The Writings of C
After Death
From
A Textbook of Theosophy
By
C
Death is the laying
aside of the physical body; but it makes no more difference to the ego than
does the laying aside of an overcoat to the physical man. Having put off his physical
body, the ego continues to live in his astral body until the force has become
exhausted which has been generated by such emotions and passions as he has
allowed himself to feel during earth life.
When that has happened,
the second death takes place; the astral body also falls away from him, and he
finds himself living in the mental body and in the lower mental world. In that
condition he remains until the thought forces generated during
his physical and astral
lives have worn themselves out; then he drops the third vehicle in its turn and
remains once more an ego in his own world, inhabiting his causal body.
There is, then, no such
thing as death as it is ordinarily understood. There is only a succession of
stages in a continuous life – stages lived in the three worlds one after
another. The apportionment of time between these three worlds varies much as
man advances. The primitive man lives almost exclusively in the physical world,
spending only a few years in the astral at the end of each of his physical
lives. As he develops, the astral life becomes longer, and as intellect unfolds
in him, and he becomes able to think, he begins to spend a little time in the
mental world as well. The ordinary man of civilized races remains longer in the
mental world than in the physical and astral; indeed, the more a man evolves
the longer becomes his mental life and the
shorter his life in the
astral world.
The astral life is the
result of all feelings which have in them the element of self. If they have
been directly selfish, they bring him into conditions of great unpleasantness
in the astral world; if, though tinged with thoughts of self, they have been
good and kindly they bring him a comparatively pleasant though still limited
astral life. Such of his thoughts and feelings as have been entirely unselfish
produce their result in his life in the mental world; therefore that life in
the mental world cannot be other than blissful. The astral life, which the man
has made for himself either miserable or comparatively joyous, corresponds to
what Christians call purgatory; the lower mental life, which is always entirely
happy, is what is called heaven.
Man makes for himself
his own purgatory and heaven, and these are not planes, but states of
consciousness. Hell does not exist; it is only a figment of the theological
imagination; but a man who lives foolishly may make for himself a very
unpleasant and long-enduring purgatory. Neither purgatory nor heaven can
ever be eternal, for a
finite cause cannot produce an infinite result. The variations in individual
cases are so wide that to give actual figures is somewhat misleading.
If we take the average
man of what is called the lower middle class, the typical specimen of which
would be a small shopkeeper or shop-assistant, his average life in the astral
world would be perhaps about forty years, and the life in the mental world
about two hundred. The man of spirituality and culture, on the other hand, may
have perhaps twenty years of life in the astral world and a thousand in the
heaven life. One who is specially developed may reduce the astral life to a few
days or hours and spend fifteen hundred years in heaven.
Not only does the length
of these periods vary greatly, but the conditions in both worlds also differ
widely. The matter of which all these bodies are built is not dead matter but
living, and that fact has to be taken into consideration. The physical body is
built up of cells, each of which is a tiny separate life animated by the Second
Outpouring, which comes forth from the Second Aspect of the Deity. These cells
are of varying kinds and fulfill various functions, and all these facts must be
taken into account if the man wishes to understand the work of his physical
body and to live a healthy life in it.
The same thing applies
to the astral and mental bodies. In the cell life which permeates them there is
as yet nothing in the way of intelligence, but there is a strong instinct
always pressing in the direction of what is for its development. The life
animating the matter of which such bodies are built is upon the outward arc of
evolution, moving downwards or outwards into matter, so that progress for it
means to descend into denser forms of matter, and to learn to express itself
through them. Unfoldment for the man is just the opposite of this; he has
already sunk deeply into matter and is now rising out of that towards his
source.
There is consequently a
constant conflict of interests between the man within and the life inhabiting
the matter of his vehicles, inasmuch as its tendency is downward, while his is upward.The matter of the astral body (or rather the life
animating its molecules) desires for its evolution such undulations as it can
get, of as many different kinds as possible, and as coarse as possible. The
next step in its evolution will be to ensoul physical
matter and become used to its still slower oscillations; and as a step on the
way to that, it desires the grossest of the
astral vibrations. It
has not the intelligence definitely to plan for these; but its instinct helps
it to discover how most easily to procure them.
