There was the true
doctrine of the Hierophants of the inner Temple; then the half-veiled
Hieratic tenets of the Priest of the outer Temple; and, finally, the
vulgar popular religion of the great body of the ignorant, who were
allowed to reverence animals as divine. As shown correctly by Sir
Gardner Wilkinson, the initiated priests taught that "dissolution is
only the cause of reproduction .... nothing perishes which has once
existed, but things which appear to be destroyed only change their
natures and pass into another form." To the present case, however, the
Egyptian doctrine of atoms coincides with our own occult teachings. In
the above remarks the words, "The life-atoms of the Jiva," are taken in
a strictly literal sense. Without any doubt Jiva or Prana is quite
distinct from the atoms it animates. The latter belong to the lowest or
grossest state of matter--the objectively conditioned; the former, to a
higher state--that state which the uninitiated, ignorant of its nature,
would call the "objectively finite," but which, to avoid any future
misunderstanding, we may, perhaps, be permitted to call the subjectively
eternal, though, at the same time and in one sense, the subsistent
existence, however paradoxical and unscientific the term may appear.
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