“It is not true that Gautama never taught anything concerning a future life, or that he denied the immortality of the soul. Ask any intelligent Buddhist his ideas on Nirvana, and he will unquestionably express himself, as the well-known Wong-Chin-Fu, the Chinese orator, now traveling in this country, did in a recent conversation with us about Niepang (Nirvana). “This condition”, he remarked, “we all understand to mean a final reunion with God, coincident with the perfection of the human spirit by its ultimate disembarrassment of matter. It is the very opposite of personal annihilation.”
Nirvana means the certitude of personal immortality, in Spirit, not in Soul, which, as a finite emanation, must certainly disintegrate its particles a compound of human sensations, passions, and yearning for some objective kind of existence, before the immortal spirit of the Ego is quite freed, and henceforth secure against further transmigration in any form. And how can man ever reach this state so long as the Upadana, that state of longing for life, more life, does not disappear from the sentient being, from the Ahancara clothed, however, in a sublimated body? It is the “Upadana” or the intense desire which produces WILL, and it is will, which develops force, and the latter generates matter, or an object having form.
Thus, the disembodied Ego, through this sole undying desire in him, unconsciously furnishes the conditions of his successive self-procreations in various forms, which depend on his mental state and Karma, the good or bad deeds of his preceding existence, commonly called “merit and demerit”. This is why the “Master” recommended to his medicants the cultivation of the four degrees of Dhyana, the noble “Path of the Four Truths”, i.e., that gradual acquirement of stoical indifference for either life or death; that state of spiritual self-contemplation during which man utterly loses sight of his physical and dual individuality, composed of soul and body; and uniting himself with his third and higher immortal self, the real and heavenly man merges, so to say, into the divine Essence, whence his own spirit proceeded like a spark from the common hearth. Thus the Arhat, the only medicant, can reach Nirvana while yet on earth; and his spirit totally freed from the trammels of the “psychical, terrestrial, devilish wisdom”, as James calls it, and being in its own nature omniscient and omnipotent, can , on earth, through the sole power of his thought, produce the greatest of phenomena.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 