Theosophical Manuals. No.3
DEATH — AND
AFTER? ΔΔ
by
ANNIE BESANT
( 1847 – 1933 )
THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE
68, Great Russell Street, London, WClB 3BU, England
1953
PREFACE
FEW words are needed in sending this little book out into
the world. It is the third of a series of Manuals designed to meet the
public demand for a simple exposition of Theosophical teachings. Some have
complained that our literature is at once too abstruse, too technical,
and too expensive for the ordinary reader, and it is our hope that the
present series may succeed in supplying what is a very real want. Theosophy
is not only for the learned; it is for all. Perhaps among those who in
these little books catch their first glimpse of its teachings, there may
be a few who will be led by them to penetrate more deeply into its philosophy,
its science, and its religion, facing its abstruser problems with the student's
zeal and the neophyte's ardour. But these Manuals are not written for the
eager student, whom no initial difficulties can daunt; they are [Page v] written
for the busy men and women of the work-a-day world, and seek to make plain
some of the great truths that render life easier to bear and death easier
to face. Written by servants of the Masters who are the Elder Brothers
of our race, they can have no other object than to serve our fellow-men. [Page i]
DEATH — AND AFTER?
WHO does not remember the story of the Christian missionary
in Britain, sitting one evening in the vast hall of a Saxon king, surrounded
by his thanes, having come thither to preach the gospel of his Master;
and as he spoke of life and death and immortality, a bird flew in through
an unglazed window, circled the hall in its flight, and flew out once more
into the darkness of the night. The Christian priest bade the king see
in the flight of the bird within the hall the transitory life of man, and
claimed for his faith that it showed the soul, in passing from the hall
of life, winging its way not into the darkness of night, but into the sunlit
radiance of a more glorious world. Out of the darkness, through the open
window of Birth, the life of a man comes to the earth; it dwells for a
while before our eyes; into the darkness, through the open window of Death,
it vanishes out of our sight. And man has questioned ever of Religion,
Whence comes it? Whither goes it? and the answers have varied with the
faiths. [Page
1] Today, many a hundred year since Paulinus
talked with Edwin, there are more people in Christendom who question whether
man has a spirit to come any whence or to go any whither than, perhaps,
in the world’s history could ever before have been found at one time. And
the very Christians who claim that Death’s terrors have been abolished,
have surrounded the bier and the tomb with more gloom and more dismal funeral
pomp than have the votaries of any other creed. What can be more depressing
than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded, while the dead body
is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent than the sweeping robes of lusterless
crape, and the purposed hideousness of the heavy cap in which the widow
laments the “deliverance”
of her husband “from the burden of the flesh”? What more revolting than
the artificially long faces of the undertaker’s men, the drooping “weepers”,
the carefully arranged white handkerchiefs, and, until lately, the pall-like
funeral cloaks? During the last few years, a great and marked improvement
has been made. The plumes, cloaks, and weepers have well-nigh disappeared.
The grotesquely ghastly hearse is almost a thing of the past, and the coffin
goes forth heaped over with flowers instead of shrouded in the heavy black
velvet pall. Men and women, though still [Page 2] wearing
black, do not roll themselves up in shapeless garments like sable winding-sheets,
as if trying to see how miserable they could make themselves by the imposition
of artificial discomforts. Welcome common-sense has driven custom from its
throne, and has refused any longer to add these gratuitous annoyances to
natural human grief.
In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding
Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted as
a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with
terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hourglass – all
that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King
of Terrors. Milton, who has done so much with his stately rhythm to mould
the popular conceptions of modern Christianity, has used all the sinewy
strength of his magnificent diction to surround with horror the figure
of Death.
The other shape,
If shape it might be called, that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either; black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
Satan was now at hand, and from his seat
The monster moving onward came as fast,
With horrid strides; hell trembled as he strode … [Page 3]
… So spoke the grisly terror; and in shape
So speaking, and so threatening, grew tenfold
More dreadful and deform …
… but he, my inbred enemy,
Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,
Made to destroy: I fled, and cried out Death!
Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed
From all her caves, and back resounded Death.
[Book ii., from lines 666-789. The whole passage bristles with horrors.]
That such a view of Death should be taken by the professed
followers of a Teacher said to have “brought life and immortality to light” is
passing strange. The claim, that as late in the history of the world as
a mere eighteen centuries ago the immortality of the Spirit in man was
brought to light, is of course transparently absurd, in the face of the
overwhelming evidence to the contrary available on all hands. The stately
Egyptian Ritual with its Book of the Dead, in which are traced the
post-mortem journeys of the Soul, should be enough, if it stood alone,
to put out of court for ever so preposterous a claim. Hear the cry of the
Soul of the righteous:
O ye, who make the escort of the God,
stretch out to me your arms, for I become one of you (xvii. 22).
Hail to thee, Osiris, Lord of Light,
dwelling in the mighty abode, in the bosom of the absolute darkness. I
come to thee, a purified Soul; my two hands are around thee (XXI, 1).
I open heaven; I do what was commanded
in Memphis. I have knowledge of my heart; I am in possession of my heart,
I am in possession of my arms, [Page 4] I am in
possession of my legs, at the will of myself. My Soul is not imprisoned
in my body at the gates of Amenti (xxvi. 5, 6).
Not to multiply to weariness quotations from a book that is
wholly composed of the doings and sayings of the disembodied man, let it
suffice to give the final judgment on the victorious Soul:
The defunct shall
be deified among the Gods in the lower divine region, he shall never be
rejected.
… He shall drink from the current of the celestial river. … His Soul shall
not be imprisoned, since it is a Soul that brings salvation to those near
it. The worms shall not devour it (clxiv. 14-16).
The general belief in Reincarnation is enough to prove that
the religions of which it formed a central doctrine believed in the survival
of the Soul after Death; but one may quote as an example a passage from
the Ordinances of Manu, following on a disquisition on metempsychosis,
and answering the question of deliverance from rebirths.
Amid all these holy acts, the knowledge
of self (should be translated, knowledge of the Self,
Ātmā) is said (to be) the highest; this indeed is the foremost
of all sciences, since from it immortality is obtained. [ xii.
85. Translation of Burnell and Hopkins.]
The testimony of the great Zarathustrean Religion is clear,
as is shown by the following, translated from the Avesta, in which,
the journey of the Soul after [Page
5] death having been described, the ancient
Scripture proceeds:
The soul of the pure
man goes the first step and arrives at (the Paradise) Humata; the soul
of the pure man takes the second step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hukhta;
it goes the third step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hvarst; the soul of
the pure man takes the fourth step and arrives at the Eternal Lights.
To it speaks a pure
one deceased before, asking it: How art thou, O pure deceased, come away
from the fleshly dwellings, from the earthly possessions, from the corporeal
world hither to the invisible, from the perishable world hither to the
imperishable, as it happened to thee – to whom hail!
Then speaks Ahura-Mazda: Ask not him
whom thou asketh, (for) he is come on the fearful, terrible, trembling
way, the separation of body and soul. [From the translation of Dhunjeebhoy
Jamsetjee Medhora, Zoroastrian and some other Ancient Systems, xxvii.]
The Persian Desatir speaks with equal definiteness.
This work consists of fifteen books, written by Persian prophets, and was
written originally in the Avestaic language; “God” is Ahura-Mazda, or Yazdan:
God selected man from animals to confer on him the
soul, which is a substance free, simple, immaterial, non-compounded and
nonappetitive.
And that becomes an angel by improvement.
By his profound wisdom
and most sublime intelligence, he connected the soul with the material
body.
If he (man) does good in the material
body, and has a good knowledge and religion he is Hartasp. …
As soon as he leaves
this material body, I (God) take him up to the world of angels, that he
may have an interview with the angels, and behold me.
As if he is not Hartasp,
but has wisdom and abstains from vice, I will promote him to the rank of
angels. [Page
6]
Every person in proportion to his
wisdom and piety will find a place in the rank of wise men, among the heavens
and stars. And in that region of happiness he will remain for ever. [Translation
by Mirza Mohamed Hadi, The Platonist, 306.]
In China, the immemorial custom of worshipping the Souls of
ancestors shows how completely the life of man was regarded as extending
beyond the tomb. The Shū King – placed by Mr. James Legge as
the most ancient of Chinese classics, containing historical documents ranging
from B. C. 2357-627 – is full of allusions to these Souls, who with other
spiritual beings, watch over the affairs of their descendants and the welfare
of the kingdom. Thus Pan-kang, ruling from B.C. 1401-1374, exhorts his
subjects:
My object is to support and nourish
you all. I think of my ancestors (who are now) the spiritual sovereigns. … Were
I to err in my government, and remain long here, my high sovereign (the
founder of our dynasty) would send down on me great punishment for my crime,
and say,
“Why do you oppress my people?” If you, the myriads of the people, do not
attend to the perpetuation of your lives, and cherish one mind with me, the
One man, in my plans, the former kings will send down on you great punishment
for your crime, and say, “Why do you not agree with our young grandson, but
go on to forfeit your virtue?” When they punish you from above, you will
have no way of escape. … Your ancestors and fathers will (now) cut you off
and abandon you, and not save you from death. [ "The Sacred
Books of the East" Volume 3, Pages 109-110 ]
Indeed, so practical is this Chinese belief, held today as
in those long-past ages, that “the change that men call Death” [Page 7] seems to play a very small part in the thoughts and lives of the people
of the Flowery Land.
These quotations, which might be multiplied a hundred-fold,
may suffice to prove the folly of the idea that immortality came to “light
through the Gospel”. The whole ancient world basked in the full sunshine
of belief in the immortality of man, lived in it daily, voiced it in its
literature, went with it in calm serenity through the gate of Death.
It remains a problem why Christianity, which vigorously and
joyously re-affirmed it, should have growing in its midst the unique terror
of Death that has played so large a part in its social life, its literature,
and its art. It is not simply the belief in hell that has surrounded the
grave with horror, for other Religions have had their hells, and yet their
followers have not been harassed by this shadowy Fear. The Chinese, for
instance, who take Death as such a light and trivial thing, have a collection
of hells quite unique in their varied unpleasantness. Maybe the difference
is a question of race rather than of creed; that the vigorous life of the
West shrinks from its antithesis, and that its unimaginative common-sense
finds a bodiless condition too lacking in solidity of comfort; whereas
the more dreamy, mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever [Page
8] seeking to escape from the thralldom
of the senses during earthly life, looks on the disembodied state as eminently
desirable, and as most conducive to unfettered thought.
Ere passing to the consideration of the history of man in
the post-mortem state, it is necessary, however briefly, to state the constitution
of man, as viewed by the Esoteric Philosophy, for we must have in mind
the constituents of his being ere we can understand their disintegration. Man
then consists of
The Immortal Triad: the
Individual. |
Ātmā,
or Spirit as Will. |
Buddhi,
or Spirit as Intuition. |
Manas,
or Spirit as Intellect. |
The Perishable Quaternary:
the Person. |
Lower
Manas, or Mind. |
Kāma,
or Desire. |
Prāna,
as Energising Vitality. |
Prāna,
as Automatic Vitality. |
If we consider the
bodies of man, the dense body is the visible, tangible outer form, composed
of various tissues. The etheric double is the ethereal counterpart of the
body, composed of the physical ethers. Prāna is vitality, the integrating
energy that co-ordinates the [Page 9] physical molecules
and holds them together in a definite organism; it is the life-breath within
the organism, the portion of the universal Life-Breath, appropriated by the
organism during the span of existence that we speak of as “a life”, and appears
in two forms in the dense and etheric parts of the physical body. Kāma
is the aggregate of appetites, passions, and emotions, common to man and
brute, the emotions evolving to a higher point in man under the play of the
lower mind. Manas is the Thinker in us, the Intellect. Buddhi is the aspect
of the Spirit, which manifests above the Intellect.
THE IMMORTAL AND THE
PERISHABLE
Now the link between the Immortal Triad and the Perishable
Quaternary is Intellect, which is dual during earth life, or incarnation,
and functions as Intellect and Mind. Intellect sends out a Ray, Mind, which
works in and through the human brain, functioning there as brain-consciousness,
as the ratiocinating intelligence. This mingles with Desire, the passional
nature, the passions and emotions thus becoming a part of Mind, as defined
in Western Psychology. And so we have the link formed between the higher
and lower natures in man, this Desire-Mind belonging to the higher by its
intellectual, and to the lower by its emotional, elements. As this forms
the battleground during life, [Page
10] so does it play an important part
in post-mortem existence. We might now classify our seven principles a
little differently, having in view this mingling in DesireMind of perishable
and imperishable elements:
Immortal |
Will |
Intuition |
Intellect |
Conditionally Immortal |
Desire-Mind |
Mortal |
Desire |
Energising
Vitality |
Automatic
Vitality |
Some Christian writers have adopted a classification similar
to this, declaring Spirit to be inherently immortal, as being Divine; Soul
to be conditionally immortal, i.e., capable of winning immortality
by uniting itself with Spirit; Body to be inherently mortal. The majority
of uninstructed Christians chop man into two, the Body that perishes at
Death, and the something – called indifferently Soul or Spirit – that survives
Death. This last classification – if classification it may be called – is
entirely inadequate, if we are to seek any rational explanation, or even
lucid statement, of the phenomena of post-mortem existence. The tripartite
view of man’s nature gives a more reasonable representation of his [Page 11] constitution, but is inadequate to explain many phenomena. The septenary
division alone gives a reasonable theory consistent with the facts we have
to deal with, and therefore, though it may seem elaborate, the student
will do wisely to make himself familiar with it. If he were studying only
the body, and desired to understand its activities, he would have to classify
its tissues at far greater length and with far more minuteness than I am
using here. He would have to learn the differences between muscular, nervous,
glandular, bony, cartilaginous, epithelial, connective tissues, and all
their varieties; and if he rebelled, in his ignorance, against such an
elaborate division, it would be explained to him that only by such an analysis
of the different components of the body can the varied and complicated
phenomena of life-activity be understood. One kind of tissue is wanted
for support, another for movement, another for secretion, another for absorption,
and so on; and if each kind does not have its own distinctive name, dire
confusion and misunderstanding must result, and physical functions remain
unintelligible. In the long run time is gained, as well as clearness, by
learning a few necessary technical terms, and as clearness is above all
things needed in trying to explain and to understand very complicated [Page
12] post-mortem phenomena, I find myself
compelled – contrary to my habit in these elementary papers – to resort
to these technical names at the outset, for the English language has as
yet no equivalents for them, and the use of long descriptive phrases is
extremely cumbersome and inconvenient.
