Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
Death And After
By Annie Besant
The Immortal And The Perishable
Now the link between the Immortal Triad and the Perishable Quaternary is Intellect, which is dual during earth life, or incarnation, and functions as Intellect and Mind. Intellect sends out a Ray, Mind, which works in and through the human brain, functioning there as brain-consciousness, as the ratiocinating intelligence. This mingles with Desire, the passional nature, the passions and emotions thus becoming a part of Mind, as defined in Western Psychology. And so we have the link formed between the higher and lower natures in man, this Desire-Mind belonging to the higher by its intellectual, and to the lower by its emotional, elements. As this forms the battleground during life, [Page 10] so does it play an important part in post-mortem existence. We might now classify our seven principles a little differently, having in view this mingling in DesireMind of perishable and imperishable elements:
Immortal
Will
Intuition
Intellect
Conditionally Immortal
Desire-Mind
Mortal
Desire
Energising Vitality
Automatic Vitality
Some Christian writers have adopted a classification similar to this, declaring Spirit to be inherently immortal, as being Divine; Soul to be conditionally immortal, i.e., capable of winning immortality by uniting itself with Spirit; Body to be inherently mortal. The majority of uninstructed Christians chop man into two, the Body that perishes at Death, and the something – called indifferently Soul or Spirit – that survives Death. This last classification – if classification it may be called – is entirely inadequate, if we are to seek any rational explanation, or even lucid statement, of the phenomena of post-mortem existence. The tripartite view of man’s nature gives a more reasonable representation of his [Page 11] constitution, but is inadequate to explain many phenomena. The septenary division alone gives a reasonable theory consistent with the facts we have to deal with, and therefore, though it may seem elaborate, the student will do wisely to make himself familiar with it. If he were studying only the body, and desired to understand its activities, he would have to classify its tissues at far greater length and with far more minuteness than I am using here. He would have to learn the differences between muscular, nervous, glandular, bony, cartilaginous, epithelial, connective tissues, and all their varieties; and if he rebelled, in his ignorance, against such an elaborate division, it would be explained to him that only by such an analysis of the different components of the body can the varied and complicated phenomena of lifeactivity be understood. One kind of tissue is wanted for support, another for movement, another for secretion, another for absorption, and so on; and if each kind does not have its own distinctive name, dire confusion and misunderstanding must result, and physical functions remain unintelligible. In the long run time is gained, as well as clearness, by learning a few necessary technical terms, and as clearness is above all things needed in trying to explain and to understand very complicated [Page 12] post-mortem phenomena, I find myself compelled – contrary to my habit in these elementary papers – to resort to these technical names at the outset, for the English language has as yet no equivalents for them, and the use of long descriptive phrases is extremely cumbersome and inconvenient.
For myself, I believe that very much of the antagonism between the adherents of the Esoteric Philosophy and those of Spiritualism has arisen from confusion of terms, and consequent misunderstanding of each other’s meaning. One eminent Spiritualist lately impatiently said that he did not see the need of exact definition, and that he meant by Spirit all the part of man’s nature that survived Death, and was not body. One might as well insist on saying that man’s body consists of bone and blood, and asked to define blood, answer: “Oh! I mean everything that is not bone”. A clear definition of terms, and a rigid adherence to them when once adopted, will at least enable us all to understand each other, and that is the first step to any fruitful comparison of experiences.
