his own Spiritual Nature and was given dominion over all lower kingdoms, to serve him in all his ways.

That you may see how these beings work and may learn their nature and thereby how consciously to control and direct their forces—for remember they actually are the forces of your nature, as they are the forces of all nature, and which accomplish all things for you, whether you are conscious of it or not, or whether in the past you directed their activities ignorantly, foolishly or destructively—we will show how they are attached to man and how they are the agents used by the Higher Self to develop and unfold man’s spiritual nature.

FIRST, remember that man fundamentally is a spiritual being, but having “fallen” or descended from his divine estate, and thereby having separated himself in consciousness from his spiritual source, he is now bringing back or redeeming and lifting up his miscreations of the past to his heavenly home. However, man being a spiritual being, his creations have always been mental ones. That is, they were first born in the realm of mind as thought-forms, and that later these forms surrounded themselves with forms of desire or feeling; which later produced for them bodies of etheric life animated and filled with their emotional vitality; and which finally crystallized into what are now called physical bodies.

But all are still only mental or more strictly speaking spiritual bodies, for the Spirit of man gave them birth first in the realm of mind, and through the mind he still controls them; for as we have shown in recent articles, man by thinking can quickly change any outer appearance on any and all planes of being by simply changing his concept or picture of them in the mental realm. This means that he thereby changes them also on all four planes of being, for what is born on the mental realm sooner or later out-manifests itself in all the outer realms.

Now when we tell you that the four basic or elemental essences of air, fire, water and earth have a definite relation to man’s inner nature, and that the elemental essences of air constitute man’s mental body; of fire his astral or emotional body; of water his etheric or vital body; and of earth his dense or physical body,—you can understand, with the elemental forces or beings of these realms subject to man’s will, how by vitalized thinking he can