For myself, I believe that very much of the antagonism between
the adherents of the Esoteric Philosophy and those of Spiritualism has
arisen from confusion of terms, and consequent misunderstanding of each
other’s meaning. One eminent Spiritualist lately impatiently said that
he did not see the need of exact definition, and that he meant by Spirit
all the part of man’s nature that survived Death, and was not body. One
might as well insist on saying that man’s body consists of bone and blood,
and asked to define blood, answer: “Oh! I mean everything that is not bone”.
A clear definition of terms, and a rigid adherence to them when once adopted,
will at least enable us all to understand each other, and that is the first
step to any fruitful comparison of experiences.
THE FATE OF THE BODY
The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay
and of reconstruction. First builded into the [Page 13] etheric
form in the womb of the mother, it is built up continually by the insetting
of fresh materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away from
it; with every moment tiny molecules are streaming into it. The outgoing
stream is scattered over the environment, and helps to rebuild bodies of
all kinds in the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms, the physical
basis of all these being one and the same.
The idea that the human tabernacle
is built by countless lives, just in the same way as the rocky crust
of our Earth was, has nothing repulsive in it for the true mystic. … Science
teaches us that the living as well as the dead organism of both man and
animal are swarming with bacteria of a hundred various kinds; that from
without we are threatened with the invasion of microbes with every breath
we draw, and from within by leucomaines, aerobes, anaerobes, and what not.
But Science never yet went so far as to assert with the Occult Doctrine
that our bodies, as well as those of animals, plants, and stones, are themselves
altogether built up of such beings, which, except larger species, no microscope
can detect. So far as regards the purely animal and material portion of
man, Science is on its way to discoveries that will go far towards corroborating
this theory. Chemistry and physiology are the two great magicians of the
future, who are destined to open the eyes of mankind to the great physical
truths. With every day, the identity between the animal and physical man,
between the plant and man, and even between the reptile and its nest, the
rock, and man, is more and more clearly shown. The physical and chemical
constituents of all being found to be identical, chemical Science may well
say that there is no difference between the matter which composes the ox
and that which forms man. But the Occult Doctrine is far more explicit.
It says: Not only the chemical compounds are the same, but the same infinitesimal invisible
lives compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the daisy,
of man and the ant, of the elephant, and of the tree which shelters him
from [Page 14] the sun.
Each particle – whether you call it organic or inorganic – is a life.
[The Secret Doctrine, Volume 1, Page 281 of 3rd Edition]
These “lives” which, separate and independent, are the minute
vehicles of Automatic Vitality, aggregated together form the molecules
and cells of the physical body, and they stream in and stream out, during
all the years of bodily life, thus forming a continual bridge between man
and his environment. Controlling these are the “Fiery Lives”, Energising
Vitality, which constrain these to their work of building up the cells
of the body, so that they work harmoniously and in order, subordinated
to the higher manifestation of life in the complex organism called Man.
These Fiery Lives on our plane correspond, in this controlling and organising
function, with the One Life of the Universe, [The
Secret Doctrine, Volume 1, Page 281 of 3rd Edition] , and when they no longer exercise this
function in the human body, the lower lives run rampant, and begin to break
down the hitherto definitely organised body. During bodily life they are
marshalled as an army; marching in regular order under the command of a
general, performing various evolutions, keeping step, moving as a single
body. At “Death” they become a disorganised and tumultuous mob, rushing
hither and [Page 15] thither, jostling each other, tumbling over each other, with no common
object, no generally recognised authority. The body is never more alive
than when it is dead; but it is alive in its units, and dead in its totality;
alive as a congeries, dead as an organism.
Science regards man as an aggregation
of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle.
To the Materialist, the only difference between a living and a dead body
is that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent. When
it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction,
which draws them asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion
must be Death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as Death, where
the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy. …
Says Eliphas Levi: “Change attests movement, and movement only reveals life.
The corpse would not decompose if it were dead; all the molecules which compose
it are living and struggle to separate.” [Isis Unveiled, Volume 1, page
480]
Those who have read The Seven Principles of Man, [ Theosophical Manuals. No 1] know that the etheric double is the
vehicle of Prāna, the life-principle, or vitality. Through the etheric
double Prāna exercises the controlling and co-ordinating force spoken
of above, and “Death” takes triumphant possession of the body when the
etheric double is finally withdrawn and the delicate cord which unites
it with the body is snapped. The process of withdrawal has been watched
by clairvoyants, and definitely described. Thus Andrew Jackson Davis, “the
Poughkeepsie Seer”, [Page 16] describes how he himself watched this escape of the ethereal body, and
he states that the magnetic cord did not break for some thirty-six hours
after apparent death. Others have described, in similar terms, how they
saw a faint violet mist rise from the dying body, gradually condensing
into a figure which was the counterpart of the expiring person, and attached
to that person by a glistening thread. The snapping of the thread means
the breaking of the last magnetic link between the dense body and the remaining
principles of the human constitution; the body has dropped away from the
man; he is excarnated, disembodied; six principles still remain as his
constitution immediately after death, the seventh, or the dense body, being
left as a cast-off garment.
Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing,
or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after
the other, its outer casings, and – as the snake from its skin, the butterfly
from its chrysalis – emerges from one after another, passing into a higher
state of consciousness. Now it is the fact that this escape from the body,
and this dwelling of the conscious entity either in the vehicle called
the body of desire, the kāmic
or astral body, or in a yet more ethereal Thought Body, can be effected
during earth-life; so that man may become familiar with the [Page 17] excarnated condition, and it may lose for him all the terrors that encircle
the unknown. He can know himself as a conscious entity in either of these
vehicles, and so prove to his own satisfaction that “life” does not depend
on his functioning through the physical body. Why should a man who has
thus repeatedly “shed” his lower bodies, and has found the process result,
not in unconsciousness, but in a vastly extended freedom and vividness
of life – why should he fear the final casting away of his fetters, and
the freeing of his Immortal Self from what he realises as the prison of
the flesh?
This view of human life is an essential part of the Esoteric
Philosophy. Man is primarily divine, a spark of the Divine Life. This living
flame, passing out from the Central Fire, weaves for itself coverings within
which it dwells, and thus becomes the Triad, the Ātma-BuddhiManas,
or Spirit, the reflection of the Immortal Self. This sends out its Ray,
which becomes encased in grosser matter, in the desire body, or kāmic
elements, the passional nature, and in the etheric double and the physical
body. The once free immortal Intelligence thus entangled, enswathed, enchained,
works heavily and laboriously through the coatings that enwrap it. In its
own nature it remains ever the free Bird of Heaven, [Page 18] but its
wings are bound to its side by the matter into which it is plunged. When
man recognises his own inherent nature, he learns to open his prison doors
occasionally and escapes from his encircling gaol; first he learns to identify
himself with the Immortal Triad, and rises above the body and its passions
into a pure mental and moral life; then he learns that the conquered body
cannot hold him prisoner, and he unlocks its door and steps out into the
sunshine of his true life. So when Death unlocks the door for him, he knows
the country into which he emerges, having trodden its ways at his own will.
And at last he grows to recognise that fact of supreme importance, that “Life” has
nothing to do with body and with this material plane; that Life is his
conscious existence, unbroken, unbreakable, and that the brief interludes
in that Life, during which he sojourns on Earth, are but a minute fraction
of his conscious existence, and a fraction, moreover, during which he is
less alive, because of the heavy coverings which weigh him down. For only
during these interludes (save in exceptional cases) may he wholly lose
his consciousness of continued life, being surrounded by these coverings
which delude him and blind him to the truth of things, making that real
which is illusion, and that stable which is transitory. [Page
19] The sunlight ranges over the universe,
and at incarnation we step out of it into the twilight of the body, and
see but dimly during the period of our incarceration; at Death we step
out of the prison again into the sunlight, and are nearer to the reality.
Short are the twilight periods, and long the periods of the sunlight; but
in our blinded state we call the twilight life, and to us it is the real
existence, while we call the sunlight Death, and shiver at the thought
of passing into it. Well did Giordano Bruno, one of the greatest teachers
of our Philosophy in the Middle Ages, state the truth as to the body and
Man. Of the real Man he says:
He will be present in the body in
such wise that the best part of himself will be absent from it, and will
join himself by an indissoluble sacrament to divine things, in such a way
that he will not feel either love or hatred of things mortal. Considering
himself as master, and that he ought not to be servant and slave to his
body, which he would regard only as the prison which holds his liberty
in confinement, the glue which smears his wings, chains which bind fast
his hands, stocks which fix his feet, veil which hides his view. Let him
not be servant, captive, ensnared, chained, idle, stolid, and blind, for
the body which he himself abandons cannot tyrannise over him, so that thus
the spirit in a certain degree comes before him as the corporeal world,
and matter is subject to the divinity and to nature. [ "The
Heroic Enthusiasts", translation by L. Williams, Part 2, Pages 22-23 ]
When once we thus come to regard the body, and by conquering
it we gain our liberty, Death loses for us [Page 20] all his
terrors, and at his touch the body slips from us as a garment, and we stand
out from it erect and free.
On the same lines of thought Dr. Franz Hartmann writes:
According to certain views of the
West, man is a developed ape. According to the views of Indian Sages,
which also coincide with those of the Philosophers of past ages and with
the teachings of the Christian Mystics, man is a God, who is united during
his earthly life, through his own carnal tendencies, to an animal (his
animal nature). The God who dwells within him endows man with wisdom. The
animal endows him with force. After death, the God effects his own release
from the man by departing from the animal body. As man carries within
him this divine consciousness, it is his task to battle with his animal
inclinations, and to raise himself above them, by the help of the divine
principle, a task which the animal cannot achieve, and which therefore
is not demanded of it. [ Cremation, Theosophical Siftings,
Volume 3 ]
The “man”, using the word in the sense of personality,
as it is used in the latter half of this sentence, is only conditionally
immortal; the true man, the evolving God, releases himself, and so much of
the personality goes with him as has raised itself into union with the divine.
The body thus left to the rioting of the countless lives –
previously held in constraint by Prāna, acting
through its vehicle the etheric double – begins to decay, that is to break
up, and with the disintegration of its cells and molecules, its particles
pass away into other combinations. [Page 21]
On our return to Earth we may meet again some of those same
countless lives that in a previous incarnation made of our then body their
passing dwelling; but all that we are just now concerned with is the breaking
up of the body whose life-span is over, and its fate is complete disintegration.
To the dense body, then, Death means dissolution as an organism, the loosing
of the bonds that united the many into one.
THE FATE OF THE ETHERIC DOUBLE
The etheric double is the ethereal counterpart of the gross
body of man. It is the double that is sometimes seen during life in the
neighbourhood of the body, and its absence from the body is generally marked
by the heaviness or semi-lethargy of the latter. Acting as the reservoir,
or vehicle, of the life-principle during earth-life, its withdrawal from
the body is naturally marked by the lowering of all vital functions, even
while the cord which unites the two is still unbroken. As has been already
said, the snapping of the cord means the death of the body.
When the etheric double finally quits the body, it does not
travel to any distance from it. Normally it remains floating over the body,
the state of consciousness [Page
22] being dreamy and peaceful, unless
tumultuous distress and violent emotion surround the corpse from which
it has just issued. And here it may be well to say that during the slow
process of dying, while the etheric double is withdrawing from the body,
taking with it the higher principles, as after it has withdrawn, extreme
quiet and self-control should be observed in the chamber of Death. For
during this time the whole life passes swiftly in review before the Ego,
the individual, as those have related who have passed in drowning into
this unconscious and pulseless state. A Master has written:
At the last moment the whole life
is reflected in our memory, and emerges from all the forgotten nooks
and corners, picture after picture, one event after another. … The man may often appear dead,
yet from the last pulsation, from and between the last throbbing of his
heart and the moment when the last spark of animal heat leaves the body,
the brain thinks, and the Ego lives over in those few brief seconds his
whole life. Speak in whispers, ye who assist at a deathbed, and find
yourselves in the solemn presence of death. Especially have ye to keep
quiet just after death has laid her clammy hand upon the body. Speak
in whispers, I say, lest ye disturb the quiet ripple of [Page
23] thought, and hinder the busy work
of the past, casting its reflection upon the veil of the future [ Man:
Fragments of Forgotten History,
by Two Chelâs, (Mohini Chatterji and Laura C.Holloway) ]
This is the time during which the thought-images of the
ended earth-life, clustering around their maker, group and interweave themselves
into the completed image of that life, and are impressed in their totality
on the Astral Light. The dominant tendencies, the strongest thought-habits,
assert their pre-eminence, and stamp themselves as the characteristics which
will appear as “innate qualities” in the succeeding incarnation. This balancing-up
of the life-issues, this reading of the karmic records, is too solemn and
momentous a thing to be disturbed by the ill-timed wailings of personal relatives
and friends.
