without vacillation, though very slowly, the road leading to
its last transformation, when, reaching its aim at last, it
becomes a Divine Being. They not only contribute to the
reaching of this goal, but without these finite breaks
Sûtrâtmâ-Buddhi could never reach it. Sûtrâtmâ is the actor,
and its numerous and different incarnations are the actor's
parts. I suppose you would not apply to these parts, and so
much the less to their costumes, the term of personality.
Like an actor the soul is bound to play, during the cycle of
births up to the very threshold of Parinirvâna, many such
parts, which often are disagreeable to it, but like a bee,
collecting its honey from every flower, and leaving the rest
to feed the worms of the earth, our spiritual individuality,
the Sûtrâtmâ, collecting only the nectar of moral qualities
and consciousness from every terrestrial personality in which
it has to clothe itself, forced by Karma, unites at last all
these qualities in one, having then become a perfect being, a
Dhyân Chohan._[30]

It is very significant, in this connection, that every devachanic
stage is conditioned by the earth-stage that precedes it, and the Man
can only assimilate in Devachan the kinds of experience he has been
gathering on earth.

_A colourless, flavourless personality has a colourless,
feeble Devachanic state._[31]

Husband, father, student, patriot, artist, Christian, Buddhist--he
must work out the effects of his earth-life in his devachanic life; he
cannot eat and assimilate more food than he has gathered; he cannot