Let us remember in connection with this Rule that it is only potent in so far as the "worker with the Law" is en rapport with the inner reality within himself, with the soul. It is essential that through him, in full waking consciousness, the soul should be functioning. It is the soul who pronounces the words. It is the soul who utters forth the mystic phrase, but it is the soul as controller or ruler of the mechanism, of the form-apparatus. This control is only possible where there is alignment of the brain and mind and soul. Again, it is necessary to remember that this Rule, being an expression of the creative work, applies to all creative process, whether macrocosmic or microcosmic, whether we are dealing with God as the creator of the solar system, with the soul as the creator of the human mechanism, or with the man as he attempts to master the technique of the magical work and so become a creator of forms in his own little sphere. All have to work out the true significance of the Rule, for God works under the law of His Being, and this Law demonstrates to us as the laws of nature.

The ideas of ordered activity and of a conscious and purposeful goal are bound up in the phrase we are considering. The builder of any form is first of all a controller of lives and the arbiter of the destinies of certain entities. In this thought we have light thrown upon the subject of free will and upon the Law of Cause and Effect. It must not be forgotten however that the mystery of causes lies hid in past universes - all, in their day, the "forms indwelt by God". For us there can be no such [464] thing as pure cause, but only the working out of major effects. Just as for us such a reality as pure reason is totally incomprehensible and unattainable, so with pure cause. These factors antedate our solar system and therefore speculation about them remains unrewarded, except in so far as it tends to develop the mental apparatus. This solar system is a system of effects, which in their turn generate causes. Only in the human family and only among those human beings who are consciously using mind power are any causes of any kind being generated. All causes, being initiated by a mind of some kind, functioning consciously and thinking clearly, posit a Thinker, and this is profoundly the position of the occult sciences. Our solar system is a thought-form but one having real existence just as long as thought persists. All that is forms part of the current of ideas emanating from the divine Thinker. All thoughts are part of a divine stream. The mass of people think not, and so do not generate causes that must in due time produce their effect.

You ask, where then the truth of the statement made in many occult modern books that the trend of life or cycle of lives indicates necessarily the future, and that the causes initiated in one life work out as effects in another? Where lives are predominantly emotional and are physically oriented, it is not a particular life that sets the pace but the group of lives, simultaneously interacting with each other, predisposes the future along certain lines. This is eternally true of all human beings at a certain level of conscious development where they are swayed by mass ideas, molded unthinkingly by tradition and public opinion, are frankly immersed in selfish interests, and are not "taking hold" of conditions themselves but are being carried forward on the tide of evolution. It is a form of group activity (groups governed by the vibration of physical and astral forms) which produces the [465] characteristics and tendencies which cause the situation and environing circumstances. In this realization lies hid the secret of racial and national karma and conditions. In these groups, the ordinary feeling, active man is immersed, and out of this immersion he must find his way by discovering and using his mind. Instinct must give place to intellect. For cycles of lives, groups of souls incarnate through the pull of the material forms, towards which they are attracted. These attractive energies have earlier been utilized by the soul - finally being discarded and disintegrated. It is the potency of form which in the first case draws the soul into incarnation, for in the first half of the evolutionary process matter - highly organized in a previous solar system - is the dominant factor. Later, we know, spirit mounts on the shoulder of matter. The mass interplay of spirit and matter is now so potent that one of the major experiences that a soul undergoes is the achieving of the stage wherein the pull of matter begins to wane and the soul learns to detach itself. This is the experience through which humanity is now passing - again a group activity on a higher turn of the spiral.