The Bardo: From Death until the next Incarnation
Summary of Stages During the Period from death to reincarnation called the Bardo
• At death, the physical, etheric and astral bodies are cast off and constitute the shell of the lower triad
• Suicides and accidental deaths are special cases
• Struggle between the lower mental (4 th Principle) and causal body (5 th, 6 th & 7 th Principles)
• Formation of residue 4 th or 5 th Principle shells
• Upper causal body enters Gestation Period
• Rebirth of causal body (with absorbed 5 th characteristics) into Devachan
• Causal body re-emerges from Devachan completely cleansed
• Causal body is reincarnated on the physical plane
• Septenary Composition of Man
In line with the Septenary Principle, each person is made up of the seven bodies as listed below. The role of all these bodies will be discussed in detail below:
Seven Vehicles of Man
Separation at Death
7- Atmic Vehicle or Seventh Principle
These three vehicles join to form the Causal Body or Spiritual Ego which Survives Until reincarnated
6- Buddhic Vehicle or Sixth Principle
5- Higher Mental or Fifth Principle
4-Lower Mental or Fourth Principle
This vehicle disintegrates after the quartenary struggle before gestation
3-Astral or Third Principle
These three vehicles are cast off as a Shell which eventually disintegrates
2-Etheric or Second Principle
Dies and returns to dust
1-Dense Physical Vehicle or First Principle
Death and Rebirth within the confines of our Planet (Round IV)
The worlds of effects are not really localities. They are the shadow of the world of causes, their souls which like men, their seven principles that develop and grow simultaneously with the body.
• Thus the body of man is wedded to and remains within the body of his planet during a given Round;
• his individual jivatma life principle, that which is called in physiology animal spirits returns after death to its source — Fohat ;
• his linga shariram (etheric) will be drawn into Akasa ;
• his Kama rupa (Astral emotional body) will recommingle with the Universal Sakti — the Will-Force, or universal energy;
• his “animal soul” borrowed from the breath of Universal Mind will return to the Dhyan Chohans;
• his sixth principle — whether drawn into or ejected from the matrix of the Great Passive Principle must remain in its own sphere — either as part of the crude material or as an individualized entity to be reborn in a higher world of causes.
• The seventh will carry it from the Devachan and follow the new Ego to its place of re-birth. . . .
BARDO
• “Bardo” is the period between death and rebirth — and may last from a few years to a kalpa (a very long period). It is divided into three sub-periods:
• The human ego still embodied in the 4 th to 7 th vehicles, enters into Kama-Loka (the world of desire, abode of Elementaries). This may last from a few minutes to a number of years — the phrase “a few years”
• It then enters into its “Gestation State” which can be “very long”, longer sometimes than you may even imagine, yet proportionate to the Ego's spiritual stamina
• Then it is reborn in the Rupa-Loka of Devachan. lasts in proportion to the good KARMA,
• Finally, the monad is again reincarnated. “ As the devas emerge from these heavens, they enter the lower world again;” i.e ., they leave a world of bliss to be reborn in a world of causes.
CASTING OFF THE LOWER TRIAD SHELL
• The experience of dying men — by drowning and other accidents — brought back to life, has corroborated our doctrine in almost every case. Such thoughts are involuntary and we have no more control over them than we would over the eye's retina to prevent it perceiving that colour which affects it most.
• 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 the other. The dying brain dislodges memory with a strong supreme impulse, and memory restores faithfully every impression entrusted to it during the period of the brain's activity. The strongest impressions naturally become the most vivid and survive while the rest of the weaker impressions vanish and disappear, to reappear only when approaching the state called Devachan.
• The most intense and uppermost thoughts of his dying brain at the time of dissolution will of course regulate all the other “moments”. Still the minor and less vivid memories will be there also, having their appointed place in this phantasmagoric marshalling of past dreams, and must give variety to the whole.
• No man dies insane or unconscious — as some physiologists assert. Even a mad man, or one in a fit of delirium will experience perfect lucidity at the moment of death. Even though the man may often appear dead, from the last throbbing of his heart and until the moment when the last spark of animal heat leaves the body — the brain thinks and the Ego relives in those few brief seconds the person's whole life.
