No wonder the Materialists, who perceive only this “rational soul” or mind, do not disconnect or differentiate it from the brain and matter. But Occult Philosophy ages ago solved the problem of mind, and discovered the duality of the soul. The pure soul consciousness ever strains upward toward its Divine Self and God, while the human consciousness gravitates downward, involved in matter, but is always connected with its higher, subjective half by its mind, the bridge, over which it can cross when it wills. The mind is thus always a connecting link during life between the two—the higher consciousness of the soul and the human intelligence of the personality.

To understand this abstruse metaphysical doctrine fully and correctly, one has to be thoroughly impressed with what I have vainly endeavored to impart to Theosophists at large, namely, the great axiomatic truth that the only eternal and living Reality is that which we call the One Consciousness or God. This is one ever-existing Root Essence, immutable and unknowable to our physical senses, but manifest and clearly perceptible to our spiritual nature. Once imbued with that basic idea and the further conception that if It is Omnipresent, Universal and Eternal, like abstract Space itself, we must have emanated from It, and we must someday return to It; and all the rest becomes easy.

If the One Consciousness is Eternal and the only Reality, then it stands to reason that life and death, good and evil, past and future, are but empty words, or at best, figures of speech. If the objective Universe itself, on account of its beginning and infinitude, is but a passing illusion, then both life and death must also be aspects and illusions. They are changes of state or condition, in fact, and no more. Real life is in the Spiritual consciousness of that life, is in conscious existence in Spirit, not matter; and real death is a purely material concept of life, is the impossibility of sensing conscious or even individual existence outside of form, or at least, of some form of matter.

Those who sincerely reject the possibility of conscious life divorced from matter and brain substance are dead units. The words of Paul, an Initiate, in the light of the above now become comprehensible: “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” Which is to say, Ye are personally at present but dead matter, that is unconscious of its spiritual essence;