358 ROSICRUCIANCOSMO-CONCEPTION
man are gradually helping him to oust the family, tribal or
national spirit from the blood, but with it has necessarily
gone the involuntary clairvoyance which was due to its
working in the blood, whereby it fostered the family
traditions in its charges, and so we see thatalso in the case
of man a faculty was destroyed by the mixture of blood. That
loss was a gain, however, for it has concentrated man's
energy on the material world and he is better able to master
its lessons than if he were still distracted by the visions of
the higher realms.
As man becomes emancipated he gradually ceases to
think of himself as “Abraham's Seed,” as a “Clan Stewart
Man,” as a “Brahmin” or a “Levite”; he is learning to think
more of himself as an individual, an “I”. The more he
cultivates that “Self,” the more he frees himself from the
family- and national-spirit in the blood, the more he
becomes a self-sufficient citizen of the world.
There is much foolish, even dangerous, talk of giving up
the Self to the Not-Self; only when we have cultivated a
“Self,” can we sacrifice ourselves and give up theSelf to the
WHOLE. So long as we can only love our own family or
nation we are incapable of loving others. We are bound by
the tie of kin and country. When we have burst the tie of
blood andasserted ourselves and become self-sufficient may
we become unselfish helpers of humanity. When a man has
reached t hat stage he will find that, inst ead of having lost his
own family, he has gained all the families in the world, for
they will have become his sisters and brothers, his fathers
and mothers to care for and help.
Then he will regain the viewpoint of the Spiritual World
which he lost by the mixing of blood, but it will be a higher
faculty, an intelligent, voluntary clairvoyance where he can