only beginning to suspect. Freud introduced the concept of the subconscious as the realm of our worst antisocial selves, the sewer of the mind and heart. C. G. Jung expanded that idea to include the collective unconscious, including the memories and capacities that all humans have shared since the birth of humankind. Roberto Assagioli and other more recent transpersonal psychologists have added the concept of the superconscious, the part of ourselves that, though unconscious, is grander and more noble than our ordinary conscious selves. Transpersonal psychology now includes parts of the Self that transcend the individual—universal experiences of higher consciousness that are not limited to a personal mind.

Traditional wisdom has inspired some recent psychologists, whose work is throwing new light on human nature and enriching the knowledge that has come down to us through the ages. An adept teacher of modern Theosophy offered "to exhume the primeval strata of man's being, his basic nature, and lay bare the wonderful complications of his inner self—something never to be achieved by . . . psychology in its ultimate expression" (Mahatma Letters  68). Yet transpersonal psychologists are exploring just such "primeval strata."

Some parts of the "primeval strata' have already been discovered. C. G. Jung defined four human functions: sensation, feeling, intuition, and thinking. Huston Smith ( Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World's Religions , 60-95), an authority on the world's religions, writes of four levels in nature and in humans that most spiritual traditions recognize. The highest is the infinite, the celestial void, unbounded, undifferentiated. The next level is the celestial, in which individual minds can be distinguished from the universal mind, although they are not separate from it. The third level is the intermediate or psychic plane, the locus of subtle bodies. And the lowest is the terrestrial plane, whose dense material bodies derive from the subtler ones of the third level. Esoteric traditions throughout history have understood in precise detail the many functions and levels of consciousness. They offer a model for the realms that comprise the human psyche, with its depths and shallows, its beauties and horrors. These traditions have also taught us how to develop latent aspects of the self and how to awaken our finer unconscious potentials.

Buddhism, for example, refers to material and psychic elements or "aggregates" that make up the individual mind-body. They are the physical body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations (or emotions and thoughts), and consciousness of the other aggregates. Vedanta philosophy teaches about "sheaths," which are bodies or vehicles of consciousness at various levels. They include a "food sheath," the physical body; a sheath made of vital forces (prana); a sheath for the mind and senses, including emotions; a sheath of higher understanding; and a sheath of bliss. The ancient Egyptians knew how various aspects of personality function in life and death. They held that the physical body is inhabited by the ba, its animating principle of spirit, and the ka, the magnetic powers we call the personality, which can gravitate to either the higher or lower principles; as well as a number of other powers, including the shade or ghost (khaibit), which persists for a while after death. Plato taught that the passions and affections are at different levels within us and have different functions in our lives. Today we might say that the passions are personal and what he called the affections are transpersonal, or not limited only to our personal concerns.

Theosophy, which is a modern statement of the wisdom of esoteric philosophy, offers a clear and comprehensive map of the different layers and functions of the human psyche. These basic powers are termed "principles." Principles are not things but rather powers or ways in which our consciousness can function. All the principles are inherent in everyone. Some principles are developed and consciously used. Others are partially developed and used only to a limited extent. Some are only potential and not used at all. Some principles have not yet dawned into human consciousness, except in a few rare individuals who are ahead of our species as a whole.

The principles include the physical body; the emotional or desire nature (kama in Sanskrit, also called the "astral body"); the mind (manas) with its concrete, everyday functions and its abstract, philosophical aspects; intuition and a sense of unity (buddi); and pure consciousness (atma), which is the ground of being and encompasses will in its most profound sense: the will to be.

All the other principles are inherent in the last, atma, which is their spiritual core. If we think of ourselves as atma, as pure consciousness without content, just knowingness or the ability to be aware, we might think of the principles as television channels on different frequencies that we can access. When we as atma tune in to WBOD, for instance, we feel the gurgling in our stomach, our chest rising and falling as we breathe, our muscles contracting as we walk. All our senses come into sharp focus. We see how the green of the pine is different from the green of the oak. We are aware of the fragrance of a rose and the pungency of onions. The tinkle of the wind chimes and the auditory quality of our partner's voice come in loud and clear. We are acutely aware of physicality and sense experience.

