Again, the mind is permanent as compared with the transitory physical world.  For the “mind” is only a clumsy name for the living Thinker in us, the true and conscious Entity, the inner Man, “that was, that is, and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike”.  The less deeply this inner Man is plunged into matter, the less unreal is his life; and when he has shaken off the garments he donned at incarnation, his physical, ethereal, and passional bodies, then he is nearer to the Soul of Things than he was before, and though veils of illusion still dim his vision they are far thinner than those which clouded it when round him was wrapped the garment of the flesh.  His freer and less illusory life is that which is without the body, and the disembodied is, comparatively speaking, his normal state.  Out of this normal state he plunges into physical life for brief periods in order that he may gain experiences otherwise unattainable, and bring them back to enrich his more abiding condition.  As a diver may plunge into the depths of the ocean to seek a pearl, so the Thinker plunges into the depths of the ocean of life to seek the pearl of experience; but he does not stay there long; it is not his own element; he rises up again into his own atmosphere and shakes off from him the heavier element he leaves.  And therefore it is truly said of the Soul that has escaped from earth that it has returned to its own place, for its home is the “land of the Gods”, and here on earth it is an exile and a prisoner.  This view was very clearly put by a Master of Wisdom in a conversation reported by H.P.  Blavatsky, and printed under the title “Life and Death."[28] The following extracts state the case: 

The Vedantins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to the latter as an undoubted actuality.  As to the terrestrial life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing but an illusion of our senses.  Our life in the spiritual spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that lives our endless, never-changing immortal I, the Sutratma.  Whereas in every new incarnation it clothes itself in a perfectly different personality, a temporary and short-lived one....  The very essence of all this, that is to say, spirit, force, and matter, has neither end nor beginning, but the shape acquired by this triple unity during its incarnations, their exterior, so to speak, is nothing but a mere illusion of personal conceptions.  This is why we call the posthumous life the only reality, and the terrestrial one, including the personality itself, only imaginary.

    Why in this case should we call the reality sleep, and the
    phantasm waking?

    This comparison was made by me to facilitate your
    comprehension.  From the standpoint of your terrestrial
    notions it is perfectly accurate.