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The Rosicrucian Mysteries by Max Heindel

IV. THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN

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When we are in health, we specialize solar energy in such great quantities that we cannot use it all in the body and therefore it radiates through the pores of our skin in straight streams and serves a similar purpose as an exhaust fan. That machine drives the foul air out of a room or building and keeps the atmosphere within pure and sweet. The excessive vital force which radiates from the body drives out poisonous gases, deleterious microbes and effete matter thus tending to preserve a healthy condition. It also prevents armies of disease germs, which swarm about in the atmosphere, from entering; upon the same principle that a fly cannot wing its way into a building through the exhaust fan. Thus it serves a most beneficent purpose even after it has been utilized in our body and is returning to the free state.

It is a curious and most astounding sight when one first observes how, from exposed parts of the body such as hands and face, there suddenly commences to flow a stream of stars, cubes, pyramids and a variety of other geometrical forms. The writer has more than once rubbed his eyes when he first perceived the phenomenon, for it seemed that he must be suffering from hallucinations. The forms observed are chemical atoms however, which have served their purpose in the body and are expelled through the pores.

When one has eaten a meal, vital fluid is consumed by the body in great quantities, for it is the cement whereby nature’s forces build our food into the body. Therefore the radiations are weakest during the period of digestion. If the meal has been heavy, the outflow is very perceptibly diminished, and does not then cleanse our body as thoroughly as when the food has been digested, nor is it as potent in keeping out inimical germs. Therefore one is most liable to catch cold or other disease by overeating, a fault which should be avoided by all who wish to keep in good health.

During ill health the vital body specializes but little solar energy. Then, for a time, the visible body seems to feed upon the vital body as it were, so that the vehicle becomes more transparent and attenuated at the same rate as the visible body exhibits a state of emaciation. The cleansing odic radiations are almost entirely absent during sickness, therefore complications set in so easily.

Though science has not directly observed this vital body of man, it has upon several occasions postulated the existence of such a vehicle as necessary to account for facts in life and the radiations have been observed by a number of scientists at different times and under varying conditions. Blondlot and Charpentier have called them N-rays after the city of Nantes where the radiations were observed by these scientists, others have named them “The Odic fluid”. Scientific investigators who have conducted researches into psychic phenomena have even photographed it when it has been extracted through the spleen by materializing spirits. Dr. Hotz for instance obtained two photographs of a materialization through the German medium, Minna-Demmler. On one a cloud of ether is seen oozing out through the left side of the medium, shapeless and without form. The second picture, taken a few moments later, shows the materialized spirit standing at the medium’s side. Other photographs obtained by scientists from the Italian medium Eusapio Palladino show a luminous cloud over-hanging her left side.

We said in the beginning of this description that the vital body is an exact counterpart of the dense body with one exception: it is of the opposite sex or perhaps we should rather say polarity. As the vital body nourishes the dense vehicle, we may readily understand that blood is its highest visible expression, and also that a positively polarized vital body would generate more blood than a negative one. Woman who is physically negative has a positive vital body, hence she generates a surplus of blood which is relieved by the periodical flow. She is also more prone to tears, which are white bleeding, than man, whose negative vital body does not generate more blood than he can comfortably take care of. Therefore it is not necessary for him to have the outlets which relieve excess of blood in woman.

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