• For those who assist at a death-bed and find themselves in the solemn presence of Death, speak in whispers. Especially keep quiet just after Death has laid her clammy hand upon the body. Speak in whispers, I say, lest you disturb the quiet ripple of thought, and hinder the busy work of the Past casting its reflection upon the Veil of the Future.
• Thus, when man dies, his “Soul” (fifth prin.) becomes unconscious and loses all remembrance of things internal as well as external. Whether his stay in Kama Loka has to last but a few moments, hours, days, weeks, months or years; whether he died a natural or a violent death; whether it occurred in his young or old age, and, whether the human Ego was good, bad or indifferent, — his consciousness leaves him as suddenly as the flame leaves the wick, when blown out. When life has retired from the last particle in the brain matter, his perceptive physical faculties become extinct and his spiritual powers of cogitation and volition are suspended for the time being.
• His etheric body may become apparent to the objective world, as in the cases of apparitions after death; but, unless an intense desire to see or appear to someone, shoots through the dying brain, the apparition will be simply passing. It will not be due to any sympathetic attraction or act of volition. It will be no more than the reflection of a person passing unconsciously near a mirror.
• At death, man's second and third principles die with him leaving a shell behind which will survive for a time, assuming that the spiritual monad temporarily engaged in this incarnation will find enough decent material in the fifth to lay hold of. The lower triad thus disappears.
• This left-behind shell (etheric and astral bodies) will have no consciousness directly after death, because “it requires a certain time to establish its new centre of gravity and evolve its perception proper.” It retains a dim recollection of the purely physical life of the former personality.
QUATERNARY STRUGGLE
• After the shell has dropped off, the remaining fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh principles form the surviving Quaternary. A struggle ensues between the Upper (5 th , 6 th & 7 th principles) and the Lower (4 th principle) known as mind or manas duads.
• If the lower half wins:
• if the Lower half wins the struggle, the fifth principle will draw out all personal recollections and perceptions of the former person's individuality in the sixth. This lower half will not remain in Kama-Loka — “the world of Desire” or our Earth's atmosphere, but Like a straw floating within the attraction of the vortices and pits of the Maelstrom, it will join the great whirlpool of human Egos that lie between the Kama-Loka and the Rupa - Loka in a locality called the dwelling of ‘Mara' (Death).
• Mara, is the allegorical image of the sphere called the “Planet of Death” — the whirlpool into which disappear the lives doomed to destruction. It is between Kama and Rupa -Lokas that the struggle takes place. This Mara filled with passion and lust, destroys all virtuous principles, as a stone grinds corn.
• This lost personal life becomes like a torn out page in the great Book of Lives , without even a disconnected word left to mark its absence. Since the purified monad does not remain in the “World of Forms” ( rupa-loka ) it cannot perceive or remember its past rebirths and retains not even the slightest trace that it had been in the world of form.
“. . . that light which shines beyond our mortal ken
The light of all the lives in all the worlds” —
throws no ray upon that personal life in the series of lives foregone.
• To the credit of mankind, such an utter obliteration of an existence from the tablets of Universal Being does not occur often enough to make a great percentage and is an exception, not the rule.
• The sixth and seventh principles left behind become a purely spiritual, individual MONAD, with nothing left in it of the late personality, has no regular “gestation” period to pass through, since there is no purified personal Ego to be reborn. It will find itself reborn in another personality on the next planet after a more or less prolonged period of unconscious rest in the boundless Space.
• In this case the monad has no Karmic body to guide its rebirth and falls thus into non-being for a certain period before reincarnating.
• If the upper half (5 th , 6 th , and 7 th principles) wins:
• The sixth principle will draw unto itself the quintessence of Good from the upper mental body, fifth principle, of the former personality. This includes the 5 th principle's nobler affections, its saintly (though they be earthly ) aspirations, and the most Spiritualized portions of its higher mind. In essence all the good of the fifth joins into the sixth which in turn joins the seventh principle to form upper triad known as the Spiritual Ego
• The Spiritual Ego will not think of the shell left behind , any more than it will think of the last suit of clothes it wore; nor will it be conscious that the individuality is gone, since the only individuality and Spiritual personality it will then behold [will be] in itself alone.
