her love or hatred of things mortal.
Considering himself as master, and that he ought not to be
servant and slave to his body, which he would regard only as
the prison which holds his liberty in confinement, the glue
which smears his wings, chains which bind fast his hands,
stocks which fix his feet, veil which hides his view. Let him
not be servant, captive, ensnared, chained, idle, stolid, and
blind, for the body which he himself abandons cannot
tyrannise over him, so that thus the spirit in a certain
degree comes before him as the corporeal world, and matter is
subject to the divinity and to nature.[10]

When once we thus come to regard the body, and by conquering it we
gain our liberty, Death loses for us all his terrors, and at his touch
the body slips from us as a garment, and we stand out from it erect
and free.

On the same lines of thought Dr. Franz Hartmann writes:

According to certain views of the West man is a developed
ape. According to the views of Indian Sages, which also
coincide with those of the Philosophers of past ages and with
the teachings of the Christian Mystics, man is a God, who is
united during his earthly life, through his own carnal
tendencies, to an animal (his animal nature). The God who
dwells within him endows man with wisdom. The animal endows
him with force. After death, _the God effects his own release
from the man_ by departing from the animal body. As man
carries within him this divine consciousness, it is his task
to battle with his animal inclinations, and to raise himself
above them, by the help of the divine principle, a task which
the animal cannot achieve, and which therefore is not
demanded of it.[11]

The "man", using the word in the sense of personality, as it is used
in the latter half of this sentence, is only conditionally immortal;
the true man, the evolving God, releases himself, and so much of the
personality goes with him as has raised itself into union with the
divine.

The body thus left to the rioting of the countless lives--previously
held in constraint by Prana, acting through its vehicle the etheric
double--begins to decay, that is to break up, and with the
disintegration of its cells and molecules, its particles pass away
into other combinations.

On our return to Earth we may meet again some of those same countless
lives that in a previous incarnation ma