When, however, this germinal Ego that I spoke of last week passes for the first time through the gateway of death, it has exceedingly little material for these stages that lie on the other side of that gateway. The first stage is that which may be called--translating the term--the Land of Desire. You will remember that desire is Kama, and Loka is place; so that this land or place of desire is called, in Theosophical books, Kama Loka; that is, a place inhabited by Souls still clad in the desire or sensation body that we studied last week. The Ego in this body dwells there for a time--but not only the Ego of man. It is the place where these bodies of sensation and desire survive the physical and the astral bodies; so that you have there these desire or sensation bodies of the lower animals as well as those which are inhabited by the Human Soul.
Now, when our baby Ego is at this very early stage of his life there will be in him a great deal of the lower element of Kama or desire, and scarcely anything at all of the higher element of Mind. His stay then in this Kama Loka will be for a considerable period, and all that he will do there is to experience pleasant or painful results according as the life which has been led on the physical plane--which has been led upon earth--has been in accordance with law or discordant with law. The life there is exceedingly limited, and is simply a result from the life upon earth. Nothing new is introduced into it; it is a life in which there is a great deal of repetition, in which an experience is repeated over and over and over again. And this automatic action, as we may call it, is one of the great characteristics of this Kamic body, or body of sensation. You know how easily habits are set up--habits of the physical body, especially habits which are connected with the passions and with the emotions. The great root of these habits lies in the body of sensation with its peculiarly strong automatic tendencies. Those are impressed on the outer body, although, of course, the habit of repetition in the physical body will also come in to some extent.
When the Soul has passed out of this transitional state it leaves behind it this body of desire, just as in leaving the earth it left the physical body. The bodies belong to certain definite stages in the Universe, and the Soul cannot carry on any body with which it has been clothed further than the stage in the Universe to which that body belongs. It cannot carry the physical body away from the physical plane; it cannot carry the astral body out of the lower astral world; it cannot carry this body of sensation out of the transitional state, known as the land of sensation or desire. And when it has worn it out sufficiently to allow it to escape, when it has exhausted, so to speak, this body of desire, which has been nourished in the sensational life of earth, then it passes on into a higher condition, into a higher sphere, where the whole of its work is the work of the mind, all higher aspirations, all thoughts which are devoid of passion and of appetite, everything which is intellectual as distinguished from what is passional, all the higher emotions which have in them this element of mind as well as the lower element of passion--these, purified from passion, will be carried on into this higher world. And the length of the stay of the Soul in that world depends on the amount which during its earth-life it has accumulated of mental experiences, and of experiences of the higher emotions, of the artistic faculties, and so on, everything in fact which has to do with the mind. Understanding that, you will see at once that when the Soul first passes through the gateway of death there will be scarcely anything for it to carry on into this higher condition, hardly any experiences which it can use for the development, as it were, of mental faculty. Still, the very few experiences that it has acquired during its first life in the body, which are not kamic, will be carried on. What will be its work then in this higher world? It will be to extract from these separated mental experiences their essence, and to transmute that essence by working upon it with this energy of the Soul, transmute that essence into mental faculty, or mental ability. The work that the Soul accomplishes when it is out of the body, when it can no longer gather fresh experiences, when it has lost the three bodies through which experiences can alone be collected, the work of the Soul is then to take up the mental images remaining from these experiences, and, working on them, to take out of them their essence. Just in the same way that a chemist might take a number of chemical elements, might throw them into a crucible, and then purifying them from dross might extract the elements themselves and combine them in the crucible; so does this chemist, as it were--the Soul--by the alchemy of its own mental ability, the thought power which it has developed, working on these accumulated and separated experiences, throwing them into the crucible of the mind, extract from them their essence, and then taking that essence it assimilates it, makes it part of itself, works it into its own nature, or--to use the phrase that I used two or three times last week--weaves these separated experiences into itself, and so begins to make a real garment of the Soul, which is the character of the Soul, and which will reappear as character when it comes back to earth. Everything that the Soul brings with it of mental faculty, everything that is born, as we say, with the child, the powers of the mind which the child shows--the whole of these are brought back by the Soul as the result of its workings on past experiences while it is living in the world of the Soul, the world that we call Devachan in our Theosophical literature, which simply means the land of bliss. As I say then, in these early experiences there will be very little for the Soul to work upon in this blissful land; but when it comes back even after this first period is completed, and comes to be born for the second time upon earth, it will have what it did not have at the beginning--a little germ of mental faculty. That is the small result in faculty which it has brought back by working on the few experiences that it accumulated during its previous life. It will start then at a certain advantage in this second period of its pilgrimage; it will start with certain tools, as it were, ready made to its hand, which it has fashioned for itself during this interlude in the world of the Soul; it will come back with a nascent memory, with a nascent power of comparison, very, very small certainly, but still, so to speak, better than none; and it will work through that on the new experiences that come to it by way of sensation from the outer world.
