On Exoteric “Blinds” and “the Death of the Soul.”

As a corollary to this, and before going into still more abstruse teachings, I must redeem the promise already given. I have to illustrate by tenets you already know, the awful doctrine of personal annihilation. Banish from your minds all that you have hitherto read in such works as Esoteric Buddhism, and thought you understood, of such hypotheses as the eighth sphere and the moon, and that man shares a common ancestor with the ape. Even the details occasionally given out by myself in the Theosophist and Lucifer were nothing like the whole truth, but only broad general ideas, hardly touched upon in their details. Certain passages, however, give out hints, especially my foot-notes on articles translated from Éliphas Lévi's Letters on Magic.839

Nevertheless, personal immortality is conditional, for there are such things as “soulless men,” a teaching barely mentioned, although it is spoken of even in Isis Unveiled;840 and there is an Avîtchi, rightly called Hell, though it has no connection with, or similitude to, the good Christian's Hell, either geographically or psychically. The truth known to Occultists and Adepts in every age could not be given out to a promiscuous public; hence, though almost every mystery of Occult Philosophy lies half concealed in Isis and the two earlier volumes of the present work, I had no right to amplify or correct the details of others. Readers may now compare those four volumes and such books as Esoteric Buddhism with the diagrams and explanations in these Papers, and see for themselves.

Paramâtmâ, the Spiritual Sun, may be thought of as outside the human Auric Egg, as it is also outside the Macrocosmic or Brahmâ's Egg. Why? Because, though every particle and atom are, so to speak, cemented with and soaked through by this Paramâtmic essence, yet it is wrong to call it a “human” or even a “universal” Principle, for the term is very likely to give rise to naught but an erroneous idea of the philosophical and purely metaphysical concept; it is not a Principle, but the cause of every Principle, the latter term being applied by Occultists only to its shadow—the Universal Spirit that ensouls the boundless Kosmos whether within or beyond Space and Time.

Buddhi serves as a vehicle for that Paramâtmic shadow. This Buddhi [pg 511] is universal, and so also is the human Âtmâ. Within the Auric Egg is the macracosmic pentacle of Life, Prâna, containing within itself the pentagram which represents man. The universal pentacle must be pictured with its point soaring upwards, the sign of White Magic—in the human pentacle it is the lower limbs which are upward, forming the “Horns of Satan,” as the Christian Kabbalists call them. This is the symbol of Matter, that of the personal man, and the recognized pentacle of the Black Magician. For this reversed pentacle does not stand only for Kâma, the fourth Principle exoterically, but it also represents physical man, the animal of flesh with its desires and passions.

Now, mark well, in order to understand that which follows, that Manas may be pictured as an upper triangle connected with the lower Manas by a thin line which binds the two together. This is the Antah-karana, that path or bridge of communication which serves as a link between the personal being whose physical brain is under the sway of the lower animal mind, and the reincarnating Individuality, the spiritual Ego, Manas, Manu, the “Divine Man.” This thinking Manu alone is that which reincarnates. In truth and in nature, the two Minds, the spiritual and the physical or animal, are one, but separate into two at reincarnation. For while that portion of the Divine which goes to animate the personality, consciously separating itself, like a dense but pure shadow, from the Divine Ego,841 wedges itself into the brain and senses842 of the fœtus, at the completion of its seventh month, the Higher Manas does not unite itself with the child before the completion of the first seven years of its life. This detached essence, or rather the reflection or shadow of the Higher Manas, becomes, as the [pg 512] child grows, a distinct thinking Principle in man, its chief agent being the physical brain. No wonder the Materialists, who perceive only this “rational soul,” or mind, will not disconnect it with the brain and matter. But Occult Philosophy has ages ago solved the problem of mind, and discovered the duality of Manas. The Divine Ego tends with its point upwards towards Buddhi, and the human Ego gravitates downwards, immersed in Matter, connected with its higher, subjective half only by the Antahkarana. As its derivation suggests, this is the only connecting link during life between the two minds—the higher consciousness of the Ego and the human intelligence of the lower mind.

To understand this abstruse metaphysical doctrine fully and correctly, one has to be thoroughly impressed with an idea, which I have in vain endeavoured to impart to Theosophists at large, namely, the great axiomatic truth that the only eternal and living Reality is that which the Hindus call Paramâtmâ and Parabrahman. This is the one ever-existing Root Essence, immutable and unknowable to our physical senses, but manifest and clearly perceptible to our spiritual natures. Once imbued with that basic idea and the further conception that if It is omnipresent, universal and eternal, like abstract Space itself, we must have emanated from It and we must, some day, return into It, and all the rest becomes easy.

