confusing and perplexing
to the dull, and hence Origen and Clement, as we have seen,[242] laid
great stress on the need for intelligence on the part of all who desired
to become Gnostics. After all, those who find them troublesome can leave
them on one side, without grudging them to the earnest student, who
finds them not only illuminative, but absolutely necessary to any clear
understanding of the Mysteries of Life and Man.

The word Body means a vehicle of consciousness, or an instrument of
consciousness; that in which consciousness is carried about, as in a
vehicle, or which consciousness uses to contact the external world, as a
mechanic uses an instrument. Or, we may liken it to a vessel, in which
consciousness is held, as a jar holds liquid. It is a form used by a
life, and we know nothing of consciousness save as connected with such
forms. The form may be of rarest, subtlest, materials, may be so
diaphanous that we are only conscious of the indwelling life; still it
is there, and it is composed of Matter. It may be so dense, that it
hides the indwelling life, and we are conscious only of the form; still
the life is there, and it is composed of the opposite of Matter--Spirit.
The student must study and re-study this fundamental fact--the duality
of all manifested existence, the inseparable co-existence of Spirit and
Matter in a grain of dust, in the Logos, the God manifested. The idea
must become part of him; else must he give up the study of the Lesser
Mysteries. The Christ, as God and Man, only shows out on the kosmic
scale the same fact of duality that is repeated everywhere in nature. On
that original duality everything in the universe is formed.

Man has a "natural body," and this is made up of four different and
separable portions, and is subject to death. Two of these are composed
of physical matter, and are never completely separated from each other
until death, though a partial separation may be caused by anaesthetics,
or by disease. These two may be classed together as the Physical Body.
In this the man carries on his conscious activities while he is awake;
speaking technically, it is his vehicle of consciousness in the physical
world.

The third portion is the Desire Body, so called because man's feeling
and passional nature finds in this its special vehicle. In sleep, the
man leaves the physical body, and carries on his conscious activities in
this, which functions in the invisible world closest to o