Karma

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophical Publishing House

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an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual spheres must be thought an actuality, because it is there that lives our endless, never-changing, immortal I, the Sütrātmā ... This is why we call the posthumous life the only reality, and the terrestrial one, including the personality itself, only imaginary.
During earth life, the activity of the soul is most directly manifested in the creation of the thoughtforms already described. But in order to follow out with any approach to exactitude the workings of karma, we must now analyse further the term " thought-form", and add some considerations necessarily omitted in the general conception first presented. The soul, working as mind, creates a mental image, the primary " thought-form ” 2; let us take the term mental image to mean exclusively this immediate creation of the mind, and henceforth restrict this term to this initial stage of what is generally and broadly spoken of as a thought-form. This mental image remains attached to its creator, part of the content of his consciousness: it is a living, vibrating form of subtle matter, the Word thought but not yet
Lucifer, October 1892, art.“ Life and Death." * See Chapter: THE GENERATION OF THOUGHT FORMS.