At the solemn moment of death every
man, even when death is sudden, sees the whole of his past life marshalled
before him, in its minutest details. For one short instant the personal become
one with the individual and all-knowing Ego. But this instant is
enough to show to him the whole chain of causes which have been at work
during his life. He sees and now understands himself as he is, unadorned
by flattery or self-deception. He reads his life, remaining as a spectator,
looking down into the arena he is quitting. [ The
Key to Theosophy, H.P.Blavatsky, Page 109, Third Edition ]
This vivid sight is succeeded, in the ordinary person, by
the dreamy, peaceful semi-consciousness spoken of above, as the etheric
double floats above the body to which it has belonged, now completely separated
from it. [Page 24]
Sometimes this double is seen by persons in the house, or
in the neighbourhood, when the thought of the dying has been strongly turned
to someone left behind, when some anxiety has been in the mind at the last,
something left undone which needed doing, or when some local disturbance
has shaken the tranquility of the passing entity. Under these conditions,
or others of a similar nature, the double may be seen or heard; when seen,
it shows the dreamy, hazy consciousness alluded to, is silent, vague in
its aspect, unresponsive.
As the days go on, the five higher principles gradually disengage
themselves from the etheric double, and shake this off as they previously
shook off the grosser body. They pass on, as a fivefold entity, into a
state to be next studied, leaving the etheric double, with the dense body
of which it is the counterpart, thus becoming an ethereal corpse, as much
as the body had become a dense corpse. This ethereal corpse remains near
the dense one, and they disintegrate together; clairvoyants see these ethereal
wraiths in churchyards, sometimes showing likeness to the dead dense body,
sometimes as violet mists or lights. Such an ethereal corpse has been seen
by a friend of my own, passing through the horribly repulsive stages of
decomposition, a ghastly [Page 25] vision in face of which clairvoyance was certainly no blessing. The process
goes on pari passu, until all but the actual bony skeleton of the
dense body is completely disintegrated, and the particles have gone to
form other combinations.
One of the great advantages of cremation – apart from all
sanitary conditions – lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of
the physical elements composing the dense and ethereal corpses, brought
about by the burning. Instead of slow and gradual decomposition, swift
dissociation takes place, and no physical remnants are left, working possible
mischief.
The ethereal corpse may to some extent be revivified for a
short period after its death. Dr. Hartmann says:
The fresh corpse of a person who has
suddenly been killed may be galvanised into a semblance of life by the
application of a galvanic battery. Likewise the astral corpse of a person
may be brought back into an artificial life by being infused with a part
of the life principle of the medium. If that corpse is one of a very intellectual
person, it may talk very intellectually; and if it was that of a fool,
it will talk like a fool. [ Magic,
White and Black by
Dr. Franz Hartmann, page 109 and 110, Third Edition ]
This mischievous procedure can only be carried out in
the neighbourhood of the corpse, and for a very limited time after death,
but there are cases on record of such galvanising of the ethereal corpse,
performed [Page 26] at the grave of the departed person. Needless to say
that such a process belongs distinctly to “Black” Magic, and is wholly evil.
Ethereal corpses, like dense ones, if not swiftly destroyed by burning, should
be left in the silence and the darkness, a silence and a darkness that it
is the worst profanity to break.
KĀMALOKA, DESIRE-LAND, AND THE FATE OF PASSIONS AND DESIRES
Loka is a Samskrit word that may be translated as place, world,
land, so that Kāmaloka is literally the place or the world of Desire,
Kāma being the name of that part of the human organism that includes
all the passions, desires, and emotions which man has in common with the
lower animals. [See The Seven Principles
of Man, pages 17 to 21] .In this division of the universe, the Kāmaloka, dwell
all the human entities that have shaken off the dense body and its ethereal
double, but have not yet disentangled themselves from the passional and
emotional nature. Kāmaloka has many other tenants, but we are concerned
only with the human beings who have lately passed through the gateway of
Death, and it is on these that we must concentrate our study. [Page 27]
A momentary digression may be pardoned on the question of
the existence of regions in the universe, other than the physical, peopled
with intelligent beings. The existence of such regions is postulated by
the Esoteric Philosophy, and is known to the Adepts and to very many less
highly evolved men and women by personal experience; all that is needed
for the study of these regions is the evolution of the faculties latent
in every man; a “living” man, in ordinary parlance, can leave his dense
and ethereal bodies behind him, and explore these regions without going
through Death’s gateway. Thus we read in the Theosophist that real
knowledge may be acquired by the Spirit in the living man coming into conscious
relations with the world of Spirit.
As in the case, say, of an initiated
Adept, who brings back upon earth with him the clear and distinct recollection
– correct to a detail – of facts gathered, and the information obtained,
in the invisible sphere of Realities. [ The
Theosophist, March 1882, page 158, note]
In this way those regions become to him matters of knowledge
as definite, as certain, as familiar, as if he should travel to Africa
in ordinary fashion, explore its deserts, and return to his own land the
richer for the knowledge and experience gained. A seasoned African explorer
would care but little for the criticisms passed [Page 28] on his report
by persons who had never been thither; he might tell what he saw, describe
the animals whose habits he had studied, sketch the country he had traversed,
sum up its products and its characteristics. If he was contradicted, laughed
at, set right, by untravelled critics, he would be neither ruffled nor
distressed, but would merely leave them alone. Ignorance cannot convince
knowledge by repeated asseveration of its nescience. The opinion of a hundred
persons on a subject on which they are wholly ignorant is of no more weight
than the opinion of one such person. Evidence is strengthened by many consenting
witnesses, testifying each to his knowledge of a fact, but nothing multiplied
a thousand times remains nothing. Strange, indeed, would it be if all the
Space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the inhabitants of earth
the only forms in which intelligence could clothe itself. As Dr. Huxley
said:
Without stepping beyond the analogy
of that which is known, it is easy to people the cosmos with entities,
in ascending scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable
from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. [ "Essays
upon Some Controverted Questions", page 36 ]
If these entities did not have organs of sense like our own,
if their senses responded to vibrations different from those which affect
ours, they and we might walk [Page
29] side by side, pass each other, meet
each other, pass through each other, and yet be never the wiser as to each
other’s existence. Mr. Crookes gives us a glimpse of the possibility of
such unconscious coexistence of intelligent beings, and but a very slight
effort of imagination is needed to realise the conception.
It is not improbable that other sentient
beings have organs of sense which do not respond to some or any of the
rays to which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate other
vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would practically be living
in a different world to our own. Imagine, for instance, what idea we should
form of surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive to
the ordinary rays of light, but sensitive to the vibrations concerned in
electric and magnetic phenomena. Glass and crystal would be among the most
opaque of bodies. Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph
wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole drilled through
an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a conflagration,
whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of medieval mystics,
and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or consumption
of fuel. [" Fortnightly Review" , Year 1892,
Page 176 ]
Kāmaloka is a region peopled by intelligent and semi-intelligent
entities, just as our own is thus peopled it is crowded, like our world,
with many types and forms of living things, as diverse from each other
as a blade of grass is different from a tiger, a tiger from a man. It interpenetrates
our own world and is interpenetrated by it,
but, as the states of matter in the two worlds differ, they co-exist without
the knowledge of the [Page 30] intelligent
beings in either. Only under abnormal circumstances can consciousness of
each other’s presence arise among the inhabitants of the two worlds; by
certain peculiar training a living human being can come into conscious
contact with and control many of the sub-human denizens of Kāmaloka;
human beings, who have quitted earth and in whom the kāmic elements
were strong, may very readily be attracted by the kāmic elements in
embodied men, and by their help become conscious again of the presence
of the scenes they had left; and human beings still embodied may set up
methods of communication with the disembodied, and may, as said, leave
their own bodies for awhile, and become conscious in Kāmaloka by the
use of faculties through which they have accustomed their consciousness
to act. The point which is here to be clearly grasped is the existence
of Kāmaloka as a definite region, inhabited by a large diversity of
entities, among whom are disembodied human beings.
From this necessary digression we return to the particular
human being whose fate, as a type, we may be said to be tracing, and of
whose dense body and etheric double we have already disposed. Let us contemplate
him in the state of very brief duration that follows the shaking off of
these two casings. [Page
31] Says H. P. Blavatsky, after quoting
from Plutarch a description of the man after death:
Here you have our doctrine, which
shows man a septenary during life; a quintile just after
death, in Kāmaloka. [ The
Key to Theosophy, page
67 ]
Prāna, the portion of the life-energy appropriated by
the man in his embodied state, having lost its vehicle, the ethereal double,
which, with the physical body, has slipped away from its controlling energy,
must pass back into the great life-reservoir of the universe. As water
enclosed in a glass vessel and plunged into a tank mingles with the surrounding
water if the vessel be broken, so Prāna, as the bodies drop from it,
mingles again with the Life Universal. It is only “just after death” that
man is a quintile, or fivefold in his constitution, for Prāna, as
a distinctively human principle, cannot remain appropriated when its vehicle
disintegrates.
The man now is clothed, but with the Kāma Rūpa,
or body of Kāma, the desire body, a body of astral matter, often termed
“fluidic”, so easily does it, during earth-life, take any form impressed
upon it from without or moulded from within. The living man is there, the
immortal Triad, still clad in the last of its terrestrial garments, in the
subtle, sensitive, responsive forms [Page
32] which lent it during embodiment the
power to feel, to desire, to enjoy, to suffer, to think, in the physical
world.
When the man dies, his three lower
principles leave him forever; i.e., body, life, and the vehicle
of the latter, the etheric body, or the double of the living man. And then
his four principles – the central or middle principle (the animal soul
or Kāma Rūpa, with what it has assimilated from the lower Manas)
and the higher Triad
– find themselves in Kāmaloka. [ "The Key to Theosophy",
page 97 ]
This desire body undergoes a marked change soon
after death. The different densities of the astral matter of which it is
composed arrange themselves in a series of shells or envelopes, the densest
being outside, shutting the consciousness away from all but very limited
contact and expression. The consciousness turns in on itself, if left undisturbed,
and prepares itself for the next step onwards, while the desire body gradually
disintegrates, shell after shell.
Up to the point of this re-arrangement of the matter of the
desire body, the post-mortem experience of all is much the same; it is
a
“dreamy, peaceful semi-consciousness”, as before said, and this, in the happiest
cases, passes without vivid awakening into the deeper “pre-devachanic unconsciousness” which
ends with the blissful wakening in Devachan, heaven, for the period of [Page
33] repose that intervenes between two
incarnations. But as, at this point, different possibilities arise, let us
trace a normal uninterrupted progression in Kāmaloka, up to the threshold
of Devachan, and then we can return to consider other classes of circumstances.
If a person has led a pure life, and has steadfastly striven
to rise and to identify himself with the higher rather than the lower part
of his nature, after shaking off the dense body and the etheric double,
and after Prāna has re-mingled with the ocean of Life, and he is clothed
only with the Kāma Rūpa, the passional elements in him, being
but weak and accustomed to comparatively little activity, will not be able
to assert themselves strongly in Kāmaloka. Now during earth-life Kāma
and the Lower Manas are strongly united and interwoven with each other;
in the case we are considering Kāma is weak, and the Lower Manas has
purified Kāma to a great extent. The mind, woven with the passions,
emotions, and desires, has purified them, and has assimilated their pure
part, absorbed it into itself, so that all that is left of Kāma is
a mere residue, easily to be gotten rid of, from which the Immortal Triad
can readily free itself. Slowly this Immortal Triad, the true Man, draws
in all his forces; he draws into himself the memories of the earth-life
just ended, [Page 34] its loves,
its hopes, its aspirations, and prepares to pass out of Kāmaloka into
the blissful rest of Devachan, the “abode of the Gods”, or, as some say, “the
land of bliss”. Kāmaloka
is an astral locality, the Limbus
of scholastic theology, the Hades of the ancients, and, strictly speaking,
a locality only in a relative sense. It has neither a definite area,
nor boundary, but exists within subjective space, i.e., is
beyond our sensuous perceptions. Still it exists, and it is there that
the astral eidolons of all the beings that have lived, animals included,
await their second death. For the animals it comes with the disintegration
and the entire fading out of their astral particles to the last. For the
human eidolon it begins when the Ātma-Buddhi-Mānasic Triad
is said to “separate” itself from its lower principles or the reflection
of the ex-personality, by falling into the devachanic state. [ The
Key to Theosophy, page 97 ]
This second death is the passage, then, of the Immortal
Triad from the kāmalokic sphere, so closely related to the earth sphere,
into the higher state of Devachan, of which we must speak later. The type
of man we are considering passes through this, in the peaceful dreamy state
already described, and, if left undisturbed, will not regain full consciousness
until these stages are passed through, and peace gives way to bliss.
But during the whole period that the five principles – the
Immortal Triad, Mind and Desire – remain in Kāmaloka, whether the
period be long or short, days or centuries, they are within the reach of
the [Page 35] earth-influences. In the case of such a person as we have been describing,
an awakening may be caused by the passionate sorrow and desires of friends
left on earth, and these violently vibrating kamic elements in the embodied
persons may set up vibrations in the desire body of the disembodied, and
so reach and rouse the lower Mind, not yet withdrawn to and reunited with
its parent, the Spiritual Intellect. Thus it may be roused from its dreamy
state to vivid remembrance of the earth-life so lately left, and may – if
any sensitive or medium is concerned, either directly, or indirectly through
one of these grieving friends in communication with the medium – use the
medium’s etheric and dense bodies to speak or write to those left behind.