When we tune in to KICK, we get emotional highs and lows as our emotions rise and fall. Peppy music exhilarates us, or news of a friend's misfortune overwhelms us with sorrow. We are aware of those nuances of anxiety, jealousy, or irritation that we usually ignore. We are in our emotions.

KNOW highlights our intellect and thoughts. On this channel, a flash of memory reminds us to pick up our dry cleaning. Questions about changing our job stay on the screen for a while. A puzzlement appears, raised by a book we are studying. Here we are aware of thoughts of all kinds—logical and irrational, cosmic and personal, significant and trivial.

WAHA shows flashes of intuition. The screen may light up with a sudden insight as to the meaning of a recent illness and how we should change our lifestyle. We may see the cyclic nature of our life and of nature from a new perspective. Sometimes we may even see the oneness and unity among ourselves, nature, and the entire cosmos—or even within the PTA board, in spite of its heated disagreements.

Theosophical writings usually refer to seven principles. H. P. Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society and its seminal teacher, in her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine , and in other writings, refers to seven principles. Two of the principles she lists are associated with the physical body: the "vital body" or "etheric double," the physical body's subtler counterpart, and the universal energy or life force (prana) that permeates every level of being, but is especially connected with the vital body. Seven Human Powers highlights five of the principles and covers the vital body and energy with the physical body in chapter 3. The Sanskrit terms for the principles are given below so that the reader may be familiar with them, as they are used in most Theosophical books. They are widely used because it is hard to find an exact English equivalent for many of them.

These principles are amazing powers, but we take most of them for granted because they are so common. Even ordinary mental powers—such as memory, delivery of the word we want, or the ability to grasp an idea—are mysterious and almost miraculous. Neuro-psychologists cannot explain them. But in a sense these powers are only shadows of our true identity. They reveal the light of atma, which, as Indian sage Shankaracharya says in The Crest Jewel of Wisdom, "causes all things to shine, but which all things cannot make to shine." Atma is the One Light that illumines all creation. The other principles reveal some of the powers of atma but are like two-dimensional representations or shadows that lack the fullness of the real thing. Still, the principles light up our inner being in the world. We can think of them as luminous shadows of our true being, or atma.

According to Theosophy, as well as to Vedanta and other Indian systems, "The reality behind all is Brahman, pure consciousness," as the Indian sage Shankaracharya put it. Atma, which is also pure consciousness, is one with Brahman, the ultimate Reality. Individual consciousness in its pure, unclouded state is one with God or the One Life that sustains the cosmos. In Indian philosophy, this fundamental Reality is referred to as sat-chit-ananda: being, knowing or consciousness, and joy. Ultimate Reality is an unbroken continuum of consciousness, and consciousness, not matter, is primary, the ground of all being.

Leading scientists are finding support for this ancient idea in contemporary quantum physics. Saul-Paul Sirag says, "There is only one consciousness in a cosmic sense." Fred Alan Wolf concurs that there is "one basic consciousness in which we are all one" (New Physics and Beyond [video], Mishlove). Amit Goswami goes farther when he states that consciousness is primary. "Consciousness is the ground of being; it is the one and only, the absolute" (The Self-Aware Universe, 72). This is the Theosophical position, and although these theorists do not claim to prove that position, their research and thought lends additional credence to the reality of one source-consciousness, from which comes everything that exists.

Although it is universal, this continuum also exists in individuals. As the Upanishads have it, atma is "greater than the great and smaller than the small." The states of consciousness we humans ordinarily experience are rooted in pure universal consciousness, but our minds become limited and clouded through involvement in our different principles and through conditioning. As Blavatsky (Secret Doctrine 1:15) put it, the One Reality is "the field of Absolute Consciousness, i.e., that Essence . . . of which conscious existence is a conditioned symbol." It is, however, possible to break through the limits of individual consciousness to the boundless One, as seers and mystics have reported, for "the mind, sense organs, and so on, are illumined by atma alone," according to Shankaracharya (Nikhilandanda, Self-Knowledge 143).

