Monads remain distinct individuals throughout their manifested existence in a particular evolutionary cycle or manvantara. The divine monad endures for a life-term of the galaxy, the spiritual monad for a life-term of the solar system, and the higher-human monad for a life-term of the planetary chain.10 At the end of its life-cycle, each monad is not destroyed but rises to higher planes of consciousness for a period of rest, until the next cycle of activity begins.

The higher qualities gained through evolution are never lost. This is exemplified by what happens to our personalities after death. At the ‘second death’ in the lower astral realms or kama-loka, everything of a noble and spiritual character that the soul retains is withdrawn into the upper triad (atman-buddhi-manas), or the (relatively) immortal monadic essence, of our sevenfold constitution, and the aggregate of these indrawn elements constitutes the human monad.11

This illustrates the fact that all real, finite monads are composite, however relatively homogeneous and indivisible they may be from our viewpoint. Speaking generally, there are no limits to how big or small a monadic entity can be. Their range of size is infinite, bounded only by the two abstract ‘limits’ of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Every infinitesimal point of space can be regarded as a monad, all of them contained within the one infinite Monad; but these ‘ultimate’ monads are of course abstractions and not real entities. Our own spiritual monad may be unimaginably small from our standpoint, and yet