Part 8

Here you have our doctrine, which shows man a _septenary_ during life; a _quintile_ just after death, in Kama-loka; and a threefold _Ego_, Spirit-Soul, and consciousness in _Devachan_. This separation, first in “the Meadows of Hades,” as Plutarch calls the _Kama-loka_, then in Devachan, was part and parcel of the performances during the sacred Mysteries, when the candidates for initiation enacted the whole drama of death, and the resurrection as a glorified spirit, by which name we mean _Consciousness_. This is what Plutarch means when he says:—

“And as with the one, the terrestrial, so with the other celestial Hermes doth dwell. This suddenly and with violence plucks the soul from the body; but Proserpina mildly and in a long time disjoins the understanding from the soul.[23] For this reason she is called _Monogenes, only begotten_, or rather _begetting one alone_; for _the better part of man becomes alone when it is separated by her_. Now both the one and the other happens thus according to nature. It is ordained by Fate (Fatum or Karma) that every soul, whether with or without understanding (mind), when gone out of the body, should wander for a time, though not all for the same, in the region lying between the earth and moon (_Kama-loka_).[24] For those that have been unjust and dissolute suffer then the punishment due to their offences; but the good and virtuous are there detained till they are purified, and have, by expiation, purged out of them all the infections they might have contracted from the contagion of the body, as if from foul health, living in the mildest part of the air, called the Meadows of Hades, where they must remain for a certain prefixed and appointed time. And then, as if they were returning from a wandering pilgrimage or long exile into their country, they have a taste of joy, such as they principally receive who are initiated into Sacred Mysteries, mixed with trouble, admiration, and each one’s proper and peculiar hope.”

This is Nirvanic bliss, and no Theosophist could describe in plainer though esoteric language the mental joys of Devachan, where every man has his paradise around him, erected by his consciousness. But you must beware of the general error into which too many even of our Theosophists fall. Do not imagine that because man is called septenary, then _quintuple_ and a triad, he is a compound of seven, five, or three _entities_; or, as well expressed by a Theosophical writer, of skins to be peeled off like the skins of an onion. The “principles,” as already said, save the body, the life, and the astral _eidolon_, all of which disperse at death, are simply _aspects_ and _states of consciousness_. There is but one _real_ man, enduring through the cycle of life and immortal in essence, if not in form, and this is _Manas_, the Mind-man or embodied Consciousness. The objection made by the materialists, who deny the possibility of mind and consciousness

## acting without matter is worthless in our case. We do not deny

the soundness of their argument; but we simply ask our opponents, “Are you acquainted _with all the states of matter_, you who knew hitherto but of three? And how do you know whether that which we refer to as ABSOLUTE CONSCIOUSNESS or Deity for ever invisible and unknowable, be not that which, though it eludes for ever our human _finite_ conception, is still universal Spirit-matter or matter-Spirit _in its absolute infinitude_?” It is then one of the lowest, and in its manvantaric manifestations _fractioned_-aspects of this Spirit-matter, which is the conscious _Ego_ that creates its own paradise, a fool’s paradise, it may be, still a state of bliss.

ENQ. But what is _Devachan_?

THEO. The “land of gods” literally; a condition, a state of mental bliss. Philosophically a mental condition analogous to, but far more vivid and real than, the most vivid dream. It is the state after death of most mortals.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] In Mr. Sinnett’s “Esoteric Buddhism” _d_, _e_, and _f_, are respectively called the Animal, the Human, and the Spiritual Souls, which answers as well. Though the principles in _Esoteric Buddhism_ are numbered, this is, strictly speaking, useless. The dual _Monad_ alone (_Atma-Buddhi_) is susceptible of being thought of as the two highest numbers (the 6th and 7th). As to all others, since _that_ “principle” only which is predominant in man has to be considered as the first and foremost, no numeration is possible as a general rule. In some men it is the higher Intelligence (Manas or the 5th) which dominates the rest; in others the Animal Soul (Kama-rupa) that reigns supreme, exhibiting the most bestial instincts, etc.