This awakening is often accompanied with acute suffering, and even if this
be avoided, the natural process of the Triad freeing itself is rudely disturbed,
and the completion of its freedom is delayed. In speaking of this possibility
of communication during the period immediately succeeding death and before
the freed Man passes on into Devachan, H. P. Blavatsky says:
Whether any living mortal, save a
few exceptional cases – when the intensity of the desire in the dying person
to return for some purpose forced the higher consciousness to remain
awake, and, therefore, it was really the individuality, the “Spirit”,
that communicated – has derived much benefit from the return of the Spirit
into the objective plane is another question. The Spirit is [Page 36] dazed after
death, and falls very soon into what we call “pre-devachanic unconsciousness". [ "The
Key to Theosophy", page 102 ]
Intense desire may move the disembodied entity
to spontaneously return to the sorrowing ones left behind, but this spontaneous
return is rare in the case of persons of the type we are just now considering.
If they are left at peace, they will generally sleep themselves quietly into
Devachan, and so avoid any struggle or suffering in connection with the second
death. On the final escape of the Immortal Triad there is left behind in
Kāmaloka only the desire body, the “shell” or mere empty phantom, which
gradually disintegrates; but it will be better to deal with this in considering
the next type, the average man or woman, without marked spirituality of an
elevated kind, but also without marked evil tendencies.
When an average man or woman reaches Kāmaloka, the spiritual
Intelligence is clothed with a desire body, which possesses considerable
vigour and vitality; the lower Manas, closely interwoven with Kāma
during the earth-life just ended, having lived much in the enjoyment of
objects of sense and in the pleasure of the emotions, cannot quickly disentangle
itself from the web of its weaving, and return to its Parent Mind, the
source [Page 37] of its own being. Hence a considerable
delay in the world of transition, in Kāmaloka, while the desires wear
out and fade away to a point at which they can no longer detain the Soul
with their clinging arms.
As said, during the period that the Immortal Triad, Mind and
Desire remain together in Kāmaloka, communication between the disembodied
entity and the embodied entities on earth is possible. Such communication
will generally be welcomed by these, disembodied ones, because their desires
and emotions still cling to the earth they have left, and the mind has
not sufficiently lived on its own plane to find therein full satisfaction
and contentment. The lower Manas still yearns towards kāmic gratifications
and the vivid highly coloured sensations of earth-life, and can by these
yearnings be drawn back to the scenes it has regretfully quitted. Speaking
of the possibility of communication between the Ego of the deceased person
and a medium, H. P. Blavatsky says in "The Theosophist", [ June
of 1882, Article "Seeming Discrepancies" ] as from the teachings received by
her from the Adept Brothers, that such communication may occur during two
intervals:
Interval the first is that period between the physical
death and the merging of the spiritual Ego into that state which is known
in the Arhat esoteric doctrine as Bardo. We have translated this as the “gestation” period
[pre-devachanic]. [Page 38]
Some of the communications made through mediums are from this
source, from the disembodied entity, thus drawn back to the earth-sphere –
a cruel kindness, delaying its forward evolution and introducing an element
of disharmony into what should be an orderly progression. The period in Kāmaloka
is thus lengthened, the desire body is fed and its hold on the Ego is maintained,
and thus is the freedom of the Soul deferred, the immortal Swallow being
still held down by the bird-lime of earth.
Persons who have led an evil life, who have gratified and
stimulated their animal passions, and have full fed the desire body while
they have starved even the lower mind – these remain for long, denizens
of Kāmaloka, and are filled with yearnings for the earth-life they
have left, and for the animal delights that they can no longer – in the
absence of the physical body – directly taste. These gather round the medium
and the sensitive, endeavouring to utilise them for their own gratification,
and these are among the more dangerous of the forces so rashly confronted
in their ignorance by the thoughtless and the curious.
Another class of disembodied entities includes those whose
lives on earth have been prematurely cut short, by their own act, the act
of others, or by accident. [Page
39] Their fate in Kāmaloka depends
on the conditions which surrounded their out-goings from earthly life,
for not all suicides are guilty of felo de se, and the measure of
responsibility may vary within very wide limits. The condition of such
has been thus described:
Suicides, although not wholly dissevered
from their sixth and seventh principles, and quite potent in the séance
room, nevertheless, to the day when they would have died a natural death,
are separated from their higher principles by a gulf. The sixth and seventh
principles remain passive and negative, whereas in cases of accidental death the higher and
the lower groups actually attract each other. In cases of good and innocent
Egos, moreover, the latter gravitates irresistibly toward the sixth and
seventh, and thus either slumbers surrounded by happy dreams, or sleeps
a dreamless profound sleep until the hour strikes. With a little reflection
and an eye to the eternal justice and fitness of things, you will see
why. The victim, whether good or bad, is irresponsible for his death.
Even if his death were due to some action in a previous life or an antecedent
birth, was an act, in short, of the Law of Retribution, still it was
not the direct result of an act deliberately committed by the personal Ego
of that life during which he happened to be killed. Had he been allowed
to live longer he might have atoned for his antecedent [Page 40] sins
still more effectually, and even now, the Ego having been made to
pay off the debt of his maker, the personal Ego is free from the blows
of retributive justice. The Dhyan Chohans, who have no hand in the
guidance of the living human Ego, protect the helpless victim when
it is violently thrust out of its element into a new one, before it
is matured and made fit and ready for it.
These, whether suicides or killed by accident, can communicate
with those in earth-life, but much to their own injury. As said above,
the good and innocent sleep happily till the life-period is over. But where
the victim of an accident is depraved and gross, his fate is a sad one.
Unhappy shades, if sinful and sensual,
they wander about (not shells, for their connection with their two higher
principles is not quite broken) until their deathhour comes. Cut off in the
full flush of earthly passions which bind them to familiar scenes, they
are enticed by the opportunities which mediums afford to gratify them
vicariously. They are the Pishachas, the Incubi and Succubae of mediaeval
times; the demons of thirst, gluttony, lust, and avarice – Elementaries
of intensified craft, wickedness, and cruelty; provoking their victims
to horrid crimes, and reveling in their commission They not only ruin
their victims, but these psychic vampires, borne along by the torrent
of their hellish impulses, at last
– at the [Page 41] fixed close to their natural period
of life – they are carried out of the earth’s aura into regions where
for ages they endure exquisite suffering and end with entire destruction.
Now the causes producing the “new
being” and determining the nature of Karma are Trishnā (Tanhā) – thirst,
desire for sentient existence – and Upādāna, which is the realisation
or consummation of Trishnā, or that desire. And both of these the
medium helps to develop ne
plus ultra in an Elementary, be he a suicide or a victim. The rule
is that a person who dies a natural death will remain from “a few hours
to several short years” within the earth’s attraction – i.
e., the Kāmaloka.
But exceptions are the cases of suicides and those who die a violent
death in general. Hence, one of such Egos who was destined to live,
say, eighty or ninety years – but who either killed himself or was killed
by some accident, let us suppose at the age of twenty – would have to
pass in the Kāmaloka not “a few years”, but in this case sixty or
seventy years, as an Elementary, or rather an
“earth-walker”, since he is not, unfortunately for him, even a “Shell”. Happy,
thrice happy, in comparison, are those disembodied entities who sleep their
long slumber and live in dream in the bosom of Space! And woe to those whose
Trishnā
will attract them to mediums, and woe to the latter who tempt them with such
an easy Upādāna. For, in grasping them [Page 42] and satisfying their thirst for life, the medium helps to
develop in them – is, in fact, the cause of – a new set of Skandhas, a new
body with far worse tendencies and passions than the one they lost. All the
future of this new body will be determined thus, not only by the Karma of
demerit of the previous set or group, but also by that of the new set of
the future being. Were the mediums and spiritualists but to know, as I said,
that with every new
“angel guide” they welcome with rapture, they entice the latter into a Upādāna,
which will be productive of untold evils for the new Ego that will be reborn
under its nefarious shadow, and that with every séance, especially for materialisation,
they multiply the causes for misery, causes that will make the unfortunate
Ego fail in his spiritual birth, or be reborn into a far worse existence
than ever – they would, perhaps, be less lavish in their hospitality.
Premature death brought on by vicious courses, by over-study,
or by voluntary sacrifice for some great cause, will bring about delay
in Kāmaloka, but the state of the disembodied entity will depend on
the motive that cut short the life.
There are very few, if any, of the
men who indulge in these vices, who feel perfectly sure that such a course
of action will lead them eventually to premature death. Such is the penalty
of Māyā. The “vices” will not escape their punishment; but
it is the cause, not the effect, that will
be punished, [Page
43] especially an unforeseen, though probable
effect. As well call a man a “suicide” who meets his death in a storm
at sea, as one who kills himself with “over-study”. Water is liable to
drown a man, and too much brain work to produce a softening of the brain
matter, which may carry him away. In such a case no one ought to cross
the Kālapāni, nor even to
take a bath for fear of getting faint in it and drowned (for we all know
of such cases), nor should a man do his duty, least of all sacrifice
himself for even a laudable and highly beneficial cause as many of us
do. Motive is everything, and man is punished in a case of direct responsibility,
never otherwise. In the victim’s case the natural hour of death was anticipated
accidentally, while
in that of the suicide death is brought on voluntarily and with a full
and deliberate knowledge of its immediate consequences. Thus a man who
causes his death in a fit of temporary insanity is not a felo
de se, to the great grief and often
trouble of the Life Insurance Companies. Nor is he left a prey to the
temptations of the Kāmaloka,
but falls asleep like any other victim.
The population of Kāmaloka is thus recruited with a peculiarly
dangerous element by all the acts of violence, legal and illegal, which
wrench the physical body from the soul and send the latter into Kāmaloka
clad in the desire body, throbbing with pulses of hatred, [Page 44] passion, emotion, palpitating with longings for revenge, with unsatiated
lusts. A murderer in the body is not a pleasant member of society, but
a murderer suddenly expelled from the body is a far more dangerous entity;
society may protect itself against the first, but in its present state
of ignorance it is defenceless as against the second.
Finally, the Immortal Triad sets itself free from
the desire body, and passes out of Kāmaloka; the higher Manas draws
back its Ray, coloured with the life-scenes it has passed through, and carrying
with it the experiences gained through the personality it has informed. The
labourer is called in from the field, and he returns home bearing his sheaves
with him, rich or poor, according to the fruitage of the life. When the
Triad with the Ray has quitted Kāmaloka, it passes wholly out of the
sphere of earth attractions:
As soon as it has stepped outside the Kāmaloka – crossed the “Golden
Bridge” leading to the “Seven Golden Mountains” – the Ego can confabulate
no more with easy-going mediums.
There are some exceptional possibilities of reaching such
an Ego, that will be explained later, but the Ego is out of the reach of
the ordinary medium and cannot be recalled into the earth-sphere. But ere
we follow [Page 45] the further course of the Triad, we
must consider the fate of the now deserted desire body, left as a mere reliquum in
Kāmaloka.
KĀMALOKA. THE SHELLS.
The Shell is the desire body, emptied of the Triad and the
Ray, which have now passed onwards; it is the third of the transitory garments
of Soul, cast aside and left in Kāmaloka to disintegrate.
When the past earth-life has been noble, or even when it has
been of average purity and utility, this Shell retains but little vitality
after the passing onwards of the Triad, and rapidly dissolves. Its molecules,
however, retain, during this process of disintegration, the impressions
made upon them during the earth-life, the tendency to vibrate in response
to stimuli constantly experienced during that period. Every student of
physiology is familiar with what is termed automatic action, with the tendency
of cells to repeat vibrations originally set up by purposive action; thus
are formed what we term habits, and we unconsciously repeat motions which
at first were done with thought. So strong is this automatism of the body,
that, as everyone knows by experience, it is difficult to break off the
use of a phrase or of a gesture that has become “habitual”. [Page
46]
Now the desire body is during earth-life the recipient of
and the respondent to all stimuli from without, and it also continually
receives and responds to stimuli from the lower Manas. In it are set up
habits, tendencies to repeat automatically familiar vibrations, vibrations
of love and desire, vibrations imaging past experiences of all kinds. Just
as the hand may repeat a familiar gesture, so may the desire body repeat
a familiar feeling or thought. And when the Triad has left it, this automatism
remains, and the Shell may thus simulate feelings and thoughts which are
empty of all true intelligence and will. Many of the responses to eager
enquiries at séances come from such Shells, drawn to the neighbourhood
of friends and relatives by the magnetic attractions so long familiar and
dear, and automatically responding to the waves of emotion and remembrance,
to the impulse of which they had so often answered during the lately closed
earth-life. Phrases of affection, moral platitudes, memories of past events,
will be all the communications such Shells can make, but these may be literally
poured out under favourable conditions under the magnetic stimuli freely
applied by the embodied friends and relatives.
In cases where the lower Manas during earth-life has been
strongly attached to material objects and to [Page 47] intellectual
pursuits directed by a self-seeking motive, the desire body nay have acquired
a very considerable automatism of an intellectual character, and may give
forth responses of considerable intellectual merit. But still the mark
of non-originality will be present: the apparent intellectuality will only
give out reproductions, and there will be no sign of the new and independent
thought which would be the inevitable outcome of a strong intelligence
working with originality amid new surroundings. Intellectual sterility
brands the great majority of communications from the “spirit world”; reflections
of earthly scenes, earthly conditions, earthly arrangements, are plentiful,
but we usually seek in vain for strong, new thought, worthy of Intelligences
freed from the prison of the flesh. The communications of a loftier kind
occasionally granted are, for the most part, from non-human Intelligences,
attracted by the pure atmosphere of the medium or sitters.
And there is an ever-present danger in this commerce with
the Shells. Just because they are Shells, and nothing more, they answer
to the impulses that strike on them from without, and easily become malicious
and mischievous, automatically responding to evil vibrations. Thus a medium,
or sitters of poor moral character, will impress the Shells that flock
around them [Page 48] with impulses of a low order, and
any animal desires, petty and foolish thoughts, will set up similar vibrations
in the blindly responsive Shells.
