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b. Diseases of the Nervous system, due to the flow of energy to all parts of the body, directed by either the personality, some aspect of the personal lower self, or by the Soul, via the brain, are many and become acute as the disciple nears initiation or becomes an initiate. Apart from the physiological ills which this produces, there are many other conditions brought about by this inflow of force. The disciple becomes, for instance, overstimulated, and therefore overactive; he becomes unbalanced, and when I say this I do not refer to mental imbalance (though that can happen), but to overdevelopment and overexpression in some part of his nature. He can become extravagantly overorganised through the medium of some overactive center, or underorganised and inactive. He is therefore subject to the imbalance of the glandular system, with all its attendant difficulties. His overstimulation or his undevelopment, where the centers are concerned, normally affects the glands, and they in their turn produce character difficulties which necessarily, in their turn, produce environmental problems as well as personality handicaps.
It is then a vicious circle, and is all due to wrong direction of force and the inflow of force from one or other of the personality vehicles to its related center (i.e., the Astral force and its relation to the Solar Plexus), and then the appearance of the problems of health, of character and of influence. Over-radiatory activity, through the medium of some center, attracts attention and the disciple becomes the victim of his own achievement. I shall deal with these at greater length when I take up the diseases which develop from the four categories.
These difficulties are of a most general kind but do affect primarily second and sixth Ray disciples. The one because the second Ray is the building Ray, and is therefore concerned predominantly with outer manifestation and with the utilisation of all the centers, and the other because it is primarily the Ray of tension—a tension which can work out in the form of the most evil fanaticism or the most altruistic devotion. All the Rays present the same problems, needless to say, but the second Ray deals largely with the Soul's activity through all the centers (those above and those below the diaphragm) but with the heart as the prime center of attention. The sixth Ray has a close relation to the Solar Plexus center as the clearing house and the place of reorientation of the life force in the personality. Bear this constantly in mind.
c. The problems connected with the Respiratory or breathing system are all related to the heart, and therefore concerned with the establishing of right rhythm and right contact with the environment. The drawing in of the life breath, the sharing of the air with all other human beings, denotes both an individual center of life and participation also in the general life of all. To these problems of individual or separative existence and of its opposite, the Sacred Word, the OM, is intimately related. It might be said in the words of an occult manual on healing, given to advanced disciples, that:
"He who lives under the sound of the AUM knows himself.
He who lives sounding the OM knows his brother. He who knows the SOUND knows all."
"The breath of life becomes the cause of death to the one who lives within a shell. He exists but he is not; the breath then leaves and spirals to the whole. He who breathes forth the OM knows not himself alone. He knows the breath is prana, life, the fluid of connection. The ills of life are his because they are the lot of man—not generated in a shell, because the shell is not. He who is the SOUND and sounding forth knows not disease, knows not the hand of death."
In these few words the whole problem of the third group of problems and diseases is summed up. They are concerned with the circulation of Soul energy, which is the energy of love, and they are not concerned with the circulation of the life essence. These two basic energies, as they play upon the forces of the personality, bring about the bulk of the problems to which humanity falls heir. These are lack of love, lack of life, failure to sound forth correctly the note of the Soul and of the Ray, and failure to transmit. The secret of constituting a pure channel (to use mystic but not occult phraseology), is considered in the first group of problems; and the establishing of right relation by right sounding forth of the attractive note of the Soul, is considered in the last two groups.
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