There is yet one aspect of the Personality which must be considered before we can fully, or even partially, grasp its entire functions and potencies. This is the possibility of its complete separation from the Higher Ego through deliberately choosing the low, sensuous plane of the Quaternary, and the cruel, conscienceless struggle for existence which there has its normal field of activity. By stifling the voice of the Higher Ego, or conscience; by allying itself to evil; by vice and crime committed with the full realization that they are vices and crimes - there becomes possible for the Personality the fate of its utter and entire extinction. The rationale of this may be readily understood by what has already been explained as to its Post-mortem history. We have seen how intensely the presence of the Thinking Principle, the Reincarnating Ego, rationalizes those which before were merely animal passions and desires. If, now, the Higher Manas fail entirely to spiritualize these, the "I am myself" of such a person is only that of an animal - more cunning, more selfish, more conscienceless and more cruel, by a thousand - fold, than if the Higher Ego had never incarnated within it. The whole of the energy aroused and imparted by the latter is absorbed by the human animal.

Instead of burning for a time in Kama Loca, like the smoking wick of a candle whose flame has been extinguished, this being enters this plane at death with all its potencies for evil in full activity. No Devachan is possible; and as all its desires rage furi - ously earthwards, their very force will carry it speedily to a new reincarnation, and we then have a Jesse Pomeroy, or a Deeming, horrifying mankind by his atrocious crimes. So great may have been the impetus, so powerful the energy thus robbed from Manas, that a series of these human-animal incarnations may occur, each more soddenly brutal than the last, until an incarnation such as a jabbering idiot at the end prefaces the final plunge into animal latency. As a nascent center of human consciousness, the human-animal Personality can not be destroyed; but it is evident that it can so cut itself off from the Higher Ego upon one hand, and from the natural evolutionary activities of the upcoming animal monads upon the other, that it is quite separated from all chance of progress during incalculable periods. For the same widening of the area of its evil nature which cut it off as unlike and unassimilable by the Higher Ego, also made it unlike and superior in evil to the kingdom below; and it can not, therefore, re-enter this.

Of its fate, however, after it has lost all of its borrowed glory, and after it no longer recognizes itself as the man who had once the opportunity to become divine, it is useless to speculate. It is enough to know that the sufferings of such a Personality must be awful, indescribable. For whether he reincarnate immediately, or whether, this reincarnation being for karmic reasons impossible, he obsesses poor "mediums," to their ultimate sharing of his fate, alike must he expiate to the full every crime or evil thing done during the time he forged the chains which bound him to so terrible a destiny.

This is a fate which can overtake every human Personality, and the fact should be known as an evolutionary possibility. There are too many evident failures upon the purely physical plane - too many infant deaths - not to make it plain by correspondence and analogy that there may be also failures upon the mental plane. Let each one who considers himself too far over the line of danger pause, and seriously question himself as to whether his life is lighted by the pure flame of spirituality, or whether he is not, after all, living an unsuspected life of merely animal emotions, instincts, and appetites, intellectualized to such a brilliancy that the glow may prove a false beacon light to the ultimate wreckage of his soul; for it can not be too often nor too strongly insisted upon that no amount of mere intellectuality removes us from the animal plane to the safety of spiritual existence. Altruism is the law; compassion, the means; self-sacrifice, the surety, of existence upon the stable spiritual planes of being.

The monadic base upon which our center of consciousness rests is alone eternal and immortal. Our Higher Ego depends for its immortality upon rising to this monadic base in its conscious functioning. In a much greater degree is the personal Ego dependent upon the Higher for its promise of eternal life. All turns, as we have seen, upon the plane in which the personal "I" habitually functions; upon how deeply it permits itself to be dragged below the Divine plane to that of mortal passions and desires. Meanwhile, as our Higher Ego gathers strength and expands its consciousness through this experience of many lives, its reflections in material incarnations, or personal "I am I's," become also stronger, and the loss of any one of them through having been overcome by sensuous attraction grows more serious, both to Higher Ego and lower personality. For the mutual reaction and interdependence of the (Higher) Ego free and the (lower) Ego incarnated are very great, or successive incarnations under the iron law of cause and effect would not take place as they now inevitably do.