Justin Estcourt, Mandala (Illustration from Chapter IV of Astral Conversations)
* * *
The Eternal Pilgrim
“M: ‘… The Higher Self moves in eternity like a pendulum between the hours of birth and death. But these hours, marking the periods of incarnate and discarnate life which make up the whole pilgrimage of the Higher Self during its many incarnations, have their beginning and end, whereas the spiritual pilgrim himself is eternal. Hence, it is the hours of his post-mortem life when, disembodied, he stands face to face with Truth, and not the mirages of his transitory earthly existences, that is the only reality.’
BOMBAST: ‘So you’re saying that as Shakespeare tells us ‘we are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ The Higher Self is the actor, and the parts it plays, our earthly personalities?’
M: ‘Precisely. After the performance is over the actor returns home, wherever home may be, and continues his real life, whatever it may be, until he is ready to take on a new role upon the stage of earthly life. Like the actor, the Higher Self is obliged to play many parts during the cycle of its incarnations, many of which may be deeply unpleasant and painful to it. One day he is Prospero, the next Caliban. As the bee gathers honey from every flower, leaving the rest as food for earthly worms, so does the Higher Self gather only the nectar of the spiritual qualities and self-consciousness of every terrestrial personality into which it is compelled to incarnate, finally blending all these qualities into one whole, and emerging then as a perfect being, a veritable god. So much the worse for those terrestrial personalities from which it could collect nothing. Consequently, such personalities do not and cannot consciously outlive their terrestrial existence.’”
— A. Listener, Astral Conversations (via Aula Lucis)