rtheless, the power to get themselves
unwrapped. Our wrappings are our bodies, but we do not begin to
understand Theosophy if we think of body in the ordinary sense; our
physical body is only one and that the coarsest of the seven veils, for
there are seven here also, in which the true soul is enmeshed. We have
really seven bodies and we are not any one of them though each of them
is useful and each one of them puts us in touch with a certain order of
existence. Some of these bodies are mortal, others of them belong to the
truly enduring order.

Now we are lost here unless we recognize the profound difference between
all our usual ways of thinking or talking and the wisdom of Theosophy.
Theosophy begins at the top and comes down, at least until it reaches
our present world; it also begins at the inside and works out. We think
of our physical bodies as the instruments, on one side at least, through
which the physical world communicates with us, but for the theosophist
they are only instruments through which we communicate with the world.
Not quite so, however, for Theosophy recognizes the give and take of
experience. The soul may slip out of the physical body in sleep and
it--our physical body--is at the best a stupid, imprisoning, misleading
sort of a husk which has its practical uses but ought by no means to be
taken too seriously.[67] Its coarse matter may be refined by discipline
and diet and apparently the physical body of a vegetarian is a finer
instrument than the physical body of one who feeds on the flesh of
animals.

[Footnote 67: For a striking modern phrasing of this see Edward
Carpenter's Free Verse "The Stupid Old Body."]

_But Becomes Deeply Entangled Itself_

The physical body has also an etheric double which duplicates in a more
subtle way the constitution of the physical body. This is the vehicle of
the life force, whatever that means. The physical body and its double
are in a rough way the vehicles of the give and take of physical
existence, but for the experiences of pain and pleasure and for the
dwelling place of the passions, desires and emotions, we have an astral
body. Here the theosophist makes much use of vibrations and colours, and
apparently our changing play of emotion is reflected in a play of colour
which puts the chameleon to shame and makes us in our most excited
moment rivals of the rainbow itself. The astral body shows upon occasion
browns, dark reds and greens and their combinati