‘Reincarnation?’ said the other. ‘There is no such thing. Reincarnation would mean that the same You goes on into body after body, like one wine poured on from bottle into bottle. Think for a moment what it is that is You. What is your true personality? Is it the thing that has fears and foolish desires and dislikes? Or is it the secret higher thing that stands behind the common everyday self of you? It is not that everyday You which is indestructible. The You of your bodily loves and hates dies with your body, should be wiped out utterly and vanish; it is the real You that continues through all the ages, until at last it is made one with the Radiance from which it sprang. Your wishes and fears must not live after you; none of the many details that have gone to the making of you survive, but only the total that they make up. On the slate of life your qualities are set down and added together. Then bodily death wipes out the items, and only the result of the addition remains. That is Karma--the character you build up for yourself through the ages. And yet, if you will, you can perpetuate in some degree the evanescent passions of your earthly life. That is what so many long to do. Immortality, to them, means an infinite prolongation of bodily and emotional enjoyment. They cannot sunder their notion of heaven from their idea of their own earthly personality. In heaven they think they must carry their earthly tastes, their earthly limbs unaltered. They imagine that without the limbs and the earthly tastes they will somehow cease to be themselves. They believe that these limbs and those tastes are themselves, and they want to enjoy them unchanged through eternity. They do not understand that desire is sorrow, and that to carry on the passions and the pleasures of earthly life is also to carry on the agonies and disappointments of earthly life. But in perfect happiness there can be no pain. Perfect happiness has no part in the earthly passing personality of man, for in the corporeal pleasures of that personality pain is always close at the side of pleasure. The Real Self suffers no pain; only the phantom self it is that suffers; you, and all like you, are forsaking the true for the false. You are seeking to prolong the sorrow instead of taking the opportunity of release.’ ‘But what release?’