[20] Paul calls Plato’s _Nous_ “Spirit”; but as this spirit is “substance,” then, of course, _Buddhi_ and not _Atma_ is meant, as the latter cannot philosophically be called “substance” under any circumstance. We include Atma among the human “principles” in order not to create additional confusion. In reality it is no “human” but the universal _absolute_ principle of which Buddhi, the Soul-Spirit, is the carrier.

[21] “Plato and Pythagoras,” says Plutarch, “distribute the soul into two parts, the rational (noetic) and irrational (agnoia); that that part of the soul of man which is rational is eternal; for though it be not God, yet it is the product of an eternal deity, but that part of the soul which is divested of reason (agnoia) dies.” The modern term _Agnostic_ comes from _Agnosis_, a cognate word. We wonder why Mr. Huxley, the author of the word, should have connected his great intellect with “the soul divested of reason” which dies? Is it the exaggerated humility of the modern materialist?

[22] The Kabalists who know the relation of Jehovah, the life and children-giver, to the Moon, and the influence of the latter on generation, will again see the point as much as some astrologers will.

[23] Proserpina, or Persephone, stands here for post mortem Karma, which is said to regulate the separation of the lower from the higher “principles”: the _Soul_, as _Nephesh_, the breath of animal life, which remains for a time in Kama-loka, from the higher compound _Ego_, which goes into the state of Devachan, or bliss.

[24] Until the separation of the higher, spiritual “principle” takes place from the lower ones, which remain in the Kama-loka until disintegrated.

VII. ON THE VARIOUS POST MORTEM STATES.

THE PHYSICAL AND THE SPIRITUAL MAN.

ENQ. I am glad to hear you believe in the immortality of the Soul.

THEO. Not of “the Soul,” but of the divine Spirit; or rather in the immortality of the reincarnating Ego.

ENQ. What is the difference?

THEO. A very great one in our philosophy, but this is too abstruse and difficult a question to touch lightly upon. We shall have to analyse them separately, and then in conjunction. We may begin with Spirit.

We say that the Spirit (the “Father in secret” of Jesus), or _Atman_, is no individual property of any man, but is the Divine essence which has no body, no form, which is imponderable, invisible and indivisible, that which does not _exist_ and yet _is_, as the Buddhists say of Nirvana. It only overshadows the mortal; that which enters into him and pervades the whole body being only its omnipresent rays, or light, radiated through _Buddhi_, its vehicle and direct emanation. This is the secret meaning of the assertions of almost all the ancient philosophers, when they said that “the _rational_ part of man’s soul”[25] never entered wholly into the man, but only overshadowed him more or less through the _irrational_ spiritual Soul or Buddhi.[26]

ENQ. I laboured under the impression that the “Animal Soul” alone was irrational, not the Divine.

THEO. You have to learn the difference between that which is negatively, or _passively_ “irrational,” because undifferentiated, and that which is irrational because too _active_ and positive. Man is a correlation of spiritual powers, as well as a correlation of chemical and physical forces, brought into function by what we call “principles.”

ENQ. I have read a good deal upon the subject, and it seems to me that the notions of the older philosophers differed a great deal from those of the mediæval Kabalists, though they do agree in some

## particulars.

THEO. The most substantial difference between them and us is this. While we believe with the Neo-Platonists and the Eastern teachings that the spirit (Atma) never descends hypostatically into the living man, but only showers more or less its radiance on the _inner_ man (the psychic and spiritual compound of the _astral_ principles), the Kabalists maintain that the human Spirit, detaching itself from the ocean of light and Universal Spirit, enters man’s Soul, where it remains throughout life imprisoned in the astral capsule. All Christian Kabalists still maintain the same, as they are unable to break quite loose from their anthropomorphic and Biblical doctrines.

ENQ. And what do you say?

