(21) [For Question see p. 306.EDS.]. A more or less complete, still dim recollection of its personality, and of its purely physical life. As in the cases of complete insanity the final severance of the two higher duads (7th 6th and 5th 4th) at the moment of the former going into gestation, digs an impassable gulf between the two. It is not even a portion of the fifth that is carried away — least of all 2½ principles as Mr. Hume crudely puts it in his Fragments — that go into Devachan leaving but 1½ principles behind. The Manas shorn of its finest attributes, becomes like a flower from which all the aroma has suddenly departed, a rose crushed, and having been made to yield all its oil for the attar manufacture purposes; what is left behind is but the smell of decaying grass, earth and rottenness.
(a) Question the second is sufficiently answered, I believe. (Your second para.) The Spiritual Ego goes on evolving personalities, in which "the sense of identity" is very complete while living. After their separation from the physical Ego, that sense returns very dim, and belongs wholly to the recollections of the physical man. The shell may be a perfect Sinnett when wholly engrossed in a game of cards at his club, and when either losing or winning a large sum of money — or a Babu Smut Murky Dass trying to cheat his principal out of a sum of rupees. In both cases — ex-editor and Babu will, as shells, remind anyone who will have the privilege of enjoying an hour's chat with the illustrious disembodied angels, more of the inmates of a lunatic asylum made to play parts in private theatricals as means of hygienic recreation, than of the Caesars and Hamlets they would represent. The slightest shock will throw them off the track and send them off raving.
(b) An error. A.P. Sinnett is not "an absolutely new invention." He is the child and creation of his antecedent personal self; the Karmic progeny, for all he knows, of Nonius Asprenas, Consul of the Emperor Domitian — (94 A.D.) together with Arricinius Clemens,211 and friend of the Flamen Dialis of that day (the high priest of Jupiter and chief of the Flaminis) or of that Flamen himself — which would account for A.P. Sinnett's suddenly developed love for mysticism. A.P.S. — the friend and brother of K.H. will go to Devachan; and A.P.S., the Editor and the lawn-tennis man, the Don Juan, in a mild way, in the palmy days of "Saints, Sinners and Sceneries," identifying himself by mentioning a usually covered mole or scar, — will, perhaps, be abusing the Babus through a medium to some old friend in California or London.
(c) It will find "enough decent material" and to spare. A few years of Theosophy will furnish it.
(d) Perfectly correctly defined.
(e) As much as there is of the personality — in A.P.S.'s reflection in the looking glass — of the real, living A.P.S.
(f) The Spiritual Ego will not think of the A.P.S. the shell, any more than it will think of the last suit of clothes it wore; nor will it be conscious that the individuality is gone, since the only individuality and Spiritual personality it will then behold [will be] in itself alone. Nosce te ipsum is a direct command of the oracle to the Spiritual monad in Devachan; and the "heresy of Individuality" is a doctrine propounded by Tathagata with an eye to the Shell. The latter, whose bumptiousness is as proverbial as that of the medium when reminded that it is A.P.S. — will echo out: "Of course, no doubt, hand me over some preserved peaches I devoured with such an appetite for breakfast, and a glass of claret!" — and who after this who knew A.P.S. at Allahabad, will dare doubt his identity? And, when left alone for one short instant by some disturbance in the circle, or the thought of the medium wandering for a moment to some other person — that shell will begin to hesitate in its thoughts whether it is A.P.S., S. Wheeler, or Ratigan; and end by assuring itself it is Julius Caesar.
(g) — and by finally "remaining asleep."
(h) No; it is not conscious of this loss of cohesion. Besides, such a feeling in a shell being quite useless for nature's purposes, it could hardly realize something that could be never even dreamed by a medium or its affinities. It is dimly conscious of its own physical death — after a prolonged period of time though — that's all. The few exceptions to this rule — cases of half successful sorcerers, of very wicked persons passionately attached to Self — offer a real danger to the living. These very material shells, whose last dying thought was Self, — Self, — Self — and to live, to live! will often feel it instinctively. So do some suicides — though not all. What happens then is terrible for it becomes a case of post mortem lycanthropy. The shell will cling so tenaciously to its semblance of life that it will seek refuge in a new organism in any beast — in a dog, a hyæna, a bird when no human organism is close at hand — rather than submit to annihilation.
(22) [For Question see pp. 307. EDS.]. A question I have no right to answer.
(23) [For Question see p. 307. EDS.]. Mars and four other planets of which astronomy knows yet nothing. Neither A, B, nor Y, Z, are known; nor can they be seen through physical means however perfected.
(24) [For Question see p. 307. EDS.]. Most decidedly not. Not even a Dhyan Chohan of the lower orders could approach it without having its body consumed, or rather annihilated. Only the highest "Planetary" can scan it. (b) Not unless we call it the vertex of an angle. But it is the vertex of all the "chains" collectively. All of us dwellers of the chains — we will have to evolute, live and run the up and down scale in that highest and last of the septenary chains (on the scale of perfection) before the Solar Pralaya snuffs out our little system.