This ought to settle the question and show there must have been some carelessly unnoticed mistake and if this is not sufficient, there is something else to demonstrate it, for it is further on:
“Thus, like the revolutions of a wheel, there is a regular succession of death and birth, the moral cause of which is the cleaving to existing objects, while the instrumental cause is Karma (the power which controls the universe, prompting it to activity,) merit and demerit. It is therefore, the great desire of all beings who would be released from the sorrows of successive birth, to seek the destruction of the moral cause the cleaving to existing objects, or evil desire.”
“They in whom evil desire is entirely destroyed are called Arhats. Freedom from evil desire insures the possession of a miraculous power. At his death, the Arhat is never reincarnated; he invariably attains nirvana—a word, by the by, falsely interpreted by the Christian scholar and skeptical commentators. Nirvana is the world of cause, in which all deceptive effects or delusions of our senses disappear. Nirvana is the highest attainable sphere. The pitris (the pre-Adamic spirits) are considered as reincarnated by the Buddhistic philosopher, though in a degree far superior to that of the man of earth. Do they not die in their turn? Do not their astral bodies suffer and rejoice, and feel the same curse of illusionary feelings as when embodied?”
And just after this we are again made to say of Buddha and his Doctrine of “Merit and Demerit,” or Karma:
“But this former life believed in by the Buddhists, is not a life on this planet for, more than any other people, the Buddhistical philosopher appreciated the great doctrine of cycles.”
Correct “life on this planet” by “life in the same cycle,” and you will have the correct reading: for what would have appreciation of “the great doctrine of cycles” to do with Buddha’s philosophy, had the great sage believed but in one short life on this Earth and in the same cycle. But to return to the real theory of reincarnation as in the esoteric teaching and its unlucky rendering in Isis.
Thus, what was really meant therein, was that, the principle which does not reincarnate—save the exceptions pointed out—is the false personality, the illusive human Entity defined and individualized during this short life of ours, under some specific form and name; but that which does and has to reincarnate nolens volens under the unflinching, stern rule of Karmic law—is the real EGO. This confusing of the real immortal Ego in man, with the false and ephemeral personalities it inhabits during its Manvantaric progress, lies at the root of every such misunderstanding. Now what is the one, and what is the other? The first group is—
1. The immortal Spirit—sexless, formless (arupa) an emanation from the One universal Breath.
2. Its Vehicle—the divine Soul—called the “Immortal Ego,” the “Divine monad,” etc. etc., which by accretions from Manas in which burns the ever existing Jiv—the undying spark—adds to itself at the close of each incarnation the essence of that individuality that was, the aroma of the culled flower that is no more.
What is the false personality? It is that bundle of desires, aspirations, affection and hatred, in short of action, manifested by a human being on this earth during one incarnation and under the form of one personality.[140] Certainly it is not all this, which as a fact for us, the deluded, material, and and materially thinking lot—is Mr. So and So, or Mrs. somebody else—that remains immortal, or is ever reborn.
All that bundle of Egotism that apparent and evanescent “I” disappears after death, as the costume of the part he played disappears from the actor’s body, after he leaves the theatre and goes to bed. That actor re-becomes at once the same “John Smith” or Gray, he was from his birth and is no longer the Othello or Hamlet that he had represented for a few hours. Nothing remains now of that “bundle” to go to the next incarnation, except the seed for future Karma that Manas may have united to its immortal group, to form with it—the disembodied Higher Self in “Devachan.” As to the four lower principles, that which becomes of them is found in most classics, from which we mean to quote at length for our defence. The doctrine of the perisprit the “false personality,” or the remains of the deceased under their astral form—fading out to disappear in time, is terribly distasteful to the spiritualists, who insist upon confusing the temporary with the immortal Ego.