The Theosophical Society,
The Writings of Alfred Percy Sinnett
Alfred
Percy Sinnett
1840
-1921
Esoteric Buddhism
Chapter 5
Devachan
IT was not possible to approach a consideration of the states into
which the higher human principles pass at death, without first indicating the
general framework of the whole design worked out in the course of the evolution
of man. That much of my task, however, having now been accomplished, we may
pass on to consider the natural destinies of each human Ego in the interval
which elapses between the close of one objective life and the commencement of
another. At the commencement of another, the Karma of the previous objective
life determines the state of life into which the individual shall be born. This
doctrine of Karma is one of the most interesting features of Buddhist
philosophy. There has been no secret about it at any time, though for want of a
proper comprehension of elements in the philosophy, which have been strictly
esoteric, it may sometimes have been misunderstood.
Karma is a collective expression applied to that complicated group
of affinities for good and evil generated by a human being during life, and the
character of which inheres in his fifth principle all through the interval
which elapses between his death out of one objective life and his birth into
the next. As stated sometimes, the doctrine seems to be one which exacts the
notion of a superior spiritual authority summing up the acts of a man’s life at
its close, taking into consideration his good deeds and his bad, and giving
judgment about him on the whole aspect of the case. But a comprehension of the
way in which the human principles divide up at death, will afford a clue to the
comprehension of the way in which Karma operates, and also of the great subject
we may better take up first - the immediate spiritual condition of man after
death.
At death the three lower principles - the body, its mere physical vitality,
and its astral counterpart - are finally abandoned by that which really is the
Man himself, and the four higher principles escape into that world immediately
above our own; above our own, that is, in the order of spirituality - not above
it at all, but in it and of it, as regards real locality - the astral plane or
kâma loca, according to a very familiar Sanskrit expression. Here a division
takes place between the two duads, which the four higher principles include.
The explanation already given concerning the imperfect extent to which the
upper principles of man are as yet developed, will show that this estimation of
the process, as in the nature of a mechanical separation of the principles, is
a rough way of dealing with the matter. It must be modified in the reader’s
mind by the light of what has been already said. It may be otherwise described
as a trial of the extent to which the fifth principle has been developed.
Regarded in the light of the former idea, however, we must conceive the sixth and
seventh principles, on the one hand, drawing the fifth, the human soul, in one
direction, while the fourth draws it back earthwards in the other. Now, the
fifth principle is a very complex entity, separable itself into superior and
inferior elements. In the struggle which takes place between its late companion
principles, its best, purest, most elevated and spiritual portions cling to the
sixth, its lower instincts, impulses and recollections adhere to the fourth,
and it is in a measure torn asunder. The lower remnant, associating itself with
the fourth, floats off in the earth’s atmosphere, while the best elements,
those, be it understood, which really constitute the Ego of the late earthly
personality, the individuality, the consciousness thereof, follow the sixth and
seventh into a spiritual condition, the nature of which we are about to
examine.
Rejecting the popular English name for this spiritual condition,
as encrusted with too many misconceptions to be convenient, let us keep to the
Oriental designation of that region or state into which the higher principles
of human creatures pass at death. This is additionally desirable because,
although the Devachan of Buddhist philosophy corresponds in some respects to
the modern European idea of heaven, it differs from heaven in others which are
even more important.
Firstly, however, in Devachan, that which survives is not merely
the individual monad, which survives through all the changes of the whole
evolutionary scheme, and flits from body to body, from planet to planet, and so
forth - that which survives in Devachan is the man’s own self-conscious
personality, under some restrictions indeed, which we will come to directly,
but still it is the same personality as regards its higher feelings,
aspirations, affections, and even tastes, as it was on earth. Perhaps it would
be better to say the essence of the late self-conscious personality.
It may be worth the reader’s while to learn what Colonel H S.
Olcott has to say in his “Buddhist Catechism” (14th thousand) of the
intrinsic difference between “individuality” and “personality.” Since he wrote
not only under the approval of the High Priest of the Sripada and Galle,
Sumangala, but also under the direct instruction of his Adept Guru, his words
will have weight for the student of occultism. This is what he says in his
appendix: -
“Upon reflection I have submitted ‘personality’ for
‘individuality,’ as written in the first edition. The successive appearances
upon one or many earths, or ‘descents into generation’ of the tanhaically coherent
parts (Skandas) of a certain being, are a succession of personalities. In each
birth the personality differs from that of the previous or next
succeeding birth. Karma, the deus ex machinâ, masks (or shall we say,
reflects?) itself now in the personality of a sage, again as an artisan, and so
on throughout the string of births. But though personalities ever shift, the
one line of life along which they are strung like beads runs unbroken.
