ons, lit from time to
time with flashes of scarlet. Our better feelings reveal themselves in
finer colours; rose indicates love, blue, religious feeling, yellow,
intelligence, and violet, spirituality. The Theosophist believes that we
can be trained to see all this and illustrates it in coloured plates
which are, to the uninitiated, not over convincing. Beside the body of
physical existence and the astral body we possess also a mental body.
This is the seat of thought and mental action. In a sentence, maybe, the
theosophist is trying to say that we have a body for each phase of
personality through which we come into contact with the finer realities
of the ascending planes of existence, and that the matter of these
bodies is more subtly refined as we pass from mere sensation to higher
spiritual states.

So within the astral body there is the mental body which, says Mrs.
Besant, is of finer material than the astral as the astral is finer than
the physical. This is the body which answers by its vibrations to our
changes of thought. The mental body may be refined by fitting
disciplines as it is coarsened by evil thoughts. These thoughts may
become "veritable diseases and maimings of the mental body incurable
during its period of life." These bodies we discard in due time, the
physical at death and the astral when ready to enter the heaven world.
What becomes of the mental body Mrs. Besant does not say.

Beyond these are bodies which belong to man's timeless existence,
curiously named and obscurely defined. There is apparently a causal body
which is possibly the vehicle of will and, more involved still, a
super-spiritual body which is the reality of God deep within us, and the
carrier and vehicle of our supreme and enduring personal values. All
this is a curious enough mingling of psychology, a subtle materialism,
and unbounded speculation; it is equally beyond proof and denial, though
for the proof of it the theosophist offers the testimony of those whose
senses are so refined by peculiar disciplines as to see in and about
physical form a play of light and colour which are themselves the
revelation of mental and emotional states. We literally go about,
according to this testimony, "trailing clouds of glory" or of gloom.
While for the denial of it there is the deep-seated protest of Western
reason, that personality, complex as it is, cannot possibly be so
bafflingly complex as this.

_The West Accepts Suffering as a Cha