He is fully reborn. This is no case of renunciation as it is at the time of the Summer Solstice. The initiant is enabled to pass through these terrible trials precisely because the Great Renunciation had previously been made at the time of the initiation of the Summer Solstice, and he has gained the strength to die completely and fully and yet to return to human physical existence. Just here, spiritually and ethically speaking, do we discern the difference between the Pratyeka Buddha who dies with a will, and dies gladly and joyfully for his own spiritual bliss, and the one who has made the Great Renunciation like the Buddhas of Compassion and their followers, who die indeed for the experience that it gives, for the great increase in knowledge that it brings with it, but who return to life in order to offer up themselves as a sacrifice in service to the world. It is not easy to die completely.
Men die daily, but imperfectly, at night when they lay themselves on their bed and fall asleep.
But deliberate dying is a very difficult thing, for it is contrary to nature's customary law and processes. In any case, death is not immediate or sudden, not even in the case of the average man who dies. For long months preceding physical dissolution there is an adjustment for it which is an interior arrangement of the auric egg preparing the monadic parts for the postmortem peregrination. The Great Ones undertake this fourth initiation in order to have firsthand experience in every respect, not only of the Underworld but more especially of the Upper Worlds, and of what every monad leaving incarnation must undergo in the ordinary course of dying. The return journey is made along the same pathway, and the sheaths or veils of consciousness that the monadic pilgrim dropped during these peregrinations in each one of the planets and in each one of the planes, are again picked up and reassumed, and thus the monadic ego clothes itself with its lower selves again and returns along the pathway by which it had ascended.