Karma

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophical Publishing House

Page 17

with which we shall presently be concerned are chiefly those of the psychic plane, for these give to man his body of desire (kāma rūpa)—his body of sensation, as it is often called—are indeed built into its astral matrix and vivify his astral senses. They are, to use the technical name, the form elementals (rūpa devatās) of the animal world, and are the agents of the changes which transmute vibrations into sensations.
The most salient characteristic of the kāmic elementals is sensation, the power of not only answering to vibrations but of feeling them; and the psychic plane is crowded with these entities, of varying degrees of consciousness, who receive impacts of every kind and combine them into sensations. Any being who possesses, then, a body into which these elementals are built, is capable of feeling, and man feels through such a body. A man is not conscious in the particles of his body or even in its cells; they have a consciousness of their own, and by this carry on the various processes of his vegetative life; but the man whose body they form does not share their consciousness, does not consciously help or hinder them as they select, assimilate, secrete, build up, and could not at any moment so put his consciousness into rapport with the consciousness of a cell in his heart as to say exactly