THEO. We say that we only allow the presence of the radiation of Spirit (or Atma) in the astral capsule, and so far only as that spiritual radiancy is concerned. We say that man and Soul have to conquer their immortality by ascending towards the unity with which, if successful, they will be finally linked and into which they are finally, so to speak, absorbed. The individualization of man after death depends on the spirit, not on his soul and body. Although the word “personality,” in the sense in which it is usually understood, is an absurdity if applied literally to our immortal essence, still the latter is, as our individual Ego, a distinct entity, immortal and eternal, _per se_. _It is only in the case of black magicians or of criminals beyond redemption, criminals who have been such during a long series of lives_—that the shining thread, which links the spirit to the _personal_ soul from the moment of the birth of the child, is violently snapped, and the disembodied entity becomes divorced from the personal soul, the latter being annihilated without leaving the smallest impression of itself on the former. If that union between the lower, or personal Manas, and the individual reincarnating Ego, has not been effected during life, then the former is left to share the fate of the lower animals, to gradually dissolve into ether, and have its personality annihilated. But even then the Ego remains a distinct being. It (the spiritual Ego) only loses one Devachanic state—after that special, and in that case indeed useless, life—as that idealized _Personality_, and is reincarnated, after enjoying for a short time its freedom as a planetary spirit, almost immediately.

ENQ. It is stated in _Isis Unveiled_ that such planetary Spirits or Angels, “the gods of the Pagans or the Archangels of the Christians,” will never be men on our planet.

THEO. Quite right. Not “_such_,” but _some_ classes of higher Planetary Spirits. They will never be men on this planet, because they are liberated Spirits from a previous, earlier world, and as such they cannot re-become men on this one. Yet all these will live again in the next and far higher Mahamanvantara, after this “great Age,” and “Brahma _pralaya_,” (a little period of 16 figures or so) is over. For you must have heard, of course, that Eastern philosophy teaches us that mankind consists of such “Spirits” imprisoned in human bodies? The difference between animals and men is this: the former are ensouled by the “principles” _potentially_, the latter _actually_.[27] Do you understand now the difference?

ENQ. Yes; but this specialisation has been in all ages the stumbling-block of metaphysicians.

THEO. It was. The whole esotericism of the Buddhistic philosophy is based on this mysterious teaching, understood by so few persons, and so totally misrepresented by many of the most learned modern scholars. Even metaphysicians are too inclined to confound the effect with the cause. An Ego who has won his immortal life as spirit will remain the same inner self throughout all his rebirths on earth; but this does not imply necessarily that he must either remain the Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown he was on earth, or lose his individuality. Therefore, the astral soul and the terrestrial body of man may, in the dark hereafter, be absorbed into the cosmical ocean of sublimated elements, and cease to feel his last _personal_ Ego (if it did not deserve to soar higher), and the _divine_ Ego still remain the same unchanged entity, though this terrestrial experience of his emanation may be totally obliterated at the instant of separation from the unworthy vehicle.

ENQ. If the “Spirit,” or the divine portion of the soul, is pre-existent as a distinct being from all eternity, as Origen, Synesius, and other semi-Christians and semi-Platonic philosophers taught, and if it is the same, and nothing more than the metaphysically-objective soul, how can it be otherwise than eternal? And what matters it in such a case, whether man leads a pure life or an animal, if, do what he may, he can never lose his individuality?

THEO. This doctrine, as you have stated it, is just as pernicious in its consequences as that of vicarious atonement. Had the latter dogma, in company with the false idea that we are all immortal, been demonstrated to the world in its true light, humanity would have been bettered by its propagation.

Let me repeat to you again. Pythagoras, Plato, Timaeus of Locris, and the old Alexandrian School, derived the _Soul_ of man (or his higher “principles” and attributes) from the Universal World Soul, the latter being, according to their teachings, _Aether_ (Pater-Zeus). Therefore, neither of these “principles” can be _unalloyed_ essence of the Pythagorean Monas, or our _Atma-Buddhi_, because the _Anima Mundi_ is but the effect, the subjective emanation or rather radiation of the former. Both the _human_ Spirit (or the individuality), the reincarnating Spiritual Ego, and Buddhi, the Spiritual soul, are pre-existent. But, while the former exists as a distinct entity, an individualization, the soul exists as pre-existing breath, an unscient portion of an intelligent whole. Both were originally formed from the Eternal Ocean of light; but as the Fire-Philosophers, the mediæval Theosophists, expressed it, there is a visible as well as invisible spirit in fire. They made a difference between the _anima bruta_ and the _anima divina_. Empedocles firmly believed all men and animals to possess two souls; and in Aristotle we find that he calls one the reasoning soul, νους and the other, the animal soul, ψυχη. According to these philosophers, the reasoning soul comes from _within_ the universal soul, and the other from _without_.