Again, the Shell is very easily taken possession of by Elementals,
the semi-conscious forces working in the kingdoms of Nature, and may be
used by them as a convenient vehicle for many a prank and trick. The etheric
double of the medium, and the desire bodies emptied of their immortal Tenants,
give the material basis by which Elementals can work many a curious and
startling result; and frequenters of séances may be confidently
appealed to, and asked whether many of the childish freaks with which they
are familiar – pullings of hair, pinchings, slaps, throwing about of objects,
piling up of furniture, playing on accordions, etc. – are not more rationally
accounted for as the tricky vagaries of subhuman forces, than as the actions
of “spirits” who, while in the body, were certainly incapable of such vulgarities.
Let us leave the Shells alone to peacefully dissolve into
their elements, and mingle once again in the crucible of Nature. The authors
of The Perfect Way put very well the real character of the
Shell:
The true “ghost” consists of the exterior
and earthly portion of the Soul, that portion which, being weighted with
cares, [Page
49] attachments, and memories merely mundane,
is detached by the Soul and remains in the astral sphere, an existence
more or less definite and personal, and capable of holding, through a sensitive,
converse with the living. It is, however, but as a cast-off vestment of
the Soul, and is incapable of endurance as ghost. The true Soul
and real person, the anima divina, parts at death with all those
lower affections which would have retained it near its earthly haunts.
[ "The Perfect Way" by Anna Bonus Kingsford and Edward
Maitland, pages 73 and 74, Edition of 1887 ]
If we would find our beloved, it is not among the
decaying remnants in Kāmaloka that we should seek them. “Why seek ye
the living among the dead?”
KĀMALOKA.
THE ELEMENTARIES.
The word “Elementary” has been so loosely used that it has
given rise to a good deal of confusion. It is thus defined by H. P. Blavatsky:
Properly, the disembodied souls of
the depraved; these souls having, at some time prior to death, separated
from themselves their divine spirits, and so lost their chance for immortality.
But at the present stage of learning it has been thought best to apply
the term to the spooks or phantoms of disembodied persons, in general to
those whose temporary habitation is the Kāmaloka. … Once divorced
from their higher Triads and their bodies, these souls remain in their
Kāma Rūpic envelopes, and are irresistibly drawn to the earth
amid elements congenial to their gross natures. Their stay in the Kāmaloka
varies as to its duration; but ends invariably in disintegration, dissolving
like a column of mist, atom by atom, in the surrounding elements. [ "Theosophical
Glossary" - Elementaries, 1892 Edition - Posthumous publication - edited
by G.R.S. Mead ] [Page 50]
Students of this series of Manuals know that it is possible
for the lower Manas to so entangle itself with Kāma as to wrench itself
away from its source, and this is spoken of in Occultism as “the loss of
the Soul" [ See The
Seven Principles of Man, pages
44 to 46 ] It
is, in other words, the loss of the personal self, which has separated
itself from its Parent, the Higher Ego, and has thus doomed itself to perish.
Such a Soul, having thus separated itself from the Immortal Triad during
its earth-life, becomes a true Elementary, after it has quitted the dense
and etheric bodies. Then, clad in its desire body, it lives for awhile,
for a longer or shorter time according to the vigour of its vitality, a
wholly evil thing, dangerous and malignant, seeking to renew its fading
vitality by any means laid open to it by the folly or ignorance of still
embodied souls. Its ultimate fate is, indeed, destruction, but it may work
much evil on its way to its self-chosen doom.
The word Elementary is, however, very often used to describe
the lower Manas in its garment the desire body, not broken away from the
higher Principles, but not yet absorbed into its Parent, the higher Manas.
Such Elementaries may be in any stage of progress, harmless or mischievous. [Page 51]
Some writers, again, use Elementary as a synonym for Shell,
and so cause increased confusion. The word should at least be restricted
to the desire body plus lower Manas, whether the lower Manas be
disentangling itself from the kamic elements, in order that it may be re-absorbed
into its source, or separated from the Higher Ego, and therefore on the
road to destruction.
DEVACHAN
Among the various conceptions presented by the Esoteric Philosophy,
there are few, perhaps, which the Western mind has found more difficulty
in grasping than that of Devachan, or Devasthān, the Devaland, or
land of the Gods.
[The
name Sukhāvatī,
borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, is sometimes used instead of that of Devachan.
Sukhāvati,
according to Schlagintweit, is “the abode of the blessed, into
which ascend those who have accumulated much merit by the practice of virtues” and “involves
the deliverance from metempsychosis” (Buddhism in Tibet, p. 99).
According to the Prasanga school, the higher Path leads to Nirvāna,
the lower to Sukhāvatī. But Eitel calls Sukhāvatī the “Nirvana
of the common people, where the saints revel in physical bliss for eons,
until they reenter the circle of transmigration”
(‘Sanskrit-Chinese Dictionary’). Eitel, however, under “Amitābha” states
that the “popular mind” regards the “paradise of the West” as “the haven
of final redemption from the eddies of transmigration”. When used by one
of the Teachers of the Esoteric Philosophy it covers the higher Devachanic
states, but from all of these the Soul comes back to earth.]
And one of the chief difficulties [Page 52] has arisen from the free use of the words illusion, dream-state, and other
similar terms, as denoting the devachanic consciousness – a general sense
of unreality having thus come to pervade the whole conception of Devachan.
When the Eastern thinker speaks of the present earthly life as Māyā,
illusion, dream, the solid Western at once puts down the phrases as allegorical
and fanciful, for what can be less illusory, he thinks, than this world of
buying and selling, of beefsteaks and bottled stout. But when similar terms
are applied to a state beyond Death – a state which to him is misty and unreal
in his own religion, and which, as he sadly feels, is lacking in all the
substantial comforts dear to the family man – then he accepts the words in
their most literal and prosaic meaning, and speaks of Devachan as a delusion
in his own sense of the word. It may be well, therefore, on the threshold
of Devachan to put this question of “illusion” in its true light.
In a deep metaphysical sense all that is conditioned is illusory.
All phenomena are literally “appearances”, the outer masks in which the
One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more
“material” and solid the appearance, the further it is from Reality, and
therefore the more illusory it is. What can be a greater fraud than our body,
so apparently solid, stable, [Page
53] visible and tangible? It is a constantly
changing congeries of minute living particles, an attractive centre into
which stream continually myriads of tiny invisibles, that becomes visible
by their aggregation at this centre, and then stream away again, becoming
invisible by reason of their minuteness as they separate off from this aggregation.
In comparison with this ever-shifting but apparently stable body how much
less illusory is the mind, which is able to expose the pretensions of the
body and put it in its true light. The mind is constantly imposed on by the
senses, and Consciousness, the most real thing in us, is apt to regard itself
as the unreal. In truth, it is the thought-world that is the nearest to reality,
and things become more and more illusory as they take on more and more of
a phenomenal character.
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 [Page
54] 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”.[ See
"Lucifer" of October 1882, Volume 11, No. 62 ] The
following extracts state the case:
The Vedântins, acknowledging two kinds
of conscious existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only
to the [Page 55] 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 Sūtrātmā. 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.
Note the words: “From the standpoint of your terrestrial notions”,
for they are the key to all the phrases used about Devachan as an
“illusion”. Our gross physical matter is not there; the limitations imposed
by it are not there; the mind is in its own realm, where to will is to create,
where to think is to see. And so, when the Master was asked: “Would it not [Page 56] be better to say that death is nothing but a birth for a new life, or
still better, a going back to eternity?” he answered:
This is how it really is, and I have nothing
to say against such a way of putting it. Only with our accepted views of
material life the words “live”
and “exist” are not applicable to the purely subjective condition after
death; and were they employed in our Philosophy without a rigid definition
of their meanings, the Vedântins would soon arrive at the ideas which are
common in our times among the American Spiritualists, who preach about
spirits marrying among themselves and with mortals. As amongst the true,
not nominal, Christians so amongst the Vedāntins – the
life on the other side of the grave is the land where there are no tears,
no sighs, where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, and where
the just realise their full perfection.
The dread of materialising mental and spiritual conceptions
has always been very strong among the Philosophers and oral Teachers of the
far East. Their constant effort has been to free the Thinker as far as possible
from the bonds of matter even while he is embodied, to open the cage for
the Divine Swallow, even though he must return to it for awhile, They are
ever seeking “to spiritualise the material”, while in the West the continual
tendency has been [Page 57] “to materialise
the spiritual”.
So the Indian describes the life of the freed Soul in all the terms that
make it least material – illusion, dream, and so on – whereas the Hebrew
endeavours to delineate it in terms descriptive of the material luxury and
splendour of earth – marriage feast, streets of gold, thrones and crowns
of solid metal and precious stones; the Western has followed the materialising
conceptions of the Hebrew, and pictures a heaven which is merely a double
of earth with earth’s sorrows extracted, until we reach the grossest of all,
the modern Summerland, with its “spirit-husbands”, “spiritwives”, and
“spirit-infants” that go to school and college, and grow up into spirit-adults.
In “Notes on Devachan”, [ "The Path" , May
1890 ] someone who evidently writes with
knowledge remarks of the Devachanī:
The a priori ideas of space and
time do not control his perceptions; for he absolutely creates and annihilates
them at the same time. Physical existence has its cumulative intensity
from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy from dotage to death;
so the dream-life of Devachan is lived correspondentially. Nature cheats
no more the Devachanī
than she does the living physical man. Nature provides for him far more
real bliss and happiness there than she does here, [Page 58] where all the conditions of evil and chance are against him.
To call the Devachan existence a “dream” in any other sense than that
of a conventional term, is to renounce for ever the knowledge of the
Esoteric Doctrine, the sole custodian of truth.
“Dream” only in the sense that it is not of this plane of
gross matter, that it belongs not to the physical world.
Let us try and take a general view of the life of the Eternal
Pilgrim, the inner Man, the human Soul, during a cycle of incarnation.
Before he commences his new pilgrimage – for many pilgrimages lie behind
him in the past, during which he gained the powers which enable him to
tread the present one – he is a spiritual Being, but one who has already
passed out of the passive condition of pure Spirit, and who by previous
experience of matter in past ages has evolved intellect, the self-conscious
mind. But this evolution by experience is far from being complete, even
so far as to make him master of matter; his ignorance leaves him a prey
to all the illusions of gross matter, so soon as he comes into contact
with it, and he is not fit to be a builder of a universe, being subject
to the deceptive visions caused by gross matter – as a child, looking through
a piece of blue glass, imagines all the outside world to be blue. [Page
59] The object of a cycle of incarnation
is to free him from these illusions, so that when he is surrounded by and
working in gross matter he may retain clear vision and not be blinded by
illusion. Now the cycle of incarnation is made up of two alternating states:
a short one called life on earth, during which the Pilgrim-God is plunged
into gross matter, and a comparatively long one, called life in Devachan,
during which he is encircled by subtle matter, illusive still, but far
less illusive than that of earth. The second state may fairly be called
his normal one, as it is of enormous extent as compared with the breaks
in it that he spends upon earth; it is comparatively normal also, as being
less removed from his essential Divine life; he is less encased in matter,
less deluded by its swiftly-changing appearances. Slowly and gradually,
by reiterated experiences, gross matter loses its power over him and becomes
his servant instead of his tyrant. In the partial freedom of Devachan he
assimilates his experiences on earth, still partly dominated by them – at
first, indeed, almost completely dominated by them so that the devachanic
life is merely a sublimated continuation of the earth-life – but gradually
freeing himself more and more as he recognises them as transitory and external,
until he can move through any [Page 60] region of our universe with unbroken self-consciousness, a true Lord of
Mind, the free and triumphant God. Such is the triumph of the Divine Nature
manifested in the flesh, the subduing of every form of matter to be the
obedient instrument of Spirit. Thus the Master said:
The spiritual Ego of the man moves
in eternity like a pendulum between the hours of life and death, but
if these hours, the periods of life terrestrial and life posthumous,
are limited in their continuation, and even the very number of such breaks
in eternity between sleep and waking, between illusion and reality, have
their beginning as well as their end, the spiritual Pilgrim himself is
eternal. Therefore the hours of his posthumous life, when
unveiled he stands face to face with truth, and the short-lived mirages
of his terrestrial existence are far from him, compose or make
up, in our ideas, the only reality. Such breaks, in spite
of the fact that they are finite, do double service to the Sūtrātmā,
which, perfecting itself constantly, follows without vacillation,
though very slowly the road leading to its last transformation, when,
reaching its aim at last, it becomes a Divine Being. They not only
contribute to the reaching of this goal, but without these finite breaks
Sūtrātmā-Buddhi
could never reach it. Sūtrātmā is the actor, and its
numerous and different incarnations are the actor’s parts. I suppose
you would not apply to these parts, and so much the less to their
costumes, the term of personality. [Page 61] Like an actor the soul is bound to play; during the cycle
of births up to the very threshold of Parinirvana, many such parts,
which often are disagreeable to it, but like a bee, collecting its
honey from every flower, and leaving the rest to feed the worms of
the earth, our spiritual individuality, the Sūtrātmā,
collecting only the nectar of moral qualities and consciousness from
every terrestrial personality in which it has to clothe itself, forced
by Karma, unites at last all these qualities in one, having then
become a perfect being, a Dhyān Chohan [ "The Path",
May 1890 ]
It is very significant, in this connection, that
every devachanic stage is conditioned by the earth-stage that precedes it,
and the Man can only assimilate in Devachan the kinds of experience he has
been gathering on earth.
