(22) Therefore it happens often, that the Spirit of a deceased Man is seen walking, also many Times it is seen riding in the perfect Form of Fire; also many Times in [some] other Manner of Disquietude; all according as the Clothing of the Soul has been in the Time of the Body, just so has its Source [or Condition] been; and such a Form, according to its Source, it has (after the Departing of the Body) in its Figure, and so rides (in such Form) in the Source [or Working] of the Stars, till that Source also be consumed; and then it is wholly naked, and is never seen more by any Man. But the deep Abyss without End and Number is its eternal Dwelling-House, and its Works which it has here wrought, stand in the Figure, in its Tincture, and follow after it.

(87) But when he set his Imagination in the Kingdom of this World, then the bright and clear Will of his Soul drew the swelled Kingdom of the Out-Birth to the Soul in its Will; and so the pure paradisical Soul became dark, and the Element of the Body got the xMesch or Massa, which the Will of the Soul of the Mind attracted into the Element [of the Body;] and then he was a fleshly Man, and got the Fierceness of the first Principle, which the strong Breaking-through to God, in the Gate of the Deep, made to be hard Gristles and Bones.

(2) Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being.

How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate beings in it may be thus conceived:

That great soul must stand pictured before another soul, one not mean, a soul that has become worthy to look, emancipate from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, body's turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens. Into that heaven, all at rest, let the great soul be conceived to roll inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering the material expanse of the heavens has given life, has given immortality: what was abject it has lifted up; and the heavenly system, moved now in endless motion by the soul that leads it in wisdom, has become a living and a blessed thing; the soul domiciled within, it takes worth where, before the soul, it was stark body- clay and water- or, rather, the blankness of Matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, "the execration of the Gods."

The Soul's nature and power will be brought out more clearly, more brilliantly, if we consider next how it envelops the heavenly system and guides all to its purposes: for it has bestowed itself upon all that huge expanse so that every interval, small and great alike, all has been ensouled.

The material body is made up of parts, each holding its own place, some in mutual opposition and others variously interdependent; the soul is in no such condition; it is not whittled down so that life tells of a part of the soul and springs where some such separate portion impinges; each separate life lives by the soul entire, omnipresent in the likeness of the engendering father, entire in unity and entire in diffused variety. By the power of the soul the manifold and diverse heavenly system is a unit: through soul this universe is a God: and the sun is a God because it is ensouled; so too the stars: and whatsoever we ourselves may be, it is all in virtue of soul; for "dead is viler than dung."

This, by which the gods are divine, must be the oldest God of them all: and our own soul is of that same Ideal nature, so that to consider it, purified, freed from all accruement, is to recognise in ourselves that same value which we have found soul to be, honourable above all that is bodily. For what is body but earth, and, taking fire itself, what is its burning power? So it is with all the compounds of earth and fire, even with water and air added to them?

If, then, it is the presence of soul that brings worth, how can a man slight himself and run after other things? You honour the Soul elsewhere; honour then yourself.

(16) And now as we understand, that Man (with the Similitude wherein God dwells) is not merely at Home in this World, much Hurts, or moves. less in the stinking Carcase, so it is manifest (in that we are so very blind as to Paradise) that our first Parents (with their Spirit) are gone out of the heavenly Paradise into the Spirit of this World, where then the Spirit of this World instantly captivated their Body, and made it earthly, so that Body and Soul are perished; and now we have the pure Element no more for our Body, but the Out-Birth, (viz. the four Elements, with the Dominion of the Stars) and the Sun only is the Light of the Body; also this Body does not belong to the Deity. God does not discover himself in the stinking Carcase [or Corpse,] but in the holy Man, in the pure Image which he created in the Beginning.

(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.

(16) Seeing then that Man is so very earthly, therefore he has none but earthly Knowledge, except he be regenerated in the Gate of the Deep. He always supposes that the Soul (at the Deceasing of the Body) goes only out at the Mouth; and he understands nothing concerning its odeep Essences above the Elements. When he sees a blue Vapor go forth out of the Mouth of a dying Man (which makes a strong Smell all over the Chamber) then he supposes that is the Soul.