• The Spiritual Ego steps outside our world of desire and crosses “Golden Bridge” leading to the “Seven Golden Mountains” and moves into the “Gestation” State. At this stage it is impossible for the Spiritual Ego to communicate with the earth, even through mediums.
• In exceptional cases, victims of accident sometimes though rarely, can communicate with us through mediums . Suicides can and generally do.
• In both cases, the good and pure sleep a quiet blissful sleep, full of happy visions of earth-life, and have no consciousness of being already forever beyond that life. Those who were neither good nor bad, will sleep a dreamless, still a quiet sleep.
• The wicked, in proportion to their grossness, will suffer the pangs of a nightmare lasting years: their thoughts become living things; their wicked passions — real substance, and they receive back on their heads all the misery they have heaped upon others. Reality and fact if described would yield a far more terrible Inferno than even Dante had imagined!
• Adepts or sorcerers know they are dead in their physical body. These two are the exceptions to the general rule . Both have been “co-workers with nature,” the former for good , the latter for bad . In a sense, they are the only ones who may be called immortal — in the Kabalistic and the esoteric sense-- because they experience an unlimited sentient existence, with no breaks and stoppages, no arrest of Self -consciousness.
THE GESTATION STAGE
• The Gestation state is “very long”and proportionate to the Spiritual Ego's spiritual stamina. It is an unconscious state where the Ego is cleansed and emerges as innocent and pure as a new-born babe, ready to enter Devachan.
• Before going into gestation, there is the final severance between the duads: the Upper and Lower halves. An impassable gulf between them forms. The Manas shorn of its finest attributes, becomes like a flower from which all the aroma has suddenly departed, a rose crushed, and having been made to yield all its oil for the attar manufacture purposes. What is left behind is but the smell of decaying grass, earth and rottenness.
THE SHELL THAT REMAINS AFTER THE QUARTERNARY STRUGGLE
• The shell that is cast off after the Quartenary Struggle roams in the earth's atmosphere. Half the personal memory is gone but the more brutal instincts remain fully alive for a certain period. This shell is in short like an “Elementary”. It is this shell that the average medium is in contact with.
• Remembrances return to this shell far more slowly, imperfectly and incompletely . With the sixth and seventh principles gone, so the finer, spiritual portions of that which once was the personal consciousness of the fifth, fade out. The shell gradually develops a kind of hazy consciousness of its own from what remains of the personality's shadow. Shells would remind anyone more of the inmates of a lunatic asylum who play parts in private theatricals as means of hygienic recreation. The slightest shock will throw them off the track and send them off raving.
• Even the shells of good men will regain their remembrance and an appearance of Self-consciousness, only after the sixth and seventh principles with the essence of the 5th (the latter having to furnish the material for even that partial recollection of personality which is necessary for the object in Devachan) — have gone to their gestation period, not before .
• If the spiritual qualities that the Sixth has drawn from the Fifth prove to be too weak to be reborn in Devachan, the sixth and seventh principles will then and there reclothe itself in a new body — and enter upon a new earth existence, whether upon this or any other planet. The fifth, the manas, will have to remain a shell and will have no time to visit mediums, because it will begin sinking down to the eighth sphere almost immediately.
• In this case, the monad will no longer have a Karmic body to guide its rebirth and will fall into non-being for a certain period— certainly not less than a thousand or two thousand years—before it can reincarnate. No, this is not an “exceptional case.” Except for a few exceptional cases involving our Teshu-Lamas and the Bodhisatwas and a few others, no monad ever gets reincarnated before its appointed cycle.
• The cast-off shell will have no time to visit mediums, for it begins sinking down to the eighth sphere almost immediately for a mighty long period.
• “Know yourself” is a direct command of the oracle to the Spiritual monad in Devachan ; and the “heresy of Individuality” is a doctrine propounded by Tathagata with an eye to the shell. It is not conscious of this loss of cohesion. Besides, such a feeling in a shell being quite useless for nature's purposes, it could hardly realize something that could be never even dreamed by a medium or its affinities. It is dimly conscious of its own physical death — after a prolonged period of time though — that's all.