A colourless, flavourless personality
has a colourless, feeble devachanic state.[ "Notes on Devachan",
as cited ]
Husband, father, student, patriot, artist, Christian,
Buddhist – he must work out the effects of his earth-life in his devachanic
life; he cannot eat and assimilate more food than he has gathered; he cannot
reap more harvest than he has sown seed. It takes but a moment to cast a
seed into a furrow; it takes many a month for that seed to grow into the
ripened ear; but [Page 62] according to the kind of the seed is the ear that
grows from it, and according to the nature of the brief earth-life is the
grain reaped in the field of Aanroo.
There is a change of occupation, a
continual change in Devachan, just as much and far more than there is
in the life of any man or woman who happens to follow in his or her whole
life one sole occupation, whatever it may be, with this difference, that
to the Devachanī this spiritual occupation is always pleasant and
fills his life with rapture. Life in Devachan is the function of the
aspirations of earth-life; not the indefinite prolongation of that “single
instance”, but its infinite developments, the various incidents and events
based upon and outflowing from that one “single moment” or moments. The
dreams of the objective become the realities of the subjective existence
. . . The reward provided by Nature for men who are benevolent in a large
systematic way, and who have not focused their affections on an individual
or speciality, is that, if pure, they pass the quicker for that through
the Kāma and Rūpa Lokas into the higher sphere of Tribhuvana,
since it is one where the formulation of abstract ideas and the consideration
of general principles fill the thought of its occupant [ “Notes
on Devachan”,
as before. There are a variety of stages in Devachan; the Rūpa Loka
is an inferior stage, where the Soul is still surrounded by forms. It
has escaped from these personalities in the Tribhuvana.] [Page 63]
Into Devachan enters nothing that defileth, for gross matter
has been left behind with all its attributes on earth and in Kāmaloka.
But if the sower has sowed but little seed, the devachanic harvest will
be meager, and the growth of the Soul will be delayed by the paucity of
the nutriment on which it has to feed. Hence the enormous importance of
the earth-life, the field of sowing, the place where experience is to
be gathered. It conditions, regulates, limits, the growth of the Soul;
it yields the rough ore which the Soul then takes in hand, and works upon
during the devachanic stage, smelting it, forging it, tempering it, into
the weapons it will take back with it for its next earth-life. The experienced
Soul in Devachan will make for itself a splendid instrument for its next
earth-life; the inexperienced one will forge a poor blade enough; but in
each case the only material available is that brought from earth. In Devachan
the Soul, as it were, sifts and sorts out its experiences; it lives a comparatively
free life, and gradually gains the power to estimate the earthly experiences
at their real value; it works out thoroughly and completely as objective
realities all the ideas of which it only conceived the germ on earth. Thus,
noble aspiration is a germ which the Soul would work out into a splendid
realisation in Devachan, and [Page 64] it would bring back with it to earth for its next incarnation that mental
image, to be materialised on earth when opportunity offers and suitable
environment presents itself. For the mind sphere is the sphere of creation,
and earth only the place for materialising the pre-existent thought. And
the soul is as an architect that works out his plans in silence and deep
meditation, and then brings them forth into the outer world where his edifice
is to be builded; out of the knowledge gained in his past life, the Soul
draws his plans far the next, and he returns to earth to put into objective
material form the edifices he has planned. This is the description of a
Logos in creative activity:
Whilst Brahma formerly, in the beginning
of the Kalpas, was meditating on creation, there appeared a creation beginning
with ignorance and consisting of darkness. … Brahmā, beholding that
it was defective, designed another; and whilst he thus meditated, the animal
creation was manifested. … Beholding this creation also imperfect, Brahmā again
meditated, and a third creation appeared, abounding with the quality of
goodness. [Vishnu
Purāna, Book 1, Chapter 5 ]
The objective manifestation follows the mental meditation; first idea,
then form. Hence it will be seen that the notion current among many Theosophists
that Devachan is waste time, is but one of the illusions due to the gross
matter that blinds them, and that their impatience of the idea of Devachan
arises from the
[Page 65] delusion
that fussing about in gross matter is the only real activity. Whereas,
in truth, all effective action has its source in deep meditation, and out
of the Silence comes ever the creative Word. Action on this plane would
be less feeble and inefficient if it were the mere blossom of the profound
root of meditation, and if the Soul embodied passed oftener out of the
body into Devachan during earth-life, there would be less foolish action
and consequent waste of time. For Devachan is a state of consciousness,
the consciousness of the Soul escaped for awhile from the net of gross
matter, and may be entered at any time by one who has learned to withdraw
his Soul from the senses as the tortoise withdraws itself within its shell.
And then, coming forth once more, action is prompt, direct, purposeful,
and the time “wasted” in meditation
is more than saved by the directness and strength of the mind-engendered
act.
Devachan is the sphere of the mind, as said, it is the land
of the Gods, or the Souls. In the before quoted “Notes on Devachan” we
read:
There are two fields of causal manifestations:
the objective and the subjective. The grosser energies find their outcome
in the new personality of each birth in the cycle of evoluting individuality.
The moral and spiritual activities find their sphere of effects in Devachan. [Page 66]
As the moral and spiritual activities are the most important,
and as on the development of these depends the growth of the true Man,
and therefore the accomplishing of “the object of creation, the liberation
of Soul”, we may begin to understand something of the vast importance of
the devachanic state.
THE DEVACHANĪ
When the Triad has shaken off its desire garment, it crosses
the threshold of Devachan, and becomes “a Devachanī”. We have seen
that it is in a peaceful dreamy state before this passage out of the earth-sphere,
the
“second death”, or “pre-devachanic unconsciousness”. This condition is otherwise
spoken of as the “gestation” period, because it precedes the birth of the
Ego into the devachanic life. Regarded from the earth-sphere the passage
is death, while regarded from that of Devachan it is birth. Thus we find
in “Notes on Devachan”:
As in actual earth-life, so there
is for the Ego in Devachan the first flutter of psychic life, the attainment
of prime, the gradual exhaustion of force passing into semi-consciousness
and lethargy, total oblivion, and – not death but birth, birth into another
personality, and the resumption of action which daily begets new congeries
of causes that must be worked out [Page 67] in another
term of Devachan, and still another physical birth as a new personality.
What the lives in Devachan and upon earth shall be respectively in each
instance is determined by Karma, and this weary round of birth must be
ever and ever run through until the being reaches the end of the seventh
Round, or attains in the interim the wisdom of an Arhat, then that of
a Buddha, and thus gets relieved for a Round or two.
When the devachanic entity is born into this new sphere it
has passed beyond recall to earth. The embodied Soul may rise to it, but
it cannot be drawn back to our world. On this a Master has spoken decisively:
From Sukhāvatī down to the “Territory of Doubt”, there is a
variety of spiritual states, but … as soon as it has stepped outside the
Kāmaloka, crossed the “Golden Bridge” leading to the “Seven Golden
Mountains”, the Ego can confabulate no more with easy-going mediums. No
Ernest or Joey has ever returned from the Rūpa Loka, let alone the
Arūpa Loka, to hold sweet intercourse with men.
In the “Notes on Devachan”, again, we read:
Certainly the new Ego, once that it
is reborn (in Devachan), retains for a certain time – proportionate
to its earth-life – a complete recollection “of his life on earth”; but
it can never revisit the Earth from Devachan except in Re-incarnation.[Page 68]
The Devachanī is generally spoken of as the Immortal
Triad, Ātma-Buddhi-Manas, but it is well always to bear in mind that
Ātman is no individual property
of any man, but is the Divine Essence which has no body, no form, which
is imponderable, invisible, and indivisible, that which does not exist and
yet is, as the Buddhists say of Nirvana. It only overshadows the mortal;
that which enters into him and pervades the whole body being only its omnipresent
rays or light, radiated through Buddhi, its vehicle and direct emanation.
[ "The Key to Theosophy", Page 69, Third Edition ]
Buddhi and Manas united, with this overshadowing of
Ātma, form the Devachanī; now, as we have seen in studying the
Seven Principles, Manas is dual during earth-life, and the lower Manas is
purified from all passional elements during the kāmalokic interlude.
By this purification of the Ray it carries only the pure and noble experiences
of the earth-life into Devachan with it, thus maintaining the past personality
as the marked characteristic of the Devachanī, and it is in this prolongation
of the
“personal Ego”, so to speak, that the “illusion” of the Devachanī
consists. Were the manasic entity free from all illusion, it would see all
Egos as its brother-Souls, and looking back over its past would recognise
all the varied relationships it had borne to others in many lives, as the
actor would remember the many parts he had played with other [Page 69] actors,
and would think of each brother actor as a man, and not in the parts he had
played as his father, his son, his judge, his murderer, his master, his friend.
The deeper human relationship would prevent the brother actors from identifying
each other with their parts, and so the perfected spiritual Egos, recognising
their deep unity and full brotherhood, would no longer be deluded by the
trappings of earthly relationships. But the Devachanī, at least in the
lower stages, is still within the personal boundaries of his past earth-life;
he is shut into the relationships of the one incarnation; his paradise is
peopled with those he “loved best with an undying love, that holy feeling
that alone survives”, and thus the purified personal Ego is the salient
feature, as above said, in the Devachanī. Again quoting from the “Notes
on Devachan”:
“Who goes to Devachan?” The personal
Ego, of course; but beatified, purified, holy. Every Ego – the combination
of the sixth and seventh principles [Sixth
and seventh in the older nomenclature - fifth and sixth in the later -
i.e., Manas and Buddhi.] – which
after the period of unconscious gestation is reborn into the Devachan,
is of necessity as innocent and pure as a new-born babe. The fact of
his being reborn at all shows the preponderance of good over evil in
his old personality. And while the Karma [of
Evil] steps [Page
70] aside for the time
being to follow him in his future earth re-incarnation, he brings along
with him but the Karma of his good deeds, words and thoughts into this
Devachan. “Bad” is
a relative term for us – as you were told more than once before – and
the Law of Retribution is the only law that never errs. Hence all
those who have not slipped down into the mire of unredeemable sin
and bestiality go to the Devachan. They will have to pay for their
sins, voluntary and involuntary, later on. Meanwhile they are rewarded;
receive the effects of the causes produced by them.
Now in some people a sense of repulsion arises at the idea
that the ties they form on earth in one life are not to be permanent in
eternity. But let us look at the question calmly for a moment. When a mother
first clasps her baby-son in her arms, that one relationship seems perfect,
and if the child should die, her longing would be to repossess him as her
babe; but as he lives on through youth to manhood the tie changes, and
the protective love of the mother and the clinging obedience of the child
merge into a different love of friends and comrades, richer than ordinary
friendship from the old recollections; yet later, when the mother is aged
and the son in the prime of middle life, their positions are reversed and
the son protects while the mother depends on him for guidance. [Page 71] Would the relation
have been more perfect had it ceased in infancy with only the one tie,
or is it not the richer and the sweeter from the different strands of which
the tie is woven? And so with Egos; in many lives they may hold to each
other many relationships, and finally, standing as Brothers of the Lodge
closely knit together, may look back over past lives and see themselves
in earth-life related in the many ways possible to human beings, till the
cord is woven of every strand of love and duty; would not the final unity
be the richer not the poorer for the manystranded tie? “Finally”, I say;
but the word is only of this cycle, for what lies beyond, of wider life
and less separateness, no mind of man may know. To me it seems that this
very variety of experiences makes the tie stronger, not weaker, and that
it is a rather thin and poor thing to know oneself and another in only
one little aspect of many-sided humanity for endless ages of years; a thousand
or so years of one person in one character would, to me, be ample, and
I should prefer to know him or her in some new aspect of his nature. But
those who object to this view need not feel distressed, for they will enjoy
the presence of their beloved in the one personal aspect held by him or
her in the one incarnation they are conscious of for as long as the
desire [Page 72] for that presence remains. Only let them not desire to impose
their own form of bliss on everybody else, nor insist that the kind of
happiness which seems to them at this stage the only one desirable and
satisfying, must be stereotyped to all eternity, through all the millions
of years that lie before us. Nature gives to each in Devachan the satisfaction
of all pure desires, and Manas there exercises that faculty of his innate
divinity, that he “never wills in vain”. Will not this suffice?
But leaving aside disputes as to what may be to us
“happiness” in a future separated from our present by millions of years,
so that we are no more fitted now to formulate its conditions than is a child,
playing with its dolls, to formulate the deeper joys and interests of its
maturity, let us understand that, according to the teachings of the Esoteric
Philosophy, the Devachanī is surrounded by all he loved on earth, with
pure affection, and the union being on the plane of the Ego, not on the physical
plane, it is free from all the sufferings which would be inevitable were
the Devachanī present in consciousness on the physical plane with all
its illusory and transitory joys and sorrows. It is surrounded by its beloved
in the higher consciousness, but is not agonised by the knowledge of what
they are suffering in the lower consciousness, held in the bonds [Page 73] of the flesh. According to the orthodox Christian view, Death is a separation,
and the “spirits of the dead” wait for reunion until those they love also
pass through Death’s gateway, or – according to some – until after the judgment-day
is over. As against this the Esoteric Philosophy teaches that Death cannot
touch the higher consciousness of man, and that it can only separate those
who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are concerned; the man
living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated from those who have passed
onwards, but the Devachanī, says H. P. Blavatsky, has a complete conviction “that
there is no such thing as Death at all”, having left behind it all those
vehicles “over which Death has power”. Therefore, to its less blinded eyes,
its beloved are still with it; for it, the veil of matter that separates
has been torn away.
A mother dies, leaving behind her
little helpless children, whom she adores, perhaps a beloved husband also.
