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The Eighth Lesson: The End of the Life Work.1045
this fact, leaving out of account the phenomena with which all advanced
occultists are familiar.
Then, one day He appeared to the disciples, and they accompanied Him to
the hills, Jesus talking to them regarding their future work on earth. He then
bade them farewell, and began to fade away from their sight. The common
account pictures Him as ascending into the air until out of sight, but the
mystic account informs us that His astral form began to slowly dematerialize
and He gradually faded away from the sight of His beloved followers,
who stood gazing in wistful longing at His form which, each moment, grew
more and more ethereal in structure, until finally the dematerialization was
complete and His soul had cast off all material form, shape and substance,
and so passed on to the higher planes of being.
* * *
In view of this explanation, does not the commonly accepted version
seem childish and crude? Can any one at all familiar with the laws and
phenomena of the land Behind the Veil, suppose that a physical body could
or would pass on to the planes in which the ordinary forms of matter do not
exist? Such ideas are fit only for minds which find it necessary to think of
the “resurrection of the body” of all departed souls, in order to conceive of
Immortality. To the occultist, the physical body is merely a temporary vehicle
for the soul which the latter discards at the proper time. It has nothing to do
with the real being of the soul. It is merely the shell which is discarded by
the soul, as the chrysalis shell is discarded by the butterfly when it spreads
its wings for its aerial flight into a new world.
All these ideas about the immortality of the mortal body are the product
of materialistic minds unused to thinking of the higher planes of life, and
unable to grasp even the mental concept regarding the same. Of the earth,
earthly, are these conceptions and ideas. And the sooner that Christianity
sheds them as discarded shells the sooner will the church experience that
revival of true spirituality that devout souls see the need of, and for which
they are so earnestly praying.