When functioning in this physical world he remembers by means of his mental body; but since that is a new one, assumed only for this birth, it naturally cannot contain the memory of previous births in which it had no part.  The man himself, the ego, does remember them all when in his own world, and occasionally some partial recollection of them or influence from them filters through into his lower vehicles.  He does not usually, in his physical life, remember the experiences of earlier lives, but he does manifest in physical life the qualities which those experiences have developed in him.  Each man is therefore exactly what he has made himself during those past lives; if he has in them developed good qualities in himself, he possesses the good qualities now; if he neglected to train himself, and consequently left himself weak and of evil disposition, he finds himself precisely in that condition now.  The qualities, good or evil, with which he is born are those which he has made for himself.

This development of the ego is the object of the whole process of materialization; he assumes those veils of matter precisely because through them he is able to receive vibrations to which he can respond, so that his latent faculties may thereby be unfolded.  Though man descends from on high into these lower worlds, it is only through that descent that a full cognizance of the higher worlds is developed in him.  Full consciousness in any given world involves the power to perceive and respond to all the undulations of that world:  therefore the ordinary man has not yet perfect consciousness at any level—­not even in this physical world which he thinks he knows.  It is possible for him to unfold his percipience in all these worlds, and it is by means of such developed consciousness that we observe all these facts which I am now describing.

The causal body is the permanent vehicle of the ego in the higher mental world.  It consists of matter of the first, second and third subdivisions of that world.  In ordinary people it is not yet fully active, only that matter which belongs to the third subdivision being vivified.  As the ego unfolds his latent possibilities through the long course of his evolution, the higher matter is gradually brought into action, but it is only in the perfected man whom we call the Adept that it is developed to its fullest extent.  Such matter can be discerned by clairvoyant sight, but only by a seer who knows how to use the sight of the ego.

It is difficult to describe a causal body fully, because the senses belonging to its world are altogether different from and higher than ours at this level.  Such memory of the appearance of a causal body as it is possible for a clairvoyant to bring into his physical brain represents it as ovoid, and as surrounding the physical body of the man, extending to a distance of about eighteen inches from the normal surface of that body.  In the case of primitive man it resembles