At conception, there is an actual fusion of cells from the father with others from the mother, thus forming one cell - the type of all life. This cell divides, and subdivides, almost infinitely, for out of its subdivisions, through repeated modifications, all the various tissues of the body are constructed. There is not nor cannot be an introduction of a single new or foreign cell in the entire organism. All increase or growth is by division of the original cell, and molecular accretions thereto by means of nutriment supplied - a fact which explains the wonderful selective power the various tissues exercise upon the common food supply. Portions of this original cell are therefore present in every other cell of the body, and by virtue of their registering qualities carry into the new body the impress of all purely physical experiences or form limitations of both parents. The fusion of two necessarily differing parental cells gives also the opportunity and basis for all requisite variation. As the matter of the father or the mother predominates, so will the new body more closely resemble the one or the other parent.

And back of this, even, a peculiarly strong physical impression made by an ancestor may dominate that of both parents, and atavism result, or the same effect may be brought about by "skandhas" unable to incarnate previously, and so lying latent.

Thus is seen how powerful is the influence from the physical line of heredity, when each cell of the entire body is tainted with every physical desire, appetite, or passion of the purely animal nature of both parents. And the Linga Sharira, enmeshed in these cells, and being the seat of the centers of sensation, bring its parent, the Reincarnating Ego, into direct karmic relations with all these animal propensities. It also affords a vehicle for the reawakened skandhic elementals to pour their stream of muddy desires into the physical body; owing to karmic attraction having drawn the Reincarnating Ego to parents having similar characteristics. Thus the physical conformation, the tendency to disease, to a long or a short life, to repeat such abnormalities as six fingers or toes, or such peculiarities as red hair or squint eyes, together with hosts of other purely physical limitations, are the result of physical heredity, and transmitted by the handing down from parent to offspring of actual physical matter so impressed, and with a subconscious tendency to repeat the original impression.

The emotional and passional nature, while afforded easy and fitting expression by physical cells from parents having like characters, appears to be of skandhic heredity, and carried over in this manner from former lives. It is a form of physical heredity, it is true, but not purely so, for it abandons one body to reincarnate in another; thus resembling the "seed" reincarnation in nature, while the physical cell heredity is a case of pure propagation by fission. But no mental characteristics can be carried over to the new life thus. As we have seen, the conservation of mental force requires a mental vehicle, so that all purely mental qualities are the result of mental or intellectual heredity, and come by and through the Reincarnating Ego. Mental powers may be and are but too often sadly inhibited, or almost destroyed, by overwhelmingly bad psychic and physical heredity, which retard or prevent their manifestation; but they none the less come through the channel of the Reincarnating Ego alone.

The creative power of the Higher Manas, then, acting upon subconscious planes, produces or creates a Linga Sharira; similarly as on the subconscious planes of the Lower Manas, our personal self, all the vital activities as well as the repair of wounded or diseased tissue go on quite independently of our conscious supervision.

On its own plane its creative potencies are exercised consciously in the production of those higher astral forms which the Adept uses when he abandons the physical, in his journeyings. With this higher creative faculty mankind at large is not, at present at least, concerned. But since the Higher Manas builds, or rather, causes to be built, its physical body, through creative power thus unconsciously exercised, in what manner is it consciously, and so karmically, connected with the body?

This calls for an examination of its creative functions on ideative or mental planes, or the reflection in matter of its true, individualizing consciousness. This reflection - perhaps refraction would be the better term - of itself is quite another process to that concerned in the formation of the Linga Sharira, which we have been considering, and is the most important of all. The Linga Sharira may be said to represent its purely physical expression, so to speak; this refraction, the Lower Manas, is itself mirrored in material thought processes. The former expresses its purely physical karma, * or its physical creative force taking the lines of least resistance; the latter connects it karmically with the thoughts and mental processes of past lives. Being, when its devachanic or subjective existence between two lives is closing, drawn to the parents presenting the greatest sum of karmic affinities, the contact of the soul with the growing form sets up in the physical brain of the latter a thinking principle, similarly as a magnet upon being brought in contact with non-magnetic iron imparts magnetism to this, without having caused the smallest change in those physical qualities which constitute it iron.

And as the evolution of the physical form, which it took ages for the Elemental Builders, or the ordinary evolutionary forces in nature, to accomplish, is repeated swiftly during the first few weeks of gestation, so is the entire evolution of the Lower Manas also repeated during the first few years of the child's life. For these Builders only push matter up to the animal or kamic † plane; the brooding presence of the Higher Manas must impart the stimulus which brings it where it is of sufficient transparency, so to speak, to receive and refract its image. It will be at once plain that our Lower Manas, the ordinary self, is thus a portion of the very essence of the Higher, just as the magnetism in the iron is a portion of that in the magnet. And just as the magnet may be withdrawn from its contact with the iron, leaving a portion of its magnetic qualities to slowly dissipate; so may the Higher Manas be separated entirely from its lower reflection, thus constituting for the latter a veritable "loss of the soul."