Death--and After?

building up the cells of the body, so that they work harmoniously and in order, subordinated to the higher manifestation of life in the complex organism called Man.
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. These Fiery Lives In Theosophical teaching, these are the invisible, spiritual-physical units that organize matter into living forms. on our plane correspond, in this controlling and organising function, with the One Life of the Universe, * and when they no longer exercise this function in the human body, the lower lives run rampant, and begin to break down the hitherto definitely organised body. During bodily life they are marshalled as an army; marching in regular order under the command of a general, performing various evolutions, keeping step, moving as a single body. At “Death” they become a disorganised and tumultuous mob, rushing hither and thither, jostling each other, tumbling over each other, with no common object, no generally recognised authority. The body is never more alive than when it is dead; but it is alive in its units, and dead in its totality; alive as a congeriesA Latin term for a collection or mass of parts heaped together without a specific structure., dead as an organism.

Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the Materialist One who believes that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications., the only difference between a living and a dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must be Death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as Death, where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy. . . . Says Eliphas Levi The pseudonym of Alphonse Louis Constant (1810–1875), a French occult author and magician.: “Change attests movement, and movement only reveals life. The corpse would not decompose if it were dead; all the molecules which compose it are living and struggle to separate.” †

Those who have read The Seven Principles of Man,§