“It is ever that particular line, never any other. It is
therefore individual, an individual vital undulation which began in Nirvana or
the subjective side of Nature, as the light or heat undulation through æther
began at its dynamic source; is careering through the objective side of Nature,
under the impulse of Karma and the creative direction of Tanha; and tends
through many cyclic changes back to Nirvana. Mr Rhys Davids calls that which
passes from personality to personality along the individual chain ‘character’
or ‘doing.’ Since ‘character’ is not a mere metaphysical abstraction, but the
sum of one’s mental qualities and moral propensities, would it not help to
dispel what Mr Rhys Davids calls ‘the desperate expedient of a mystery,’ if we
regarded the life undulation as individuality, and each of its series of natal
manifestations as a separate personality?
“The denial of ‘soul’ by Buddha (see ‘Sanyutto Nikaya,’ the Sutta
Pitaka) points to the prevalent delusive belief in an independent transmissible
personality; and entity that could move from birth to birth unchanged, or go to
a place or state where, as such perfect entity, it could eternally enjoy or
suffer. And what he shows is that the ‘I am I’ consciousness is, as regards
permanency, logically impossible, since its elementary constituents constantly
change, and the ‘I’ of one birth differs from the ‘I’ of every other birth. But
everything that I have found in Buddhism accords with the theory of a gradual
evolution of the perfect man - viz. A Buddha through numberless natal
experiences. And in the consciousness of that person who at the end of a given
chain of beings attains Buddha-hood, or who succeeds in attaining the fourth
stage of Dhyâna, or mystic self-development, in any one of his births anterior
to the final one, the scenes of all these serial births are perceptible. In the
‘Jatakattahavannana,’ so well translated by Mr Rhys Davids, an expression
continually recurs which I think rather supports such an idea - viz. ‘Then the
blessed one made manifest an occurrence hidden by change of birth,’ or
‘that which had been hidden by, &c.’ Early Buddhism, then, clearly held to
a permanency of records in the Akâsa, and the potential capacity of man to read
the same when he has evoluted to the stage of true individual enlightenment.”
The purely sensual feelings and tastes of the late personality
will drop off from it in Devachan, but it does not follow that nothing is
preservable in that state, except feelings and thoughts having a direct
reference to religion or spiritual philosophy. On the contrary, all the
superior phases, even of sensuous emotion, find their appropriate sphere of
development in Devachan. To suggest a whole range of ideas by means of one
illustration, a soul in Devachan, if the soul of a man who was passionately
devoted to music, would be continuously enraptured by the sensations music
produces. The person whose happiness of the higher sort on earth had been
entirely centered in the exercise of the affections will miss none in Devachan
of those whom he or she loved. But, at once it will be asked, if some of these
are not themselves fit for Devachan, how then? The answer is, that does not
matter. For the person who loved them they will be there. It is not
necessary to say much more to give a clue to the position. Devachan is a subjective
state. It will seem, as real as the chairs and tables round us; and remember
that, above all things, to the profound philosophy of occultism are the chairs
and tables, and the whole objective scenery of the world, unreal and merely
transitory delusions of sense. As real as the realities of this world to us,
and even more so, will be the realities of Devachan to those who go into that
state.