• The few exceptions to this rule — cases of half successful sorcerers, of very wicked persons passionately attached to Self — offer a real danger to the living. These very material shells, whose last dying thought was Self, — Self, — Self — and to live, to live! will often feel it instinctively. So do some suicides — though not all. What happens then is terrible for it becomes a case of post mortem lycanthropy. The shell will cling so tenaciously to its semblance of life that it will seek refuge in a new organism in any beast — in a dog, a hyæna, a bird when no human organism is close at hand — rather than submit to annihilation.
• But what is then “the nature of the remembrance and self-consciousness of the shell?” No better than a reflected or borrowed light. “Memory” is one thing, and “perceptive faculties” quite another. A madman may remember very clearly some portions of his past life; yet he is unable to perceive anything in its true light for the higher portion of his Manas and his Buddhi are paralysed in him, have left him. Could an animal — a dog, for instance — speak, he would prove [to] you that his memory in direct relation to his canine personality is as fresh as yours; nevertheless his memory and instinct cannot be called “perceptive faculties.” A dog remembers that his master thrashed him when the latter gets hold of his stick — at all other times he has no remembrance of it. Thus with a shell; once in the aura of a medium, all he perceives through the borrowed organs of the medium and of those in magnetic sympathy with the latter, he will perceive very clearly — but not further than what the shell can find in the perceptive faculties and memories of circle and medium — hence often the rational and at times highly intelligent answers; hence also a complete oblivion of things known to all but that medium and circle.
• The shell of a highly intelligent, learned, but utterly unspiritual man who died a natural death, will last longer, and the shadow of his own memory helping — that shadow which is the refuse of the sixth principle left in the fifth — he may deliver discourses through trance speakers and repeat parrotlike that which he knew of and thought much over it, during his life-time. But find me one single instance in the annals of Spiritualism where a returning shell said one word more than it knew during its life-time. Where is that scientific shell, that ever gave evidence of that which is claimed on behalf of the “disembodied Spirit ” — namely, that a free Soul, the Spirit disenthralled from its body's fetters perceives and sees that which is concealed from living mortal eyes?
• Challenge the Spiritualists (today's New Agers) fearlessly, I say! Defy the best, the most reliable of mediums to give you through that high disembodied shell to tell you what you will have hidden in your box, or to repeat to you a line from a Sanskrit manuscript unknown to his medium, or anything of that kind. Pro pudore! Spirits they call them? Spirits with personal remembrances? Personal consciousness does leave everyone at death; and when even the centre of memory is re-established in the shell, it will remember and speak out its recollections but through the brain of some living human being.
SPIRITUAL EGO ENTERS DEVACHAN
• “Who goes to Devachan?” The beatified, purified, holy personal Ego which we now can call the spiritual Ego — the combination of the sixth and seventh principles — which, after the period of unconscious gestation, is reborn into the Devachan. It is of necessity as innocent and pure as a new-born babe.
• Man's purely spiritual sixth principle (Buddhic body) cannot exist or have conscious being in the Devachan, unless it assimilates some of the more abstract and pure mental attributes of the fifth principle or animal Soul (higher mental body), its manas (mind) and memory. The sixth and seventh principles apart from the rest constitute the eternal, imperishable, but also unconscious “Monad.” To awaken in it to life, the latent consciousness, especially that of personal individuality, requires the monad plus the highest attributes of the fifth principle — the “animal Soul”. It is this animal soul that makes the ethereal Ego which lives and enjoys bliss in the Devachan.
• Every one is fitted to pass into a relative “spiritual” condition that is adjusted to his previous condition in life and mode of thought. The fact of its being reborn at all, shows the preponderance of good over evil in his old personality. And while the Karma (of evil) steps aside for the time being to follow him in his future earth-reincarnation, 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.
• The Spiritual Ego does not fall headlong into devachan but sinks gradually into it by easy stages. With the first dawn of that state appears that life (or rather is once more lived over by the Ego) from its first day of consciousness to its last. From the most important down to the most trifling event, all are marshalled before the spiritual eye of the Spiritual Ego. The Spiritual Ego then chooses certain scenes and actors that will remain with it permanently in devachan.
