< Theosophists' Ideas as to the Nature of Spirits (continued from page 11-281) >
insuperable obstacle. Once reborn into the higher world and (independent of the physical impossibility of any communication between its world and ours, to all but the very highest adepts) the new Ego has become a new person; it has lost its old consciousness linked with earthly experiences and has acquired a new consciousness which, as time rolls on, will be interpenetrated by its experiences in that higher sphere. The time will come, no doubt, but many steps higher on the ladder, when the Ego will regain its consciousness of all its past stages of existence, but in the next higher world of causes, or activity, to our own, the new Ego has no more remembrance of its earthly career than we here have of the life that preceded this present one.
Therefore, it is that the Occultists maintain that no spirits of the departed can appear or take part in the phenomena of seance-rooms. To what can appear and take part in these, the Occultists refuse the name of spirits.
But it may be said, what is it that can appear?
We reply—merely the animal souls or perispirits of the deceased. It might appear from what we have said that while this, according to our previous exposition, would be true in the case of the spiritually minded, in that of the materially minded we should have these plus the spiritual Ego or consciousness. But such is not the case. Immediately on the severance of the spirit, whether at death, or (as we have already hinted is sometimes the case) before death, the spiritual Ego is dissipated and ceases to exist. It is the result of the action of spirit on matter, and it might, to render the matter more clear, be described as a combination of spirit and matter, just as flame is the result of the combination of oxygen with the substance being oxygenised, and might loosely be described as the combination of the two. Withdraw the oxygen and the flame censes; withdraw the spirit, and the spiritual Ego disappears. The sense of individuality in spirit cannot exist without combination with matter. Thus the pure planetary spirits, when first propelled into the circle of necessity, have no individual consciousness, only the absolute consciousness which they share with all fragments of the spirit hitherto entirely uncombined with matter. As they, entering into generation, descend the ladder and grow gradually more and more hemmed in by matter and isolated from the universal spirit, so the sense of individuality, the spiritual Egoship, grows. How finally on reascending the circle, step by step, they regain on reunion with the universal, the absolute consciousness, and simultaneously all the individual consciousnesses which they have developed at each stage of their descending and ascending progress, is one of the highest mysteries.
Theosophists' Ideas as to the Nature of Spirits
...
<... continues on page 11-283 >
Editor's notes
- ↑ Theosophists' Ideas as to the Nature of Spirits by unknown author, London Spiritualist, No. 485, December 9, 1881, pp. 284-87
Sources
-
London Spiritualist, No. 485, December 9, 1881, pp. 284-87