THE TRUE DEATH EXPLAINED BY BLAVATSKY

Theosophy explains that physical death is not a true annihilation because humans continue to exist and it is only their lower bodies that become extinct. But there are also situations where the individual immerses himself so deeply in evil that this person ends up being destroyed.

And Blavatsky detailed these particular cases, but so that you can better understand what she explained, I recommend you first to read this other article where I summarize the Masters' explanation about what happens after we die (link).

« As a corollary to this and before going into still more abstruse teachings, I must redeem my promise already given to you in my last letter. I have to illustrate by tenets you already know, the awful doctrine of personal annihilation.

Banish from your minds all that you have hitherto read and thought you understood, in such works as Esoteric Buddhism, of such hypotheses as the eighth sphere and the moon, and that man shares a common ancestor with the ape.

Even the details occasionally given out by myself in The Theosophist and Lucifer were nothing like the whole truth, but only broad general ideas, hardly touched upon in their details. Certain passages, however, give out hints, especially my footnotes on articles translated from Éliphas Lévi’s “Letters on Magic.”

Nevertheless, personal immortality is conditional, for there is such a thing as “soulless man,” a teaching barely mentioned, yet still spoken of in Isis Unveiled; and there is an Avichi, rightly called Hell, though it has no connection with, or similitude to, the good Christian Hell, either geographically or psychically.

The truth known to Occultists and Adepts in every age could not be given out to a promiscuous public; hence, though almost every mystery of occult philosophy lies half concealed in Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, I had no right to amplify or correct Mr. Sinnett’s details.

You may now compare these four volumes and especially Esoteric Buddhism with the diagrams and written explanations in the Instructions, and see for yourselves.

Thus the chief and most important secret with regard to that “second death,” in the esoteric teaching, was and is to this day the terrible possibility of the death of the Soul, that is, its severance from the Ego on earth during a person’s lifetime. This is a real death (though with chances of resurrection), which shows no traces in a person and yet leaves him morally a living corpse.

It is difficult to see why this teaching should have been preserved until now with such secrecy, when, by spreading it among people, at any rate among those who believe in reincarnation, so much good might be done. But so it was, and I had no right to question the wisdom of the prohibition, but have given it hitherto, as it was given to myself, under pledge not to reveal it to the world at large.

But now I have permission to give it to all, revealing its tenets first to the Esotericists; and then when they have assimilated them thoroughly, it will be their duty to teach others this special tenet of the “second death,” and warn all the Theosophists of its dangers.

Therefore we are told that if we destroy Antaskarana (which is the connection between the high triad and the lower quaternary) before the personal is absolutely under the control of the impersonal Ego, we risk to lose the latter and be severed forever from it, unless indeed we hasten to reestablish the communication by a supreme and final effort.

It is only when we are indissolubly linked with the essence of the divine Mind, that we have to destroy Antaskarana. “Like as a solitary warrior pursued by an army, seeks refuge in a stronghold; to cut himself off from the enemy, he first destroys the drawbridge, and then only commences to destroy the pursuer; so must the Srotâpanna act before he slays Antaskarana.” Or, as an occult axiom has it: “The unit becomes three, and three generate four. It is for the latter (the quaternary) to rebecome three, and for the divine three to expand into the Absolute One.”

Monads (which become duads on the differentiated plane, to develop into triads during the cycle of incarnations), even when incarnated, know neither Space nor Time, but are diffused through the lower principles of the quaternary, being omnipresent and omniscient in their nature. But this omniscience is innate, and can manifest its reflected light only through that which is at least semi-terrestrial or material; even as the physical brain which, in its turn, is the vehicle of the lower Manas enthroned in Kâma-Rûpa. And it is this which is gradually annihilated in cases of “second death.”

But such annihilation —which is in reality the absence of the slightest trace of the doomed soul from the eternal MEMORY, and therefore signifies annihilation in eternity— does not mean simply discontinuation of human life on earth, for earth is AVICHI, and the worst Avichi possible.

Expelled forever from the consciousness of the Individuality (the reincarnating Ego), the physical atoms and psychic vibrations of the now separate personality are immediately reincarnated on the same earth, only in a lower and still more abject creature, a human being only in form, doomed to Karmic torments during the whole of its new life. Moreover, if it persists in its criminal or debauched course, it will suffer a long series of such immediate reincarnations.

Here two questions present themselves:

    1. What becomes of the Higher Ego in such cases?

    2. What kind of an animal is a human creature born soulless?

Thus, in answer to the first question, I say:

1) The Divine Ego does one of two things: either (a) it recommences immediately under its own Karmic impulses a fresh series of incarnations; or (b) it seeks and finds refuge in the “bosom of the Mother,” Alaya, the Universal Soul, of which the Manvantaric aspect is Mahat.

Freed from the life impressions of the personality, it merges into a kind of interlude of Nirvana, wherein there can be nothing but the eternal Present, which absorbs the Past and Future.

Bereft of the “laborer,” both field and harvest now being lost, the Master, in the infinitude of his thought, naturally preserves no recollection of the finite and evanescent illusion which had been his last personality. The latter, then, is indeed annihilated.

2) The future of the Lower Manas is more terrible, and still more terrible to humanity than to the now animal man. It sometimes happens that after the separation the exhausted Soul, now become supremely animal, fades out in Kama-Loka, as do all other animal souls.

But seeing that the more material the human mind, the longer it lasts, in that intermediate stage, it frequently happens that after the actual life of the soulless man is ended, he is again and again reincarnated into new personalities, each one more abject than the other. The impulse of animal life is too strong; it cannot wear itself out in one or two lives only. »

(This was originally published in the Instructions III of the Esoteric Section, and later in the Collected Writings 12, p.622-638)

Observation: Blavatsky also pointed out that not all those heartless humans end up disintegrating, but there are also cases where some of those entities are transformed into what the occultists call “the Dweller of the Threshold”, and in the previous article I put the explanation she gave about it.