We say that her “Spirit” or Ego – that individuality which is now wholly
impregnated, for the entire devachanic period, with the noblest feelings
held by its late personality, i.e., love for her children,
pity for those who suffer, and so on – is now entirely separated from the “vale
of tears”, that its future bliss consists in that blessed ignorance of
all the woes it left behind … that the post-mortem spiritual consciousness
of the mother will represent to her that she lives surrounded by her children
and all those whom she loved; that no gap, no link will be missing to make
her disembodied state the most perfect and absolute happiness. [ "The
Key to Theosophy" , page 99, Third Edition ] [Page
74]
And so again:
As to the ordinary mortal his bliss
in Devachan is complete. It is an absolute oblivion of all that gave it
pain or sorrow in the past incarnation, and even oblivion of the fact that
such things as pain or sorrow exist at all. The Devachanī lives its
intermediate cycle between two incarnations surrounded by everything it
had aspired to in vain, and in the companionship of everything it loved
on earth. It has reached the fulfilment of all its soul-yearnings. And
thus it lives throughout long centuries an existence of unalloyed happiness,
which is the reward for its sufferings in earth-life. In short, it bathes
in a sea of uninterrupted felicity spanned only by events of still greater
felicity in degree. [ "The Key to Theosophy", page 100,
Third Edition ]
When we take the wider sweep in thought demanded
by the Esoteric Philosophy, a far more fascinating prospect of persistent
love and union between individual Egos rolls itself out before our eyes than
was offered to us by the more limited creed of exoteric Christendom. “Mothers
love their children with an immortal love”, says H. P. Blavatsky, and the
reason for this immortality in love is easily grasped when we realise that
it is the same Egos that play so many parts in the drama of life, that the
experience of each part is recorded in the memory of the Soul, and that between
the Souls there is no separation, though during incarnation they may not
realise the fact in its fullness and beauty.
We are with those whom we have lost
in material form, and far, far nearer to them now than when they were alive.
And it is [Page
75] not only in the fancy of the Devachanī,
as some may imagine, but in reality. For pure divine love is not merely
the blossom of a human heart, but has its roots in eternity. Spiritual
holy love is immortal, and Karma brings sooner or later all those who loved
each other with such a spiritual affection to incarnate once more in the
same family group. [ "The Key to Theosophy", Page 101
of the Third Edition; Page 95 of the 1969 Edition ]
Love “has its roots in eternity”, and those to whom on
earth we are strongly drawn are the Egos we have loved in past earth-lives
and dwelt with in Devachan; coming back to earth, these enduring bonds of
love draw us together yet again, and add to the strength and beauty of the
tie, and so on and on till all illusions are lived down, and the strong and
perfected Egos stand side by side, sharing the experience of their well-nigh
illimitable past.
THE RETURN TO EARTH
At length the causes that carried the Ego into Devachan are
exhausted, the experiences gathered have been wholly assimilated, and the
Soul begins to feel again the thirst for sentient material life that can
be gratified only on the physical plane. The greater the degree of spirituality
reached, the purer and loftier the preceding earth-life, the longer the
stay in Devachan, [Page
76] the world of spiritual, pure, and
lofty effects. [I am here ignoring the
special conditions surrounding one who is forcing his own evolution, and
has entered on the Path that leads to Adeptship within a very limited number
of lives.] The “average time [in
Devachan] is from ten to fifteen centuries”,
H. P. Blavatsky tells us, and the fifteen centuries cycle is one of those
most plainly marked in history.[ See Manual No. 2 "Reincarnation",
pages 60-61, Third Edition ] But in modern life this period has much shortened, in consequence
of the greater attraction exercised by physical objects over the heart
of man. Further, it must be remembered that the “average time” is not the
time spent in Devachan by any person. If one person spends there 1000 years,
and another fifty, the “average” is 525. The devachanic period is longer
or shorter according to the type of life which preceded it; the more there
was of spiritual, intellectual, and emotional activity of a lofty kind,
the longer will be the gathering in of the harvest; the more there was
of activity directed to selfish gain on earth, the shorter will be the
devachanic period.
When the experiences are assimilated, be the time long or
short, the Ego is ready to return, and he brings back with him his now
increased experience, and any [Page
77] further gains he may have made in
Devachan along the lines of abstract thought; for, while in Devachan,
In one sense we can acquire more knowledge;
that is, we can develop further any faculty which we loved and strove after
during life, provided it is concerned with abstract and ideal things, such
as music, painting, poetry, etc. [ "The Key to Theosophy"
page 105, Third Edition; Page 100-101, 1969 Edition ]
But the Ego meets, as he crosses the threshold of Devachan
on his way outwards – dying out of Devachan to be reborn on earth – he
meets in the “atmosphere of the terrestrial plane”, the seeds of evil sown
in his preceding life on earth. During the devachanic rest he has been
free from all pain, all sorrow, but the evil he did in his past has been
in a state of suspended animation, not of death. As seeds sown in the autumn
for the springtime lie dormant beneath the surface of the soil, but touched
by the soft rain and penetrating warmth of sun begin to swell and the embryo
expands and grows, so do the seeds of evil we have sown lie dormant while
the Soul takes its rest in Devachan, but shoot out their roots into the
new personality which begins to form itself for the incarnation of the
returning man. The Ego has to take up the burden of his past, and these
germs or seeds, coming over as the harvest of the past life, are the Skandhas,
to borrow a [Page 78] convenient
word from our Buddhist brethren. They consist of material qualities, sensations,
abstract ideas, tendencies of mind, mental powers, and while the pure aroma
of these attached itself to the Ego and passed with it into Devachan, all
that was gross, base and evil remained in the state of suspended animation
spoken of above. These are taken up by the Ego as he passes outwards towards
terrestrial life, and are built into the new “man of flesh” which the true
man is to inhabit. And so the round of births and deaths goes on, the turning
of the Wheel of Life; the treading of the Cycle of Necessity, until the
work is done and the building of the Perfect Man is completed.
NIRVÃNA
What Devachan is to each earth-life, Nirvana is to the finished
cycle of Re-incarnation, but any effective discussion of that glorious
state would here be out of place. It is mentioned only to round off the “After”
of Death, for no word of man, strictly limited within the narrow bounds of
his lower consciousness, may avail to explain what Nirvana is, can do aught
save disfigure it in striving to describe. What it is not may be roughly,
badly stated – it is not “annihilation”, it is not [Page
79] destruction of consciousness. Mr.
A. P. Sinnett has put effectively and briefly the absurdity of many of the
ideas current in the West about Nirvāna. He has been speaking of absolute
consciousness, and proceeds:
We may use such phrases as intellectual
counters, but for no ordinary mind – dominated by its physical brain and
brain-born intellect – can they have a living signification. All that words
can convey is that Nirvāna is a sublime state of conscious rest in
omniscience. It would be ludicrous, after all that has gone before, to
turn to the various discussions which have been carried on by students
of exoteric Buddhism as to whether Nirvāna does or does not mean annihilation.
Worldly similes fall short of indicating the feeling with which the graduates
of Esoteric Science regard such a question. Does the last penalty of the
law mean the highest honour of the peerage? Is a wooden spoon the emblem
of the most illustrious pre-eminence in learning? Such questions as these
but faintly symbolise the extravagance of the question whether Nirvāna
is held by Buddhism to be equivalent to annihilation. [ "Esoteric
Buddhism", page 197, Eight Edition ]
So we learn from The Secret Doctrine that the
Nirvānī returns to cosmic activity in a new cycle of manifestation,
and that
The thread of radiance which is imperishable
and dissolves only in Nirvāna, reemerges from it in its integrity
on the day when the Great Law calls all things back into action.[Quoted
in The Secret Doctrine, vol. ii. p. 83. The student will do well to read,
for a fair presentation of the subject, G. R. S. Mead’s “Note on Nirvāna” in ‘Lucifer’,
for March, April, and May 1893. (Reprinted in "Theosophical Siftings")] [Page 80]
COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN THE EARTH AND OTHER SPHERES
We are now in position to discriminate between the various
kinds of communication possible between those whom we foolishly divide
into
“dead” and “living”, as though the body were the man, or the man could die.
“Communications between the embodied and the disembodied” would be a more
satisfactory phrase.
First, let us put aside as unsuitable the word Spirit: Spirit
does not communicate with Spirit in any way conceivable by us. That highest
principle is not yet manifest in the flesh; it remains the hidden fount
of all, the eternal Energy, one of the poles of Being in manifestation.
The word is loosely used to denote lofty Intelligences, who live and move
beyond all conditions of matter imaginable by us, but pure Spirit is at
present as inconceivable by us as pure matter. And as in dealing with possible
“communications” we have average human beings as recipients, we may as well
exclude the word Spirit as much as possible, and so get rid of ambiguity.
But in quotations the word often occurs, in deference to the habit of the
day, and it then denotes the Ego. [Page
81]
Taking the stages through which the living man
passes after “Death”, or the shaking off of the body, we can readily classify
the communications that may be received, or the appearances that may be seen:
1. ) While the Soul has shaken off only the dense
body, and remains still clothed in the etheric double. This is a brief period
only, but during it the disembodied Soul may show itself, clad in this ethereal
garment.
For a very short period after death,
while the incorporeal principles remain within the sphere of our earth’s
attraction, it is possible for spirit, under peculiar and favourable conditions,
to appear. [ Theosophist, Sept. 1882,
page 310.]
It makes no communications during this brief interval, nor
while dwelling in this form. Such “ghosts” are silent, dreamy, like sleep-walkers,
and indeed they are nothing more than astral sleep-walkers. Equally irresponsive,
but capable of expressing a single thought, as of sorrow, anxiety, accident,
murder, etc., are apparitions which are merely a thought of the dying, taking shape in the astral world,
and carried by the dying person’s will to some particular person, with
whom the dying intensely longs to communicate. Such a thought, sometimes
called a Māyāvi Rūpa, or illusory form, [Page 82]
may be often thrown into objectivity, as in the case of apparitions
after death; but, unless it is projected with the knowledge of (whether
latent or potential), or owing to the intensity of the desire to see or appear to some one shooting through,
the dying brain, the apparition will be simply automatical; it will not
be due to any sympathetic attraction, or to any act of volition, any more
than the reflection of a person passing unconsciously near a mirror is
due to the desire of the latter.
When the Soul has left the etheric double, shaking it off
as it shook off the dense body, the double thus left as a mere empty corpse
may be galvanised into an “artificial life”; but fortunately the method
of such galvanisation is known to few.
2.) While the Soul is in Kāmaloka. This period is
of very variable duration. The Soul is clad in an astral body, the last
but one of its perishable garments, and while thus clad it can utilise
the physical bodies of a medium, thus consciously procuring for itself
an instrument whereby it can act on the world it has left, and communicate
with those living in the body. In this way it may give information as to
facts known to itself only, or to itself and another person, in the earth-life
just closed; and for as long as it remains within the terrestrial atmosphere
such communication is possible. [Page 83] The harm and the peril of such communication has been previously explained,
whether the lower Manas be united with the Divine Triad and so on its way
to Devachan, or wrenched from it and on its way to destruction.
3.) While the Soul is in Devachan, if an embodied Soul
is capable of rising to its sphere, or of coming into rapport with
it. To the Devachanī, as we have seen, the beloved are present in
consciousness and full communication, the Egos being in touch with each
other, though one is embodied and one is disembodied, but the higher consciousness
of the embodied rarely affects the brain. As a matter of fact, all that
we know on the physical plane of our friend, while we both are embodied,
is the mental image caused by the impression he makes on us. This is, to
our consciousness, our friend, and lacks nothing in objectivity. A similar
image is present to the consciousness of the Devachanī, and to him
lacks nothing in objectivity. As the physical plane friend is visible to
an observer on earth, so is the mental plane friend visible to an observer
on that plane. The amount of the friend that ensouls the image is dependent
on his own evolution, a highly evolved person being capable of far more
communication with a Devachanī than one who is unevolved. [Page 84] Communication when the body is sleeping is easier than when
it is awake, and many a vivid “dream” of one on the other side of death
is a real interview with him in Kāmaloka or in Devachan.
Love beyond the grave, illusion though
you may call it, [See
on
“illusion” what was said under the heading “Devachan”] has
a magic and divine potency that reacts on the living. A mother’s Ego, filled
with love for the imaginary children it sees near itself, living a life of
happiness, as real to it as when on earth – that love will always be felt
by the children in flesh. It will manifest in their dreams and often in various
events – in providential protections
and escapes, for love is a strong shield and is not limited by space or
time. As with this devachanic “mother”, so with the rest of human relationships
and attachments, save the purely selfish or material. ["The
Key to Theosophy" , page 102, Third edition]
Remembering that a thought becomes an active entity, capable
of working good or evil, we easily see that as embodied Souls can send
to those they love helping and protecting forces, so the Devachanī,
thinking of those dear to him, may send out such helpful and protective
thoughts, to act as veritable guardian angels round his beloved on earth.
But this is a very different thing from the “Spirit” of the mother coming
back to earth to be the almost helpless spectator of the child’s woes. [Page 85]
The Soul embodied may sometimes escape from its prison of
flesh, and come into relations with the Devachanī. H. P. Blavatsky
writes:
Whenever years after the death of
a person his spirit is claimed to have “wandered back to earth” to give
advice to those it loved, it is always in a subjective vision, in dream
or in trance, and in that case it is the Soul of the living seer that is
drawn to the disembodied spirit, and not the latter which wanders
back to our spheres. [ "The Theosophist", September 1881 ]
Where the sensitive, or medium, is of a pure and lofty
nature, this rising of the freed Ego to the Devachanī is practicable,
and naturally gives the impression to the sensitive that the departed Ego
has come back to him. The Devachanī is wrapped in its happy “illusion”,
and
The Souls or astral Egos, of pure
loving sensitives, labouring under the same delusion, think their loved
ones come down to there on earth, while it is their own spirits that
are raised towards those in the Devachan [ "Notes
on Devachan", "The Path, June
1890, page 80 ]
This attraction can be exercised by the departed Soul from
Kāmaloka or from Devachan:
A “spirit”, or the spiritual Ego,
cannot descend to the medium, but it can attract the spirit
of the latter to itself, and it can do this only during the two intervals – before
and after its “gestation period”. Interval the first is that period between
the physical death and the merging of the spiritual Ego into that state
which is known in the Arhat Esoteric Doctrine as “Bar-do”. We have [Page 86] translated this as the “gestation period”, and it lasts from a few days
to several years, according to the evidence of the Adepts. Interval the
second lasts so long as the merits of the old [personal] Ego entitle the
being to reap the fruit of its reward in its new regenerated Ego-ship.
