The Trees of Life : Occult Anatomy
The Trees of Life: Occult Anatomy
The Trees of Life: Occult AnatomyThe trees are God's great alphabet:
With them, He writes in shining green
Across the world His thoughts serene.
~Leonora Speyer
The Tree of Life is a universal symbol found in many spiritual traditions. It symbolizes many things, including wisdom, protection, strength, bounty, beauty, and redemption. This tree is symbolic of the Creator as it sustains creation with its abundant fruit, protection, and regeneration.
The Tree also represents humans as we too develop roots, strengthen our trunk and branch out to a wider vision of life as we grow. The tree provides shelter. Tall and strong, it has deep roots. It reaches skyward. It loses its leaves and grows new ones …bears fruit …gives shelter. With nurture and care, it lives for generations.
~ Sondra Crane
The concept of a Tree of Life, a many-branched tree illustrating the idea that all life on earth is related, has been used in science, religion, philosophy, mythology and other areas. A Tree of Life is a motif in various world theologies, mythologies, and philosophies; a mystical concept alluding to the interconnectedness of all life on our planet; and a metaphor for common descent in the evolutionary sense.
Many parallels can be made between the Tree of Life as described by the Kabbalah and the Chakra Tree, the main system of the energy of our bodies. Both of them have three structural channels. The central channel on the Chakra Tree is called the “Shushumna.”
The central channel on the kabbalistic Tree is symbolized as the “Central Column.” The side channels on the Chakra Tree are called the “Ida” and the “Pingala” and on the kabbalistic Tree, the “Columns of the Right and the Left.” The side channels play a much more prominent role in the Kabbalah than they do in the Tantric wisdom.
The esoteric tradition admits the existence of two trees inside of the human body. The regular Tree of Life, the kabbalistic representation of the manifested universe-macrocosm, has its roots anchored in the higher planes; into the divine realms. In the Human body, the microcosm, we see at least two different trees that work in unison with each other.
The first is the nervous system, which integrates the entire body, and which the main root is the Brain. Through this organic tree passes all the electrical stimuli that move the body and sensitize it to the daily requirements of living.
A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible.
~Welsh Proverb
The second tree is formed by the multiple ramifications of the circulatory system of the organism and has its roots anchored in the heart center. Through this center runs the vital energy that sustains life. The Ageless Wisdom teaches that the great phenomena of Human and animal life come from the “marriage” or reunion of these two elements: the vital principal of Prana, directed by the heart center and the second, the electrical principal ruled by the Brain; The Brain captures and produces the etheric electric stimuli and re-transmit it throughout the body in order to stimulate the transmutations necessary to sustain a biological life. At the same time, the Prana is absorbed by the respiratory system and made available to every cell inside of the living organism through the circulatory system. It is through the circulatory system that life renews itself every time.
The Ageless Wisdom teaches that the great phenomena of Human and animal life come from the “marriage” or reunion of these two elements: the vital principal of Prana, directed by the heart center and the second, the electrical principal ruled by the Brain; The Brain captures and produces the etheric electric stimuli and re-transmit it throughout the body in order to stimulate the transmutations necessary to sustain a biological life. At the same time, the Prana is absorbed by the respiratory system and made available to every cell inside of the living organism through the circulatory system. It is through the circulatory system that life renews itself every time.
“THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEMS:
In the Saturn Revolution of the Earth period the dense body was given the ability to form a brain and become a vehicle for the germ of mind which was to be added later. The impulse was given to building the frontal part of the brain. The brain and the nervous systems are the highest expression of the desire body. They call up pictures of the outside world, but in mental image-making, the blood brings the material for the pictures; therefore, when thought is active the blood flows to the head.
In man the brain is the link between the Spirit and the outside world. He can know nothing of the outside world except through the medium of the brain. The sense organs are merely carriers to the brain of impacts from without and the brain is the instrument which interprets and coordinates those impacts. The Spirit, aided by the Angels, built the brain to gather knowledge of the Physical World. When the Ego entered into possession of its vehicles it became necessary to use part of the creative force for the building of a brain and larynx. The Lucifers are the instigators of all mental activity, by means of the part of the sex force that is carried upward for work in the brain. Thus did the evolving entity obtain brain consciousness of the outside world at the cost of half its creative power.
Physiologists note that certain areas of the brain are devoted to particular thought activities, and phrenologists have carried this branch of science still farther. Now, it is known that thought breaks down and destroys nerve tissues. This and all other waste of the body, is replaced by the blood. When, through the development of the heart into a voluntary muscle, the circulation of the blood finally passes under the absolute control of the unifying Life Spirit it will then be within the power of that Spirit to withhold the blood from those areas of the mind devoted to selfish purposes. As a result, those particular thought centers will gradually atrophy.
Brain-knowledge, with its concomitant selfishness, was bought by man at the cost of the power to create from himself alone. He bought his free will at the cost of pain and death; but when man learns to use his intellect for the good of humanity, he will gain spiritual power over life, and in addition, will be guided by an innate knowledge as much higher than the present brain-consciousness as that is higher than the lowest animal consciousness. The brain is, at best, only an indirect way of gaining knowledge and will be superseded by direct touch with the Wisdom of Nature, which man, without any cooperation, will then be able to use for the creation of new bodies.
In the Moon Period it was necessary to reconstruct the dense body to make it capable of being interpenetrated by a desire body, and also capable of evolving a nervous system, muscle, cartilage, and a rudimentary skeleton. This reconstruction was the work of the Saturn Revolution of the Moon Period.
The reconstruction of the dense body in the Saturn Revolution of the Earth Period gave the first impulse to the incipient division in the nervous system which has since become apparent in its subdivisions: the voluntary and the sympathetic. The latter was the only one provided for in the Moon Period. The voluntary nervous system (which has transformed the dense body from a mere automaton acting under stimuli from without, to an extraordinary adaptable instrument capable of being guided and controlled by an Ego from within) was not added until the present Earth Period.
When the division of the Sun, Moon, and Earth took place, in the early part of the Lemurian Epoch, the more advanced portion of humanity-in-the-making experienced a division of the desire body into a higher and a lower part. The reset of humanity did likewise in the early part of the Atlantean Epoch. This higher part of the desire body became a sort of animal soul. It built the cerebrospinal nervous system and the voluntary muscles, by that means controlling the lower part of the threefold body until the link of mind was given.
Part of the involuntary muscular system is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system.
The seat of the Human Spirit is primarily in the pineal gland and secondarily in the brain and the cerebrospinal nervous system, which controls the voluntary muscles.”
– Max Heindel
http://www.rosicrucian.com/oph/opheng01.htm#chapterIpart4
OCCULT ANATOMY AND THE BIBLE:
http://newagebible.tripod.com/nbtr.htm