The eighteen fires must die down; the lesser lives (embodying the principle of form, of desire and of thought, the sumtotal of creativity, based upon magnetic love) must return to the reservoir of life and naught be left but that which caused them to be, the central will which is known by the effects of its radiation or breath.
This dispersal, death or dissolution, is in reality a great effect produced by the central Cause, and the injunction is consequently: "This they must bring about by the evocation of the Will"... The disciple finds his group in the Master's Ashram and consciously and with full understanding masters death - the long-feared enemy of existence. He discovers that death is simply an effect produced by life and by his conscious will, and is a mode whereby he directs substance and controls matter. This becomes consciously possible because, having developed awareness of two divine aspects - creative activity and love - he is now focused in the highest aspect and knows himself to be the Will, the Life, the Father, the Monad, the One.
- Vol. V.

A great upheaval in all the kingdoms in nature has characterized this day and generation; a stupendous destruction of all forms of divine life and in every kingdom has been the outstanding note of this upheaval. Our modern civilization has received a death blow from which it will never recover, but which will be recognized some day as the "blow of release" and as the signal for that which is better, new and more suitable for the evolving spirit, to make its appearance. Great and penetrating energies and their [451] evoked forces have met in conflict which has, figuratively speaking, elevated the mineral kingdom into the skies and which has brought down fire from heaven. I am talking to you factually and not just symbolically. The bodies of men, women and children, as well as animals, have been destroyed; the forms of the vegetable kingdom and the potencies of the mineral kingdom have been disintegrated, distributed and devastated. The coherent life of all the planetary forms has been temporarily rendered incoherent. As an ancient prophecy has put it: "No true united Sound goes out from form to form, from life to life. Only a cry of pain, a demand for restitution and an invocation for relief from agony, despair and fruitless effort goes out from here to There."
All this upheaval of the "soil" of the world - spiritual, psychological and physical - all this disruption of the forms and of the familiar contours of our planetary life, had to take place before there could come the emergence of the Hierarchy into the public consciousness; all this had to do its work upon the souls of men before the New Age could come in, bringing with it the Restoration of the Mysteries and the rehabilitation of the peoples of the Earth. The two go together. This is one of the major points which I am seeking to make. The disruption, disintegration and the completely chaotic conditions existing for the past five hundred years within all the kingdoms of nature have at last worked their way out into paralleling physical conditions. This is good and desirable; it marks the prelude to a better building of a better world, and the construction of more adequate forms of life and of more correct human attitudes, plus a sounder orientation to reality. The best is yet to be.
Everything is being rapidly brought to the surface - the good and the bad, the desirable and the undesirable, the [452] past and the future (for the two are one); the plow of God has nearly accomplished its work; the sword of the spirit has severed an evil past from the radiant future, and both are seen as contributory in the Eye of God; our material civilization will be seen as giving place rapidly to a more spiritual culture; our church organizations, with their limiting and confusing theologies, will soon give place to the Hierarchy with its emerging teaching - clear, factual, intuitive and non-dogmatic.
- Vol. V.

The Light of the Soul:

Intense desire for sentient existence or attachment. This is inherent in every form, is self-perpetuating and known even to the very wise.
When the life or Spirit withdraws itself, the form dies, occultly. When the thought of the ego or higher self is occupied with its own plane, there is no energy outgoing towards the matter of the three worlds, and so no form-building and form-attachment is there possible. This is in line with the occult truism that "energy follows thought," and is in line, too, with the teaching that the body of the Christ principle (the Buddhic vehicle) only begins to coordinate as the lower impulses fade out...Attachment to form or the attraction of form for Spirit is the great involutionary impulse. Repulsion of form and consequent form disintegration is the great evolutionary urge.
- Pages 137-138.

When the cause, desire, has produced its effect, the personality or form aspect of man, then as long as the will to live exists, so long will the form persist. It is kept in manifestation through mental vitality. This has been demonstrated time and again in the annals of medicine, for it has been proven that as long as the determination to live persists, so will be the probable duration of the physical plane [453] life; but that the moment that will is withdrawn, or the interest of the dweller in the body is no longer centered upon personality manifestation, death ensues and the disintegration of that mind-image, the body, takes place.
- Page 397.

There are two main lines of evolution, that which concerns matter and form, and that which concerns the soul, the consciousness aspect, the thinker in manifestation. For each of these the path of progress differs, and each pursues its course. As has been noted, for a long period of time the soul identifies itself with the form aspect and endeavors to follow the "Path of Death," for that is what the dark path is in fact to the thinker. Later, through strenuous effort, this identification ceases; the soul becomes aware of itself, and of its own path, or dharma, and follows then the way of light and of life. It should ever be borne in mind, however, that for the two aspects their own path is the right path, and that the impulses which lie hidden in the physical vehicle or in the astral body are not in themselves wrong. They become wrong from certain angles when twisted from their right use, and it was this realization that led the disciple in the Book of Job to cry out and say, "I have perverted that which was right." The two lines of development are separate and distinct, and this every aspirant has to learn.
- Pages 402-403