The molecules of the
astral body are constantly changing, as are those of the physical body, but
nevertheless the life in the mass of those astral molecules has a sense, though
a very vague sense, of itself as a whole – as a kind of temporary entity. It
does not know that it is part of a man’s astral body; it is quite capable of
understanding what a man is; but it realizes in a blind way that under itpresent conditions it receives many more waves, and much
stronger ones, than it would receive if floating at large in the atmosphere. It
would then only occasionally catch, as from a distance, the radiation of man’s
passions and emotions; now it is in the very heart of them, it can miss none,
and it gets them at their strongest.
Therefore it feels
itself in a good position, and it makes an effort to retain that position. It
finds itself in contact with something finer than itself – the matter of the
man’s mental body; and it comes to feel that if it can contrive to involve that
finer something in its own undulations, they will be greatly intensified and
prolonged.
Since astral matter is
the vehicle of desire and mental matter is the vehicle of thought, this instinct,
when translated into our language, means that if the astral body can induce us
to think that we want what it wants, it is much more likely to get it. Thus it
exercises a slow steady pressure upon the man – a kind of hunger on its side,
but for him a temptation to what is coarse and undesirable. If he be a
passionate man there is a gentle but ceaseless pressure in the direction of
irritability; if he be a sensual man, an equally steady pressure in the
direction of impurity.
A man who does not understand
this usually makes one of two mistakes with regard to it: either he supposes it
to be the prompting of his own nature, and therefore regards that nature as
inherently evil; or he thinks of the pressure as coming from outside – as
temptation of an imaginary devil. The truth lies between the two. The pressure
is natural, not to the man but to the vehicle which he is using; its desire is
natural and right for it, but harmful to the man, and therefore it is necessary
that he should resist it. If he does so resist, if he declines to yield himself
to the feelings suggested to him, the particles within him which need those
vibrations become apathetic for lack of nourishment, and eventually atrophy and
fall out from his astral body, and are replaced by other particles, whose
natural wave rate is more nearly in accordance with that which the man
habitually permits within his astral body.
This gives the reason
for what are called promptings of the lower nature during life. If the man
yields himself to them, such promptings grow stronger and stronger until at
least he feels as though he could not resist them, and identifies himself with
them – which is exactly what this curious half-life in the particles of the
astral body wants him to do.
At the death of the physical
body this vague astral consciousness is alarmed. It realizes that its existence
as a separated mass is menaced, and it takes instinctive steps to defend itself
and to maintain its position as long as possible. The matter of the astral body
is far more fluidic than that of the physical, and this consciousness seizes
upon its particles and disposes them so as to resist encroachment. It puts the
grossest and densest upon the outside as a kind of shell, and arranges the
others in concentric layers, so that the body as a whole may become as
resistant to friction as its constitution permits, and may therefore retain its
shape as long as possible.
For the man this
produces various unpleasant effects. The physiology of the astral body is quite
different from that of the physical; the latter acquires its information from
without by means of certain organs which are specialized as the instruments of
its senses, but the astral body has no separated senses in
our meaning of the word.
That which for the astral body corresponds to sight is the power of its
molecules to respond to impacts from without, which come to them by means of
similar molecules. For example, a man has within his astral body matter
belonging to all the subdivisions of the astral world, and it is because of
that that he is capable of “seeing” objects built of the matter of any of these
subdivisions.
Supposing an astral
object to be made of the matter of the second and third subdivisions mixed, a
man living in the astral world could perceive that object only if on the
surface of his astral body there were particles belonging to the second and
third subdivisions of that world which were capable of receiving and recording
the vibrations which that object set up. A man who from the arrangement of his
body by the vague consciousness of which we have spoken, had on the outside of
that vehicle only the denser matter of the lowest subdivision, could no more be
conscious of the object which we have mentioned than we are ourselves conscious
in the physical body of the gases which move about us in the atmosphere or of
objects built exclusively of etheric matter.
During physical life the
matter of the man’s astral body is in constant motion, and its particles pass
among one another much as do those of boiling water. Consequently at any given
moment it is practically certain that particles of all varieties will be
represented on the surface of his astral body, and that therefore when he is
using his astral body during sleep he will be able to “see” by its means any
astral object which approaches him.
