e will then recognize why an
understanding of the cosmic occurrences narrated in this book, is
necessary to man's understanding of humanity itself and its life process.
In fact, we can understand the physical body only when we recognize the
manner in which it has been built up through the developments undergone in
the Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth periods, and we understand the etheric
body when we follow its evolution through the Sun, Moon, and Earth stages
of evolution. We further comprehend what is bound up with our
earth-development at present, if we can grasp how all things proceed by
the process of gradual evolution. Occult training places us in a position
to recognize the connection between everything that is within man and the
corresponding facts and beings existing in the world external to him. For
it is a fact that each principle of man stands in some connection with the
rest of the world. The outlines of these subjects could only be briefly
sketched in this book. It must however be borne in mind that the physical
body had, at the time of the Saturn development, for instance, no more
than its rudimentary beginnings. Its organs--such as the heart, lungs, and
brain--developed later during the Sun, Moon, and Earth periods, for which
reason heart, lungs and brain are related to the evolutionary process of
Sun, Moon and Earth.

It is the same with the members of the etheric body, the sentient body,
and the sentient soul. Man is the outcome of the entire world surrounding
him, and every part of his constitution corresponds to some event, to some
being in the external world. At a certain stage of his development the
occult student comes to a realization of this relation of his own being to
the great cosmos, and this stage of development may in the occult sense be
termed a becoming aware of the relationship of the little world, the
microcosm--that is, man himself--to the great world, the macrocosm. And when
the occult student has struggled through to such cognition, he may then go
through a new experience; he begins to feel himself united, as it were,
with the entire cosmic structure, although he remains fully conscious of
his own independence. This sensation is a merging into the whole world, a
becoming "at one" with it, yet _without_ losing one's own individual
identity. Occult science describes this stage as the "becoming one with
the macrocosm." It is important that this union should not be imagined as
one in which