“Mr. Old: Then would you say that all this is written of Nirvana of Brahma, of Para-Nirvana, of Para-Brahm, is the result of experience?
Mr. Kingsland: All that you can understand of it, that is the result of experience.
Mr. Old: I take it as the result of intuition.
Mme. Blavatsky: It is simply a symbol expressed in the best language in which man is capable of expressing it, that is all.
Mr. B. Keightley: Try to formulate your idea more clearly by explaining what kind of meditation you refer to, because I think you will find that the very highest meditation you can conceive of is really Manasic, and nothing more. Manas and experience are not synonymous.
Mr. Old: Kingsland wishes to identify intuition with experience. According to Kingsland, intuition is one aspect of Manas.
Mme. Blavatsky: Look here, you Europeans ought never to have been given the seven principles. Well, perhaps in a hundred years you will understand it. It would be a thousand times better to hold to the old methods, those that I have held to in Isis Unveiled, and to speak about triple man; spirit, soul, and matter; then you would not fall into the heresies, in such heresies as you do.
Why do we divide this into seven parts or aspects? Because ours is the highest philosophy. But, for the general mortal, certainly it is a great deal easier to understand if they say man is triple; he has got spirit, soul, and matter.
What is spirit? Spirit then becomes the ego. Soul is simply the Nephesh, the living soul of every animal, that is to say, the lower Jiva, and matter is his physical body.
Now, we having divided it, as all esoteric philosophies divide it, have simply confused the European mind, because it has not been trained in that direction. It is too early for them, and there are very few men who will really understand the seven divisions. And, therefore, we are called lunatics or frauds – one of the two – and nobody will understand what we mean. I say it is a thousand times better not to understand it, and not to go on and speak about this septenary number, and simply take it in the old ground of spirit, soul and matter. There would be no heresy then.
Mr. Kingsland: It has broached abroad now, this seven principle, and we have to clear our ideas of it.
Mme. Blavatsky: You must never say: “my Atma”; you have no Atma; this idea is the curse of the world; it has produced this tremendous selfishness, this egotism [ ] we say “we are”, “my Atma”, “my Buddhi”. Who are you? You are nobodies; you are something today, and tomorrow you are not. Even that disappears at the end of the Manvantara in the one.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 