Death—and After?

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 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 co-existence of intelligent beings, and but a very slight effort of imagination is needed to realise the conception.

Kâmaloka 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 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 Kâmaloka; human beings, who have quitted earth and in whom the kâmic elements were strong, may very readily be attracted by the kâmic 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 Kâmaloka 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 Kâmaloka 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. Says H.P. Blavatsky, after quoting from Plutarch a description of the man after death:

Prâna, 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 Prâna, 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 Prâna, as a distinctively human principle, cannot remain appropriated when its vehicle disintegrates.

The man now is clothed, but with the Kâma Rûpa, or body of Kâma, 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 form which lent it during embodiment the power to feel, to desire, to enjoy, to suffer, in the physical world.

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, for the period of repose that intervenes between two incarnations. But as, at this point, different possibilities arise, let us trace a normal uninterrupted progression in Kâmaloka, 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 parts of his nature, after shaking off the dense body and the etheric double, and after Prâna has re-mingled with the ocean of Life, and he is clothed only with the Kâma Rûpa, the passional elements in him, being but weak and accustomed to comparatively little activity, will not be able to assert themselves strongly in Kâmaloka. Now during earth-life Kâma and the Lower Manas are strongly united and interwoven with each other; in the case we are considering Kâma is weak, and the Lower Manas has purified Kâma 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 Kâma 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, its loves, its hopes, its aspirations, and prepares to pass out of Kâmaloka into the blissful rest of Devachan, the "abode of the Gods", or as some say, "the land of bliss". Kâmaloka

This second death is the passage, then, of the Immortal Triad from the kâmalokic 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 four principles—the Immortal Triad and Kâma—remain in Kâmaloka, whether the period be long or short, days or centuries, they are within the reach of the 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 kâmic elements in the embodied persons may set up vibrations in the desire body of the disembodied, and so reach and rouse the lower Manas, not yet withdrawn to and reunited with its parent, the Spiritual Intelligence. 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:

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 Kâmaloka 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 Kâmaloka, the spiritual Intelligence is clothed with a desire body, which possesses considerable vigour and vitality; the lower Manas, closely interwoven with Kâma during the earth-life just ended, having lived much in the enjoyment of objects of sense and in the pleasures of the emotions, cannot quickly disentangle itself from the web of its own weaving, and return to its Parent Mind, the source of its own being. Hence a considerable delay in the world of transition, in Kâmaloka, 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 and Kâma remain together in Kâmaloka, 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 kâmic 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,[23] as from the teachings received by her from the Adept Brothers, that such communication may occur during two intervals:

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 Kâmaloka 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 Kâmaloka, 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. Their fate in Kâmaloka depends on the conditions which surrounded their outgoings 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:

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.

Premature death brought on by vicious courses, by over-study, or by voluntary sacrifice for some great cause, will bring about delay in Kâmaloka, but the state of the disembodied entity will depend on the motive that cut short the life.

The population of Kâmaloka 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 Kâmaloka clad in the desire body, throbbing with pulses of hatred, 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 Kâmaloka; 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 has quitted Kâmaloka, it passes wholly out of the sphere of earth attractions:

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 the further course of the Triad, we must consider the fate of the now deserted desire body, left as a mere reliquum in Kâmaloka.

Kâmaloka. The Shells.

The Shell is the desire body, emptied of the Triad, which has now passed onwards; it is the third of the transitory garments of Soul, cast aside and left in Kâmaloka 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."

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 intellectual pursuits directed by a self-seeking motive, the desire body may 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 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, &c.—are not more rationally accounted for as the tricky vagaries of sub-human 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.

If we would find our beloved, it is not among the decaying remnants in Kâmaloka that we should seek them. "Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

Kâmaloka. 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:

Students of this series of Manuals know that it is possible for the lower Manas to so entangle itself with Kâma as to wrench itself away from its source, and this is spoken of in Occultism as "the loss of the Soul."[26] 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.

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 that lower Manas be disentangling itself from the kâmic 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 Devasthân, the Devaland, or land of the Gods.[27] And one of the chief difficulties 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 Mâyâ, 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 is it from Reality, and therefore the more illusory it is. What can be a greater fraud than our body, so apparently solid, stable, 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 become 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 illusion still dim his vision they are far thinner than those which clouded it when round him was wrapped the garment of the flesh. His freer and less illusory life is that which is without the body, and the disembodied is, comparatively speaking, his normal state. Out of this normal state he plunges into physical life for brief periods in order that he may gain experiences otherwise unattainable, and bring them back to enrich his more abiding condition. As a diver may plunge into the depths of the ocean to seek a pearl, so the Thinker plunges into the depths of the ocean of life to seek the pearl of experience; but he does not stay there long; it is not his own element; he rises up again into his own atmosphere and shakes off from him the heavier element he leaves. And therefore it is truly said of the Soul that has escaped from earth that it has returned to its own place, for its home is the "land of the Gods", and here on earth it is an exile and a prisoner. This view was very clearly put by a Master of Wisdom in a conversation reported by H.P. Blavatsky, and printed under the title "Life and Death."[28] The following extracts state the case:

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 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:

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 "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", "spirit-wives", and "spirit-infants" that go to school and college, and grow up into spirit-adults.

In "Notes on Devachan",[29] someone who evidently writes with knowledge remarks of the Devachanî:

"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. 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 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:

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.