The Karmic Long Body
Now, as it happens, there is a morphological structure to one complete cycle of human incarnations across many thousands of years. We will call this “the Karmic Longbody.” That is to say, one complete cycle from the birth of the soul out of the mind of the Godbeing, across all of its incarnations until it is finished and has become an Ascended Master, which is a human soul who no longer needs to incarnate (unless, like a bodhisattva-being, it is so motivated by compassion for those souls still stuck in the realm of samsara, or the round of rebirths). There is a structure to this Karmic Long Body.
The psychiatrist Michael Newton, using the technique of hypnotic regression, was able to regress his patients back, not only to retrieve clear memories of previous lifetimes, but also to retrieve clear memories of what life between lives was like in the Otherworlds. As his case studies piled up over time, he began to notice a pattern of colors which the soul appears to evolve through. So far as I know, Newton had no knowledge of The Ra Sessions and so was not aware of the color densities described there (and in my previous Substack installments), but yet the color evolution spectrum follows exactly the same colors as the densities described by the Ra beings (and also the chakras). The colors, however, move as it were horizontally in this case, across time. Here is the chart which he extracted from his many case studies:
This is actually the morphological skeleton of a single human Karmic Longbody. And as is quite evident, the soul evolves through the same colors as the chakras and the cosmic densities. This means that infant souls and baby souls are those types of individuals who are in spiritual kindergarten and have not grown up. They are motivated mostly by the energies of the lower chakras and their densities of mere survival, erotic relationships and large-scale social formations. These are people who routinely resort to violence to solve their problems. Their incarnations tend to be focused mainly upon themselves and upon sensory gratification. Service to others is not something that generally ever dawns on them. Just like a child, they see life as being all about themselves and they see the world as revolving around them only. They are motivated only by the desire for sex, romantic love, power and wealth. The Egyptian-Greek philosopher Plotinus, in his book The Enneads, describes them perfectly:
“Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute, unrighteous teeming with all the lusts; torn by internal discord; beset by the fears of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness; thinking, in the little thought it has, only of the perishable and the base; perverse in all its impulses; the friend of unclean pleasures; living the life of abandonment to bodily sensation and delighting in its deformity.”
Newton reported that these early souls comprised the majority of his clients, about 42%. Which is probably a miniaturization of about the same percentage of these souls upon the entire planet. And that explains why the planet has so many problems. Most of the souls occupying bodies on Earth are in spiritual kindergarten. That is why we have so many unnecessary wars.
Intermediate souls, those who are generally colored in the yellow to green zone, are souls which have let go of resorting to violence to solve their problems. They are generally more compassionate and empathetic and are more interested in service to others than early souls. The self / other-selves axis at this point may be compared with the balanced scales of Libra. These individuals tend to have more responsibilities in teaching others. They often work alone. They are usually forward looking and optimistic. Newton reported that this group comprised about 26% of his clients.
Notice, too, that in Goethe’s color theory, the color green is produced when blue and yellow shade into each other. It is the Green Ray Energy, in other words, which transforms the Yellow Ray Energy into the Blue Ray Energy of the upper, more spiritually evolved chakras.
In the above color wheel, if we begin with Red at the top and follow clockwise as it gradually lightens to orange and then yellow, green is produced as the boundary between yellow and blue. The color blue then darkens to indigo and then violet. By analogy, the spiritual evolution of the soul consists in gradually lightening the heavier energies, transforming them via green, and then gradually darkening as spiritual energies within the soul become more and more advanced and dense with spiritual experience.
The advanced souls, those in the blue to indigo range, comprised only about 1% of Newton’s clients, as these are generally autonomous individuals who rarely need to seek out help for their problems. They tend to exhibit patience with society and are generally calm and self-composed. They are often in the helping professions, such as medicine, psychiatry and healing, and are more interested in making life better for others than in self-aggrandizement. By this point in the soul’s evolution, the Libra scales of the service to self / service to others axis is now tilting decisively in the direction of service to others. They may be spiritual teachers and metaphysically inclined philosophers.
Now by the time the soul has reached this point in its evolution, it may be ready to graduate to the ontological level of a Guide. These are the beings who used to be called “guardian angels,” but as should be evident here, they are not angels at all, but rather human beings nearing the end of their Karmic Longbody cycle who, in between physical incarnations, may become Guides in training. Not everyone becomes a guide, but if the soul has a propensity and inclination for the task then it is generally paired up with a more experienced Guide.