It occurs after the gestation period is over, and the new spiritual Ego
is reborn-like the fabled Phoenix from its ashes – from the old one. The
locality which the former inhabits is called by the northern Buddhist Occultists “Devachan”.
[ "The
Theosophist", June 1882, Page 226 ]
So also may the incorporeal principles of pure sensitives
be placed en rapport with disembodied Souls, although information
thus obtained is not reliable, partly in consequence of the difficulty
of transferring to the physical brain the impressions received, and partly
from the difficulty of observing accurately, when the seer is untrainee.
[ Summarized from article in "The Theosophist", September
of 1882. ]
A pure medium’s Ego can be drawn to
and made, for an instant, to unite in a magnetic (?) relation with a real
disembodied spirit, whereas the soul of an impure medium can only confabulate
with the Astral Soul, or Shell, of the deceased. The former possibility
explains those extremely rare cases of direct writing in recognised autographs,
and of messages from the higher class of disembodied intelligences.
But the confusion in messages thus obtained is
considerable, not only from the causes above named, but also because
even the best and purest sensitive
can at most only be placed at any time en rapport with a particular
spiritual entity, and can only know, see, and feel what that particular
entity knows, sees, and feels. [Page
87]
Hence much possibility of error if generalisations are indulged
in, since each Devachanī lives in his own paradise, and there is no “peeping
down to earth”.
Nor is there any conscious communication
with the flying Souls that come as it were to learn where the Spirits are,
what they are doing, and what they think, feel, and see.
What then is being en rapport? It is simply an identity
of molecular vibration between the astral part of the incarnated sensitive
and the astral part of the dis-incarnated personality. The spirit of the
sensitive gets “odylised”, so to speak, by the aura of the spirit, whether
this be hybernating in the earthly region or dreaming in the Devachan;
identity of molecular vibration is established, and for a brief space the
sensitive becomes the departed personality, and writes in its handwriting,
uses its language, and thinks its thoughts. At such times sensitives may
believe that those with whom they are for the moment en rapport descend
to earth and communicate with them, whereas, in reality, it is merely their
own spirits which, being correctly attuned to those others, are for the
time blended with them. [ "The Theosophist", September
1882, Page 309 ]
In a special case under examination, H. P. Blavatsky
said that the communication might have come from an Elementary, but that
it was
far more likely that the medium’s
spirit really became en rapport with some spiritual entity in Devachan,
the thoughts, knowledge, and sentiments of which formed the substance,
while the medium’s own personality and pre-existing ideas more or less
governed the forms of the communication. [ "The Theosophist", September
1882, Page 310 ]
While these communications are not reliable in the facts and
opinions stated,
we would remark that it may possibly be
that there really is a distinct spiritual entity impressing our correspondent’s
mind. In [Page 88] other words, there may,
for all we know, be some spirit, with whom his spiritual nature becomes
habitually, for the time, thoroughly harmonised, and whose thoughts, language,
etc., become his for the time, the result being that this spirit seems
to communicate with him. … It is possible (though by no means probable)
that he habitually passes into a state of rapport with a genuine
spirit, and, for the time, is assimilated therewith, thinking (to a great
extent if not entirely) the thoughts that spirit would think, writing in
its handwriting, etc. But even so, Mr. Terry must not fancy that that spirit
is consciously communicating with him, or knows in any way anything of
him, or any other person or thing on earth. It is simply that, the rapport established,
he, Mr. Terry, becomes for the nonce assimilated with that other personality,
and thinks, speaks, and writes as it would have done on earth. … The molecules
of his astral nature may from time to time vibrate in perfect unison with
those of some spirit of such a person, now in Devachan, and the result
may be that he appears to be in communication with that spirit, and to
be advised, etc., by him, and clairvoyants may see in the Astral Light
a picture of the earth-life form of that spirit.
4.) Communications other than those from disembodied Souls,
passing through normal post-mortem states.
(a) From Shells. These, while but the cast-off garment
of the liberated Soul, retain for some time the impress of their late inhabitant,
and reproduce automatically his habits of thought and expression, just
as a physical body will automatically repeat habitual gestures. Reflex
action is as possible to the desire body as to the physical, but all reflex
action is marked by its character of repetition, and absence of all power
to initiate movement. It answers to a stimulus with [Page 89] an appearance
of purposive action, but it initiates nothing. When people “sit for development”,
or when at a séance they anxiously hope and wait for messages from
departed friends, they supply just the stimulus needed, and obtain the
signs of recognition for which they expectantly watch.
(b) From Elementaries. These, possessing the lower
capacities of the mind, i.e., all the intellectual faculties that
found their expression through the physical brain during life, may produce
communications of a highly intellectual character. These, however, are
rare, as may be seen from a survey of the messages published as received
from “departed Spirits”.
(c) From Elementals, or Nature Spirits. These play
a great part at séances, and are mostly the agents who are active
in producing physical phenomena. They throw about or carry objects, make
noises, ring bells, etc., etc. Sometimes they play pranks with Shells,
animating them and representing them to be the spirits of great personalities
who have lived on earth, but who have sadly degenerated in the “spirit-world”,
judging by their effusions. Sometimes, in materialising séances,
they busy themselves in throwing pictures from the Astral Light on the
fluidic forms produced, so causing them to assume likenesses of various
persons. There [Page 90] are also Elementals of a high type who occasionally communicate with very
gifted mediums, “Shining Ones” from other spheres.
(d) From Nirmānakāyas. For these communications,
as for the two classes next mentioned, the medium must be of a very pure
and lofty nature. The Nirmānakāya is a perfected man, who has
cast aside his physical body but retains his other lower principles, and
remains in the earth-sphere for the sake of helping forward the evolution
of mankind. Nirmānakāyas
have, out of pity for mankind and
those they left on earth, renounced the Nirvanic state. Such an Adept,
or Saint, or whatever you may call him, believing it a selfish act to rest
in bliss while mankind groans under the burden of misery produced by ignorance,
renounces Nirvana and determines to remain invisible in spirit on
this earth. They have no material body, as they have left it behind: but
otherwise they remain with all their principles even in astral life in
our sphere. And such can and do communicate with a few elect ones, only
surely not with ordinary mediums. [ "The Key to
Theosophy", page 151 ]
(e) From Adepts now living on earth. These often communicate
with Their disciples, without using the ordinary methods of communication,
and when any tie exists, perchance from some past incarnation, between
an Adept and a medium, constituting that medium a disciple, a message from
the Adept might readily be mistaken for a message from a “Spirit”. [Page 91] The receipt of such messages by precipitated writing or spoken words is
within the knowledge of some.
(f) From the medium’s Higher Ego. Where a pure and
earnest man or woman is striving after the light, this upward striving
is met by a downward reaching of the higher nature, and light from the
higher streams downward, illuminating the lower consciousness. Then the
lower mind is, for the time, united with its parent, and transmits as much
of its knowledge as it is able to retain.
From this brief sketch it will be seen how varied may be the
sources from which communications apparently from “the other side of Death” may
be received. As said by H. P. Blavatsky:
The variety of the causes of phenomena
is great, and one need be an Adept, and actually look into and examine
what transpires, in order to be able to explain in each case what really
underlies it. [ "The Theosophist", September
1882, Page 210 [ "The Theosophist", September
1882, Page 310 ]
To complete the statement it may be added that what the average
Soul can do when it has passed through the gateway of Death, it can do
on this side, and communications may be as readily obtained by writing,
in trance, and by the other means of receiving messages, from embodied
as from disembodied Souls. [Page
92] If each developed within himself the
powers of his own Soul, instead of drifting about aimlessly, or ignorantly
plunging into dangerous experiments, knowledge might be safely accumulated
and the evolution of the Soul might be accelerated. This one thing is sure:
Man is today a living Soul, over whom Death has no power, and the key of
the prison-house of the body is in his own hands, so that he may learn
its use if he will. It is because his true Self, while blinded by the body,
has lost touch with other Selves, that Death has been a gulf instead of
a gateway between embodied and disembodied Souls. [Pages 93-94 - are blank]
APPENDIX
The following passage on the fate of suicides is taken from
the Theosophist, September 1882.
We do not pretend – we are not permitted – to deal exhaustively
with the question at present, but we may refer to one of the most important
classes of entities, who can participate in objective phenomena, other
than Elementaries and Elementals.
This class comprises the Spirits of conscious sane suicides.
They are Spirits, and not Shells, because there is not in
their cases, at any rate until later, a total and permanent divorce between
the fourth and fifth principles on the one hand, and the sixth and seventh
on the other. The two duads are divided, they exist apart, but a line of
connection still unites them, they may yet reunite, and the sorely threatened
personality avert its doom; the fifth principle still holds in its hands
the clue by which, traversing the labyrinth of earthly sins and passions,
it may regain the sacred penetralia. [Page
95] But for the time, though really a
Spirit, and therefore so designated, it is practically not far removed
from a Shell.
This class of Spirit can undoubtedly communicate with men,
but, as a rule, its members have to pay dearly for exercising the privilege,
while it is scarcely possible for them to do otherwise than lower and debase
the moral nature of those with and through whom they have much communication.
It is merely, broadly speaking, a question of degree; of much or little
injury resulting from such communication; the cases in which real, permanent
good can arise are too absolutely exceptional to require consideration.
Understand how the case stands. The unhappy being revolting
against the trials of life-trials, the results of its own former actions;
trials, heaven’s merciful medicine for the mentally and spiritually diseased –
determines, instead of manfully taking arms against a sea of troubles, to
let the curtain drop, and, as it fancies, end them. It destroys the body,
but finds itself precisely as much alive mentally as before. It had an appointed
life-term determined by an intricate web of prior causes, which its own willful
sudden act cannot shorten. That term must run out its appointed sands. You
may smash the lower half of the hand [Page 96] hour-glass,
so that the impalpable sand shooting from the upper bell is dissipated by
the passing aerial currents as it issues; but that stream will run on, unnoticed
though it remain, until the whole store in that upper receptacle is exhausted.
So you may destroy the body, but not the appointed period
of sentient existence, foredoomed (because simply the effect of a plexus
of causes) to intervene before the dissolution of the personality; this
must run on for its appointed period.
This is so in other cases, e.g., those of the victims
of accident or violence; they, too, have to complete their life-term, and
of these, too, we may speak on another occasion – but here it is sufficient
to notice that, whether good or bad, their mental attitude at the time
of death alters wholly their subsequent position. They, too, have to wait
on within the
“Region of Desires” until their wave of life runs on to and reaches its appointed
shore, but they wait on, wrapped in dreams soothing and blissful, or the
reverse, according to their mental and moral state at, and prior to the fatal
hour, but nearly exempt from further material temptations, and, broadly speaking,
incapable (except just at the moment of real death) of communicating scio
motu with mankind, though not wholly beyond the possible reach of [Page 97] the higher forms of the “Accursed Science”, Necromancy. The question is
a profoundly abstruse one; it would be impossible to explain, within the
brief space still remaining to us, how the conditions immediately after death
differ so entirely as they do in the case (1) of the man who deliberately lays
down (not merely risks) his life from altruistic motives in the
hope of saving those of others; and (2) of him who deliberately sacrifices
his life from selfish motives, in the hope of escaping trials and troubles
which loom before him. Nature or Providence, Fate, or God, being merely a
self-adjusting machine, it would at first sight seem as if the result must
be identical in both cases. But, machine though it be, we must remember that
it is a machine sui generis —
Out of himself he span
The eternal web of right and wrong;
And ever feels the subtlest thrill,
The slenderest thread along.
A machine compared with whose perfect sensitiveness and adjustment
the highest human intellect is but a coarse clumsy replica, in petto.
And we must remember that thoughts and motives are material,
and at times marvelously potent material, forces, an we may then begin
to comprehend why the [Page
98] hero, sacrificing his life on pure
altruistic grounds, sinks as his life-blood ebbs way into a sweet dream,
wherein
All that he wishes and all that he loves
Come smiling round his sunny way,
only to wake into active
or objective consciousness when reborn in the Region of Happiness, while
the poor unhappy and misguided mortal who, seeking to elude fate, selfishly
loosens the silver string and breaks the golden bowl, finds himself terribly
alive and awake, instinct with all the evil cravings and desires that embittered
his world-life, without a body in which to gratify these, and capable of
only such partial alleviation as is possible by more or less vicarious
gratification, and this only at the cost of the ultimate complete rupture
with his sixth and seventh principles, and consequent ultimate annihilation
after, alas! prolonged periods of suffering.
Let it not be supposed that there is no hope for
this class – the sane deliberate suicide. If, bearing steadfastly his cross, he
suffers patiently his punishment, striving against carnal appetites still
alive in him, in all their intensity, though, of course, each in proportion
to the degree to which it had been indulged in earth-life –
if, we say, he bears this humbly, never allowing himself to be tempted
here or there into unlawful [Page 99] gratifications of unholy desires – then when his fated
death-hour strikes, his four higher principles reunite, and, in the final
separation that then ensues, it may well be that all may be well with him,
and that he passes on to the gestation period and its subsequent developments. [Page 100]