A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c6.s3.t2.6

c6.s3.t2.6

25. Among modern Theosophists, this theory has assumed quite an extraordinary importance. The etheric double, they say, is exactly like the shape of the human body, that it lingers a few days after the death of the physical body, that the etheric double of a child lingers only for three days after its death but that in the case of an adult it may linger for a sufficiently long time to allow for the period of mourning, that in dreams while we are having the curious experience of flying like a bird in mid-air or swimming like a fish in the seas¹ it is our etheric double which by a kind of endosmosis is transmitting its experience into the physical body, that the scheme of the five bodies mentioned in the Upanishads is only a description of the " manifest " bodies of man, and that over and above these, there are two more "unmanifest" bodies which may be called the Monadic and the Divine, the Anupādaka and the Ādi, or in Buddhistic terminology, the Parinirvāṇa and the Mahāparinirvāṇa. So far as we apprehend it, the general mistake of this theory consists in taking words for things, in refusing to see that what are by sufferance called the " bodies " of man in the Upanishads are nothing more than mere allegorical representations of certain psychological conceptions. Man is made up of a physical body, of vital air, of mind and intellect, and of the faculty which enables him to enjoy an ecstatic θεωρία. This only is what is meant by the passage in question. To ignore its mere psychological aspect and to proceed to erect an occultist philosophy upon the doctrine is hardly justifiable. The great Śaṅkara did recognise the " kośas," but he understood them as having merely an ideal existence. We have to discriminate in thought (*viveka*),¹ he says the five different kośas, and to find our true Self beyond the physical body, beyond the *ψυχή* or vital principle, beyond the mind and intellect, and beyond even our beatific consciousness. He wavers,² however, in deciding as to whether we should identify the Brahman with beatific consciousness, or whether we should even penetrate beyond it to find the Brahman; but in any case, he insists that the kośas or sheaths have no real existence, and that a theory which is built upon the conception of the sheaths is a theory which is "built upon ignorance."