THEO. Taken literally, with regard to the personality and differentiated matter, not otherwise. These ideas on re-incarnation and the trinity of man were held by many of the early Christian Fathers. It is the jumble made by the translators of the New Testament and ancient philosophical treatises between soul and spirit, that has occasioned the many misunderstandings. It is also one of the many reasons why Buddha, Plotinus, and so many other Initiates are now accused of having longed for the total extinction of their souls: “absorption unto the Deity,” or “reunion with the universal soul,” meaning, according to modern ideas, annihilation. The personal soul must, of course, be disintegrated into its particles, before it is able to link its purer essence for ever with the immortal spirit. But the translators of both the _Acts_ and the _Epistles_, who laid the foundation of the _Kingdom of Heaven_, and the modern commentators on the Buddhist _Sutra of the Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness_, have muddled the sense of the great apostle of Christianity as of the great reformer of India. The former have smothered the word ψυχικος so that no reader imagines it to have any relation with _soul_; and with this confusion of _soul_ and _spirit_ together, _Bible_ readers get only a perverted sense of anything on the subject. On the other hand, the interpreters of Buddha have failed to understand the meaning and object of the Buddhist four degrees of Dhyâna. Ask the Pythagoreans, “Can that spirit, which gives life and motion and partakes of the nature of light, be reduced to nonentity?” “Can even that sensitive spirit in brutes which exercises memory, one of the rational faculties, die and become nothing?” observe the Occultists. In Buddhistic philosophy _annihilation_ means only a dispersion of matter, in whatever form or _semblance_ of form it may be, for everything that has form is temporary, and is, therefore, really an illusion. For in eternity the longest periods of time are as a wink of the eye. So with form. Before we have time to realize that we have seen it, it is gone like an instantaneous flash of lightning, and passed for ever. When the Spiritual _entity_ breaks loose for ever from every particle of matter, substance, or form, and re-becomes a Spiritual breath: then only does it enter upon the eternal and unchangeable _Nirvana_, lasting as long as the cycle of life has lasted—an eternity, truly. And then that Breath, existing _in Spirit_, is _nothing_ because it is _all_; as a form, a semblance, a shape, it is completely annihilated; as absolute Spirit it still is, for it has become _Be-ness_ itself. The very word used, “absorbed in the universal essence,” when spoken of the “Soul” as