• Out of the resurrected Past nothing remains but what the Spiritual Ego has felt spiritually — that was evolved by and through, and lived over by his spiritual faculties — be they love or hatred . All that I am now trying to describe is in truth — indescribable. As no two men, not even two photographs of the same person, nor yet two leaves resemble line for line each other, so no two states in Devachan are like. Unless he be an adept, who can realize such a state in his periodical Devachan — how can one be expected to form a correct picture of the same?
• Most emphatically “the Devachan is not solely the heritage of adepts,” and most decidedly there is a “heaven” — if you must use this astro-geographical Christian term — for “an immense number of those who have gone before.” While in Devachan, the Ego cannot watch “the life of Earth” for reasons of the Law of Bliss plus Maya .
• No sensual, material or unholy recollection can follow the purified memory of the Ego to the region of Bliss. The Karma recollections of evil deeds and thought will again reach the Ego when it assumes another personality in the world of causes again. “No sorrow or Pain for those born there (in the Rupa-Loka of Devachan); for this is the Pure-land. The Monad , or the “Spiritual Individuality,” remains untainted throughout this process though.
• Of course devachan is a state of intense selfishness , during which Spiritual Ego reaps the reward of his unselfishness on earth. He is completely engrossed in the bliss of all his personal earthly affections, preferences and thoughts, and gathers in the fruit of his meritorious actions. No pain, no grief nor even the shadow of a sorrow comes to darken the bright horizon of his unalloyed happiness: for, it is a state of perpetual “Maya.” . . Since the conscious perception of one's personality on earth is but an evanescent dream, that sense will be equally that of a dream in the Devachan — only a hundred fold intensified. So much so, indeed, that the happy Ego is unable to see through the veil the evils, sorrows and woes to which those it loved on earth may be subjected. It lives in that sweet dream with its loved ones — whether gone before, or yet remaining on earth; it has them near itself, as happy, as blissful and as innocent as the disembodied dreamer himself; and yet, apart from rare visions, the denizens of our gross planet feel it not. It is in this, during such a condition of complete Maya that the Souls or astral Egos of pure, loving sensitives, labouring under the same illusion, think their loved ones come down to them on earth, while it is their own Spirits that are raised towards those in the Devachan.
• There are great varieties of bliss in the Devachan, just as on earth there are shades of perception and of capability to appreciate such reward. It is an ideated paradise, in each case of the Ego's own making, filled with the scenery, crowded with the incidents, and thronged with the people he would expect to find in such a sphere of compensative bliss. And it is that variety which guides the temporary personal Ego into the current which will lead him to be reborn in a lower or higher condition in the next world of causes. Everything is so harmoniously adjusted in nature — especially in the subjective world, that no mistake can be ever committed by the Dhyan Chohans who guide the impulses.
• Many degrees of spirituality constitute and determine the great “varieties” of conditions within the limits of Devachan. A mother from a savage tribe is just as unhappy as a mother from a regal palace when she loses her child. (Children who die prematurely before the perfection of their septenary Entity do not find their way to Devachan.) Yet the mother who lost her children finds her children there in Devachan, without one missing that her heart yearns for.
• Say it is but a dream, but after all, objective life itself is only a panorama of vivid unrealities. An American Indian realizes pleasures in his “happy hunting grounds” which in that Land of Dreams is no less intense than the ecstasy felt by a connoisseur who passes æons in the rapt delight of listening to divine Symphonies by imaginary angelic choirs and orchestras. Even if the former is born a “savage” with an instinct to kill and has caused the death of many an innocent animal, he is also a loving father, son and husband. So why should he not also enjoy his share of reward? The case would be quite different if an educated and civilized person had done the same cruel acts from a mere love of sport. The American Indian would simply take a low place in the scale when reborn, by reason of his imperfect moral development; while the Karma of the other would be tainted with moral delinquency. . . .
