Theos-Talk Archives (June 2004 Message tt00122)

June 19 2004

Part II

Dear Gopi:

Continued [ this is Part II ]

Here is the philosophy of Life and Death as HPB taught:

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Part II


DIALOGUE ON THE MYSTERIES OF THE AFTER LIFE

Article by H. P. Blavatsky	[ HPB Articles, II 194...]

ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE INNER MAN AND ITS DIVISION

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Part II


X. Stop! . . . Can the consciousness of my terrestrial Egos perish not
only for a time, like the consciousness of the materialist, but in any
case so entirely as to leave no trace behind? 

M. According to the teaching, it must so perish and in its fulness,
all except that principle which, having united itself with the Monad,
has thereby become a purely spiritual and indestructible essence, one
with it in the Eternity. But in the case of an out and out
materialist, in whose personal "I" no Buddhi has ever reflected
itself, how can the latter carry away into the infinitudes one
particle of that terrestrial personality? 

Your spiritual "I" is immortal; but from your present Self it can
carry away into after life but that which has become worthy of
immortality, namely, the aroma alone of the flower that has been mown
by death. 


X. Well, and the flower, the terrestrial "I"? 

M. The flower, as all past and future flowers which blossomed and
died, and will blossom again on the mother bough, the Sutratma, all
children of one root of Buddhi, will return to dust. Your present "I,"
as you yourself know, is not the body now sitting before me, nor yet
is it what I would call Manas-Sutratma--but Sutratma Buddhi. 


X. But this does not explain to me at all, why you call life after
death immortal, infinite, and real, and the terrestrial life a simple
phantom or illusion; since even that post-mortem life has limits,
however much wider they may be than those of terrestrial life. 

M. No doubt. The spiritual Ego of man moves in Eternity like a
pendulum between the hours of life and death. But if these hours
marking the periods of terrestrial and spiritual life are limited in
their duration, and if the very number of such stages in Eternity
between sleep and awakening, illusion and reality, has its beginning
and its end, on the other hand the spiritual "Pilgrim" is eternal.

Therefore are the hours of his post-mortem life--when, disembodied he
stands face to face with truth and not the mirages of his transitory
earthly existences during the period of that pilgrimage which we call
"the cycle of rebirths"--the only reality in our conception. Such
intervals, their limitation not withstanding, do not prevent the Ego,
while ever perfecting itself, to be following undeviatingly, though
gradually and slowly, the path to its last transformation, when that
Ego having reached its goal becomes the divine ALL. 

These intervals and stages help towards this final result instead of
hindering it; and without such limited intervals the divine Ego could
never reach its ultimate goal. This Ego is the actor, and its numerous
and various incarnations the parts it plays. Shall you call these
parts with their costumes the individuality of the actor himself? 

Like that actor, the Ego is forced to play during the Cycle of
Necessity up to the very threshold of Para-nirvana, many parts such as
may be unpleasant to it. But as the bee collects its honey from every
flower, leaving the rest as food for the earthly worms, so does our
spiritual individuality, whether we call it Sutratma or Ego.

It collects from every terrestrial personality into which Karma
forces it to incarnate, the nectar alone of the spiritual qualities
and self-consciousness, and uniting all these into one whole it
emerges from its chrysalis as the glorified Dhyan Chohan. So much the
worse for those terrestrial personalities from which it could collect
nothing. Such personalities cannot assuredly outlive consciously their
terrestrial existence. 


X. Thus then it seems, that for the terrestrial personality,
immortality is still conditional. Is then immortality itself not
unconditional? 

M. Not at all. But it cannot touch the non-existent. For all that
which exists as SAT, ever aspiring to SAT, immortality and Eternity
are absolute. Matter is the opposite pole of spirit and yet the two
are one. The essence of all this, i.e., Spirit, Force and Matter, or
the three in one, is as endless as it is beginningless; but the form
acquired by this triple unity during its incarnations, the
externality, is certainly only the illusion of our personal
conceptions. Therefore do we call the after-life alone a reality,
while relegating the terrestrial life, its terrestrial personality
included, to the phantom realm of illusion. 


X. But why in such a case not call sleep the reality, and waking the
illusion, instead of the reverse? 

M. Because we use an expression made to facilitate the grasping of the
subject, and from the standpoint of terrestrial conceptions it is a
very correct one. 


X. Nevertheless, I cannot understand. If the life to come is based on
justice and the merited retribution for all our terrestrial suffering,
how, in the case of materialists many of whom are ideally honest and
charitable men, should there remain of their personality nothing but
the refuse of a faded flower! 

M. No one ever said such a thing. No materialist, if a good man,
however unbelieving, can die forever in the fulness of his spiritual
individuality. What was said is, that the consciousness of one life
can disappear either fully or partially; in the case of a thorough
materialist, no vestige of that personality which disbelieved remains
in the series of lives. 