Intuition, mind, emotion, and body (with energy and form)—all the other principles—express something of the immense potential of atma. "The six principles [are] the outcome—the variously differentiated aspects—of the SEVENTH and ONE, the only reality in the Universe" (Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine 1:17). Although atma can be thought of as a continuum of consciousness, an unbroken field, it also expresses itself as points. Each individual is a point of localization in the universal field of atma. We can think of ourselves as a point in the eternal encased in different layers, the six lower principles, a white light surrounded by globes of different colors through which it shines.

The six principles plus atma can be grouped into three aspects of ourselves: the personality, the transpersonal Self or soul, and the spiritual core or atma. Theosophy gives a precise meaning to the term "personality"; it combines the functions of the body, the vital body and its energy, the emotions and desires, and the concrete, everyday part of the mind. You can easily recognize this aspect of the self as you function in daily life. When you make a to-do list, when you feel a surge of anxiety or excitement, when you want an ice-cream cone or a new car, when you feel energized or depleted, you are experiencing aspects of the personality. It is the most familiar part of ourselves.

According to C. G. Jung, the soul or subjective "inner personality," which stands outside time and space, consists of a certain "limited complex of functions." In Theosophy, too, though the soul or transpersonal Self is seen somewhat differently than from Jung's view, it is not vague and unformed. It has specific powers: the abstract, philosophical mind; the intuition or unity sense; and the spiritual will. You are familiar with these functions in yourself, but you use them less often than those of the personality. When you get a sudden rush of compassion, when you reach to understand the nature of an abstract idea, when the solution to a persistent problem dawns on you, when you act heroically without thinking of yourself, when you resolve to follow a spiritual path, when you are taken out of yourself by music or a sunset, you are calling on the powers of the transpersonal Self. Ken Wilber, a principal theorist in the transpersonal movement, refers to this level of experience as a deeper within and a wider beyond.

The transpersonal Self serves as a bridge between the personality and the pure transcendent unity of atma where there is no separate self. It is the locus of individuality, the refraction of the One Light into an individual ray. Many Theosophical sources use the term individuality for that soul or transpersonal Self.

The myth of Narcissus illustrates the relation between the personality and the soul or transpersonal Self. In this story, Narcissus, who is a beautiful youth, sees his reflection in a fountain where he goes to drink. Believing the reflection to be the nymph of the fountain, he falls in love with it. When he smiles, the reflection smiles back at him, and when he opens his arms to it, the reflection opens its arms to him. But when he plunges his arms into the water to embrace it, the reflection flees from his touch. When he finds his beloved unattainable, he pines away, dies, and his shade turns into a flower.

The myth is usually interpreted as a warning against self-love and narcissism. But in Hermetic Gnostic versions of the story, the soul projects its image into the world. It then falls in love with the image and thus becomes captured by the world. The transpersonal Self mistakes its temporary reflection, the personality, as something real that can be grasped and held on to. We become attached to our reflection in the personality, forgetting who we truly are. The Tibetan teacher Nyoshul Khenpo understood the myth of Narcissus in a similar way; he says that "beings become alienated, confused (like Narcissus), and through their own ignorance get lost in self-deception" (Natural Great Perfection, 110-11). The personality is only a temporary reflection of the soul. When we identify ourselves with it, we become limited to a small range of functions and powers and closed to our higher principles.

Atma, our deepest spiritual core, is outside the sphere of individual selfhood. It is universal and impersonal, one with the divine or Brahman, the one essence of all. We may have occasional intimations of the oneness of pure atma, which is consciousness itself, not colored by the principles, though normally we function only through the other principles.