ENQ. Would you call the Soul, _i.e._, the human thinking Soul, or what you call the Ego—matter?

THEO. Not matter, but substance assuredly; nor would the word “matter,” if prefixed with the adjective, _primordial_, be a word to avoid. That matter, we say, is co-eternal with Spirit, and is not our visible, tangible, and divisible matter, but its extreme sublimation. Pure Spirit is but one remove from the _no_-Spirit, or the absolute _all_. Unless you admit that man was evolved out of this primordial Spirit-matter, and represents a regular progressive scale of “principles” from _meta_-Spirit down to the grossest matter, how can we ever come to regard the _inner_ man as immortal, and at the same time as a spiritual Entity and a mortal man?

ENQ. Then why should you not believe in God as such an Entity?

THEO. Because that which is infinite and unconditioned can have no form, and cannot be a being, not in any Eastern philosophy worthy of the name, at any rate. An “entity” is immortal, but is so only in its ultimate essence, not in its individual form. When at the last point of its cycle, it is absorbed into its primordial nature; and it becomes spirit, when it loses its name of Entity.

Its immortality as a form is limited only to its life-cycle or the _Mahamanvantara_; after which it is one and identical with the Universal Spirit, and no longer a separate Entity. As to the _personal_ Soul—by which we mean the spark of consciousness that preserves in the Spiritual Ego the idea of the personal “I” of the last incarnation—this lasts, as a separate distinct recollection, only throughout the Devachanic period; after which time it is added to the series of other innumerable incarnations of the Ego, like the remembrance in our memory of one of a series of days, at the end of a year. Will you bind the infinitude you claim for your God to finite conditions? That alone which is indissolubly cemented by _Atma_ (_i.e._, Buddhi-Manas) is immortal. The Soul of man (_i.e._, of the personality) _per se_ is neither immortal, eternal nor divine. Says the _Zohar_ (vol. iii., p. 616), “the soul, when sent to this earth, puts on an earthly garment, to preserve herself here, so she receives above a shining garment, in order to be able to look without injury into the mirror, whose light proceeds from the Lord of Light.” Moreover, the _Zohar_ teaches that the soul cannot reach the abode of bliss, unless she has received the “holy kiss,” or the reunion of the soul _with the substance from which she emanated_—spirit. All souls are dual, and, while the latter is a feminine principle, the spirit is masculine. While imprisoned in body, man is a trinity, unless his pollution is such as to have caused his divorce from the spirit. “Woe to the soul which prefers to her divine husband (spirit) the earthly wedlock with her terrestrial body,” records a text of the _Book of the Keys_, a Hermetic work. Woe indeed, for nothing will remain of that personality to be recorded on the imperishable tablets of the Ego’s memory.

ENQ. How can that which, if not breathed by God into man, yet is on your own confession of an identical substance with the divine, fail to be immortal?