Rudolf Steiner, in his transformation of the celestial hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius, had said that the lowest rank of the nine is called simply Angeloi or Angels proper. He then went on to say that each one of us has an angel from this rank assigned to him or her:
“Every individual is endowed with a Being who, because it stands one stage above humanity, guides that individual from one incarnation to another. We should bear in mind that these are not the beings who order karma…They are simply Guardian Spirits, who preserve the memory of each incarnation until the next, because human beings cannot do so of their own accord. These are Angels or Angeloi. A human being is an individuality in each incarnation, and is watched over by a Being who carries from incarnation to incarnation the consciousness of what occurred in each life. This explains why, at certain lower stages of initiation, people may be able to ask their Angels about their former incarnations. This is within the bounds of possibility.” (The Age of the Archangel Michael, 35)
Guides, however, are assigned to soul groups composed of about anywhere from 3 to 20 souls. Their relationship to a particular soul group is exactly like that of a teacher to a classroom. Everyone in each soul group is about at the same level of development in their evolution. Their task is to incarnate together and constantly switch roles. Your brother this time might have been your son last time. Or your mother. Or your best friend. The roles are constantly changing as the group’s collective karma evolves. Every soul group has at least one Guide, but some have more.
Rudolf Steiner, here again, seems to have been the first to anticipate this finding. “We come down again and again with a limited circle of people,” he says in a lecture dating from 1924 long before the psychiatric researches of Brian Weiss and Michael Newton found this to be true. Neither of them knew anything about Steiner.
Now, the goal of this process is the gradual mastery of vices by transforming them into cosmic virtues. In a way, Catholicism has this correct: the seven deadly sins must eventually be transformed into the seven heavenly virtues. Greed must be transformed into Charity; Lust into Chastity (however, from the looks of it, Christianity got this wrong, for sex is a universal activity of joy throughout all the worlds, both subtle and physical); Sloth into Diligence; Pride into Humility; Envy into Kindness; Wrath into Patience and Gluttony into Temperance. Or as T.S. Eliot puts it in his great 1922 poem “The Waste Land,” as the three virtues that, if practiced, will bring verdant green out of the waste land of dry bones: “give, sympathize and practice (self) control.” In a brief paragraph, that is the purpose of life, all life in both worlds.
This process is also described vividly in the second century AD collection of texts known as the Corpus Hermeticum. Book XIII is entitled “A secret discourse of Hermes Trismegistus to his son Tat, concerning rebirth.” And here is the crux of the book:
“Hermes: But if you would be born again, you must cleanse yourself from the irrational torments of matter. Tat: What, father, have I torturers within me? Hermes: Yes, my son, and not a few; they are terrible, and they are many. Tat: I do not know them, father. Hermes: This very ignorance, my son, is one of the torments.
the second is Grief;
the third is Incontinence [i.e. lack of self-control]
the fourth is Desire
the fifth is Injustice
the sixth is Covetousness
the seventh is Deceitfulness
the eighth is Envy
the ninth is Fraud
the tenth is Anger
the eleventh is Rashness
the twelfth is Vice.
In other words, Red Ray (muladhara) Energy. What is the solution? The text continues:
Rejoice, now, my son; you are being cleansed by the powers of God; for they have come to build up in you the powers of reason. The knowledge of God has come to us and at its coming, my son, ignorance has been driven out.
Joy has come to us; and at her coming, my son, Grief will flee away, to enter into those in whom there is room for her.
And after Joy, I summon a third power, even Continence [i.e. self-control]. O sweetest Power! Let us receive her, my son, most gladly. See how, at the instant of her coming, she has pushed Incontinence away.
And now I summon the fourth Power, Endurance, the opponent of Desire.
And this, my son, is the tribunal on which Justice sits enthroned. See how she has driven out Injustice. We have been justified, my son, without being brought to judgment; for Injustice is no longer here.
As the sixth Power, I call to us Unselfishness, the opponent of Covetousness. And when Covetousness has departed…
As the seventh, I invoke Truth. Flee away Deceit for Truth has come.
See, my son, how, on the coming of Truth, the Good is completed, for Envy has departed from us, [and other torments also].”
In short, that is a concise description of what needs to happen in the soul gradually across its many lifetimes. It is given various life scenarios that will act upon it as catalyst and opportunity to master such virtues as these. This is why we incarnate in groups. One soul in your group may have been an abusive father, let’s say. The opportunity that is offered to the soul’s evolution in such a scenario is to learn Forgiveness. Once forgiveness takes place, the karmic knot is untangled and the souls move on into other group scenarios.
As Rudolf Steiner, in his model of the architecture of the subtle body, puts it: the ego must perform work on the astral body by mastering its passions and desires so that the spirit self chakra may open to receive the Light of spiritual luminosity. Like flowers turning heliotropically toward the sunlight, the upper chakras turn towards the light of the Spirit, upon which they flower in bluegold colors.
And that is how the evolution of the human soul works.
Hey John, do you see crossover between a sufi like Ibn Arabi and a Christian mystic like Meister Eckhart and say Hinduism roughly speaking ?
Very insightful, thank you.