From this it ensues that the subjective isolation of
Devachan, as it will perhaps be conceived at first, is not real isolation at
all, as the word is understood on the physical plane of existence; it is
companionship with all that the true soul craves for, whether persons, things,
or knowledge. An a patient consideration of the place in Nature which Devachan
occupies will show that this subjective isolation of each human unit is the
only condition which renders possible anything which can be described as a
felicitous spiritual existence after death for mankind at large, and Devachan
is as much a purely and absolutely felicitous condition for all who attain it,
as Avitchi is the reverse of it. There is no inequality or injustice in the
system; Devachan is by no means the same thing for the good and the indifferent
alike, but it is not a life of responsibility, and therefore there is no
logical place for it for suffering, any more than in Avitchi there is any room
for enjoyment or repentance. It is a life of effects, not of causes;
a life of being paid your earnings, not of labouring for them. Therefore it is
impossible to be during that life cognizant of what is going on on earth. Under
the operation of such cognition there would be no true happiness possible in
the state after death. A heaven which constituted a watch-tower, from which the
occupants could still survey the miseries of the earth, would really be a place
of acute mental suffering for its most sympathetic, unselfish, and meritorious
inhabitants. If we invest them in imagination with such a very limited range of
sympathy that they could be imagined as not caring about the spectacle of
suffering after the few persons to whom they were immediately attached had died
and joined them, still they would have a very unhappy period of waiting to go
through before survivors reached the end of an often long and toilsome
existence below. And even this hypothesis would be further vitiated by making
heaven most painful for occupants who were most unselfish and sympathetic,
whose reflected distress would thus continue on behalf of the afflicted race of
mankind generally, even after their personal kindred had been rescued by the
lapse of time. The only escape from this dilemma lies in the supposition that
heaven is not yet opened for business, so to speak, and that all people who
have ever lived from Adam downwards are still lying in a death-like trance,
waiting for the resurrection at the end of the world. This hypothesis also has
its embarrassments, but we are concerned at present with the scientific harmony
of esoteric Buddhism, not with the theories of other creeds.
Readers, however, who may grant that a purview of earthly life
from heaven would render happiness in heaven impossible, may still doubt
whether true happiness is possible in the state, as it may be objected, of
monotonous isolation now described. The objection is merely raised from the
point of view of an imagination that cannot escape from its present
surroundings. To begin with, about monotony. No one will complain of having
experienced monotony during the minute, or moment, or half-hour, as it may have
been of the greatest happiness he may have enjoyed in life. Most people have
had some happy moments, at all events, to look back to for the purpose of this
comparison; and let us take even one such minute or moment, too short to be
open to the least suspicion of monotony, and imagine its sensations immensely
prolonged without any external events in progress to mark the lapse of time.
There is no room, in such a condition of things, for the conception of
weariness. The unalloyed, unchangeable sensation of intense happiness goes on
and on, not for ever, because the causes which have produced it are not
infinite themselves, but for very long periods of time, until the efficient
impulse has exhausted itself.
Nor must it be supposed that there is, so to speak, no change of
occupation for souls in Devachan - that any one moment of earthly sensation is
selected for exclusive perpetuation. As a teacher of the highest authority on
this subject writes: -
“There are two fields of causal manifestations - the objective and
subjective. The grosser energies - those which operate in the denser condition
of matter - manifest objectively in the next physical life, their outcome being
the new personality of each birth marshaling within the grand cycle of the
evolving individuality. It is but the moral and spiritual activities that find
their sphere of effects in Devachan. And, thought and fancy being limitless,
how can it be argued for one moment that there is anything like monotony in the
state of Devachan? Few are the men whose lives were so utterly destitute of
feeling, love, or of a more or less intense predilection for some one line of
thought as to be made unfit for a proportionate period of Devachanic experience
beyond their earthly life. So, for instance, while the vices, physical and
sensual attractions, say, of a great philosopher, but a bad friend and a
selfish man, may result in the birth of a new and still greater intellect, but
at the same time a most miserable man, reaping the Karmic effects of all the
causes produced by the ‘old’ being, and whose make-up was inevitable from the
pre-ponderating proclivities of that being in the preceding birth, the
intermedial period between the two physical births cannot be, in
Nature’s exquisitely well-adjusted laws, but a hiatus of unconsciousness.
There can be no such dreary blank as kindly promised, or rather implied, by
Christian Protestant theology, to the ‘departed souls,’ which, between death
and ‘resurrection,’ have to hang on in space, in mental catalepsy, awaiting the
‘Day of Judgment.’ Causes produced by mental and spiritual energy being far
greater and more important than those that are created by physical impulses,
their effects have to be, for weal or woe, proportionately as great. Lives on
this earth, or other earths, affording no proper field for such effects, and
every labourer being entitled to his own harvest, they have to expand in either
Devachan or Avitchi. [The lowest states of Devachan interchain with those of
Avitchi.] Bacon for instance, whom a poet called
‘The brightest, wisest, meanest of mankind,’might reappear
in his next incarnation as a greedy money-getter, with extraordinary
intellectual capacities. But, however great the latter, they would find no
proper field in which that particular line of thought, pursued during his
previous lifetime by the founder of modern philosophy, could reap all its dues.
