(27) The Most High God will preserve him from all evil, and will be with him; for He will not forsake him all his days;

(1) Then the god of the realms gives them some of those who serve him. . . . They come on that land where the great ones are who have not been defiled, nor will they be defiled by any desire. For their souls did not come from a defiled hand, but from an eternal angel's great command.

(51) Yea, he dwells in security forever. His form is vanished, he is a mere mirror; If you spit at it, you spit at your own face, And if you hit that mirror, you hit yourself; And if you see an ugly face in it, 'tis your own, And if you see an 'Isa there, you are its mother Mary. He is neither this nor that he is void of form; 'Tis your own form which is reflected back to you. But when the discourse reaches this point, lip is closed; When pen reaches this point, it is split in twain.

(25) Thy body being a mental body is incapable of dying even though beheaded and quartered. In reality, thy body is of the nature of voidness; thou needst not be afraid. The Lords of Death are thine own hallucinations. Thy desire -body is a body of propensities, and void. Voidness cannot injure voidness; the qualityless cannot injure the qualityless.

(19) The soul in man, however - not every soul, but one that pious is - is a daimonic something and divine. And such a soul when from the body freed, if it have fought the fight of piety - the fight of piety is to know God and to do wrong to no man - such a soul becomes entirely mind. Whereas the impious soul remains in its own essence, chastised by its own self, and seeking for an earthly body where to enter, if only it be human. For that no other body can contain a human soul; nor is it right that any human soul should fall into the body of a thing that doth possess no reason. For that the law of God is this: to guard the human soul from such tremendous outrage.

(50) But if thou fightest and strivest with the devil, and keepest the gate of love in thy astral birth, and so departest from hence as to the body, then thy soul remaineth in the word quite hidden from the devil, and reigneth with God, even unto the day of the restitution of that which was lost.

(62) And the Lord of Spirits will abide over them, And with that Son of Man shall they eat And lie down and rise up for ever and ever.

(68) If not, then a hell or hole, burrow or dungeon shall be given to him for an everlasting prison, and there shall he together with his sons be imprisoned for ever: and you should take heed lest a Court of Justice be held, and pass upon you also.

(38) The Soul is washed in the holy Water, and the Word is presented to it, and the Soul stands in the Covenant. And now it may reach after the Pearl; although the Soul be tied backward in the Kingdom of this World, yet it stands in the Covenant notwithstanding. And if, in the unfeigned Faith of the Parents, of the Priest, and of the Standers by, it be thus washed in the Laver of Regeneration, and so passes into the Covenant, then the Devil may not touch it, till [the Time] that it understands what Evil and Good are, and enters into one of them in a free Will.

(59) If the Soul be freed from the Bands of the Devil, then it lives in Meekness, and in great Humility, in the Stillness of the Miracles, [or shows no Work of Wonder,] but humbles itself before God. Yet it is possible for the highly-worthy championlike Souls to do Wonders; for they have great Knowledge, and Power, [or Virtue,] though they all appear (in the humble Love) before the Countenance of God, and there is no Grudging among them. The True Door of the Entrance into Heaven, or into Hell.

(48) And on the day of their affliction there shall be rest on the earth, And before them they shall fall and not rise again: And there shall be no one to take them with his hands and raise them: For they have denied the Lord of Spirits and His Anointed. The name of the Lord of Spirits be blessed.

(6) "Hearken, therefore, that I may discourse with you concerning the soul according as I have said: The five great rulers of the great Fate of the æons and the rulers of the disk of the sun and the rulers of the disk of the moon breathe into that soul, and there cometh out of them a portion of my power, as I have just said. And the portion of that power remaineth within the soul, so that the soul can stand. And they put the counterfeiting spirit outside the soul, watching it and assigned to it; and the rulers bind it to the soul with their seals and their bonds and seal it to it, that it may compel it always, so that it continually doeth its mischiefs and all its iniquities, in order that it may be their slave always and remain under their sway always in the changes of the body; and they seal it to it that it may be in all the sin and all the desires of the world.

