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the higher, as the ray is one with its sun; the sunmanas shines ever in the heaven of the spiritual plane, the ray-manas penetrates the psychic plane; but if they be regarded as two, otherwise than for convenignce in distinguishing their functioning, hopeless confusion will arise.
The ego then is a growing entity, an increasing quantity. The ray sent down is like a hand plunged into water to seize some object and then withdrawn, holding the object in its grasp. The increase in the Ego depends on the value of the objects gathered by its outstretched hand, and the importance of all its work when the ray is withdrawn is limited and conditioned by the experiences gathered while that ray has been functioning on the psychic plane. It is as though a labourer went out into a field, toiling in rain and in sunshine, in cold and in heat, returning home at night; but the labourer is also the proprietor, and all the results of his labour fill his own granaries and enrich his own store. Each Personal-Ego is the immediately effective part of the continuing or Individual-Ego, representing it in the lower world, and necessarily more or less developed according to the stage at which the Ego, as a totality or an individual, has arrived. If this be clearly understood the sense of injustice to the
