[From private correspondence]

Correspondent: What exactly is ‘permanent’ in each person?

Their existence as a unit. When someone dies, the story of their life is written and sealed. What they did, what they were, the sum totality of their lives isn’t going to change, ever. It is fixed. This is why “death is the crown of all.”

You can’t think of “permanent” in this sense as meaning “exactly the same on May 5th, 1980 as it was on January 12th, 1991” or anything like that. “Die daily!” illustrates that what constitutes the “self” changes with every passing moment. The self is not a momentary thing, it is a collection of point-events.

In one sense, that collection of point-events grows throughout life, and stops growing upon death, giving it a fixed, concrete nature. In another sense it was of a fixed, concrete nature before it even “began”. In either sense, “permanent” does not have to mean “currently in manifest existence”; the Battle of Hastings is part of history, for example, and it will always be a part of history. Permanently.

Again, “Do that and no other shall say nay,” since once you’ve actually done something, it cannot be undone, regardless of whether or not its effects can be reversed; once it’s happened, that happening cannot be reversed, and has become permanent. Similarly, the collection of happenings that constitute the self, once happened, cannot “unhappen,” and so are permanent.

The “Hadit that is the core of every star” is that centre upon which all these point-events concentrate to give an identity; a house-brick is ultimately a collection of sub-atomic particles, strings, whatever they are, and whatever it is that surrounds the brick is similarly constructed, and on a small enough scale there is nothing to really determine “brick” from “non-brick.” Furthermore, over time it may start off as sand, progress to being a half-brick, and progress further to being not a brick at all. Nevertheless, at this point in time, a house-brick it remains. It is that individuality, that identification of it as a discrete unit, an individual, that it the “Hadit at its core.” Same thing applies to people.

Correspondent: but obviously any kind of positive idea is impermanent, an attachment, and cannot be eternal

Only if you use “permanent” in the sense used in paragraph 2 of this response.

You can say “the past exists” and be entirely correct, without necessarily meaning the same thing as if you were to say “that tree over there exists.” If the past exists, then (barring the possibility of time travel) it will continue to exist into perpetuity in exactly the same way. If the past doesn’t exist, and your self is nothing but a collection of past point-events, then you don’t exist, either. If the past can influence the present, it has to exist in some form, or where does the influence come from?

One of the ways Liber AL is able to provide “certainty, not faith, while in life” is through this clarification of the word “eternal.” Rather than providing people with vain promises of eternal life in the vulgar sense (which, no doubt, would shortly become intolerable even if possible) it shows people that the life they are living right now is eternal. If the self dies with every moment, then what distinguishes physical death at the “end of life” from the continuous death which occurs with the passing of time? If your existence as a unit of individuality right now depends upon past events, then your existence as a unit of individuality say, six months after you physically die, will still depend on those exact same past events, which will still exist in exactly the same way as they do today, and the fact you are living it demonstrates that to be the case.

You just have to stop thinking of “star” in this sense as meaning a particular point in space at a particular point in time that is unchanging. For, in reality, all the above applies just as equally to the existence of a star as a unit as it does to the existence of a person as a unit.