THEOSOPHY, Vol. 52, No. 7, May, 1964
(Pages 215-216; Size: 6K)
ONLY the Individuality, which possesses the most spiritual feelings, can survive by uniting with the immortal principle. It is not the divine soul, the immortal Individuality, that perishes, but only the animal soul with its consciousness of a personality too gross, too terrestrial, for the former to assimilate. If we maintain that the shell, the reflection of the person that was, survives in the land of shades for a certain time proportionate to its constitution and then disappears, we offer nothing but the logical and philosophical. Even in the case of the most depraved, when dissociated from its divine and immortal double principle, and unable to give anything to the spiritual Ego, the material soul is annihilated without leaving anything behind of its personal individuality -- is that annihilation for the spiritual Ego? Those whose spirit is open to the great truths, those who understand absolute justice and reject every doctrine based on favoritism or personal grace will fully understand what we mean. For the immortal soul there is nothing but justice. Conviction that life holds a definite purpose, and longing to attain this, spring from the spiritual presence indwelling. They are the language of the soul. The purpose of life ever remains an unknown quantity until self-knowledge is sought. We need, as monads ourselves, to take a Monadic view of life, of action, of our fellow monads.
The "cast-off existence" is for the spiritual Ego but a page torn out of the great book of life before the pages are numbered, and the SOUL suffers no more from it than a saint in ecstasy would suffer because he had lost all recollection of one wretched day among 20,000 days that he has passed on earth. On the contrary, had he retained that recollection, it would have been enough to prevent him from ever feeling happy. Only one drop of gall is enough to make the water bitter in the largest vessel. And after all, the doctrine teaches us that these cases of total annihilation of a personality are extremely rare.
Neither infants nor idiots, being irresponsible in their actions, are able to receive either reward or punishment. The difference between these souls and those of people in general is that the former incarnate immediately. Failures of nature, they begin a new life immediately; while reincarnations in general take place after rather long periods passed in the intermediate and invisible spheres. Should we be thoroughly ostracized if we were to say that the souls of idiots and extremely young children (dying before the age of personal consciousness) are the exact parallels of those who are annihilated? Can the personalities of the infants and the idiots leave a greater trace on the monadic memory with which they have not been able to become united, than those of the souls of marked animal tendencies who have also, though not more than the former, failed to become assimilated therein? In both cases the final result is the same.
The sixth element of the spiritual Ego which has not had either the time or the possibility to unite with the lower principles in the case of the idiot and the infant, has had the time but not the possibility to accomplish that union in the case of the totally depraved person. It is not to say that the spiritual Ego is "dissipated" and ceases to exist. It would be absurd to say that something which is immortal in its essence can be dissipated or cease to be. The spiritual Ego is dissociated from the lower elements, and, following its divine monad -- the seventh element -- disappears in the case of the utterly vicious man and ceases to exist for him, for the personal and physical as well as for the astral man. As for the latter, once being depraved, whether it belong to an idiot or to a Newton, if it has failed to grasp, or has lost the Ariadne's thread which must lead it through the labyrinth of matter into the regions of eternal light -- it must disappear.
Thus this personal astral man (or the fourth and fifth principles) whether it disappears into an immediate reincarnation, or is annihilated, drops from the number of the individual existences which are to the monad equivalent to days passed by an individual -- a series of recollections, some fresh and eternal in our memory, others forgotten and dead, never to revive.
INITIATES AND INITIATION
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