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CONFLUENCE OF OPPOSITES
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the kind of muddle in which unscientific thought finds itself wben bent on theorising against facts.
The third particular, the obtainment or acquisition of immortality by each and every risen individual, is equally astonishing. An embodied soul is a compound of spirit and matter, and it is not in the nature of compounds to be eternal. Nor is immortality a thing that can be purchased in two-penny packets at a chemist's, The fact is that the doctrine of resurrection is really the doctrine of transmigration of souls, though couched in mystic symbology. It was not unknown to the Jews, and the Pharisees actually subscribed to it. Before them it was well known to the Egyptians who had probably borrowed it from Persian sources. But the original of the Lord of the Judgment Day is to be found in the god Yamaraja of Hindu mythology, who weighs the merit and demerit of creatures on their death and disposes of them accordingly.
Now, Yamaraja is a personification of the Law of karmız, which, being the effect of the operation of the forces bound up in different substances, is absolutely unerring. The idea of a general rising of the dead on a certain day at the end of the world.cycle was, however, never associated with this doctrine in any religion, though some of the passages of the esoteric teaching are liable to be twisted in that direction. What was meant was that as each individual died his future was determined automatically by the operation of the Law of Karma, personified as the Lord of Death, and he
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