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Blavatsky H.P. - Stray Thoughts on Death and Satan (view source)

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| [12] Their reflections in the astral light.
 
| [12] Their reflections in the astral light.
 
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{{Style P-No indent|alluded when he says that the wicked shall be cast into Gehenna; signifying that dead souls will be treated as corpses.
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The Talmud says that the souls of those who have not believed in immortality will not become immortal. It is faith only which gives personal immortality;<ref>Faith and will power. Immortality is conditional, as we have ever stated. It is the reward of the pure and good. The wicked man, the material sensualist, only survives. He who appreciates but physical pleasures will not and cannot live in the hereafter as a self-conscious Entity.—Ed. Theosophist.</ref>}}
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{{Style P-No indent|[13] science and reason can only affirm the general immortality.
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The mortal sin is the suicide of the soul. This suicide would occur if the man devoted himself to evil with the full strength of his mind, with a perfect knowledge of good and evil, and an entire liberty of action which seems impossible in practice, but which is possible in theory, because the essence of an independent personality is an unconditioned liberty. The divinity imposes nothing upon man, not even existence. Man has a right to withdraw himself even from the divine goodness, and the dogma of eternal Hell is only the assertion of eternal free will.
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God precipitates no one into Hell. It is men who can go there freely, definitely and by their own choice.Those who are in Hell, that is to}}
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| [13] In the Deva-Chan the Ego sees and feels but that which he longed for. He who cares not for a continuation of sentient personal life after physical death will not have it. He will be reborn remaining unconscious of the transition.
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{{Style P-No indent|say, amid the gloom of evil<ref>That is to say, they are reborn in a “lower world” which is neither “hell” nor any theological purgatory, but a world of nearly absolute matter and one preceding the last one in the “circle of necessity” from which “there is no redemption for there reigns absolute spiritual darkness” (Book of Khiu-ti).—Ed. Theosophist.</ref> and the sufferings of the necessary punishment, without having absolutely so willed it, are called to emerge from it. This Hell is for them only a purgatory. The damned completely, absolutely and without respite, is Satan who is not a rational existence, but a necessary hypothesis.
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'''N.I.''' <ref>{{HPB-CW-comment|[See corresponding marks in the second Essay, on “Satan,” which follows.]}}</ref><u>Satan is the last word of the creation. He is the end infinitely emancipated. He willed to be like God of which he is the opposite. God is the hypothesis necessary to '''II'''.† reason, Satan the hypothesis necessary to unreason asserting itself as free will. [14]</u> To be <u>immortal</u>}}
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|[14] That which I have marked with red pencil are all <u>seeming contradictions</u> but they are not.
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{{Style P-No indent|[15] in good, one must identify oneself with God; to be immortal in evil, with Satan. These are the two poles of the world of souls; between these two poles vegetate and die without remembrance the useless portion of mankind.}}
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| [15] As a rule the Hermetists, when using the word “immortality,” limit its duration from the beginning to the end of the minor cycle. The deficiencies of their respective languages cannot be visited upon them. One could not well say a semi-immortality. The ancients called it “panaeonic eternity” from the words, πάν —all or nature, and αίών, a period of time which had no definite limit, except for the initiates. See Dictionaries —an aeon is the period of time during which a person lives, the period during which the universe endures, and also—<u>eternity</u>. It was a “mystery word” and was purposely <u>veiled</u>.
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Editor’s Note.—This may seem into the average reader, for it is one of the most abstruse of the tenets of Occult [16] doctrine. Nature is dual; there is a physical and material side, as there is a spiritual and moral side to it; and, there both good and evil in it, the latter the necessary shadow to its light. To force oneself upon the current of immortality, or rather to secure for oneself an endless series of rebirths conscious individualities—says the Book of Khiu-ti, Volume XXXI,}}
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| [16] Western.
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{{Style P-No indent|[17] one must become a co-worker with nature, either for good or for bad, in her work of creation and reproduction, or in that of destruction.}}
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| [17] Chap. III.
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{{Style P-No indent|[18] It is but the useless drones, which she gets rid of, violently ejecting and making them perish by the millions}}
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| [18] This sentence refers to the two kinds of the initiates—the adepts and the sorcerers.
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{{Style P-No indent|[19] as self-conscious entities.}}
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| [19] One of her usual exaggerations.
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{{Style P-No indent|[20] Thus, while the good and the pure strive to reach Nipang (Nirvana or that state of absolute existence and absolute consciousness—which, in the world of finite perceptions, is non-existence and non-consciousness)—the wicked will seek, on the contrary, a series of lives as conscious, definite existences or beings, preferring to be ever suffering under the law of retributive justice}}
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| [20] Two useless words.
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{{Style P-No indent|[21] rather than give up their lives as portions of the integral, universal whole. Being well aware that they can never hope to reach the final rest in pure spirit, or}}
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| [21] Karma.
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nirvana, they cling to life in any form, [22] rather than give up that “desire for life,” or Tanha which causes a new aggregation of Skandhas or individuality to be reborn.* Nature is as good a mother to the cruel bird of prey as she is to the harmless dove. Mother nature will punish her child, but since he has become her co-worker for destruction she cannot eject him.}}
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| [22] Thro’ mediums who have existed everywhere in every age.
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<br>*Read note on pages attached.
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{{Style P-No indent|[23] There are thoroughly wicked and depraved men, yet as highly intellectual and acutely spiritual for evil, as those who are spiritual for good.}}
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| [23] Not during the aeon, if they but know how to force her. But it is a life of torture and eternal hatred. If you believe in us how can you disbelieve in them?
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{{Style P-No indent|[24] The Egos of these may escape the law of final destruction or annihilation for ages to come.}}
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| [24] The Brothers o the shadow.
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{{Style P-No indent|[25] That is what Éliphas Lévi means by becoming “immortal in evil,” through identification with Satan. “I would thou wert cold or hot,” says the vision of the Revelation to St. John (iii, 15-16). “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” The Revelation is an absolutely Kabalistic book. Heat and cold are the two “poles,” i.e., good and evil, spirit and matter. Nature spues the “lukewarm” or “the useless portion of mankind” out of her mouth, i.e., annihilates them. This conception that a considerable portion of mankind may after all not have immortal souls, will not be new even to European readers. Coleridge himself likened the case to that of an oak tree bearing, indeed, millions of acorns,}}
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| [25] The majority have to go out of this planet into the 8th as she calls it. But the highest will live till the very threshold of the final nirvana.
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{{Footnotes}}
 
{{Footnotes}}
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