“The proof that the transmigration of the soul does not relate to man’s condition on this earth after death, is found in the Sohar, notwithstanding the many incorrect renderings of its translators. “All souls which have alienated themselves in heaven from the Holy One – blessed be His Name – have thrown themselves into an abyss at their very existence, and have anticipated the time when they are to descend on earth. Come and see when the soul reaches the abode of Love. The soul could not bear this light, but for the luminous mantle which she puts on. For, just as the soul, when sent to this earth, puts on an earthly garment to preserve herself here, so she receives above a shining garment, in order to be able to look without injury into the mirror, whose light proceeds from the Lord of Light.”
Moreover, the Sohar teaches that the soul cannot reach the abode of bliss, unless she has received the “holy kiss”, or the reunion of the soul with the substance from which she emanated – spirit. All souls are dual, and, while the latter is a feminine principle, the spirit is masculine. While imprisoned in body, man is a trinity, unless his pollution is such as to have caused his divorce from the spirit. “Woe to the soul which prefers to her divine husband, (spirit), the earthly wedlock with her terrestrial body”, records a text of the Book of Keys.
These ideas on the transmigration 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 animal soul must, of course, be disintegrated of its particles, before it is able to link its purer essence forever 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 has smothered the word ψυχικος, (psychic), 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; and the interpreters of the latter have failed to understand the meaning and object of the Buddhist four degrees of Dhyâna.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 