Figure 2 depicts the principles grouped according to the levels of consciousness. Atma is represented in the chart as spiritual will, the will to be. The Theosophical teacher and social activist Annie Besant called will "the power aspect of consciousness." It is the charioteer that drives the horses of both the personality and the transpersonal Self.

Atma can also be thought of as the background on which table 2 is drawn, the consciousness behind each principle. Spiritual will brings into being the transpersonal Self, comprising intuition and the higher mind. From this level emanate the powers of the personality: lower mind, emotions, vital body, and energy. Finally, the physical body becomes solidified within these interpenetrating fields. Rather than reducing inner functions to the physical level as scientific materialism does, Theosophy and esoteric philosophy view the body as the outcome of the higher principles.

The transpersonal Self is a relatively permanent expression for the atmic consciousness as it is focused in each individual. From this level the personality is projected, and at death the locus of consciousness that we experience recedes to the level of the soul. After a period of gestation, another personality is projected into the world.

A human being, an animal, a plant, or even a stone cannot exist in isolation. The life of a maple tree in the forest, for example, depends on many other things. One of those is light from the sun, which travels through immense distances before it reaches the tree. The life cycle of the tree is coordinated with the earth's spin on its axis, which causes night and day, as the leaves give off oxygen in the light and carbon dioxide in the dark. The tree's supply of water comes from falling rain or lies buried as ground water. The rain comes from clouds that were formed from water vapor rising from oceans, rivers, and streams—some of the sources being far distant from the tree. The ground water, which feeds the tree's roots, is also part of the earth's water cycle, and the roots draw other forms of nourishment from below the earth's surface. The universal gravitational field anchors the tree on the earth, while the electromagnetic field is connected with the electrical activity in the tree's cells. You could say that the whole universe supports this one little tree. Nothing can exist alone and isolated, but everything partakes in the being of all things. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls this connection among all things "interbeing."

Although every being in the universe can exist only because of an intricate system of interconnections or "interbeing," at the present state of evolution of the human race, we tend to experience ourselves as isolated individuals. Our isolation is the result of identifying ourselves with our personality and its separative tendencies. We might think of ourselves in relation to our various principles as atma wearing a space suit to function in the world. The apparatus of this space suit at the level of the emotions and concrete mind is very sophisticated, resulting in our competency in the world of business and technology. But focusing on those outer levels tends to make us feel separated from other persons and confined within our own minds.

The suit works very well for its purpose, and we come to think of it as ourselves. But although it reveals the general shape of its wearer, it also conceals a great deal. We have to look through the window that covers the eyes to see the true individual. Atma is in there behind the physical, emotional, and mental apparatus, but atma is hard to find when covered over by the space suit.

In his studies of the human personality, C. G. Jung found that people who live in tribes have less independent thought and are more emotionally enmeshed in their group than those who live in more advanced social groups. For Jung, mature separation and a degree of independent individuality was a sign of growth. He called the process of becoming more independent "individuation." From the Theosophical perspective, we humans have the potential in our consciousness for both merging with the whole and maintaining relative independence, and we evolve from an unconscious oceanic state of oneness to a stage of relative separation and individualism, to a further stage of conscious merging.

Much of humanity has now passed the nadir of the separative tendency, and some are beginning to turn again toward a realization of oneness, but this time with mature realization of one's individuality. The practice of meditation in its many forms around the world today with an emphasis on unity, the overwhelming scientific evidence for interconnections, and an increasing recognition of the need for cooperation in every realm, including business and commerce, worldwide and locally, all bear witness to this growing realization. Though the tendency toward division and separation is still dominant, there are signs that a new consciousness is dawning.