If so, then it stands to reason that life and death, good and evil, past and future, are all empty words, or at best, figures of speech. If the objective Universe itself is but a passing illusion on account of its beginning and finitude, then both life and death must also be aspects and illusions. They are changes of state, in fact, and no more. Real life is in the spiritual consciousness of that life, in a conscious existence in Spirit, not Matter; and real death is the limited perception of life, the impossibility of sensing conscious or even individual existence outside of form, or at least, of some form of Matter. Those who sincerely reject the possibility of conscious life divorced from Matter and brain-substance, are dead units. The words of Paul, an Initiate, become comprehensible. “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God;” which is to say: Ye are personally dead matter, unconscious of its own spiritual essence, and your real life is hid with your Divine Ego (Christos) in, or merged with, God (Âtmâ); now has it departed from you, ye soulless people. Speaking on Esoteric lines, every irrevocably [pg 513] materialistic person is a dead Man, a living automaton, in spite of his being endowed with great brain power. Listen to what Aryasangha says, stating the same fact:

That which is neither Spirit nor Matter, neither Light nor Darkness, but is verily the container and root of these, that thou art. The Root projects at every Dawn its shadow on Itself, and that shadow thou callest Light and Life, O poor dead Form. (This) Life-Light streameth downward through the stairway of the seven worlds, the stairs of which each step become denser and darker. It is of this seven-times-seven scale that thou art the faithful climber and mirror, O little man! Thou art this, but thou knowest it not.

This is the first lesson to learn. The second is to study well the Principles of both the Kosmos and ourselves, dividing the group into the permanent and the impermanent, the higher and immortal and the lower and mortal, for thus only can we master and guide, first the lower cosmic and personal, then the higher cosmic and impersonal.

Once we can do that we have secured our immortality. But some may say: “How few are those who can do so. All such are great Adepts, and none can reach such Adeptship in one short life.” Agreed; but there is an alternative. “If the Sun thou canst not be, then be the humble Planet,” says the Book of the Golden Precepts. And if even that is beyond our reach, then let us at least endeavour to keep within the ray of some lesser star, so that its silvery light may penetrate the murky darkness, through which the stony path of life trends onward; for without this divine radiance we risk losing more than we imagine.

With regard, then, to “soulless” men, and the “second death” of the “Soul,” mentioned in the second volume of Isis Unveiled, you will there find that I have spoken of such soulless people, and even of Avîtchi, though I leave the latter unnamed. Read from the last paragraph on page 367 to the end of the first paragraph on page 370, and then collate what is there said with what I have now to say.

The higher triad, Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas, may be recognized from the first lines of the quotation from the Egyptian papyrus. In the Ritual, now the Book of the Dead, the purified Soul, the dual Manas, appears as “the victim of the dark influence of the Dragon Apophis,” the physical personality of Kâmarûpic man, with his passions. “If it has attained the final knowledge of the heavenly and infernal Mysteries, the Gnosis”—the divine and the terrestrial Mysteries, of White and Black Magic—then the defunct personality “will triumph over its enemy”—death. This alludes to the case of a complete re-union, at the end of [pg 514] earth life, of the lower Manas, full of “the harvest of life,” with its Ego. But if Apophis conquers the Soul, then it “cannot escape a second death.”

These few lines from a papyrus, many thousands of years old, contain a whole revelation, known, in those days, only to the Hierophants and the Initiates. The “harvest of life” consists of the finest spiritual thoughts, of the memory of the noblest and most unselfish deeds of the personality, and the constant presence during its bliss after death of all those it loved with divine, spiritual devotion.843 Remember the teaching: The Human Soul, lower Manas, is the only and direct mediator between the personality and the Divine Ego. That which goes to make up on this earth the personality miscalled individuality by the majority, is the sum of all its mental, physical, and spiritual characteristics, which, being impressed on the Human Soul, produces the man. Now, of all these characteristics it is the purified thoughts alone which can be impressed on the higher, immortal Ego. This is done by the Human Soul merging again, in its essence, into its parent source, commingling with its Divine Ego during life, and re-uniting itself entirely with it after the death of the physical man. Therefore, unless Kâma-Manas transmits to Buddhi-Manas such personal ideations, and such consciousness of its “I” as can be assimilated by the Divine Ego, nothing of that “I” or personality can survive in the Eternal. Only that which is worthy of the immortal God within us, and identical in its nature with the divine quintessence, can survive; for in this case it is its own, the Divine Ego's, “shadows” or emanations which ascend to it and are indrawn by it into itself again, to become once more part of its own Essence. No noble thought, no grand aspiration, desire, or divine immortal love, can come into the brain of the man of clay and settle there, except as a direct emanation from the Higher to, and through, the lower Ego; all the rest, intellectual as it may seem, proceeds from the “shadow,” the lower mind, in its association and commingling with Kâma, and passes away and disappears for ever. But the mental and spiritual ideations of the personal “I” return to it, as parts of the Ego's Essence, and can never fade out. Thus of the personality that was, only its spiritual experiences, the memory of all that is good and noble, with the consciousness of its “I” blended with that of all the other personal “I's” that preceded it, survive and become immortal. [pg 515] There is no distinct or separate immortality for the men of earth outside of the Ego which informed them. That Higher Ego is the sole bearer of all its alter egos on earth and their sole representative in the mental state called Devachan. As the last embodied personality, however, has a right to its own special state of bliss, unalloyed and free from the memories of all others, it is the last life only which is fully and realistically vivid. Devachan is often compared to the happiest day in a series of many thousands of other “days” in the life of a person. The intensity of its happiness makes the man entirely forget all others, his past becoming obliterated.

