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��Esoteric BuddJiism. — A Revieiv.
��so many molecules forming, by their accretion, the animal and the human soul. As, at death, the molecules of the body separate and are, by-and-by, absorbed with their inherent vitality into new agglomerations, and become part of new living forms, so the ele- ments of the human soul may be torn apart, and some of them, being no longer man, but following the fortunes of the lower principles, may be lost to us, while other elements, clinging to the spiritual soul, follow its destiny in the after-life. I know a thinking man who believes in nothing but matter and motion ; add time and space, and we have the all in all, the Nature, of Buddhism. Yet the Buddhist believes in a state of being beyond this earthly life : a state whose conditions are de- termined absolutely by the use which the human soul has made of its oppor- tunities in the life that now is, and my friend says he does not. Truly, Bud- dhism is better than the materialism of to-day.
Let me now turn to the history of humanity as revealed to us in our book. Every monad, or spirit-element, be- ginning its course by becoming sep- arated from what I conceive as the great central reservoir of Nature, must, before returning thither, make a cer- tain fixed round through an individual existence. If it belongs to the plan- etary chain, of which our earth is the fourth and lowest link, it must pass seven times through each of the kingdoms of Nature on each one of the seven planets. Of these seven planets. Mars, our Earth, and Mercury, are three. The other four are too tenuous to be cognizable by our present senses. Of the seven kingdoms of Nature, three are likewise beyond our ken or conception ; the highest four are
��the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and man. Our immortal part has therefore passed already through six of the kingdoms of its destiny, and is, in fact, now near the middle of its fourth round of human existence upon the earth. One life on earth is, however, not sufficient for the development of our powers. Every human being must pass through each of the seven branch- races of each of the sub-races of each of the root-races of humanity; and mtist, in short, live, or, as our author expresses the idea, be incarnated about eight hundred times — some more and some less — upon this planet, before the hour will come when it will be permitted to him, by a path as easy of passage for him then, as is that followed by the rays of light, to visit the planet Mercury, for his next two million years of existence.
Through each of these eight hundred mortal lives, man is purifying and developing his nature. When, at the end of each, his body dies, his higher principles leave the lower to gradual dissolution, while they themselves re- maining still bound in space to this planet, pass into Devachan, the state of effects. Here, entirely unconscious of what passes on earth, the soul remains, absorbed in its own subjectivity. For a length of time, stated as never less than fifteen hundred years, and shown by figures to average not less than eight thousand, the soul, enjoying in its own contemplation those things it most desired in mortal life, surrounded in its own imagination by the friends and the scenes it has loved on earth, reaps the exact reward of its own deeds. Wherr Nature has thus paid the laborer his hire, when his power of enjoyment has exhausted itself, the soul passes by a gradual process into oblivion of all the
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