Chapter 23The Psychic Being and the Progression from · Animals and the Process of Rebirth

there was no hint of any insuperable difficulty, quite the contrary.

* For most people [when they die] the vital dissolves after a time as it is not sufficiently formed to be immortal. The soul descending makes a new vital formation suitable for the new life.

* The physical always dissolves and in each new life one gets a new physical formation. To preserve the same physical would mean physical immortality.

* Not as they are.2 What remains and to what degree depends on the development in each case. Of course the centres themselves remain — for they are in the subtle body and it is from there that they act on the corresponding physical centres.

* No, the subconscient is an instrument for the physical life and disappears [after death]. It is too incoherent to be an organised enduring existence.

What is exactly your theory? There is one thing — influences — everybody undergoes influences, absorbs them or rejects, makes them disappear in one’s own developed [poetic] style or else keeps them as constituent strands. There is another thing — lines of Force. In the universe there are many lines of Force on which various personalities or various achievements and forma-tions spring up — e.g. the line Pericles–Caesar–Napoleon or the line Alexander–Jenghiz–Tamerlane–Napoleon — meeting together there — so it may be too in poetry, lines of poetic force prolonging themselves from one poet to another, meeting and 2 The disciple asked, “Do the centres remain as they are after death?” — Ed.