Through this life, then, again it will pass, having this advantage now, that it has a little mental faculty to go upon which it can increase. As it goes on experiences increase, its power to receive the experiences being greater, and this mental element mixing itself up with the emotional and the passional nature. So that wenow speak of the mind, or as we call it, Manas--the word from which our own word man is derived, and which really means the thinker: the great characteristic of the man being that he thinks. This Manas, then, now coming back, small as its powers are, will modify and change the whole of the kamic nature, the passional nature; and all that this Ego now experiences will have in it the two elements--the element of passion which belongs to its passional nature, and the element which comes from this mind which is developing, which tends gradually more and more to observe, and to compare, and to make record of its experiences, and to store them up in order that it may direct its action by them. At first all the actions will grow from outer attraction; presently against the outer attraction there will be working the images of past experiences. So that, to take up the illustration that I used last week of taste, when there is a strong attraction from without of a taste which it knows will be pleasurable, excess will be guarded against by the mental image which has been preserved of the pains that in previous experiences were the result of over-gratification of taste. So that now you will have this double element. And remember that the element of the mind is increasing, while the other element is more or less stationary. As the Soul passes from life to life, and in each life accumulates experiences, in each transitional stage after death suffers from the animal appetites which hold it prisoner from going on into the happier world, and then in that happier world works upon experiences and changes them into faculties, it will always have an accumulating stock of faculty, an accumulating store of memories, while the outer attractions will remain comparatively the same, and action will be more and more directed by reason and less and less directed by appetite.
Now, understanding that you will be fairly able, I think, to trace, so to speak, the stages of this pilgrimage of the Soul: you see the elements that enter into the pilgrimage; you see the tools with which the Soul will have to work improvements, if it uses its experiences well in the successive incarnations; and you will also understand that on the accumulation of these experiences, and the working upon those experiences in the blissful land, will depend the more rapid or the slower growth of the faculties of the Soul--that is, whether it will grow rapidly, or will grow slowly, or moderately, whether the pilgrimage shall be comparatively swift or very much delayed. You will see also how the Soul may often be thrown back, how a very strong attraction from without may overbear, say, a comparatively small store of accumulated experiences; and then the Soul will make a mistake, will go against the law, and will suffer.
How should we regard such an experience when we are studying this pilgrimage of the Soul? Is it a matter for very great regret? Is it a matter for extreme grief and sorrow?