• To make it clear you must keep in mind that there are two fields of causal manifestation, to wit: the objective and subjective. The grosser energies operate in the heavier or denser conditions of matter and manifest objectively in physical life, their outcome being the new personality of each birth included within the grand cycle of the evolving individuality. The moral and spiritual activities find their sphere of effects in “Devachan.” For example: the vices, physical attractions, etc. — say, of a philosopher may result in the birth of a new philosopher, a king, a merchant, a rich Epicurean, or any other personality whose make-up was inevitable from his preponderant proclivities preceding the next birth.
• Sir Francis Bacon might reappear in his next incarnation as a greedy money-getter, with extraordinary intellectual capacities. But the moral and spiritual qualities of the previous Bacon would also have to find a field in which their energies could expand themselves. Devachan is such field. Hence — all the great plans of moral reform, of intellectual and spiritual research into abstract principles of nature, all the divine aspirations, would, in Devachan come to fruition, and the abstract entity previously known as the great Chancellor would occupy itself in this inner world of its own preparation, living, if not quite what one would call a conscious existence, at least a dream of such realistic vividness that none of the life-realities could ever match it.
• In Devachan one moment of earthly sensation is selected for perpetuation and lasts as the theme of the whole harmony, a definite tone of appreciable pitch, around which cluster and develop in progressive variations of melody and as endless variations on a theme, all the aspirations, desires, hopes, dreams, which, in connection with that particular “moment” had ever crossed the dreamer's brain during his lifetime, without having ever found their realization on earth, and which he now finds fully realized in all their vividness in Devachan, without ever suspecting that all that blissful reality is but the progeny begotten by his own fancy, the effects of the mental causes produced by himself.
• Imagine yourself then, in Devachan with those you may have loved with such immortal love; with the familiar, shadowy scenes connected with them for a background and — a perfect blank for everything else relating to your interior, social, political, literary and social life. In that spiritual, purely cogitative existence, of unalloyed felicity, with the intensity of the feelings that created it, lasts from a few to several thousand years. Dreadfully monotonous? Not in the least — I answer. Have you experienced monotony as the moment of the highest bliss? Of course not. Well, you will not experience it there, in that passage through the Eternity in which a million of years is no longer than a second. There, where there is no consciousness of an external world, there can be no discernment to mark differences, hence no perception of contrasts of monotony or variety; nothing in short, outside that immortal feeling of love and sympathetic attraction whose seeds are planted in the fifth principle, whose plants blossom luxuriantly in and around the fourth, but whose roots have to penetrate deep into the sixth principle, if it would survive the lower groups.
• Remember that we create ourselves our devachan as our avitchi (hell) while yet on earth, and mostly during the latter days and even moments of our intellectual, sentient lives. That feeling which is the strongest in us at that supreme hour; when the events of a long life, to their minutest details, are marshalled in the greatest order in a few seconds in our vision, becomes the fashioner of our bliss or woe, the life principle of our future existence. In the latter we have no substantial being, only a present and momentary existence. Its duration as every other effect of a transitory cause will be fleeting, and will vanish and cease to be.The real full remembrance of our lives will come at the end of the minor cycle — not before.
• Unless a man loves well or hates as well, he will be neither in Devachan nor in Avitchi. “Nature spews the luke-warm out of her mouth” means only that she annihilates their personal Egos (not the shells, nor yet the sixth principle) in the Kama Loka and the Devachan. This does not prevent them from being immediately reborn — and, if their lives were not very bad, there is no reason why the eternal Monad should not find the page of that life intact in the Book of Life.
• The duration spent in Devachan could be years, decades, centuries and milleniums, oftentimes-multiplied by something more. It all depends upon the duration of Karma. Fill with oil Den's little cup, and a city reservoir of water, and lighting both see which burns the longer. The Ego is the wick and Karma the oil, the difference in the quantity of the latter (in the cup and the reservoir) suggests the great difference in the duration of various Karmas .
• The stay in Devachan is proportioned to the unfinished psychic impulses originating in earth-life: those persons whose attractions were predominantly material will sooner be drawn back into rebirth.
• This “dream” would last until Karma is satisfied in that direction, the ripple of force reaches the edge of its cyclic basin, and the being moves into the next area of causes. This, it may find in the same world as before, or another, according to his or her stage of progression through the necessary rings and rounds of human development.
