The implications in assuming death to be the termination of individual existence run counter to the ineradicable expectations based upon rationalized intuition. A conflict usually arises between the claims of intuition and the conclusions of impure intellect, which assumes death to be the termination of individual existence. Such conflict is often a beginning of pure thinking, which immediately seriously challenges the usually accepted belief that death is the real termination of individual existence. Death as an extinction of life can never be wholly acceptable to the spiritual aspirations of man. Therefore, belief in the immortality of the individualized soul is often accepted by the human mind without much resistance, even in the absence of direct supersensible knowledge about the existence of life after death.
Those who know from personal experience the immortality of the soul to be true are few. Supersensible knowledge of the existence of life after death is inaccessible to the vast majority of persons. For them, immortality must remain an agreeable and acceptable belief but nothing more. It becomes a part of personal knowledge for those who through their interest in the occult, have built up means of communication with “other worlds”; or those whose special circumstances have resulted in their personally experiencing the appearance or intervention of departed spirits; or those who, through their spiritual advancement, have automatically unfolded certain latent perceptual capacities of the inner vehicles of consciousness.
-Discourses 7th Ed., p303