Think it out for yourselves and you will see the way in which this wider view of life will regard any mistake, any blunder, any fall, any sin. Sin is disharmony with law. So long as the law is not understood, desire will constantly be drawing the Soul outward without regard to this law of which it knows nothing, and striking on the law it will feel pain. Suppose then that it has not accumulated a sufficient store of these painful experiences to make it realize the presence of the law; or suppose that having accumulated sufficient experience to recognize the presence of the law, it has not accumulated sufficient to overbear the strong drawing of attraction to the external object; then the very experience of wrong-doing is a necessary stage in its education. For the pain that results from the wrong-doing will add to the store of experience that the Soul is gradually accumulating, and will make it stronger against the temptation in the future by this new suffering which it has found must inevitably result from coming into conflict with the law. So that instead of being heart-broken over a failure, those who see from life to life and look on the pilgrimage of the Soul as a great whole, and not simply in the fragments that ordinary persons see in looking at it, they can see with calmness these blunders that the Soul makes, knowing that they are the result of insufficient experience, and that the very fall will supply an added experience which will help the Soul to stand when it comes into a similar position in the future. And there is no more reason for extreme sorrow over these blunders of the growing Soul than, to use a simile that I have often used before, there is reason for the mother to break her heart because the child may stumble when it is learning to walk. If the child is hurt she may feel sorrow for the child's pain, but she certainly will not go into a state of frantic despair about it. She will know that these tumbles are a necessary part of the education of the child in gaining equilibrium, and will know that every tumble it has will make the tumbles of the future less likely to occur.
Now, that is not a callous way of looking at things; it is a wise way; and as knowledge grows wisdom gives balance to contemplate calmly many things that otherwise would be distressing and disturbing in the very highest degree. Calmness, which is a characteristic of wisdom, comes from this wider vision which is able to understand causes as well as see effects, and which understands how that which to-day seems sad will work out for good in days to come.
One other distinction that we want to realize as to the principles at work in this pilgrimage of the Soul, is that the kamic element with which the Ego is encircled, constantly giving rise to desire, is that which is always making links which bring it back to birth. Every desire that you have for something down here survives death, remains behind you in the transition state until you return for reincarnation, and draws you back to rebirth as soon as you have exhausted in the blissful land the accumulated experiences of the mind which you work upon in that region of the Universe. So to speak, when the body drops from it, the Ego, having accumulated sufficient materials for its work, has the tendency to leave the Earth and assimilate what it has gained through these agencies which exist in the desire body. It leaves earth behind, being drawn by the stronger mental forces onward, where it has to work in the region of ideas. When its store is exhausted, then the desire links re-assert their power, and the Ego having finished, having got through all the mental experiences in the blissful land, feels again these links of desire reasserting their power, and it is drawn back by them to re-incarnation, and attached by those links of desire to all the objects of desire, with which they are connected.
Now the especial reason that I mention this is that I hear so many people when they are dealing with reincarnation say, "I don't want to come back." It is of no use having a theory that you do not want to come back, if you are making these desire links to things on the physical and on the kamic planes. So long as you want anything which the world can give you, your Ego does want to come back, and must come back whether you think you want it or not. The fact that it desires something here shows this fundamental craving for return, and the mere feeling of weariness, which is the outcome of a tired brain, and of a consciousness working in that tired brain, has absolutely nothing to do with the inevitable destiny of the Ego. The brain which is tired certainly will not come back; it will go to pieces on the earth to which it belongs, and the tiredness which makes people say, "I don't want to come back," is the tiredness of this outside body, the desire to escape from the painful things that have made an impression upon it, and so on. The real desire is shown by the attachment to the things of earth, by the wish for one thing or another, the wish for ease, the wish for pleasure, the wish for social consideration, the wish for the praise of men, the wish for everything with which men's and women's lives are filled well-nigh to the brim at the present time. For persons who are full of desire in this way, to say: "I don't want to come back," is simply to show a lack of understanding. They must come back until there is nothing here which has the slightest attraction for them. When nothing here attracts them, when praise and blame are exactly the same to them, when they do not mind whether in the outside world they are rich or poor, when they do not mind whether they are what people call happy or unhappy, when the whole outside life is an absolute matter of indifference, when nothing can shake their peace or bring the slightest ruffle of any kind over the emotional nature, then that Soul is ready to go on; but so long as any of these things have the slightest influence, so long these links are being made and must draw the Soul back to fresh experiences of earth.