(31) Man was so altogether dead in death, and so bolted up in the outermost birth or geniture in the dead palpability; or else they could have thought, that in this palpability there must needs be a divine power hidden in the centre, which had so created this palpability, and moreover preserveth, upholdeth and ruleth the same.

(9) And God said; In the Sweat of thy gFace, thou shalt eat thy Bread till thou turn to Earth again. Here now all is clear [and manifest] in the Light; for he had lost the heavenly Fruit, which grew for him without Labour [or Toil of his;] and now he must dig and delve in the Earth, and sow and plant, and so in the four Elements must get Fruit, in Cares, Labour, Toil, and Misery. For while the Element, or the Virtue [or Power] out of the Element, sprung forth through the Earth, there was so long a continual lasting Root to the Fruit; but when the Element (by the Curse) withdrew, then the congealed Death, Frailty, and transitory Fading, was in the Root, and they must now continually be i planted again: Thus the turmoiling Life of Man took Beginning, wherein we must now bathe ourselves.

(9) Seeing therefore that this is the weightiest Article, and cannot be apprehended in such a Way, we will describe the Dying of Man, and the Departure of the Soul from a Body, and try if it might so be brought to Knowledge, that the Reader may comprehend the [true] Meaning of it.

(11) And now it may very exactly be understood by the Essences and Property of the Soul, that in this House of Flesh (where it is as it were generated) it is not at Home; and its horrible Fall may be also understood [thereby.] For it has no Light in itself of its own, it must borrow its Light from the Sun; which indeed springs up along with it in its Birth, but that is corruptible, and the Worm of the Soul is not so; and it is seen that when a Man dies it goes out. And if then the divine Light be not again generated in the Center, then the Soul remains in the eternal Darkness, in the eternal anguishing [Source or] Quality of the Birth, where nothing is to be found in the kindled Captive. Fire, but a horrible Flash of Fire, in which [Source, Property, or] Quality, also the Devils dwell; for it is the first Principle.

(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.

(34) This I have here shown very briefly and summarily, and not according to all the Circumstances, that it might thereby be somewhat understood [by the Way, what] the Life [is.] In its due Place all shall be explained at large, for herein is very much contained, and there might be great Volumes written of it; but I have set down only this, that the Overcoming and the Sleep might be apprehended. The Gate [or Explanation] of the heavenly Tincture, how it was in Adam before the Fall, and how it shall be in us after this Life.

(9) But we must examine how soul comes to inhabit the body- the manner and the process- a question certainly of no minor interest.

The entry of soul into body takes place under two forms.

Firstly, there is the entry- metensomatosis- of a soul present in body by change from one frame to another or the entry- not known as metensomatosis, since the nature of the earlier habitacle is not certainly definable- of a soul leaving an aerial or fiery body for one of earth.

Secondly, there is the entry from the wholly bodiless into any kind of body; this is the earliest form of any dealing between body and soul, and this entry especially demands investigation.

What then can be thought to have happened when soul, utterly clean from body, first comes into commerce with the bodily nature?

It is reasonable, necessary even, to begin with the Soul of the All. Notice that if we are to explain and to be clear, we are obliged to use such words as "entry" and "ensoulment," though never was this All unensouled, never did body subsist with soul away, never was there Matter unelaborate; we separate, the better to understand; there is nothing illegitimate in the verbal and mental sundering of things which must in fact be co-existent.

The true doctrine may be stated as follows:

In the absence of body, soul could not have gone forth, since there is no other place to which its nature would allow it to descend. Since go forth it must, it will generate a place for itself; at once body, also, exists.