It would be but the astute lawyer, the corrupt Attorney-General, the ungrateful
friend, and the dishonest Lord Chancellor, who might find, led on by his Karma,
a congenial new soil in the body of the money-lender, and reappear as a
new Shylock. But where would Bacon, the incomparable thinker, with whom
philosophical inquiry upon the most profound problems of Nature was his ‘first
and last and only love,’ where would this ‘intellectual giant of his race,’
once disrobed of his lower nature, go to? Have all the effects of that
magnificent intellect to vanish and disappear? Certainly not. Thus his moral
and spiritual qualities would also have to find a field in which their energies
could expand themselves. Devachan is such a field. Hence all the great plans of
moral reform, of intellectual research into abstract principles of Nature - all
the divine, spiritual aspirations that had so filled the brightest part of his
life would, in Devachan, come to fruition; and the abstract entity, known in
the preceding birth as Francis Bacon, and that maybe known in its
subsequent re-incarnation as a despised usurer - that Bacon’s own creation, his
Frankenstein, the son of his Karma - shall in the meanwhile occupy itself in
this inner world, also of its own preparation, in enjoying the effects of the
grand beneficial spiritual causes sown in life. It would live a purely and
spiritually conscious existence - a dream of realistic vividness - until Karma,
being satisfied in that direction, and the ripple of force reaching the edge of
its sub-cycle basin, the being should move into its next area of causes, either
in this same world or another, according to his stage of progression . . . . Therefore,
there is’ a change of occupation,’ a continual change, in Devachan. For
that dreamlife is but the fruition, the harvest-time, of those psychic
seed-germs dropped from the tree of physical existence in our moments of dream
and hope - fancy-glimpses of bliss and happiness, stifled in an ungrateful
social soil, blooming in the rosy dawn of Devachan, and ripening under its
ever-fructifying sky. If man had but one single moment of ideal experience, not
even then could it be, as erroneously supposed, the indefinite prolongation of
that ‘single moment.’ That one note, struck from the lyre of life, would form
the key-note of the being’s subjective state, and work out into numberless
harmonic tones and semitones of psychic phantasmagoria. There, all unrealized
hopes, aspirations, dreams, become fully realized, and the dreams of the
objective become the realities of the subjective existence. And there, behind
the curtain of Maya, its vaporous and deceptive appearances are perceived by
the Initiate, who has learned the great secret how to penetrate thus deep into
the Arcana of Being . . . .”
As physical existence has its cumulative intensity from infancy to
prime, and its diminishing energy thenceforward to dotage and death, so the
dream-life of Devachan is lived correspondentially. There is the first flutter
of psychic life, the attainment of prime, the gradual exhaustion of force
passing into conscious lethargy, semi-unconsciousness, 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 in another
term of Devachan.
“It is not a reality then, it is a mere dream,” objectors will urge;
“the soul so bathed in a delusive sensation of enjoyment, which has no reality
all the while, is being cheated by Nature, and must encounter a terrible shock
when it wakes to its mistake.” But, in the nature of things, it never does or
can wake. The waking from Devachan is its next birth into objective life, and
the draught of Lethe has then been taken. Nor as regards the isolation of each
soul is there any consciousness of isolation whatever; nor is there ever
possibly a parting from its chosen associates. Those associates are not in the
nature of companions who may wish to go away, of friends who may tire of the
friend that loves them, even if he or she does not tire of them. Love, the
creating force, has placed their living image before the personal soul which
craves for their presence, and that image will never fly away.