Manas itself does not make these links, it makes them through Kama, and makes them where the desire even for intellectual things comes in, but not by pure abstract thinking, which is its own special work. That is to say, it is not Manas pure and simple which makes links bringing us back to rebirth, it is Kama-Manas, which is the form of Manas working amongst the great masses of people to-day. Manas itself, which comes out now and again in absolutely abstract thinking, does not make links which draw to rebirth. But inasmuch as almost all intellectual effort here is very largely carried on with the kamic element, and has worked through the brain, which is the vehicle of Kama-Manas, most intellectual effort will have in it the desire element, and so will bring the Soul back for fresh experiences upon the earth.
As to the way in which it works: it works by what we may call the creative power of thought. The whole world is the outcome of the Divine Thought. Everything which we know as phenomenal is the mere outside appearance which has in it the inner and living reality of thought. All outside appearance is but the form which the thought takes for expression on these lower planes; and the whole Universe is nothing more than a Divine Thought in manifestation. That Divine, that God-like element is in man, and it works through Manas, and is the creative element. The more of that there is in the activity of a person, the more is he a creative energy in the world
Every thought makes to itself a form. Every time that you think, a form is made in your mental atmosphere. A passing thought will only have a very transitory form, a thought which is constantly repeated will have a form which by these repetitions becomes stronger and stronger, and more and more permanent, so that according to the fixity and the motives of your thoughts will be the life of the thought forms that you are continually generating around you.
If you refer to a letter in The Occult World, written by Master K. H. to Mr. Sinnett, you will see that He points out that when a thought goes out and takes form, it is vivified or entered into by an Elemental, and the character of the Elemental will be according to the character of the thought, and according to the motive that has inspired the thought. If the thought be a good one, for instance directed to human service with a desire to serve, then it will be helped from outside by this Elemental which is of a good and a pure type, and the thought will be a force for good, reacting on the person who has thought it, and reacting on all those who come within the sphere of his influence. So that every thought which is loving and helpful lives in the world of thought as a useful influence. And supposing that these good thoughts are directed towards people, then they go to the people to whom the will directs them and, so to speak, encircle them with a protective and aiding power. And it is a real thing that every good and kind thought that you have of a person, every wish for their benefit, every desire for their happiness, is an actual living thing that goes to that person as a living entity, and lives as it were in connection with the person towards whom you have directed it as a protective agency, warding off danger and drawing good towards that person to whom you have sent this angel of your thought.
So again, with all evil thoughts, thoughts which have in them the element of hate, of revenge, of passion--those draw to themselves from the outer world Elementals which increase this energy. So that an evil thought directed against a person is an absolutely mischievous agent, which may injure him either in physical health, in the astral body, or in any part of his body or mind. Suppose the person has nothing in him which in any sense forms a link with this thought of yours, then the thought will be thrown back, and will return to yourself and strike you to your own injury. Suppose, however, that the person has, what most people have, some little fault in himself, which may make a link with this thought of yours, then the evil thought attaches itself to the person and injures that person in some part of his nature. Therefore is it that everything which is of the nature of evil thought consciously directed towards a person has been called, and rightly called, Black Magic. A thought of revenge or of anger which is directed towards any person with a view to injure him is essentially of the nature of Black Magic. And the greater the power of the person who does it, and the greater the knowledge of the person who does it, the greater is their crime for which they have to answer to the Law. In this way, then, the Soul works by these thought-forms. First these thought-forms, then their Elementals, working back upon the Soul that generates them, as well as working in the outer world; these go on with the Soul into Devachan, so far as they are pure in their nature, and make the faculty of which I spoke, being as it were moulded into faculty; and then coming back, the physical body is moulded by way of the astral to manifest this character, which has taken to itself, by means of these thought-forms, certain definite shapes. So that it is perfectly true that the outer body of a person will show something of its character. That body is physically built on the aggregated thought-forms which have been transformed, by the alchemy that I spoke of, into definite faculties, and these having their characteristic forms will mould the shaping of the outer body. And it is perfectly true that when you are dealing with the general shape of the brain, you will have that brain developed in certain regions, according to the character of the Ego that inhabits it. The mistake is to suppose that it is the tabernacle which makes the tenant; it is the tenant who builds the tabernacle. So that while you have the two correlated the one to the other, we must not begin at the wrong end, and believe that the master-builder is made by his house; he builds himself the dwelling in which, in his coming incarnation, he will have to live.
