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?
Before answering these two very natural queries, I have to draw the attention of all of you who are born in Christian countries to the fact that the romance of the vicarious atonement and the mission of Jesus, [pg 524] as it now stands, was drawn or borrowed by some too liberal Initiates from the mysterious and weird tenet of the earthly experience of the reincarnating Ego. The latter is indeed the sacrificial victim of, and through, its own Karma in previous Manvantaras, which takes upon itself voluntarily the duty of saving what would be otherwise soulless men or personalities. Eastern truth is thus more philosophical and logical than Western fiction. The Christos, or Buddhi-Manas of each man is not quite an innocent and sinless God, though in one sense it is the “Father,” being of the same essence with the Universal Spirit, and at the same time the “Son,” for Manas is the second remove from the “Father.” By incarnation the Divine Son makes itself responsible for the sins of all the personalities which it will inform. This it can do only through its proxy or reflection, the lower Manas. The only case in which the Divine Ego can escape individual penalty and responsibility as a guiding Principle, is when it has to break off from the personality, because matter, with its psychic and astral vibrations, is then, by the very intensity of its combinations, placed beyond the control of the Ego. Apophis, the Dragon, having become the conqueror, the reincarnating Manas, separating itself gradually from its tabernacle, breaks finally asunder from the psycho-animal Soul.
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 Nirvânic interlude, wherein there can be nothing but the eternal Present, which absorbs the Past and Future. Bereft of the “labourer,” 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. And then, indeed, is the latter 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 Kâma Loka, as do all other animal souls. But seeing that the more material is the human mind, the longer it lasts, even in the intermediate stage, it frequently happens that after the present life of the soulless man is ended, he is again and again [pg 525] 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. In rarer cases, however, when the lower Manas is doomed to exhaust itself by starvation; when there is no longer hope that even a remnant of a lower light will, owing to favourable conditions—say, even a short period of spiritual aspiration and repentance—attract back to itself its Parent Ego, and Karma leads the Higher Ego back to new incarnations, then something far more dreadful may happen. The Kâma-Mânasic spook may become that which is called in Occultism the “Dweller on the Threshold.” This Dweller is not like that which is described so graphically in Zanoni, but an actual fact in Nature and not a fiction in romance, however beautiful the latter may be. Bulwer, however, must have got the idea from some Eastern Initiate. This Dweller, led by affinity and attraction, forces itself into the astral current, and through the Auric Envelope, of the new tabernacle inhabited by the Parent Ego, and declares war to the lower light which has replaced it. This, of course, can only happen in the case of the moral weakness of the personality so obsessed. No one strong in virtue, and righteous in his walk of life, can risk or dread any such thing; but only those depraved in heart. Robert Louis Stevenson had a glimpse of a true vision indeed when he wrote his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His story is a true allegory. Every Chelâ will recognise in it a substratum of truth, and in Mr. Hyde a Dweller, an obsessor of the personality, the tabernacle of the Parent Spirit.
“This is a nightmare tale!” I was often told by one, now no more in our ranks, who had a most pronounced “Dweller,” a “Mr. Hyde,” as an almost constant companion. “How can such a process take place without one's knowledge?” It can and does so happen, and I have almost described it once before in the Theosophist.
The Soul, the lower Mind, becomes as a half animal principle almost paralyzed with daily vice, and grows gradually unconscious of its subjective half, the Lord, one of the mighty Host; [and] in proportion to the rapid sensuous development of the brain and nerves, sooner or later, it (the personal Soul) finally loses sight of its divine mission on earth.
Truly,
Like the vampire, the brain feeds and lives and grows in strength at the expense of its spiritual parent ... and the personal half-unconscious Soul becomes senseless, beyond hope of redemption. It is powerless to discern the voice of its [pg 526]God. It aims but at the development and fuller comprehension of natural, earthly life; and thus can discover but the mysteries of physical nature.... It begins by becoming virtually dead, during the life of the body; and ends by dying completely—that is, by being annihilated as a complete immortal Soul. Such a catastrophe may often happen long years before one's physical death: “We elbow soulless men and women at every step in life.” And when death arrives ... there is no more a Soul (the reincarnating Spiritual Ego) to liberate ... for it has fled years before.
Result: Bereft of its guiding Principles, but strengthened by the material elements, Kâma-Manas, from being a “derived light” now becomes an independent Entity. After thus suffering itself to sink lower and lower on the animal plane, when the hour strikes for its earthly body to die, one of two things happens: either Kâma-Manas is immediately reborn in Myalba, the state of Avîtchi on earth,[849] or, if it become too strong in evil—“immortal in Satan” is the Occult expression—it is sometimes allowed, for Karmic purposes, to remain in an active state of Avîtchi in the terrestrial Aura. Then through despair and loss of all hope it becomes like the mythical “devil” in its endless wickedness; it continues in its elements, which are imbued through and through with the essence of Matter; for evil is coeval with Matter rent asunder from Spirit. And when its Higher Ego has once more reincarnated, evolving a new reflection, or Kâma-Manas, the doomed lower Ego, like a Frankenstein's monster, will ever feel attracted to its Father, who repudiates his son, and will become a regular “Dweller on the Threshold” of terrestrial life. I gave the outlines of the Occult doctrine in the Theosophist of October, 1881, and November, 1882, but could not go into details, and therefore got very much embarrassed when called upon to explain. Yet I have written there plainly enough about “useless drones,” those who refuse to become co-workers with Nature and who perish by millions during the Manvantaric life-cycle; those, as in the case in hand, who prefer to be ever suffering in Avîtchi under Karmic law rather than give up their lives “in evil,” and finally, those who are co-workers with Nature for destruction. These are thoroughly wicked and depraved men, but yet as highly intellectual and acutely spiritual for evil, as those who are spiritual for good.