WE have now reached a point where we may perhaps profitably study the nature and function of man's Fifth Principle, omitted in the general review because its importancerequired more extended and careful consideration. This Principle is variously spoken of as Higher Manas, the Reincarnating Ego, the Thinker, and other names. It is the true individuality, as contradistinguished from the lower, fleeting personalities of its successive incarnations. It represents that aspect or power of the Absolute which causes individualized centers of consciousness to first form and then to attain to self-consciousness in the Phenomenal Universe. It is this Principle which reincarnates, for it alone represents the true man. The Quaternary disappears as an entity at death. Buddhi and Atman are universal non- individualized Principles; Manas, the Thinker, alone journeys as a self-conscious entity from body to body by means of Reincarnation. This Thinker, then, in its various relations to the body, and especially in its aspect as the Lower Manas, or the personal self, remains, after all possible elimination of other factors, as of prime and paramount importance in the problem of human existence.

Let us study it carefully and reverentially, for in and through it alone shall we be able to come into an understanding of the Divine in nature and in man; for they are One.

There has been shown, in the chapter devoted to the evolution of the soul, the gradual process by which an atomic center of consciousness, through continuous conscious experiences, attains to the self-conscious, or human, stage, while on its way to godhood. We have also seen that the law of cyclic periodicity shows how and why such centers are graded into great hierarchies, by the natural limits thus set to their emergence from the bosom of the Absolute. The relation which the Reincarnating Ego bears to this world and its cycle is thus capable of logical solution.

It is evident both phenomenally and philosophically that the material Universe is embodied Consciousness, or Consciousness of infinite gradations, clothed in equally infinite expressions of form. As the Universe ebbs and flows - to finite perception - from subjective to objective states throughout the eternities of Duration, it follows that worlds appear and disappear endlessly; the Great Pralaya, even, being only a subjective arc of larger immensity. In the life history of all worlds, as is proven by the records now visible in the heavens, there comes a time when they cool down sufficiently to become habitable; when they pass through this stage; when, by the ebbing of their life force, or the completion of their limiting cycle, humanities can no longer exist upon them in material form. There is no doubt but that their minor pralayas, or deaths, overtake them with the consciousness of their entities in states of infinite diversity, such as we now perceive upon this earth. Hence, there would be Egos passing through the human stage overtaken when their world became uninhabitable for them; for the life cycle of a planet pursues its course perfectly uninterrupted and uncontrolled by the evolution of any humanity upon it, although the two always correspond.

Similarly, were pralaya to strike for this earth to-day, would all entities, human, animal, or elemental, be arrested in their material evolution and be compelled to remain in subjective states until other worlds arrived at stages capable of affording them expression in suitable material forms.

Our Higher Egos have witnessed, it is claimed, the death or pralaya of many such worlds; for matter on our own physical or molecular plane, by its power of illusion, and by the ease and rapidity with which its unstable nature permits of disintegration and the entering of the outworn constituents into new combinations, is evidently a very important, if humble, school in a Universe where every entity "is, was, or prepares to become a man." * Planetary pralayas, therefore, have overtaken our Higher Egos, it may be, a great number of times; for who can estimate the period necessary in material states of consciousness for them to arrive at their present stage? At any rate, when their last world went into pralaya they had not yet passed beyond the desire for material or sensuous existence, and so were, under the law of cause and effect, drawn to human-animal bodies which nature, through its lower hierarchies of "Builders," had been preparing for their occupation during those interminable periods which geology is beginning to recognize as necessary factors in human evolution.

This reincarnation of already highly advanced Egos of former worlds in human-animal forms, prepared for them under the physical aspect of the triple-sided process (physical, intellectual, and spiritual) of evolutionary activity upon this world, is the key to the whole scheme of human evolution upon this planet. It also solves many otherwise hopelessly insoluble problems in human consciousness, such as clairvoyance, prophetic dreams, and the "buried selves," so strangely dug out of their unsuspected graves by hypnotic processes. All such phenomena, as we have seen, prove that there is in man's body a soul too superior to that body to be the product of the same evolutionary process which has produced its transient tenement of clay.

* Secret Doctrine.

Man's Higher Ego, then, as shown by its possessing powers and faculties far transcending its material vehicle, must be the product of former world periods. Because of its derivation from the Conscious-Aspect of the Absolute, as a Ray from Mahat or the Cosmic Mind, the Reincarnating Ego is a center of potential self- consciousness upon all the planes of nature in the Cosmos. This potentiality has, during these former manvantaras, become a potency upon many of these planes, some of which, as shown by the Divine Wisdom of the Higher Ego, must be infinitely superior to the sensuous consciousness of this earth. It now seeks cosmic perfection by the evolution or attainment of this same, or perfect, self-consciousness, upon all planes of the Cosmos yet remaining unexplored. For Self-Consciousness is the aim, the end, and the crown of consciousness upon any plane, whether material or spiritual.