(1) Whether every human being is immortal or we are wholly destroyed, or whether something of us passes over to dissolution and destruction, while something else, that which is the true man, endures for ever- this question will be answered here for those willing to investigate our nature.

We know that man is not a thing of one only element; he has a soul and he has, whether instrument or adjunct in some other mode, a body: this is the first distinction; it remains to investigate the nature and essential being of these two constituents.

Reason tells us that the body as, itself too, a composite, cannot for ever hold together; and our senses show us it breaking up, wearing out, the victim of destructive agents of many kinds, each of its constituents going its own way, one part working against another, perverting, wrecking, and this especially when the material masses are no longer presided over by the reconciling soul.

And when each single constituent is taken as a thing apart, it is still not a unity; for it is divisible into shape and matter, the duality without which bodies at their very simplest cannot cohere.

The mere fact that, as material forms, they have bulk means that they can be lopped and crushed and so come to destruction.

If this body, then, is really a part of us, we are not wholly immortal; if it is an instrument of ours, then, as a thing put at our service for a certain time, it must be in its nature passing.

The sovereign principle, the authentic man, will be as Form to this Matter or as agent to this instrument, and thus, whatever that relation be, the soul is the man.

(173) Therefore also the creatures, as beasts, fowls or birds, fishes and worms in this world, are not created to an eternal being, but to a transitory one, as the figures in heaven also pass away.

(92) Timaeus: into one another in all these ways, as they undergo transformation by the loss or by the gain of reason and unreason. And now at length we may say that our discourse concerning the Universe has reached its termination. For this our Cosmos has received the living creatures both mortal and immortal and been thereby fulfilled; it being itself a visible Living Creature embracing the visible creatures, a perceptible God made in the image of the Intelligible, most great and good and fair and perfect in its generation—even this one Heaven sole of its kind.

(27) For the water which resteth on the earth is as corrupt and perished and mortal or dead a being or thing as the earth is, and belongeth also to the outermost birth, which with its comprehensibility, or as to its palpability, stands in death, even as the earth and stones do.

(3) And of the matter stored beneath it , the Father made of it a universal body, and packing it together made it spherical - wrapping it round the life - [a sphere] which is immortal in itself, and that doth make materiality eternal. But He, the Father, full-filled with His ideas, did sow the lives as in a cave, willing to order forth the life with every kind of living. So He with deathlessness enclosed the universal body, that matter might not wish to separate itself from body's composition, and so dissolve into its own [original] unorder. For matter, son, when it was yet incorporate , was in unorder. And it doth still retain down here this [nature of unorder] enveloping the rest of the small lives - that increase-and-decrease which men call death.

(2) When a hundred thousand generations had passed, the mortal birds surrendered themselves spontaneously to total annihilation. No man, neither young nor old, can speak fittingly of death or immortality. Even as these things are far from us so the description of them is beyond all explanation or definition. If my readers wish for an allegorical explanation of the immortality that follows annihilation, it will be necessary' for me to write another book. So long as you are identified with the things of the world you will not set out on the Path, but when the world no longer binds you, you enter as in a dream; but, knowing the end, you see the benefit. A germ is nourished among a hundred cares and loves so that it may become an intelligent and acting being. It is instructed and given the necessary knowledge. Then death comes and evernhing is effaced, its dignity is thrown down. This that was a being has become the dust of the street. It has several times been annihilated; but in the meanwhile it has been able to learn a hundred secrets of which previously it had not been aware, and in the end it receives immortality', and is given honour in place of dishonour. Do you know what you possess? Enter into yourself and reflect on this. So long as you do not realize your nothingness and so long as you do not renounce your self-pride, your vanity and your self-love, you will never reach the heights of immortality. On the ay you are cast down in dishonour and raised in honour.

And now my story is finished, I have nothing more to say.

(92) And then from all the qualities which are in the body, there grows a bud or head, and there is a new body in the bud or head, which is formed or figured answerable or like to the first root in the earth, only now it gets another more subtile form.

(81) Your souls, void of substance, rest still in forms. If the form of man were all that made man, A painting on a wall resembles a man, 'Tis life that is lacking to that mere semblance of man. Go! seek for that pearl it never will find. The heads of earth's lions were bowed down When God gave might to the Seven Sleepers' dog. What mattered its despised form When its soul was drowned in the sea of light?" Human wisdom, the manifestation of divine.