• The “reward provided by nature for men who are benevolent in a large, systematic way” and who have not focussed their affections upon an individual or speciality, is that — if pure — they pass more rapidly through the Kama and Rupa 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 occupants.
• Every effect must be proportionate to the cause. And, as man's terms of incarnate existence bear but a small proportion to his periods of inter-natal existence in the Great Solar cycle, so the good thoughts, words, and deeds of any one of these “lives” on a globe cause effects, the working out of which requires far more time than the evolution of the causes occupied.
• Nature cheats no more the devachanee than she does the living, physical man. Nature provides for him far more real bliss and happiness there than she does here, where all the conditions of evil and chance are against him, and his inherent helplessness — that of a straw violently blown hither and thither by every remorseless wind — has made unalloyed happiness on this earth an utter impossibility for the human being, whatever his chances and condition may be.
• 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 correspondingly.
• As in actual earth-life, so there is for the Spiritual Ego in Devachan — the first flutter of psychic life, the attainment of prime, the gradual exhaustion of force passing into semi-unconsciousness, gradual oblivion 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 in another term of Devachan, and still another physical rebirth as a new personality. What the lives in Devachan and upon Earth shall be in each instance determined by Karma. And this weary round of birth upon 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, — having learned how to burst through the vicious circles — and to pass periodically into the Paranirvana.
• There a continual change in Devachan, just as much — and far more — as there is in the life of any man or woman. The Devachanee's special occupation is always pleasant and fills his life with rapture. That dream-life is but the fruition, the harvest-time of those psychic seed-germs dropped from the tree of physical existence in our moments of dreams and hopes, 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. No failures there, no disappointments!
• If man had but one single moment of ideal happiness and experience during his life, if Devachan exists, it could not be the indefinite prolongation of that “single moment,” but the infinite developments, the various incidents and events, based upon and outflowing from that one “single moment” or moments. That one note, as I said, struck from the lyre of life, would form but the Key-note of the being's subjective state and work out into numberless harmonic tones and semi-tones 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 with its vapours and deceptive appearances. the adept can perceive the great secret of how to penetrate deeply into the Arcana of being.
REINCARNATION OF THE SPIRITUAL EGO
• Each personality the Spiritual Ego takes is not “an absolutely new invention.” He is the child and creation of his antecedent personal self; the Karmic progeny of past lives
CONCERNING SUICIDES AND ACCIDENTAL DEATHS
• Suicides and those who have perished by violent death, consciousness requires a certain time to establish its new centre of gravity and evolve its “perception proper”.
• As these suffering spirits of suicides and accidental deaths have to remain within the earth's attraction, and in its atmosphere — the Kama-Loka — until the very last moment of what would have been the natural duration of their lives. It is a sin and an act of cruelty to revive their memory and intensify their suffering by giving them a chance of living an artificial life; a chance to overload their Karma, by tempting them into opened doors provided by mediums and sensitives, for they will have to pay roundly for every such pleasure.
• Suicides , who foolishly hope to escape life, find themselves still alive on the other side of death. They will suffer even more from this after life. Their punishment is to temporarily lose their seventh and sixth principles by this rash act. Some, instead of accepting their punishment and taking their chances of redemption, are often made to long for life and are tempted to regain a hold upon it by sinful means. In the Kama-Loka , the land of intense desires, they can gratify their earthly yearnings by possessing a living proxy; and by so doing, at the expiration of what would have been their natural term of life, they generally lose connection with their monad forever.
• In cases of accidental death the higher and the lower principle groups mutually 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, this is eternal justice and fitness of things. 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; and was an act of the Law of Retribution, his death was not the direct result of an act deliberately committed by the lifetime's personal Ego. Had he been allowed to live longer, he might have atoned for his antecedent sins still more effectually. and even then, the Ego, having been made to pay off the debt of his maker (the previous Ego) is free from the blows of retributive justice.
• Victims of accident who were so good and pure are drawn immediately within the Akashic Samadhi and fall into a state of quiet slumber, a sleep full of rosy dreams, during which they have no recollection of the accident. They move and live among their familiar friends and scenes, until their natural life-term is finished. They then find themselves born in the Devachan.