(24) Now comes the question of the soul leaving the body; where does it go?

It cannot remain in this world where there is no natural recipient for it; and it cannot remain attached to anything not of a character to hold it: it can be held here when only it is less than wise, containing within itself something of that which lures it.

If it does contain any such alien element it gives itself, with increasing attachment, to the sphere to which that element naturally belongs and tends.

The space open to the soul's resort is vast and diverse; the difference will come by the double force of the individual condition and of the justice reigning in things. No one can ever escape the suffering entailed by ill deeds done: the divine law is ineluctable, carrying bound up, as one with it, the fore-ordained execution of its doom. The sufferer, all unaware, is swept onward towards his due, hurried always by the restless driving of his errors, until at last wearied out by that against which he struggled, he falls into his fit place and, by self-chosen movement, is brought to the lot he never chose. And the law decrees, also, the intensity and the duration of the suffering while it carries with it, too, the lifting of chastisement and the faculty of rising from those places of pain- all by power of the harmony that maintains the universal scheme.

Souls, body-bound, are apt to body-punishment; clean souls no longer drawing to themselves at any point any vestige of body are, by their very being, outside the bodily sphere; body-free, containing nothing of body- there where Essence is, and Being, and the Divine within the Divinity, among Those, within That, such a soul must be.

If you still ask Where, you must ask where those Beings are- and in your seeking, seek otherwise than with the sight, and not as one seeking for body.

(47) For the soul, which apprehendeth the word, has an open gate in heaven, and can be prevented by nothing; neither does the devil see the soul, because it is not in his country or dominions.

(88) But now he must lie captivated and imprisoned in the outermost birth or geniture, even till the Last Judgment Day, which is at hand, and very near to be expected.

(74) The Spirit of their Souls is in the Stillness, in the still Habitation before God. It does not let thy rough Sins come into it to sleep upon them, but its Imagination and whole Will stands directly bent into the Heart of God, and the Spirit of the first Principle of its original Source says, Lord, when avengest thou our Blood? And the Meekness of Jesus Christ says; Rest in the Stillness, till thy Brethren also come to thee, who shall be slain in Babel for the Witness of Jesus.

(2) and said unto Thomas: "Amēn, I say: This sin is more heinous than all sins and iniquities. Such men will straightway be taken into the outer darkness and not be cast back anew into the sphere, but they shall perish, be destroyed in the outer darkness in a region where there is neither pity nor light, but howling and grinding of teeth. And all the souls which shall be brought into the outer darkness, will not be cast back anew, but will be destroyed and dissolved." John answered [and said]: "A man who hath committed no sin, but done good persistently, but hath not found the mysteries to pass through the rulers, when he cometh out of the body, what will happen unto him?"

(45) And into the heaven they shall not ascend, And on the earth they shall not come: Such shall be the lot of the sinners Who have denied the name of the Lord of Spirits, Who are thus preserved for the day of suffering and tribulation.

(1) IF we consider now (in the Light of Nature) of Man, the Image of God, of his Beginning, and of his eternal Enduring, Being, [or Substance,] and then of the Breaking of his Body, how Body and Soul part asunder, and whither the Souls go, when the Spirit of their Breath does break [or dissolve] in them, and the Springing or Moving in the Tincture of this World does cease, then we find the Ground of the Unquietness of the Soul, when it is separated from the Body, [being] unregenerated; from whence Lamentation and Desiring arise; from whence then the Babel of Confusion has risen, so that very many Things have therefore been invented to ransom Souls [out of Distress.]

(48) And the wisdom of the Lord of Spirits hath revealed him to the holy and righteous; For he hath preserved the lot of the righteous, Because they have hated and despised this world of unrighteousness, And have hated all its works and ways in the name of the Lord of Spirits: For in his name they are saved, And according to his good pleasure hath it been in regard to their life.