One other point as regards our back-coming Ego. You will notice I am not tracing him life by life. I am giving you general principles which will work through large numbers of lives. These stages being passed through, what circumstances will our Ego come back into ? That will depend upon the circumstances that during his past life he caused upon earth; according to the happiness or misery he causes upon earth in a past incarnation, so will be the circumstances in which he will find himself when he comes back to earth.
Suppose, for instance, that a man whose influence extends over large numbers of people spreads happiness around him on every side. That is a distinct effect that he has worked and it will govern the condition in which he will be born in his next life. This happiness that he spreads amongst large numbers of his fellows is a seed which will spring up as happy circumstances for his next incarnation. Sowing happiness he will reap happiness. Sowing pain he will reap pain. If he causes a great deal of physical suffering in his life, he will reap much physical misery in some following incarnation. If he spreads around himmuch mental distress and trouble he will reap mental distress and trouble in the circumstances that come in his way. Mind, these are things he cannot alter They are fixed future events, so to speak; when he leaves the earth. These are the things that can be predicted of him. with fair certainty, because these are seeds that are left which have to grow up each after its own kind. Over these he has no power; they are there and he has got to live amongst them.
Now you may have a man who is not a good man morally, but who has yet spread a very large amount of happiness amongst people, say of a physical kind; he will reap physical happiness in his next incarnation. You may find a good man who by lack of knowledge has spread a great deal of misery, and he will reap physical suffering in his next incarnation. You have to distinguish, if you want to understand, between these different agencies of the Soul. According to his desires and his will, so will be his faculties--his own personal possessions, or individual possessions rather, if I may call them so; according to what he has sown upon earth will be his harvest upon earth when he returns. So that all these circumstances of happiness or of misery will be the result of the happiness or the misery that he has spread in previous incarnations: they will come back to him as environment, as circumstances.
Now I come to my next point. You must remember the pilgrimage of the Soul is very long, and a lecture is very short, so that I am obliged to run somewhat rapidly from one subject to another. The next point at which I must make a moment's pause is on our Ego when he has become more experienced. He is no longer a baby, nor even a child, or even a youth; he is a mature Ego, and he is becoming wise. With this wisdom of his he is bringing back more and more faculty, he is bringing back more and more memory, he will make for himself instruments which will be able to express greater and greater capacity, and a time will come in this pilgrimage of his in which his constant efforts to impress on these lower tabernacles his own ever-lengthening memory of past experiences will become more and more successful. His will having grown very strong, will tell considerably upon his lower nature. What we call the voice of conscience will begin to make itself heard with more imperative force. Now conscience is this memory of the soul expressing itself in the lower nature; it comes with authority, and the lower nature feels the authoritative sound in it: " You ought to do this, you ought not to do that." And sometimes the lower nature will challenge it, not being able to understand where this authority comes from. The authority lies in the Soul, which is trying to make the lower nature go its way; it is using its own past experience to prevent the lower nature being led astray by the outside objects, by its mistaken deductions, by its very incomplete experiences. And it is speaking constantly to this lower nature, and constantly the lower nature does not hear. In all the clatter and jangle of the body in which it is living, it finds it is very difficult to make its voice heard coming from the higher planes. But the voice of the conscience is always this voice of the Soul, speaking out of its memory. And if you think that out at your leisure you will see how it is that conscience will sometimes speak wrongly as to choice of action, but always with the sense of: "You ought to do." The reason that it sometimes speaks wrongly as to action is because the experience is still a limited experience. The reason why it is always imperative is because that limited experience is the only guide which Manas has, and it is the best guide even though it be imperfect. A man therefore does wisely always to obey his conscience. It is the best decision which experience enables the Soul to make, and if it be guilty, it is faulty because of the want of experience. If you obey it, when it blunders you will gain the lacking experience; and you will suffer more if you do not obey it. By following some other rule whichis not the rule of your own inner Self, speaking from its own experience, you will be obeying an external law, which, speaking from without, is not to be relied upon to develop your Soul. The Soul is developed by experience, not by compulsion, and an outer law, however good it may be, does not, being a compulsory power, add to the inner forces of the Soul; therefore is it of comparatively small value in evolution, far less than the voice of conscience, even when the conscience is faulty.
