,
and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike". The less deeply
this inner Man is plunged into matter, the less unreal is his life;
and when he has shaken off the garments he donned at incarnation, his
physical, ethereal, and passional bodies, then he is nearer to the
Soul of Things than he was before, and though veils of illusion still
dim his vision they are far thinner than those which clouded it when
round him was wrapped the garment of the flesh. His freer and less
illusory life is that which is without the body, and the disembodied
is, comparatively speaking, his normal state. Out of this normal state
he plunges into physical life for brief periods in order that he may
gain experiences otherwise unattainable, and bring them back to enrich
his more abiding condition. As a diver may plunge into the depths of
the ocean to seek a pearl, so the Thinker plunges into the depths of
the ocean of life to seek the pearl of experience; but he does not
stay there long; it is not his own element; he rises up again into his
own atmosphere and shakes off from him the heavier element he leaves.
And therefore it is truly said of the Soul that has escaped from earth
that it has returned to its own place, for its home is the "land of
the Gods", and here on earth it is an exile and a prisoner. This view
was very clearly put by a Master of Wisdom in a conversation reported
by H.P. Blavatsky, and printed under the title "Life and Death."[28]
The following extracts state the case:

_The Vedantins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious
existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to
the latter as an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial
life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing
but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual
spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that
lives our endless, never-changing immortal I, the Sutratma.
Whereas in every new incarnation it clothes itself in a
perfectly different personality, a temporary and short-lived
one.... The very essence of all this, that is to say, spirit,
force, and matter, has neither end nor beginning, but the
shape acquired by this triple unity during its incarnations,
their exterior, so to speak, is nothing but a mere illusion
of personal conceptions. This is why we call the posthumous
life the only reality, and the terrestrial one, including the
persona