• The not-so-good victims of accident have a more gloomy fate. If sinful and sensual they wander about NOT as shells , for their connection with their two higher principles is not quite broken until their natural term death-hour arrives. 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 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 fixed close of 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.
• For the average victim of accident or violence, neither very good nor very bad, a medium who attracts him will create for him a new combination of body vehicles and thus a new and evil Karma . The medium helps to awaken and to develop nec plus ultra in an Elementary, be he a suicide or a victim.
• Motive is everything and man is punished in a case of direct responsibility, never otherwise. In the accidental victim's case death came about accidentally , while in that of the suicide, death is brought on voluntarily and with a full and deliberate knowledge of its immediate consequences. However, a man who causes his own death in a fit of temporary insanity is not left a prey to the temptations of the Kama Loka but falls asleep like any other victim.
• Happy are those disembodied entities who sleep their long slumber and live in dream in the bosom of Space! And woe to those who are attracted to mediums, and woe to the latter, who tempt them. For in grasping them, and satisfying their thirst for life, the medium helps to develop in them a new set of bodies, with far worse tendencies and passions than was the one they lost. All the future of this new body will be determined, 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. If mediums and Spiritualists knew that with every new “angel guide” they welcome with rapture, they entice the latter into a series of untold evils for the new Ego that will be born under its nefarious shadow, and that with every séance — especially for materialization — they multiply the causes for misery, causes that will make the unfortunate Ego fail in his spiritual birth, or be reborn into a worse existence than ever. And now, you may understand why we oppose so strongly Spiritualism and indiscriminate mediumship and physical manifestations, — materializations and trance- possessions especially.
• Whether good or bad, the victims sleep, to awaken at the hour of the last Judgment, which is that hour of the supreme struggle between the sixth and seventh, and the fifth and fourth at the threshold of the gestation state. And even after that, when the sixth and seventh carry off a portion of the fifth into their Akasic Samadhi, that portion of the fifth might prove too weak to be reborn in Devachan. In this case it will then re-clothe itself in a new body, the subjective “Being” created from the Karma of the victim (or no-victim, as the case may be) and enter upon a new earth-existence whether upon this or any other planet.
• If those who communicate with the “dead” could be only made to understand the difference between individuality and personality , between individual and personal immortality, they would see that Occultists are convinced of the monad's immortality, and yet deny the immortality of the soul which is the vehicle of the personal Ego. T hey can firmly believe in and practice spiritual communications and intercourse with the disembodied Egos of the Rupa-Loka.
THE NON-DESCRIPT PERSONALITY
• But suppose some hum-drum person, some colourless, flaxless personality, who never impinged upon the world enough to make himself felt: what then? Simply that his devachanic state is as colourless and feeble as was his personality. How could it be otherwise since cause and effect are equal?
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE WICKED PERSONALITY?
• But where is a monster of wickedness, sensuality, ambition, avarice, pride, deceit, etc., who nevertheless has a germ or germs of something better, flashes of a more divine nature to go? The said spark smouldering under a heap of dirt will counteract, nevertheless, the attraction of the eighth sphere (of perdition) or Avitchi, the perfect antithesis of Devachan.
• These “failures of nature”, whose divine monad separated itself from the five principles during their life-time, (or preceding births since such cases are also on our records), and who have lived as soulless human beings must be remodeled entirely. These persons whose sixth principle has left them, while the seventh having lost its vahan or vehicle, can exist independently no longer, their fifth or animal Soul of course goes down “the bottomless pit.”
• The first named entity then, cannot, with all its wickedness go to the eighth sphere — since his wickedness is of a too spiritual, refined nature. He is a monster — not a mere Soulless brute. He must not be simply annihilated but PUNISHED; for, annihilation, i.e. total oblivion, and the fact of being snuffed out of conscious existence, constitutes per se no punishment As Voltaire expressed it: “le néant ne laisse pas d'avoir du bon.” Here is no taper-glimmer to be puffed out by a zephyr, but a strong, positive, maleficent energy, fed and developed by circumstances, some of which may have really been beyond his control.