This is what we call the Devachanic state, the reward of the personality, and it is on this old teaching that the hazy Christian notion of Paradise was built, borrowed with many other things from the Egyptian Mysteries, wherein the doctrine was enacted. And this is the meaning of the passage quoted in Isis. The Soul has triumphed over Apophis, the Dragon of Flesh. Henceforth, the personality will live in eternity, in its highest and noblest elements, the memory of its past deeds, while the “characteristics” of the “Dragon” will be fading out in Kâma Loka. If the question be asked, “How live in eternity, when Devachan lasts but from 1,000 to 2,000 years,” the answer is: “In the same way as the recollection of each day which is worth remembering lives in the memory of each one of us.” For the sake of an example, the days passed in one personal life may be taken as an illustration of each personal life, and this or that person may stand for the Divine Ego.

To obtain the key which will open the door of many a psychological mystery it is sufficient to understand and remember that which precedes and that which follows. Many a Spiritualist has felt terribly indignant on being told that personal immortality was conditional; and yet such is the philosophical and logical fact. Much has been said already on the subject, but no one to this day seems to have fully understood the doctrine. Moreover, it is not enough to know that such a fact is said to exist. All Occultist, or he who would become one, must know why it is so; for having learned and comprehended the raison d'étre, it becomes easier to set others right in their erroneous speculations, and, most important of all, it affords one an opportunity, without saying too much, to teach other people to avoid a calamity which, sad to say, occurs in our age almost daily. This calamity will now be explained at length.

One must know little indeed of the Eastern modes of expression to fail to see in the passage quoted from the Book of the Dead, and the pages of Isis, (a) an allegory for the uninitiated, containing our Esoteric teaching; and (b) that the two terms “second death” and “Soul” are, in one sense, blinds. “Soul” refers indifferently to Buddhi-Manas and Kâma-Manas. As to the term “second death,” the qualification “second” applies to several deaths which have to be undergone by the “Principles” during their incarnation, Occultists alone understanding fully the sense in which such a statement is made. For we have (1) the death of the Body; (2) the death of the Animal Soul in Kâma Loka; (3) the death of the Astral Linga Sharîra, following that of the Body; (4) the metaphysical death of the Higher Ego, the immortal, every time it “falls into matter,” or incarnates in a new personality. The Animal Soul, or lower Manas, that shadow of the Divine Ego which separates from it to inform the personality, cannot by any possible means escape death in Kâma Loka, at any rate that portion of this reflection which remains as a terrestrial residue and cannot be impressed on the Ego. Thus the chief and most important secret with regard to that “second death,” in the Esoteric teaching, was and is to this day the terrible possibility of the death of the Soul, that is, its severance from the Ego on earth during a person's lifetime. This is a real death (though with chances of resurrection), which shows no traces in a person and yet leaves him morally a living corpse. It is difficult to see why this teaching should have been preserved until now with such secrecy, when, by spreading it among people, at any rate among those who believe in reincarnation, so much good might be done. But so it was, and I had no right to question the wisdom of the prohibition, but have given it hitherto, as it was given to myself, under pledge not to reveal it to the world at large. But now I have permission to give it to all, revealing its tenets first to the Esotericists, and then when they have assimilated them thoroughly it will be their duty to teach others this special tenet of the “second death,” and warn all the Theosophists of its dangers.

To make the teaching clearer, I shall seemingly have to go over old ground; in reality, however, it is given out with new light and new details. I have tried to hint at it in the Theosophist as I have done in Isis, but have failed to make myself understood. I will now explain it, point by point.