X. But is this not annihilation to the Ego? 

M. Certainly not. One can sleep a dead sleep during a long railway
journey, miss one or several stations without the slightest
recollection or consciousness of it, awake at another station and
continue the journey recollecting other halting places, till the end
of that journey, when the goal is reached. Three kinds of sleep were
mentioned to you: the dreamless, the chaotic, and the one so real,
that to the sleeping man his dreams become full realities. If you
believe in the latter why can't you believe in the former? According
to what one has believed in and expected after death, such is the
state one will have. He who expected no life to come will have an
absolute blank amounting to annihilation in the interval between the
two rebirths. This is just the carrying out of the programme we spoke
of, and which is created by the materialist himself. But there are
various kinds of materialists, as you say. 

A selfish wicked Egoist, one who never shed a tear for anyone but
himself, thus adding entire indifference the whole world to his
unbelief, must drop at the threshold of death his personality forever.
This personality having no tendrils of sympathy for the world around,
and hence nothing to hook on to the string of the Sutratma, every
connection between the two is broken with last breath. 

There being no Devachan for such a materialists, the Sutratma will
re-incarnate almost immediately. But those materialists who erred in
nothing but their disbelief, will oversleep but one station. Moreover,
the time will come when the ex-material perceive himself in the
Eternity and perhaps repent that he lost even one day, or station,
from the life eternal. 


X. Still would it not be more correct to say that death is birth new
Life or a return once more to the threshold of eternity? 

M. You may if you like. Only remember that births differ, and that
there are births of "still-born" beings, which are failures. Moreover
with your fixed Western ideas about material life, the words "living"
and "being" are quite inapplicable to the pure subjective post-mortem
existence. It is just because of such ideas--a few philosophers who
are not read by the many and who lives are too confused to present a
distinct picture of it--that all your conceptions of life and death
have finally become so narrow. On the one hand, they have led to crass
materialism, and on the to the still more material conception of the
other life which ritualists have formulated in their Summer-land.
There the souls of men eat, drink and marry, and live in a Paradise
quite as sensual as that of Mohammed, but even less philosophical. Nor
are average conceptions of the uneducated Christians any better, they
are still more material, if possible... And, it is also just because
the life of the disembodied soul, while possessing all the vividness
of reality, as in certain dreams, is devoid of every grossly objective
form of terrestrial life, that the Eastern philosophers have compared
it with visions during sleep. HPB [ HPB Articles, II 194...]

 

Footnotes

2 Iswara is the collective consciousness of the manifested deity,
Brahmâ, i.e., the collective consciousness of the Host of Dhyan
Chohans; and Pragna is their individual wisdom. 
 
3 Taijasi means the radiant in consequence of the union with Buddhi of
Manas, the human, illuminated by the radiance of the divine soul.
Therefore Manas-taijasi may be described as radiant mind; the human
reason lit by the light of the spirit; and Buddhi-Manas is the
representation of the divine plus the human intellect and
self-consciousness. 
 
4 Some Theosophists have taken exception to this phrase, but the words
are those of the Masters, and the meaning attached to the word
"unmerited" is that given above. ... the essential idea was that men
often suffer from the effects of the actions done by others, effects
which thus do not strictly belong to their own Karma, but to that of
other people--and for these sufferings they of course deserve
compensation. If it is true to say that nothing that happens to us can
be anything else than Karma--or the direct or indirect effect of a
cause--it would be a great error to think that every evil or good
which befalls us is due only to our personal Karma. 
 
5 Our immortal and reincarnating principle in conjunction with the
Manasic recollections of the preceding lives is called Sutratma, which
means literally the Thread-Soul; because like the pearls on a thread
so is the long series of human lives strung together on that one
thread. Manas must become taijasi, the radiant, before it can hang on
the Sutratma as a pearl on its thread, and so have full and absolute
perception of itself in the Eternity. As said before, too close
association with the terrestrial mind of the human soul alone causes
the radiance to be entirely lost.
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I hope this is of help

To pursue this study refer to The KEY TO THEOSOPHY , pp 101....
Also to The OCEAN OF THEOSOPHY W. Q. Judge  
Chapter 4 pp 29...
Chapters 8, 9, 10 pp. 60....

Best wishes,

Dallas
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Gopi 
Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 4:36 AM
To: 
Subject: Re: PRINCIPLES and STATES AFTER DEATH 


I have trouble with perceptions of 'reincarnations' as something 
we can understand from the three dimensional physics. 

Time, as we look at, is only an attribute of the three dimensions, 
not an independent dimension, which it is! 

Reincarnation is part of the lower three dimensions of 'Star
of David' portion of the Theosophical symbol. 
It is fine to look at it as an analogy in the completely physical 
world, but to tie it up in only physical world may not be accurate
way!

Gopi