Immortality is participation in the eternal now of the divine Ground.

Survival is persistence in one of the forms of time. Immortality is the result of total deliverance. Survival is the lot of those who are partially delivered into some heaven, or who are not delivered at all but find themselves by the law of their own untranscended nature compelled to choose some purgatorial or embodied servitude even more painful than the one they have just left.

The word Tathagata, one of the names of the buddha signifies one who does not go to anywhere and does not come from anywhere and therefore is he called Tathagata (Thus-gone), holy and fully enlightened.

              I died a mineral and became a plant. I died a plant and rose an animal. I died an animal and I was    man.   Why should I fear ? When was I less by dying ?

      jalal-uddin  Rumi

There is a general agreement, East and West, that life in a body provides uniquely good opportunities for achieving salvation or deliverance. Catholic and Mahayana buddhist doctrine is alike in insisting that the soul in its disembodied state after death cannot acquire merit, but merely suffers in purgatory the consequences of its past acts.

Meanwhile, the fact that one has been born in a human body is one of the things for which says Shankara, one should daily give thanks to God.

      The spiritual creature which we are has need of a body without which it could nowise attain that knowledge which it obtains as the only approach to those things by knowledge of which it is made blessed.

            St. Bernard

Good men spiritualize their bodies, bad men incarnate their souls.

More precisely, good men spiritualize their mind-bodies;

bad men incarnate and mentalize their spirits.

The completely spiritualized mind-body is a Tathagata, who doesn't go anywhere when he dies,

for the good reason that he is already, actually and consciously, where everyone has always potentially been without knowing.

The person who has not in this life gone into Thusness, into the eternal principle of all states of being, goes at death into some particular state either purgatorial or paradisal.

For oriental theologians there is no eternal damnation; there are only purgatories and then an indefinite series of second chances to go forward towards not only man's but the whole creation's final end total reunion with the Ground of all being.

Preoccupation with posthumous deliverance is not one of the means to such deliverance and may easily indeed, become an obstacle in the way of advance towards it.

In oriental discussions of the subject, that which survives death is not the personality.

Buddhism accepts the doctrine of reincarnation but it is not a soul that passes on, (buddhism denies the existence of a soul), it is the character.

What we choose to make of our mental and physical constitution in the course of our life on earth affects the psychic medium within which individual minds lead a part at least of their amphibious existence and this modification of the medium results, after the body's death, in the initiation of a new existence either in a heaven, or a purgatory, or another body.

In the Vedanta cosmology there is over and above the Atman or spiritual Self, identical with the divine Ground, something in the nature of a soul that reincarnates in a gross or subtle body or manifests itself in some incorporeal state.

This soul is not the personality of the defunct but rather the particularized i consciousness out of which a personality arises.

The only personalities with which we have any direct acquaintance are incarnate beings, compounds of a body and some unknown x.

But if x plus a body equals a personality, then, obviously, it is impossible for x minus a body to equal the same thing. The apparently personal entities which psychical research sometimes seems to discover can only be regarded as temporary pseudopersonalities compounded of x and the medium's body.

These two conceptions are not mutually exclusive and survival may be the joint product of a persistent consciousness and a modification of the psychic medium.

If this is so, it is possible for a given human being to survive in more than one posthumous form.

His 'soul' the non-personal ground and principle of past and future personalities

may go marching on in one mode of being while the traces left by his thoughts and volitions in the psychic medium may become the origin of new individualized existences, having quite other modes of being.

aldous huxley

hollywood 1945