Karma

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

Page 55

45 endures and grows throughout the manvantara, surrounded by the aura that belongs to it as an individual, more or less glorious, many-hued, luminous, definite, and extensive, according to the stage of evolution reached by the soul. It has been wrought in the heavenly fire, and comes forth as King Soma.1
Passing on to the astral plane on its earthward journey, it clothes itself anew in a body of desire, the first result of the workings out of its past karma. The mental images formed during the past “from materials supplied by the desire nature, that had become latent in consciousness, or what H. P. Blavatsky used to call “privations of matter,' capable of existing, but out of material manifestation," are now thrown outwards by the soul, and immediately attract to themselves from the matter of the astral plane the kāmic elements congenial to their natures, and “ become the appetites, passions, and lower emotions of his [the Ego's] desire body for his new incarnation." When this work is accomplished -a work sometimes very brief, sometimes one that
1 A mystic name, full of meaning to the student who understands the part played by Soma in some ancient mysteries.
· Ante, p. 35.