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that it exists; but the belief or unbelief in that immortality as the
property of independent or separate entities, cannot fail to give color to
that fact in its application to each of these entities. Now do you begin to
understand it?
Q. I think I do. The materialist, disbelieving in everything that cannot be
proven to him by his five senses, or by scientific reasoning, based
exclusively on the data furnished by these senses in spite of their
inadequacy, and rejecting every spiritual manifestation, accepts life as the
only conscious existence. Therefore according to their beliefs so will it be
unto them. They will lose their personal Ego, and will plunge into a
dreamless sleep until a new awakening. Is it so?
A. Almost so. Remember the practically universal teaching of the two kinds
of conscious existence: the terrestrial and the spiritual. The latter must
be considered real from the very fact that it is inhabited by the eternal,
changeless, and immortal Monad; whereas the incarnating Ego dresses itself
up in new garments entirely different from those of its previous
incarnations, and in which all except its spiritual prototype is doomed to a
change so radical as to leave no trace behind.
Q. How so? Can my conscious terrestrial "I" perish not only for a time, like
the consciousness of the materialist, but so entirely as to leave no trace
behind?
A. According to the teaching, it must so perish and in its fullness; all
except the principle which, having united itself with the Monad, has thereby
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The Key To Theosophy - HP Blavatsky.txt
become a purely spiritual and indestructible essence, one with it in the
Eternity. But in the case of an out-and-out materialist, in whose personal
"I" no Buddhi has ever reflected itself, how can the latter carry away into
the Eternity one particle of that terrestrial personality? Your spiritual
"I" is immortal; but from your present self it can carry away into Eternity
that only which has become worthy of immortality, namely, the aroma alone of
the flower that has been mown by death.
Q. Well, and the flower, the terrestrial "I"?
A. The flower, as all past and future flowers which have blossomed and will
have to blossom on the mother bough, the Sutratman, all children of one root
or Buddhi-will return to dust. Your present "I," as you yourself know, is
not the body now sitting before me, nor yet is it what I would call
Manas-Sutratman, but Sutratman-Buddhi.
Q. But this does not explain to me, at all, why you call life after death
immortal, infinite, and real, and the terrestrial life a simple phantom or
illusion; since even that postmortem life has limits, however much wider
they may be than those of terrestrial life.
A. No doubt. The spiritual Ego of man moves in eternity like a pendulum
between the hours of birth and death. But if these hours, marking the
periods of life terrestrial and life spiritual, are limited in their
duration, and if the very number of such stages in Eternity between sleep
and awakening, illusion and reality, has its beginning and its end, on the
other hand, the spiritual pilgrim is eternal. Therefore are the hours of his
postmortem life, when, disembodied, he stands face to face with truth and
not the mirages of his transitory earthly existences, during the period of
that pilgrimage which we call "the cycle of rebirths"-the only reality in
our conception. Such intervals, their limitation notwithstanding, do not
prevent the Ego, while ever perfecting itself, from following undeviatingly,
though gradually and slowly, the path to its last transformation, when that
Ego, having reached its goal, becomes a divine being. These intervals and
stages help towards this final result instead of hindering it; and without
such limited intervals the divine Ego could never reach its ultimate goal. I
have given you once already a familiar illustration by comparing the Ego, or
the individuality, to an actor, and its numerous and various incarnations to
the parts it plays. Will you call these parts or their costumes the
individuality of the actor himself? Like that actor, the Ego is forced to
play during the cycle of necessity, up to the very threshold of ParaNirvana,
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