On this aspect of the subject I may again avail myself of the
language of my teacher:-
“Objectors of that kind will be simply postulating an incongruity,
an intercourse of entities in Devachan, which applies only to the mutual
relationship of physical existence! Two sympathetic souls, both disembodied,
will each work out its own Devachanic sensations, making the other a sharer in
its subjective bliss. This will be as real to them, naturally, as though both
were yet on this earth. Nevertheless, each is dissociated from the other as
regards personal or corporeal association. While the latter is the only one of
its kind that is recognized by our earth experience as an actual
intercourse, for the Devachanee it would be not only something unreal, but
could have no existence for it in any sense, not even as a delusion: a
physical body or even a Mâyâvi-rûpa remaining to its spiritual senses as
invisible as it is itself to the physical senses of those who loved it best on
earth. Thus even though one of the ‘sharers’ were alive and utterly unconscious
of that intercourse in his waking state, still every dealing with him would be
to the Devachanee an absolute reality, And what actual companionship
could there ever be other than the purely idealistic one, as above described,
between two subjective entities which are not even as material as that
ethereal body-shadow - the Mâyâvi-rûpa? To object to this on the ground that
one is thus ‘cheated by Nature,’ and to call it ‘ a delusive sensation of
enjoyment which has no reality,’ is to show oneself utterly unfit to comprehend
the conditions of life and being outside of our material existence. For how can
the same distinction be made in Devachan - i.e. outside of the conditions of
earth-life - between what we call a reality and a factitious or an artificial
counterfeit of the same, in this, our world? The same principle cannot apply to
the two sets of conditions. It is conceivable that what we call a reality in
our embodied physical state will exist under the same conditions as an
actuality for a disembodied entity? On earth, man is dual - in the sense of
being a thing of matter and a thing of spirit; hence the natural distinction
made by his mind - the analyst of his physical sensations and spiritual
perceptions - between an actuality and a fiction; though, even in this life,
the two groups of faculties are constantly equilibrating each other, each group
when dominant seeing as fiction or delusion what the other believes to be most
real. But in Devachan our Ego has ceased to be dualistic, in the above sense,
and becomes a spiritual, mental entity. That which was a fiction, a dream in
life, and which had its being but in the region of ‘fancy,’ becomes, under the
new conditions of existence, the only possible reality. Thus, for us to
postulate the possibility of any other reality for a Devachanee is to maintain
an absurdity, a monstrous fallacy, an idea unphilosophical to the last degree.
The actual is that which is acted or performed de facto: ‘the reality of
a thing is proved by its actuality.’ And the suppositions and artificial having
no possible existence in that Devachanic state, the logical sequence is that
everything in it is actual and real. For, again, whether overshadowing the five
principles during the life of the personality, or entirely separated from the
grosser principles by the dissolution of the body - the sixth principle, or our
‘Spiritual Soul,’ has no substance - it is ever Arupa; nor is it confined to
one place with a limited horizon of perceptions around it. Therefore, whether in
or out of its mortal body it is ever distinct, and free from its
limitations; and if we call its Devachanic experiences ‘a cheating of Nature,’
then we should never be allowed to call ‘reality’ any of those purely abstract
feelings that belong entirely to, and are reflected and assimilated by, our higher
soul - such, for instance, as an ideal perception of the beautiful, profound
philanthropy, love, &c., as well as every other purely spiritual sensation
that during life fills our inner being with either immense joy or pain.”
We must remember that by the very nature of the system described
there are infinite varieties of well-being in Devachan, suited to the infinite
varieties of merit in mankind. If “the next world” really were the objective
heaven which ordinary theology preaches, there would be endless injustice and
inaccuracy in its operation. People, to begin with, would be either admitted or
excluded, and the differences of favour shown to different guests within the
all-favoured region would not sufficiently provide for differences of merit in
this life. But the real heaven of our earth adjusts itself to the needs and
merits of each new arrival with unfailing certainty. Not merely as regards the
duration of the blissful state, which is determined by the causes engendered
during objective life, but as regards the intensity and amplitude of the
emotions which constitute that blissful state, the heaven of each person who
attains the really existent heaven is precisely fitted to his capacity for
enjoying it. It is the creation of his own aspirations and faculties. More than
this it may be impossible for the uninitiated comprehension to realize. But
this indication of its character is enough to show how perfectly it falls into
its appointed place in the whole scheme of evolution.
