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From the fact that we now exist, no new energy ever being created, it is logical to assume that we each have at least potentially always existed. That is, the potentiality which we call the ego never had a beginning and never can have an end. But states of consciousness are more than potentialities, they are the result of specific activities. Until the ego inaugurated these specific activities there was no consciousness, consequently no soul. The ego must always have existed, but the soul only came into existence as the result of definite activities of the ego. The soul, therefore, probably has not always existed.

When that potentiality which we now call the ego inaugurated the specific activities that resulted in the first gleam of consciousness, the activity was a movement of substance, and the consciousness itself was a special kind of motion in substance. Thus, the moment there was consciousness there was also a form. Consciousness, in fact, must be nothing, or it must be a movement in some kind of substance. Logically it cannot be nothing. And as movement in substance has form, and the soul embraces states of consciousness, the soul is ever associated with a form. Consequently, as soon as the ego has the first rudiments of a soul it also has at least the rudiments of some kind of a body.

Before it had a soul, the ego existed as a potentiality, as an eternal spark of the infinite; coeternal with Deity. But there came a time when it initiated specific activities. Hermetic tradition holds that this was due to the love vibrations of angelic parents occupying a plane interior to the spiritual. That is, the undifferentiated potential spark of Deity was drawn to the celestial realm and there given birth by beings occupying that realm. At least it is certain that its potentialities were given a definite trend, otherwise there would have been no soul.

As soon as specific activities commenced, there also developed an awareness of these activities. The ego came in contact with its environment, which was that of the celestial realm, and began to have states of consciousness as the result of its experiences. These states of consciousness of the celestial realm developed a soul sphere, a sphere of consciousness organized in celestial substance, about the ego. But the trend of activity given the ego by its divine progenitors was of immensely greater scope than could find expression in the infinitely tenuous realms of celestial life. Its potentialities were directed to penetrating and conquering, that it might develop deific attributes, the lower realms of existence known as the spiritual plane, the astral plane, and the material plane.

Hermetic tradition holds that due to laws governing such processes, the celestial soul sphere—the organizations of consciousness in celestial substance surrounding the ego—is unable to communicate energy to, or receive energy from, substances grosser than that of the highest spiritual realm. Because celestial substance is so much finer than the others, there are insufficient points of contact to transmit motion. A familiar illustration of this principle is the transmission of energy by radio. This energy has not sufficient points of contact with most physical objects to affect them. To cause motion in physical substance requires special conditions. And the ego, so Hermetic tradition holds, is able to impart its energies and directing power to substance coarser than the finest spiritual substance, only under conditions of a certain kind.

These conditions, under which the ego, operating from the seventh state of the spiritual world, is able to contact lower spiritual substance and thus transmit energy to still coarser astral substance and physical substance, are believed to be the polarization of its energies into two separate channels of flow; related to each other as positive and negative, masculine and feminine. The states of consciousness evolved by the ego, then, in the spiritual world, the astral world, and the physical world, represent two separate organizations. Each of these organizations of consciousness is a soul.

We are familiar with somewhat similar organizations in the study of the structure of the atom. Each atom of matter, according to the chemistry of today, is a positive nucleus of energy about which revolves one or more negative charges of energy, or electrons. Each different element has a definite number of electrons revolving around the positive nucleus. In the case of man, according to the Hermetic conception, the constant factors are a single ego, about which revolve two human souls.

The potentialities of the ego, therefore, are directed, due to the trend given it by its angelic parents, to developing these two, male and female, souls.

This development is accomplished through experience. In fact, the only possible way of developing consciousness is through experience. All knowledge, as was illustrated in detail in Chapter 1 (Serial Lesson No. 39), Course I, Laws of Occultism, necessarily rests upon experience. This will the more readily be understood when it is realized that consciousness is a perception of relations, and that apart from an awareness of relations there can be no consciousness. But in order for there to be such awareness, relative conditions must be contacted. These conditions are present only in association with substances. That is, it is possible to evolve consciousness only through contact with substances that in some manner display differences; for only through the awareness which perceives likeness and unlikeness is there consciousness.

Excerpt from: Mission of the Soul by C.C. Zane

https://www.light.org/The-Mission-of-the-Soul-SL004.cfm

Original Copyright 1927, Elbert Benjamine (a.k.a. C. C. Zain), Copyright 2010, The Church of Light