The eventual goal of our sojourn in the many fields of being is to actualize their potentials in us, including our forgotten sense of unity. Blavatsky speaks of the monad, or atmic unit within us, as a "pilgrim" because it makes "an obligatory pilgrimage" or sacred journey through many kingdoms and levels of development. She defines monad as "that immortal part of man which reincarnates in the lower kingdoms and gradually progresses through them to Man and then to the final goal—Nirvana" (Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary 216). In the beginning, we humans are unitary consciousness with no sense of separation. Eventually, we become self-conscious, aware of ourselves as individuals. At the end of the journey, we are the same unitary consciousness but have become "individualized Self-Consciousness," in Blavatsky's words. This movement has been described as from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection to conscious perfection.

Myths and fairy tales about journeys depict this sojourn of our consciousness within the personality and body and its return home to atma. The story of Tom Thumb is one such tale.

Tom's father is a tailor and his mother spins thread. Tom, who was born prematurely, is no bigger than your thumb. Even though so small, he is eager to leave home and see the world. Among other adventures, Tom leads a horse drawing a cart by climbing into its ear and whispering to it. Tom collaborates with thieves by slipping between the bars of a window and handing money out to them. Later, he is swallowed by a cow that is fed hay in which Tom was sleeping. Tom's yelling inside the cow's stomach leads people to think the animal is possessed by evil spirits, so they slaughter her. But before Tom can escape from her stomach, he is swallowed by a wolf. Tom lures the wolf into his parents' kitchen by offering the wolf a meal if he will crawl through a drain. The wolf eats so much that he cannot fit into the drain to get out. Tom cries out in the wolf's stomach, and his father rescues him. His parents hug and kiss Tom and give him food and drink and new clothes. His journey is over and he is happy to be home.

The story is a fantastic comedy on the literal level. But if we look at it from a cosmic point of view, Tom's parents can be seen as creating the form side of the universe. The thread his mother spins represents the substance from which the cosmos is woven. The fabric with which his father, the tailor, works is woven from the thread. Tom's parents suggest Brahman or God creating the form side of the cosmos.

Atma is described in the Upanishads as "greater than the great," that is, universal, but also "smaller than the small," a focus of pure Consciousness buried in the heart of every living being. Atma is unformed and inexperienced in the world, as Tom was when he was born prematurely. Tom is eager to leave home and see the world, as the pilgrim in each of us is eager to embark on a life of experience.

The cow is an earth symbol that can represent the physical body Tom takes on. The horse, too, is a symbol of the body, and Tom's guiding it represents taking control of the appetites. Tom's falling in with thieves and his being swallowed by a wolf symbolize greed and gluttony, aspects of human nature that Tom has to deal with. When he eventually finds his way home, he tells his father, "I've been about in the world a lot. Thank heaven I can breathe fresh air again." The literal meaning of atma is "breath." Tom has returned to the pure air of atma.

Tom and we ourselves, as atma the pilgrim, unfold our inner latent powers as we journey through the many levels of experience. As Blavatsky put it, we ascend "through all the degrees of intelligence, from the lowest to the holiest archangel" (Secret Doctrine 1:17). Eventually, with our latent powers well developed, we reach the sacred goal of the pilgrimage, which is the realization of unity with the whole, not as unconscious sparks, but as fully Self-conscious individuals.

In the course of our journey, we gradually begin to realize who we really are. Attachments to purely personal concerns diminish, and we begin to sense the rich potentials of the higher mind, the intuition, and the spiritual will. We begin to take control of our personality and focus on the deeper realities of the transpersonal Self. We sense that the life of the Self is a richer, more satisfying way of being. Eventually we come to know ourselves as atma, limitless universal consciousness, empty and void in itself but able to function in us at any level.

Practices such as Yoga and meditation are designed to help us wake up to the reality of our true being in atma. They teach us to quiet the mind and find stillness at deep levels within. We slowly come to identify with that aspect of ourselves that is beyond the seemingly separative outer levels and rooted in the essence that permeates all. We come to sense unity within diversity, or as Blavatsky states, "from ONE light, seven lights" (Secret Doctrine 1:122). Atma is the true light of which all our various fields and powers are but luminous shadows, beautiful in themselves but only partial revelations of our essential being.