Now taking that, let us come back from that slight digression to our Ego. It has become comparatively mature, it is getting wiser. Getting wiser it wants to escape from this constant succession of births and of deaths of which it is beginning to get a little tired. It has gone through it so often that it has accumulated a great deal of experience, and many things in the world no longer attract it. Everything they can give it, it has gathered; why should it want to repeat its experience of them? The taste has disappeared because the experience has been obtained; and as this Soul comes back there will be a number of things in the outer world that will no longer attract, and that it will turn aside from with a sense of weariness and disgust. These things will first be the things of the senses, which are the soonest worn out, and it will go more and more towards the things of the mind, more and more towards the things of the intellect, accumulating a larger and larger store for its Devachanic life, a greater and greater accumulation on which it is going to work. So that the life in Devachan will be longer and longer, the Soul working out these greater stores which it carries with it from this earthly life. Coming back then again, having had these long Devachanic interludes, it comes back with this ever increasing distaste for the lower desires, and the links with objects of the sense become feebler and feebler. Its knowledge enables it to recognize the transitory and illusory character of earthly things, and it breaks the links of desire by knowledge; knowing that they pass, it refuses to be attached to them, and so exhausts these links which inevitably draw it back to earth so long as they last. Instead of setting up great numbers of these, it creates only thought-forms of the pure intellect, and the pure reason, and the pure thought, which do not tie it to these transitory things of the earth. And it may break these links in two ways--by knowledge in the way that I described; or also it may break them by catching glimpses of higher and greater realities--the spiritual realities as we say--and that mightier attraction, overbearing the attraction to earth, will draw the desires upwards, purifying them as they ascend. So that at last all the lower element of desire which is for the lower self will be gotten rid of, and there will be present only the desire to work because the work is useful, to work because the work is duty, to work because others need the service, and so on.
You may thus get rid of the personal element in desire, which is the binding element for return, and in one of two ways; either by a distinctly intellectual recognition of the transitory character of the objects and the exhausting of desire by knowledge, or by the burning up of desire by devotion, and the deliberate sacrifice of everything to the higher ideal of life which is to become its compelling power.
The time will come in this growth of the Ego when it will realize then that the lower earth has nothing which is worth having. By knowledge, by devotion, or by both, it has broken these links. What then will be the nature of the life to be lived, when it is establishing no new links to bring it back to birth? It may be a very active life, employed constantly in working amongst men; for it is not action that binds men to birth, but the desire which causes action. In desire, and not in act, lies this link which draws the Ego back to birth. Suppose then that during a life of very great activity there is no desire; suppose every action that is performed, is performed because it is right to be done; suppose that when it is performed, the Ego concerns itself no more about it; suppose it has no wish for the result of that action, either good, or bad, or indifferent; suppose that when the action is performed there is no link which binds the Soul to it in any way, that it remains absolutely indifferent to the fruit of action, as it is technically called, and works, not because it wants to gain anything, but because it wants to serve and because it recognizes that it is one with the All, and therefore must discharge perfectly everything which the law demands of it in the particular place in the world in which it may be. Freedom of the Soul, then, depends on whether you want to bring about a result by your action, because the result is desirable, or merely because you want to be in harmony with law, because you recognize yourself as part of the All, because you recognize yourself as a channel of the law. If you are nothing more than that, if everything that you do is done because it is duty, if you act neither for pleasure nor pain, neither from love nor hatred, neither from attraction nor repulsion, neither for gain nor loss, then, there being no desire, no link is made; in the doing of the action you are part of the One and the All, and that cannot be bound by these links to rebirth, so that the question of outer activity does not affect in itself the freedom of the Soul. I grant, of course, to the full that people need the stimulus of desire in order to make them act, until they have reached this higher stage where action is perfectly performed for duty's sake. It cannot be reached at a bound, it cannot be reached by its intellectual recognition, it cannot be reached even by saying that it is desirable; it can only be reached by the inner growth of the Ego, which makes it really fundamentally indifferent to all the things which attract the masses of mankind. So long as there is attraction, that is needed for the performance of duty. It is only when the lower nature is entirely the instrument of the higher that a man will lead a life of great activity without the smallest wish to see anything which may flow from his acts; and when that point is reached, he has achieved his freedom, when that is done, Karma for him--save the great Karma of the Universe--is at an end. Individual Karma for him is burnt up, burnt up in these fires of knowledge and of devotion which prevent him establishing any links with the earth, and he therefore makes no fetters which bind him to the wheel of birth and of death. The burning up of Karma in this fire of devotion means that you throw into the fire every action of your life, and like a sacrifice it is burnt up and changed.