While the Soul is at rest- in rest firmly based on Repose, the Absolute- yet, as we may put it, that huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes at last to the extreme bourne of its light and dwindles to darkness; this darkness, now lying there beneath, the soul sees and by seeing brings to shape; for in the law of things this ultimate depth, neighbouring with soul, may not go void of whatsoever degree of that Reason-Principle it can absorb, the dimmed reason of reality at its faintest.

Imagine that a stately and varied mansion has been built; it has never been abandoned by its Architect, who, yet, is not tied down to it; he has judged it worthy in all its length and breadth of all the care that can serve to its Being- as far as it can share in Being- or to its beauty, but a care without burden to its director, who never descends, but presides over it from above: this gives the degree in which the kosmos is ensouled, not by a soul belonging to it, but by one present to it; it is mastered not master; not possessor but possessed. The soul bears it up, and it lies within, no fragment of it unsharing.

The kosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it stretches, from being wet in the water, and has no act of its own; the sea rolls away and the net with it, precisely to the full of its scope, for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place: the soul is of so far-reaching a nature- a thing unbounded- as to embrace the entire body of the All in the one extension; so far as the universe extends, there soul is; and if the universe had no existence, the extent of soul would be the same; it is eternally what it is. The universe spreads as broad as the presence of soul; the bound of its expansion is the point at which, in its downward egression from the Supreme, it still has soul to bind it in one: it is a shadow as broad as the Reason-Principle proceeding from soul; and that Reason-Principle is of scope to generate a kosmic bulk as vast as lay in the purposes of the Idea which it conveys.

(50) Thus thou seest and understandest out of what the earth and stones are come to be. But if that kindled Salitter should have continued to be thus in the whole deep of this world, then the whole place thereof would have been a dark valley; for the light was imprisoned, together with and in the third birth or geniture.

(74) Now, as the deep, or the house of this world, is a dark house, where the whole corporeity generateth itself, and is very thick, dark, anxious and half dead, and taketh its moving from the planets and stars which kindle the body in the outermost birth or geniture, from whence existeth the mobility of the elements, as also the figured and creaturely being, so also the human house of flesh is a dark valley, wherein is indeed the anxiety to the birth of life, and it always highly endeavoureth, intending to elevate itself into the light, from whence the life might kindle itself.

(6) For neither can he who perceiveth It, perceive aught else; nor he who gazeth on It, gaze on aught else; nor hear aught else, nor stir his body any way. Staying his body's every sense and every motion he stayeth still. And shining then all round his mond, It shines through his whole soul, and draws it out of body, transforming all of him to essence. For it is possible, my son, that a man's soul should be made like to God, e'en while it still is in a body, if it doth contemplate the Beauty of the Good.

(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.

(4) This is the case, for example, when, after fixation, one has chiefly thoughts of dry wood and dead ashes, and few thoughts of the resplendent spring on the great earth. In this way one sinks into the world of darkness. The power is cold there, breathing is heavy, and many images of coldness and decay display themselves. If one tarries there long one enters the world of plants and stones.

(79) And the life of the light breaketh through the death, and generateth to it another body out of death, which is not conformable to, or of the condition of, the water and the dead earth; also it does not get their taste and smell; but the power of the light presseth through, and tempereth or mixeth itself with the power of the earth, and taketh from death its sting, and from the wrath its poisonous, venomous power, and presseth forth up together in the midst or centre of the body, in the growth or vegetation, as a heart thereof.

(24) Even though thou couldst enter thy dead body nine times over — owing to the long interval which thou hast passed in the Chonyid Bardo — it will have been frozen if in winter, been decomposed if in summer, or, otherwise, thy relatives will have cremated it, or interred it, or thrown it into the water, or given it to the birds and beasts of pray. Wherefore finding no place for thyself to enter into, thou wilt be dissatisfied and have the sensation of being squeezed into cracks and crevices amidst rocks and boulders. The experiencing of this sort of misery occurs in the Intermediate State when seeking rebirth. Even though thou seekest a body, thou wilt gain nothing but trouble. Put aside the desire for a body; and permit thy mind to abide in the state of resignation, and act so as to abide therein.