Karma

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

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their essence; by meditation it creates a mental organ and pours into it as faculty the essence it has extracted. For instance: a man has formed many mental images out of aspirations for knowledge and efforts to understand subtle and lofty reasonings; he casts off his body, his mental powers being of only average kind; in his devachan he works on all these mental images, and evolves them into capacity, so that his soul returns to earth with a higher mental apparatus than it before possessed, with much increased intellectual powers, able to achieve tasks for which before it was utterly inadequate. This is the transformation of the mental images, by which as mental images they cease to exist; if in later lives the soul would seek to see again these as they were, it must seek them in the karmic records, where they remain for ever as ākāshic images. By this transformation they cease to be mental images created and worked on by the soul, and become powers of the soul, part of its very nature. If then a man desires to possess higher mental faculties than he at present enjoys, he can ensure their development by deliberately willing to acquire them, persistently keeping their acquirement in view, for desire and aspiration in one life become faculty in another, and the will to perform becomes the capacity