THEOSOPHY
The Blavatsky Blogger’s
Instant Guide
To
Death & The Afterlife
He’s moved on
The
Reincarnating Ego
Jo
Bloggs comes back
but not as Jo Bloggs
Firstly, our Jo Bloggs is a
purely fictitious character created for the purposes of this web page. Any
resemblance to any real person living or in between lives is purely
coincidental.
Jo Bloggs
is a regular guy with a physical body that everybody recognizes and a
personality that enable to deal with life. When he eventually leaves that
physical world, hopefully at the end of a long enjoyable life, he will go
through a series of inter life phases and then be reborn. He won’t however come
back as Jo Bloggs and it is unlikely that he will
even remember being Jo Bloggs. He may even be a
Mongolian milkman or return as female. What is it then
that carries the link between incarnations?
To begin to answer this
question, let’s look at a thing that Theosophists call the Constitution of Man.
And this is it;
Man has seven principles, sometime
referred to as bodies.
These are
Atma – The piece of the divine in
everybody
Buddhi – Our individual spiritual
identity
Manas – The Mind principle divided into
higher – spiritual ideals and lower – concrete and rational thought.
Atma, Buddhi and higher Manas form the
immortal part of man. The four principles below are dumped at the end of you
physical life and you get new ones for next time.
Prana – The life energy principle
Linga
Sharira – The model body or template for your
physical body
Sthula
Sharira – Physical body – we are all familiar with
this one.
_________________________
So there we have the constitution of man
and as you will appreciate, the only principle or body that we regard as real
in everyday life is the Physical Body.
At the end of physical life (aka Death) we lose the physical body and we are dead for
all practical purposes.
Soon after death we loose the Etheric
Body which has provided a network for our Life Energy Principle during life
(Prana). The principles above this sometimes struggle to break free from the
remnant of this energy web.
The remaining principles then go into
what is known as Kama Loka or the Desire realm and over time, the Desire
Principle and Lower Mind (concrete and rational) Principle dissolve. These two
principles provide the basis for the personality.
At the end of this process, we are left
with an assimilation of the experience of the last life which is reviewed by
the remaining higher principles which are Atma, Buddhi and Manas (Higher Mind).
These three higher principles form the
immortal part of man and will continue into the next life. This combination is
known as the Reincarnating Ego and it is this which will carry Jo Bloggs’s individual entity into his next life. Jo himself
has dissolved and a distilled essence of his life experience is carried
forward.
This will be covered in other articles
but just to keep you in the picture, the process doesn’t end with the
dissolution of the lower principles. The Reincarnating Ego carries on into what
is known as Devachan which is a state of bliss in which positive life
aspirations are realized. Then it’s time to go back to earth but you do get
some choice about your next birth.
______________________
The Blavatsky
Blogger
Taking Theosophical
ideas
into the 21st
century
He’s moved on
The
Blavatsky Blogger’s
Instant
Guide to
Death
& The Afterlife
__________________________
Postings
to this Website reflect
the views of The Blavatsky Blogger.
Please
don’t go looking for anyone else.