THEO. Every atom and speck of matter, not of substance only, is _imperishable_ in its essence, but not in its _individual consciousness_. Immortality is but one’s unbroken consciousness; and the _personal_ consciousness can hardly last longer than the personality itself, can it? And such consciousness, as I already told you, survives only throughout Devachan, after which it is reabsorbed, first, in the _individual_, and then in the _universal_ consciousness. Better enquire of your theologians how it is that they have so sorely jumbled up the Jewish Scriptures. Read the Bible, if you would have a good proof that the writers of the _Pentateuch_, and _Genesis_ especially, never regarded _nephesh_, that which God breathes into Adam (Gen. ch. ii.), as the _immortal_ soul. Here are some instances:—“And God created ... every _nephesh_ (life) that moveth” (Gen i. 21), meaning animals; and (Gen. ii. 7) it is said: “And man became a _nephesh_” (living soul), which shows that the word _nephesh_ was indifferently applied to _immortal_ man and to _mortal_ beast. “And surely your blood of your _nepheshim_ (lives) will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man” (Gen. ix. 5), “Escape for _nephesh_” (escape for thy _life_, it is translated), (Gen. xix. 17). “Let us not kill him,” reads the English version (Gen. xxxvii. 21). “Let us not kill his _nephesh_” is the Hebrew text. “_Nephesh_ for _nephesh_,” says Leviticus (xvii. 8). “He that killeth any man shall surely be put to death,” literally “He that smiteth the _nephesh_ of a man” (Lev. xxiv. 17); and from verse 18 and following it reads: “And he that killeth a beast (_nephesh_) shall make it good ... Beast for beast,” whereas the original text has it “nephesh for nephesh.” How could man _kill_ that which is immortal? And this explains also why the Sadducees denied the immortality of the soul, as it also affords another proof that very probably the Mosaic Jews—the uninitiated at any rate—never believed in the soul’s survival at all.

ON ETERNAL REWARD AND PUNISHMENT; AND ON NIRVANA.

ENQ. It is hardly necessary, I suppose, to ask you whether you believe in the Christian dogmas of Paradise and Hell, or in future rewards and punishments as taught by the Orthodox churches?

THEO. As described in your catechisms, we reject them absolutely; least of all would we accept their eternity. But we believe firmly in what we call the _Law of Retribution_, and in the absolute justice and wisdom guiding this Law, or Karma. Hence we positively refuse to accept the cruel and unphilosophical belief in eternal reward or eternal punishment. We say with Horace:—

“Let rules be fixed that may our rage contain, And punish faults _with a proportion’d pain_; But do not flay him who deserves alone A whipping for the fault that he has done.”

This is a rule for all men, and a just one. Have we to believe that God, of whom you make the embodiment of wisdom, love and mercy, is less entitled to these attributes than mortal man?

ENQ. Have you any other reasons for rejecting this dogma?

THEO. Our chief reason for it lies in the fact of re-incarnation. As already stated, we reject the idea of a new soul created for every newly-born babe. We believe that every human being is the bearer, or _Vehicle_, of an _Ego_ coeval with every other Ego; because all _Egos_ are _of the same essence_ and belong to the primeval emanation from one universal infinite _Ego_. Plato calls the latter the _logos_ (or the second manifested God); and we, the manifested divine principle, which is one with the universal mind or soul, not the anthropomorphic, extra-cosmic and _personal_ God in which so many Theists believe. Pray do not confuse.

ENQ. But where is the difficulty, once you accept a manifested principle, in believing that the soul of every new mortal is _created_ by that Principle, as all the Souls before it have been so created?

THEO. Because that which is _impersonal_ can hardly create, plan and think, at its own sweet will and pleasure. Being a universal _Law_, immutable in its periodical manifestations, those of radiating and manifesting its own essence at the beginning of every new cycle of life, IT is not supposed to create men, only to repent a few years later of having created them. If we have to believe in a divine principle at all, it must be in one which is as absolute harmony, logic, and justice, as it is absolute love, wisdom, and impartiality; and a God who would _create_ every soul for the space of _one brief span of life_, regardless of the fact whether it has to animate the body of a wealthy, happy man, or that of a poor suffering wretch, hapless from birth to death though he has done nothing to deserve his cruel fate—would be rather a senseless _fiend_ than a God. (_Vide infra_, “On the Punishment of the Ego.”) Why, even the Jewish philosophers, believers in the Mosaic Bible (esoterically, of course), have never entertained such an idea; and, moreover, they believed in re-incarnation, as we do.

ENQ. Can you give me some instances as a proof of this?