Here, we will reintroduce the old terminology which defines the three great categories into which the whole of humanity is divided: hylic, psychic and pneumatic.
By hylic, we mean the man who lives below the first Threshold, by psychic we indicate psychological man, one who has crossed the first Threshold, and who has started on the Staircase leading to the second Threshold; by pneumatic, we refer to one who, having crossed the second Threshold and reached his second Birth, is making progress towards the third Threshold.
As we have seen, everything that lives, lives by Love, and aspires to Love, And by changing its appearance, Love manifests itself as a whole scale of values. It is, however, important to understand that this whole scale of values corresponds to several different levels of Consciousness. And in the case of Love as in that of Consciousness, the acquisition of the higher level does not automatically exclude or annihilate the lower level that has been transcended, but transform! it.
One often speaks of the sublimation of sex which follows the passage to higher levels of Consciousness. In fact, this sublimation takes place continuously on the whole Great Ladder of the evolution of living beings. For mankind it involves three steps which correspond to the three categories, already described, into which humanity is sub-divided.
The hylic man is satisfied with life below the first Threshold, whether he is a 'success' or not, whether he is rich or poor, happy or unhappy. As a result his aspirations and his desires, like his loves, ate aiso kept below the first Threshold.
The pneumatic man, that is, one who has crossed the second Threshold and has been born again, aspires to attain and cross the third Threshold, which will open up the Way leading to the Pleroma, the ineffable Love in the bosom of the Absolute,
The psychic (psychological) man also aspires to this state; but before it becomes possible for him to work effectively in this sense, he must be regenerated and come to the second Birth. In the first volume of our work, we studied the elements of the Way in detail and pointed out that access to what is properly called the Way demands assiduous work which may be divided into four stages. This forms a Staircase of four 'steps' of which the last is Love—the level that the man of the psyche must attain to appear before the second Threshold and to cross it. We indicated the traditional virtues which correspond to these four stages: Faith — Hope — Knowledge (Gnosis) and, lastly hove. The execution of this successive programme of work depends on the continuity of the faithful's efforts. The latter are often super-human, and must be made in the framework of one of the four Ways, which must correspond to the neophyte's type of psyche.
In this second volume we have also seriously studied the fifth Way, which offers the possibility of rapidly attaining and triumphantly crossing the second Threshold. This way is only possible to two polar beings in a united and conscious effort. This is the way of the Knight and the Lady of his Dreams.