Let me give you one illustration only to show you how this change may occur in the higher spiritual life.
There may be a thing which will bring suffering. The Soul which is nearing its liberation is willing to accept that suffering which still it feels; it throws the suffering on to the altar of devotion; the fire of devotion burns up the suffering, and the Soul feels joy in its gift. But that suffering is not lost; it is changed in the fire, and it becomes spiritual energy, which the Great Lodge can use for the helping of man--the voluntary acceptance of pain as a sacrifice to the Masters is changed by that fire of devotion into spiritual energy for the helping of the world. There is the underlying truth of the doctrine of what is called vicarious atonement: not the legal thing that the Churches have sometimes taught, but the sacrifice of a great Soul, which bears suffering and offers it for the spiritual life of the world, so that it shall be changed in the fire of love and come back as spiritual energy to be spread over the whole of the world for the raising and the helping of man.
The Soul, then, thus achieving liberation, comes to the period of choice of which you hear so much. Being free it has a right to choose, and it may either pass onwards into higher types of life, or it may elect to remain within the sphere of earth in order that it may directly help in the freeing of other Souls. That is, of course, the Great Renunciation of which every now and then you catch glimpses in the Theosophical writings; that is the choice of the liberated Soul; it is free, but it remains within the sphere of earth in order to help. It may choose that, by renunciation of its right to go on. It is not bound to earth, but by a voluntary renunciation it remains there with some of the disadvantages, so to speak, which belong to the material existence, for the sake of helping others and carrying on this evolution of the Race.
Where a Soul has thus accomplished its pilgrimage, where stage after stage it has developed mind, where stage after stage it has purified intellect, when it has gotten rid of desire, when it has become a liberated Soul, when it has renounced the going onward for the sake of humanity, when it has remained within this sphere of earth for helping man until the cycle of humanity is completed, then, entering into Nirvana, there comes the state of All-consciousness, of bliss which no words are able to describe. And then when the time comes for a new manifestation, when the beginning of a new Manvantara approaches, then this Soul which had achieved its liberation comes forth as a Son of Mind, in order in due time to generate mind in a new humanity, to be the Teacher of that humanity in its infancy, its guide in its maturity, rising Manvantara after Manvantara higher and higher. For the pilgrim Soul which began in the germ-union that I described, which went on by accumulating experiences, which then from these experiences extracted their essence, which then got rid of the desires which made it separate, and which unified itself once more, becoming a unit consciousness in a mysterious way which can not even be sensed until at least the lower grades of the higher consciousness have been experienced during earth-life by rising out of the body and learning what it is to be an Intelligence working without the shackles of the brain--such a Soul thus having worked through its pilgrimage and regained unity shakes off the compound individually, retaining the essence of it which it extracts; being a unit it is incapable of disintegration, it is for ever immortal--the Soul has achieved its immortality, and through all Universes to come it is one of the Workers, one of the Builders, one with God in work for the worlds.