“Devachan,” to resume my direct quotations, “is, of course, a state,
not a locality, as much as Avitchi, its antithesis (which please not to
confound with hell). Esoteric Buddhist philosophy has three principal lokas
so-called - namely, 1. Kâma loka; 2. Rûpa loka; and 3. Arûpa
loka; or in their literal translation and meaning - 1. world of desires or
passions, of unsatisfied earthly cravings - the abode of ‘Shells’ and Victims,
of Elementaries and Suicides; 2. the world of forms - i.e., of shadows more
spiritual, having form and objectivity, but no substance; and 3. the formless
world, or rather the world of no form, the incorporeal, since its denizens can
have neither body, shape, nor colour for us mortals, and in the sense that we
give to these terms. These are the three spheres of ascending spirituality in
which the several groups of subjective and semi-subjective entities find their
attractions. All but the suicides and the victims of premature violent deaths
go, according to their attractions and powers, either into the Devachanic or
the Avitchi state, which two states form the numberless subdivisions of Rûpa
and Arûpa lokas - that is to say, that such states not only vary in degree, or
in their presentation to the subject entity as regards form, colour, &c.,
but that there is an infinite scale of such states, in their progressive
spirituality and intensity of feeling, from the lowest in the Rûpa, up to the
highest and the most exalted in the Arûpa-loka. The student must bear in mind
that personality is the synonym for limitation; and that the more
selfish, the more contracted the person’s ideas, the closer will he cling to
the lower spheres of being, the longer loiter on the plane of selfish social
intercourse.”
Devachan being a condition of mere subjective enjoyment, the
duration and intensity of which is determined by the merit and spirituality of
the earth-life last past, there is no opportunity, while the soul inhabits it,
for the punctual requital of evil deeds. But Nature does not content herself
with either forgiving sins in a free and easy way, or damning sinners outright,
like a lazy master too indolent, rather than too good-natured, to govern his
household justly. The Karma of evil, be it great or small, is at certainly
operative at the appointed time as the Karma of good. But the place of its
operation is not Devachan, but either a new rebirth, or Avitchi - a state to be
reached only in exceptional cases and by exceptional natures. In other words,
while the common-place sinner will reap the fruits of his evil deeds in a
following re-incarnation, the exceptional criminal, the aristocrat of sin, has
Avitchi in prospect - that is to say, the condition of subjective spiritual
misery which is the reverse side of Devachan.
“Avitchi is a state of the most ideal spiritual wickedness,
something akin to the state of Lucifer, so superbly described by Milton. Not
many, though, are there who can reach it, as the thoughtful reader will
perceive. And if it is urged that since there is Devachan for nearly all, for
the good, the bad, and the indifferent, the ends of harmony and equilibrium are
frustrated, and the law of retribution and of impartial, implacable justice,
hardly met and satisfied by such a comparative scarcity, if not absence of its
antithesis, then the answer will show that it is not so. ‘Evil is
the dark son of Earth (matter), and Good - the fair daughter of Heaven’
(or Spirit), says the Chinese philosopher; hence the place of punishment for
most of our sins is the earth - its birth-place and play-ground. There is more
apparent and relative than actual evil even on earth, and it is not given to
the hoi polloi to reach the fatal grandeur and eminence of a ‘Satan’
every day.”
Generally the re-birth into objective existence is the event for
which the Karma of evil patiently waits; and then it irresistibly asserts
itself, not that the Karma of good exhausts itself in Devachan, leaving the
unhappy monad to develop a new consciousness with no material beyond the evil
deeds of its last personality. The re-birth will be qualified by the merit as
well as the demerit of the previous life, but the Devachan existence is a rosy
sleep - a peaceful night, with dreams more vivid than day, and imperishable for
many centuries.
It will be seen that the Devachan state is only one of the
conditions of existence which go to make up the whole spiritual or relatively
spiritual complement of our earth life. Observers of spiritualistic phenomena
would never have been perplexed, as they have been, if there were no other but
the Devachan state to be dealt with. For once in Devachan there is very little
opportunity for communication between a spirit, then wholly absorbed in its own
sensations and practically oblivious of the earth left behind, and its former
friends still living. Whether gone before or yet remaining on earth, those
friends, if the bond of affection has been sufficiently strong, will be with
the happy spirit still, to all intents and purposes for him, and as happy,
blissful, innocent, as the disembodied dreamer himself. It is possible,
however, for yet living persons to have visions of Devachan, though such
visions are rare, and only one-sided, the entities in Devachan, sighted by the
earthly clairvoyant, being quite unconscious themselves of undergoing such
observation. The spirit of the clairvoyant ascends into the condition of
Devachan in such rare visions, and thus becomes subject to the vivid delusions
of that existence. It is under the impression that the spirits, with which it
is in Devachanic bonds of sympathy, have come down to visit earth and itself,
while the converse operation has really taken place. The clairvoyant’s spirit
has been raised towards those in Devachan. Thus many of the subjective
spiritual communications - most of them when the sensitives are pure-minded -
are real, though it is most difficult for the uninitiated medium to fix in his
mind the true and correct pictures of what he sees and hears. In the same way
some of the phenomena called psychography (though more rarely) are also real.
