Mystery of Death and Reincarnation

Original PowerPoint Slides

Created by KVK. Nehru

The Theosophical Society :: Adyar
2004


Some Works Referred:

Jinarajadasa C., First Principles of Theosophy, TPH, 1960

Leadbeater C.W., Man, Visible and Invisible, TPH, 1971

Leadbeater C.W., The Masters and the Path, TPH, 1973

Manual, The Elemental Kingdoms

Pearson N., Space, Time and Self, TPH, 1964

Powell A.E., The Causal Body and the Ego, TPH, 1972

Powell A.E., The Etheric Double, TPH, 1971


Death is a phenomenon that is of the deepest interest to every one of us, since the one thing which is absolutely certain in everyone's life is that one day one must die. Even so, there seems to be no other subject which is full of misconceptions that are serious. Mankind has suffered vast amount of utterly unnecessary sorrow, misery and terror simply from its ignorance and superstition with regard to this important question.

People are sometimes inclined to think that after all, it does not matter much if our ideas about death are distorted: one will find out the facts, they say, when one dies any way. This opinion ignores the fact of the unnecessary sorrow and anxiety of the survivors, and secondly, they don't realize that the departed could easily have saved lot of trouble by having a previous knowledge of the after death conditions.

Considerable information on the process of death and the after-death states is available in the Ancient Teachings. An understanding of these, will therefore, deprive death of its terror, anxiety and sorrow.

The four lower Principles, which constitute the perishable Personality (Dêhâtma), are renewed every incarnation. The real Individual, the Self (Jîvâtma) continues in the Causal Body, lasts throughout the Human stage.

Death is a process of successive withdrawal from the physical Plane 'upwards.' The discarded Astral and Mental bodies linger as Shells and gradually disintegrate. The respective Permanent Atoms become dormant. All the gains from the experiences are stored in the Causal body.

After a time of recluse in the Causal, when time comes for the next incarnation, the Mental, Astral and the physical Permanent Atoms get re-activated successively, in that order, each acquiring matter of their respective Planes, conducive to the new incarnation and gradually building them into bodies.

A class of Devas, the Recorders or the Lords of Karma (Lîpikas), assist the individual in the process of coming into a new incarnation by deciding the various parameters, with the objective to enable one to grow steadily towards the Archetype, the Ideal set by the God of the System. There is a Cause-and-Effect Law behind the evolution of the human individual.

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