How to Force Oneself upon the Current of Immortality

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 11 pages

From The Theosophist of November 1882, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IV. It answers a reader's difficulty with a passage by Éliphas Lévi printed the month before — that to be immortal in good one must identify oneself with God, and to be immortal in evil with Satan, these being the two poles of the world of souls, between which the useless portion of mankind vegetates and dies without remembrance.

Her explanatory note quotes the book of Kiu-te for the principle behind it: that to force oneself upon the current of immortality, or rather to secure an endless series of rebirths as a conscious individuality, one must become a co-worker with nature — for good or for bad — in her work of creation and reproduction or in that of destruction. It is the useless drones nature gets rid of, violently ejecting them and making them perish by the millions as self-conscious entities. The consequence drawn is uncomfortable and deliberately so: while the good and pure strive to reach Nirvana, the wicked seek on the contrary a series of conscious definite existences, preferring to suffer perpetually under the law of retributive justice rather than give up their lives as portions of the integral universal whole — knowing they can never reach final rest in pure spirit, and so clinging to life in any form at all.

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