The spirit of the sensitive, getting odylized, so to say, by the aura of the spirit
in the Devachan, becomes for a few minutes that departed personality,
and writes in the handwriting of the latter, in his language and in his
thoughts, as they were during his lifetime. The two spirits become blended in
one, and the preponderance of one over the other during such phenomena
determines the preponderance of personality in the characteristic exhibited.
Thus it may incidentally be observed, what is called rapport, is, in
plain fact, an identity of molecular vibration between the astral part of the
incarnate medium and the astral part of the disincarnate personality.
As already indicated, and as the common sense of the mater would
show, there are great varieties of states in Devachan, and each personality
drops into its befitting place there. Thence, consequently he emerges in his
befitting place in the world of causes, this earth or another, as the case may
be, when his time for re-birth comes. Coupled with survival of the affinities,
comprehensively described as Karma, the affinities both for good and evil
engendered by the previous life, this process will be seen to accomplish
nothing less than an explanation of the problem which has always been regarded
as so incomprehensible - the inequalities of life. The conditions on which we
enter life are the consequences of the use we have made of our last set of
conditions. They do not impede the development of fresh Karma, whatever they
may be, for this will be generated by the use we make of them in turn.
Nor is it to be supposed that every event of a current life which bestows joy
or sorrow is old Karma bearing fruit. Many may be the immediate consequences of
acts in the life to which they belong - ready-money transactions with Nature,
so to speak, of which it may be hardly necessary to make any entry in her
books. But the great inequalities of life, as regards the start in it which
different human beings make, is a manifest consequence of old Karma, the
infinite varieties of which always keep up a constant supply of recruits for
all the manifold varieties of human condition.
It must not be supposed that the real Ego slips instantaneously at
death from the earth life and its entanglements, into the Devachanic condition.
When the division of, or purification of the fifth principle has been
accomplished in Kâma loca by the contending attractions of the fourth and sixth
principles, the real Ego passes into a period of unconscious gestation. I have
spoken already of the way in which the Devachanic life is in itself a process
of growth, maturity, and decline; but the analogies of earth are even more
closely preserved. There is a spiritual ante-natal state at the entrance to
spiritual life, as there is a similar and equally unconscious physical state at
the entrance to objective life. And this period, in different cases, may be of
very different duration - from a few moments to immense periods of years. When
a man dies, his soul or fifth principle becomes unconscious and loses all
remembrance of things internal as wall as external. Whether his stay in Kâma loca
has to last but a few moments, hours, days, weeks, months or years, whether he
dies a natural or a violent death, whether this occurs in youth or age, and
whether the Ego has been good, bad, or indifferent, his consciousness leaves
him as suddenly as the flame leaves a wick when it is blown out. When life has
retired from the last particle of the brain matter, his perceptive faculties
become extinct for ever, and his spiritual powers of cognition and volition
become for the time being as extinct as the others. His Mâyâvi-rûpa may be
thrown into objectivity, as in the case of apparitions after death, but unless
it is projected by a conscious or intense desire to see or appear to some one
shooting through the dying brain, the apparition will be simply automatic. The
revival of consciousness in Kâma loca is obviously, from what has been said, a
phenomenon that depends on the characteristic of the principles passing,
unconsciously at the moment, out of the dying body. It may become tolerably
complete under circumstances by no means to be desired, or it may be
obliterated by a rapid passage into the gestation state leading to Devachan.
This gestation state may be of very long duration in proportion to the Ego’s
spiritual stamina, and Devachan accounts for the remainder of the period
between death and the next physical re-birth. The whole period is, of course,
of very varying length in the case of different persons, but re-birth in less
than fifteen hundred years is spoken of as almost impossible, while the stay in
Devachan, which rewards a very rich Karma is sometimes said to extend to
enormous periods.
ANNOTATIONS
The comments I have to make on the doctrine embodied in the
foregoing chapter will be postponed most conveniently to the end of the next,
and offered in connection with those applying to the conditions of Kâma loca.
The Theosophical Society,
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