< Theosophists' Ideas as to the Nature of Spirits (continued from page 11-283) >
constituent principles. This analysis being almost wholly unknown to Western nations, it is difficult in some cases to find any English words by which to represent the Occult subdivisions, but we give them in the least obscure phraseology that we can command.
Now the change we call death, only immediately affects the first three constituents; the body decomposes to enter into new combinations, and the vital force is dissipated to help to animate new organisms, and the astral human form (Linga Sharira) dies with the body.
There remain four principles. As a rule (we except the cases of the higher adepts) one of two things occurs in accordance with the Universal Law of Affinity. If the spiritual Ego has been in life material in its tendencies, placing its main enjoyment in, and centering its desires on, material objects and the gratification of earthly desires, then at death it continues to cling blindly to the lower elements of its late combination, and the true spirit severs itself from these and passes away elsewhere. To follow its course is beside the present question since the remaining principles in which personal or animal consciousness remains have parted with it for ever, and it would require a complete exposition of the entire philosophy of Occultism to explain fully its course; suffice it to say, now, that it passes away (taking with it no fragment of the individual consciousness of the man with which it was temporarily associated) to fulfill its mission, still guides! and governed by the irresistible cyclic impulse which first projected: it through the veil of primitive kosmic matter.
But if, on the other hand, the tendencies of; the Ego have been towards things spiritual, if I its aspirations have been heavenwards (we use I a conventional term), if it have, when weighed as it were in the balance, a greater affinity for the spiritual than for the earthly constituents (with their accompanying desires) of the combination in which it recently took part, then will it cling to the spirit, and with this pass into the adjoining so-called world of effects, (in reality, a state, and not a place), and there purified of much of its still remaining material taints, evolve out of itself by the spirit’s aid a new Ego, to be reborn (after a brief period of freedom and enjoyment) in the next higher world of causes, an objective world similar to this present globe of ours, but higher in the spiritual scale, where matter and material tendencies and desires play a far less important part than here.
In either case, it is not a matter of Judgement, of Salvation and Damnation, of Heaven and Hell, but solely the operation of the Universal Law of Affinity or Attraction, which makes the Ego cling in one case to the more material, in the other to the spiritual components of the late, now death-parted, aggregation. Now neither during its gestation in the subjective world of effects, nor during its temporary period of the enjoyment in its newly evolved Ego-hood of the fruits of the good deeds, its Karmar on earth, nor after its entry on rebirth into the higher objective world of causes can the Ego re-enter this present world. During the first period it is, so to speak, dormant, and can no more issue from the state in which it is developing than a child can come out of its mother’s womb to pay a visit before the period of pregnancy concludes. During the second period, however ethereal and purified of gross matter the regenerated Ego may be, it is still subject to the physical and universal laws of matter. It cannot, even if it would, span the abyss that separates its state from ours. It can be visited in spirit by men, it cannot descend into our grosser atmosphere and reach us. It attracts, it cannot be attracted, its spiritual polarity presenting an <... continues on page 11-282 >