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TRANSMIGRATION & NIRVANA
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2. Such good things as can only be enjoyed through embodied existence, as for instance, the earth' which is promised to the meek.
“Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. v. 5); and the hundred-fold promised to everyone who 'forsakes houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, or wife, or lands' (Matt. xix. 19).
The wicked soul may experience a fall into any of the following conditions, according to its sins:
1. the human kingdom,
2. rebirth in hells or among animals or still lower beings, and
3. 'the outer darkness that is to say, deprivation or loss of light and knowledge, as descriþed already.
In the language of the Bible the word 'heaven 2 is sometimes used in an allegorical and sometimes in a natural sense. In the allegorical sense it signifies a condition in which riddance from matter has been attained, in other words, the attainment of Nirvana. In the ordinary sense, the word means a distant or higher region, like this earth, which is peopled by living beings who are not unperishing though endowed with greater powers than ourselves.
In the same way, the word 'hell' has a double signification in the Bible: an allegorical and a plain one. Allegorically, the term means the condition of being involved in matter, which is always one of suffering and beset with birth, decay and death. In the plain sense, the term means a distant region of space where conditions of existence are very very painful. But the
