Transmigration of the Life-Atoms

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 12 pages

A question from N.D. Khandalavala, published in The Theosophist of August 1883 and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings V as Transmigration of the Life-Atoms. He quotes back to her a passage from her note on Oxley's article: that for at least three thousand years a mummy, notwithstanding all chemical preparation, goes on throwing off invisible atoms which from the hour of death re-enter the vortices of being and pass through every variety of organised life form — but that these are not the soul, nor the fifth principle, nor least of all the sixth, but the life-atoms of the jiva, the second principle.

The rest of the passage is what opens the field: that after three thousand years or thereabouts, and after endless transmigrations, all these atoms are drawn together again and made to form the new outer clothing of the same monad they had clothed two or three millennia before; and that even in the worst case, the annihilation of the conscious personal principle, the monad remains the same, as do the atoms of the lower principles, which are magnetically drawn together by affinity and reincarnated together. Khandalavala's question is what this does to the exoteric doctrine so widely believed in the East — the transmigration of the soul itself through lower forms — and the file is the answer to it. The companion study in Confusing Words separates transmigration, metempsychosis and reincarnation on the same principle.

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