[London Lectures of 1907 by Annie Besant]@TWC D-Link book
London Lectures of 1907

PART II
54/97

As regards the bodies there is also a difference: the whole of the five bodies of these planes act for Him as a single body, His body of action.

That does not mean, of course, that He cannot separate off the parts if He needs to do so; but it means that in His ordinary, normal condition, the whole of His bodies are only layers of a single body, just as much as solid, liquid, gases, and ethers, for you and me, form our physical body, and we need not trouble to distinguish the matter belonging to one sub-plane or another.

So to the Master, the matter of the whole of these planes forms His body of action, and although He is able to separate one part from another if he desires, normally He will be working with the whole of them together, and the whole will constitute the instrument of His physical or waking consciousness.
It is hardly necessary to add to that definition that He is one who is always in possession of a physical body; it is implied in the very description I have been giving.

That part of it is important only, or chiefly, when you are considering the question of liberation in relation to a number of different classes, as we may say, in this great Occult Hierarchy, the names in the West are not familiar, and there is no particular need to trouble you with them for the moment in the Samskrit form.

Speaking generally, you have a class I have just alluded to, the Masters who possess the physical body, and another who are without that body, and are therefore not called Jivanmuktas (the name you so often find in our books in relation to the Masters) but Muktas, with a prefix which means "without a body." Then again you may have other classes, Beings who perform various functions in the universe; some, for instance, animate the whole of the physical universe, and are distinguished as being what is called blended with matter, the class that gives the sense of life, of consciousness, to all those things in Nature which so much impress the mind occasionally when we are face to face in solitude with some splendid landscape--some great forest, perhaps, in the silence.


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