(16) How then, O son, could there be in the God, the image of the Father, in the plenitude of Life - dead things? For that death is corruption, and corruption destruction. How then could any part of that which knoweth no corruption be corrupted, or any whit of him the God destroyed? Tat: Do they not, then, my father, die - the lives in it, that are its parts? Hermes: Hush, son! - led into error by the term in use for what takes place. They do not die, my son, but are dissolved as compound bodies. Now dissolution is not death, but dissolution of a compound; it is dissolved not so that it may be destroyed, but that it may become renewed. For what is the activity of life? Is it not motion? What then in Cosmos is there that hath no motion? Naught is there, son!

(277) 'All created things perish,' he who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way to purity.

(24) Well hast thou taught me all, as I desired, O Mind. And now, pray, tell me further of the nature of the Way Above as now it is [for me]. To this Man-Shepherd said: When the material body is to be dissolved, first thou surrenderest the body by itself unto the work of change, and thus the form thou hadst doth vanish, and thou surrenderest thy way of life, void of its energy, unto the Daimon. The body's senses next pass back into their sources, becoming separate, and resurrect as energies; and passion and desire withdraw unto that nature which is void of reason.

(18) Know, therefore, generally, my son, that all that is in Cosmos is being moved for increase or for decrease. Now that which is kept moving, also lives; but there is no necessity that that which lives, should be all same. For being simultaneous, the Cosmos, as a whole, is not subject to change, my son, but all its parts are subject unto it; yet naught [of it] is subject to corruption, or destroyed. It is the terms employed that confuse men. For 'tis not genesis that constituteth life, but 'tis sensation; it is not change that constituteth death, but 'tis forgetfulness. Since, then, these things are so, they are immortal all - Matter, [and] Life, [and] Spirit, Mind [and] Soul, of which whatever liveth, is composed.

(14) (19) As for the souls of the other living beings, fallen to the degree of entering brute bodies, these too must be immortal. And if there is in the animal world any other phase of soul, its only possible origin, since it is the life-giver, is, still, that one principle of life: so too with the soul in the vegetal order.

All have sprung from one source, all have life as their own, all are incorporeal, indivisible, all are real-beings.

If we are told that man's soul being tripartite must as a compound entity be dissolved, our answer shall be that pure souls upon their emancipation will put away all that has fastened to them at birth, all that increment which the others will long retain.

But even that inferior phase thus laid aside will not be destroyed as long as its source continues to exist, for nothing from the realm of real being shall pass away.

(3) Now ope thine eyes to what I answer thee, And thou shalt see thy creed and my discourse Fit in the truth as centre in a circle. That which can die, and that which dieth not, Are nothing but the splendour of the idea Which by his love our Lord brings into being; Because that living Light, which from its fount Effulgent flows, so that it disunites not From Him nor from the Love in them intrined, Through its own goodness reunites its rays In nine subsistences, as in a mirror, Itself eternally remaining One. Thence it descends to the last potencies, Downward from act to act becoming such That only brief contingencies it makes; And these contingencies I hold to be Things generated, which the heaven produces By its own motion, with seed and without. Neither their wax, nor that which tempers it, Remains immutable, and hence beneath The ideal signet more and less shines through; Therefore it happens, that the selfsame tree After its kind bears worse and better fruit, And ye are born with characters diverse.

(6) After his soul has departed he dies, and when it has gone down he decays; he is all corruption; all his bones are rottenness, putrefaction seizes his limbs and makes his bones break down, his flesh becomes a fetid liquid, his breath is stink, he becomes a multitude of worms

(51) Now this nature is as a dead, unintellectual being, and stands or consisteth not in the power of the birth or geniture, but is a body, wherein the power generateth.

Light and darkness, life and death, and right and left are siblings of one another, and inseparable. For this reason the good are not good, the bad are not bad, life is not life, death is not death. Each will dissolve into its original nature, but what is superior to the world cannot be dissolved, for it is eternal.

(78) But now the Salitter of the earth and of the water is no more able to change or alter itself in its dead being, and shew forth itself infinitely, as it did in the heavenly place or seat; but when the qualifying or fountain spirits form the body, then it riseth up in the power and virtue of the light.

(55) The goddess said: Likewise all living beings (fundamentally) are subject to neither death nor birth.”

(3) 'This (body) indeed withers and dies when the living Self has left it; the living Self dies not. 'That which is that subtile essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art it.' 'Please, Sir, inform me still more,' said the son. 'Be it so, my child,' the father replied.