but the belief or unbelief in that immortality, as the continuation or annihilation of separate
entities cannot fail to give color to that fact in its application to each of these entities. Now do
you begin to understand it?
X. I think I do. The materialist, disbelieving in everything that cannot be proven to him by his
five senses or by scientific reasoning, and rejecting every spiritual manifestation, accepts life as
the only conscious existence. Therefore, according to their beliefs so will it be unto them. They
will lose their personal Ego, and will plunge into a dreamless sleep until a new awakening. Is it
so?
M. Almost so. Remember the universal esoteric teaching of the two kinds of conscious
existence: the terrestrial and the spiritual. The latter must be considered real from the very fact
that it is the region of the eternal, changeless, immortal cause of all; whereas the incarnating Ego
dresses itself up in new garments entirely different from those of its previous incarnations, and in
which all except its spiritual prototype is doomed to a change so radical as to leave no trace
behind.
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"?
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STUDIES IN OCCULTISM
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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 or 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 notwithstanding, 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 Dhyani 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? [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]