Dictionary of all Scriptures & Myths

CAUSAL-BODY, OR KARANA SARIRA

This term denotes the vehicle of the spiritual ego in the higher mind of each individual. It is usually called the immortal soul, for it persists throughout the cycle. To it are attached the vehicles of the personality or personal ego, on the lower planes.

"The Vedanta affirms the existence of a third body, called Karana-Sarira, or causal body, described as a kind of inner rudiment or latent embryo of the body existing with the soul." - MON. WILLIAMS, Indian Wisdom, p. 64.

This is the "cognitional vesture" of the Upanishads which is at first rudimentary, but is gradually perfected through the efforts of the personalities.

"Tauler said: "The ground or centre of the soul is so high and glorious a thing, that it cannot properly be named, even as no adequate name can be found for the Infinite and Almighty God. In this ground lies the image of the Holy Trinity. Its kindred and likeness with God is such as no tongue can utter. Could a man perceive and realise how God dwelleth in this ground, such knowledge would be straightway the blessedness of salvation. - Arnstein. -VAUGHAN, Hours with the Mystics, Vol. I. p. 246.

The causal-body is the seat of the higher Triad,—atma-buddhi-manas.

"The inner habitat which the soul provides for itself, and which goes every- where with it. The grandest fruit of our earlier moral victories is that their results are woven into this structure and help to make it and us invulnerable.. free and growing soul this structure, woven out of our past and present, and open sheer to the heavens, becomes growingly real in our consciousness. It regulates for us the temperature of the outside world, and amid the disorders of the external, creates an inner calm when the spiritual can have full play. It is, as it were, the condensed exhalation of our personality, which, when death has loosed the bond between us and the physical, may take shape in the spiritual world as the form of life we have been leading." - J. BRIERLY The Eternal Religion, pp. 93, 94.

"The soul in its highest sense is a vast capacity for God. It is like a curious chamber added on to being, and somehow involving being, a chamber with elastic and contractile walls, which can expanded, with God as its guest, illimitably, but which without God shrinks and shrivels until every vestige of the Divine is gone, and God's image is left without God's Spirit." - H. DRUMMOND, Natural Law, etc., p. 110.

“The spiritual faculties are organised in the spiritual protoplasm of the soul, just as other faculties are organised in the protoplasm of the body." - Ibid., p. 233.

The causal-body is at first potential only. It becomes actual by a process of building up, life after life, so that when perfected at the close of the cycle, it forms the resurrection body of the glorified spirit.

"We are content then to fall back on Scripture words, and to believe in the resurrection of the dead simply because it is, as we believe, told us from God. For all who accept the message, this hope shines clear, of a building of God imperishable and solid, when contrasted with the tent in which we dwell here of a body raised in corruption,' 'clothed with immortality,' and so, as in many another phrase, declared to be exempt from decay, and therefore vigorous with unchanging youth. Whether because that body of glory has no proclivity to mutation and decay, or whether the perpetual volition and power of God counteract such tendency, matters not at all. The truth of the promise remains, though we have no means of knowing more than the fact, that we shall receive a body, fashioned like His who dieth no more. And if all this be true, that glorious and undecaying body shall then be the equal and fit instrument of the perfected spirit, not, as it is now, the inadequate instrument only of the natural life." - A. MACLAREN, Sermons, 2nd Series, p. 204.

See Also

AB
ADYTUM
BIRTH-CHAMBER
DEFUNCT
DWELLING
GLORY
HEART
HEBEN
HERMES
KA
KARANA
KHA-BIT
LAZARUS
LINGAM
MAHAVIRA-POT
MANASI
MIRROR
NESHAMAH
PRÂNA
PROVINCE-RULER
RESURRECTION
SAHU
SHINTAI
SAMKHARA
SOUL (middle)
STHULA
TABERNACLE
TEMPLE
TENT
Tzelem
VESTURES