After death, if he has
allowed the rearrangement to be made (as from ignorance, all ordinary persons
do) his condition in this respect will be different. Having on the surface of
his astral body only the lowest and grossest particles, he can receive
impressions only from corresponding particles outside; so that instead
of seeing the whole of
the astral world about him, he will see only one-seventh of it, and that the
densest and most impure. The vibrations of this heavier matter are the
expressions only of objectionable feelings and emotions, and of the least
refined class of astral entities. Therefore it emerges that a man in this
condition can see only the undesirable inhabitants of the astral world, and can
feel only its most unpleasant and vulgar influences.
He is surrounded by
other men, whose astral bodies are probably of quite ordinary character; but
since he can see and feel only what is lowest and coarsest in them, they appear
to him to be monsters of vice with no redeeming features. Even his friends seem
not at all what they used to be, because he is
now incapable of
appreciating any of their better qualities.
Under these
circumstances it is little wonder that he considers the astral world a hell;
yet the fault is in no way with the astral world, but with himself – first, for
allowing himself so much of that ruder type of matter, and secondly, for
letting that vague astral consciousness dominate him and dispose it in that
particular way.
The man who has studied
these matters declines absolutely to yield to the pressure during life or to
permit the rearrangement after death, and consequently he retains his power of
seeing the astral world as a whole, and not merely the cruder and baser part of
it.
The astral world has
many points in common with the physical; just like the physical, it presents
different appearances to different people, and even to the same person at
different periods of his career. It is the home of emotion and of lower
thoughts; and emotions are much stronger in that world than in this.
When a person is awake
we cannot see that larger part of his emotion at all; its strength goes in
setting in motion the gross physical matter of the brain. So if we see a man
show affection here, what we can see is not the whole of his affection, but
only such part of it as is left after all this other work has been done.
Emotions therefore bulk far more largely in the astral life than in the
physical. They in no way exclude higher thought if they are controlled, so in
the astral world as in the physical a man may devote himself to study and to
helping his fellows, or he may waste his time and drift about aimlessly.
The astral world extends
nearly to the mean distance of the orbit of the moon; but though the whole of
this realm is open to any of its inhabitants who have not permitted the
redistribution of their matter, the great majority remain much nearer to the
surface of the earth. The matter of the different subdivisions of that world
interpenetrates with perfect freedom, but there is on the whole a general
tendency for the denser matter to settle towards the center. The conditions are
much like those which obtain in a bucket
of water which contains in suspension a number of kinds of matter of different
degrees of density. Since the water is kept in perpetual motion, the different
kinds of matter are diffused through it; but in spite of that, the densest
matter is found in greatest quantity nearest to the bottom. So that though we
must not at all think of the various subdivisions of the astral world as lying
above one another as do the coats of an onion, it is nevertheless true that the
average arrangement of the matter of those subdivisions partakes somewhat of
that general character.
Astral matter
interpenetrates physical matter precisely as though it were not there, but each
subdivision of physical matter has a strong attraction for astral matter of the
corresponding subdivision. Hence it arises that every physical body has its
astral counterpart. If I have a glass of water standing upon a table, the glass
and the table, being of physical matter in the solid state, are interpenetrated
by astral matter of the lowest subdivision. The water in the glass, being
liquid, is interpenetrated by astral matter of the sixth subdivision; whereas
the air surrounding both, being physical
matter in the gaseous condition, is entirely interpenetrated by astral gaseous
matter – that is, astral matter of the fifth subdivision.
But just as air, water,
glass and table are alike interpenetrated all the time by the finer physical
matter which we have called etheric, so are all the astral counterparts
interpenetrated by the finer astral matter of the higher subdivisions which
correspond to the etheric. But even the astral solid is less dense than the
finest of the physical ethers.
The man who finds
himself in the astral world after death, if he has not submitted to the
rearrangement of the matter of his body, will notice but little difference from
physical life. He can float about in any direction at will, but in actual fact
he usually stays in the neighbourhood to which he is
accustomed. He is still able to perceive his house, his room, his furniture,
his relations, his friends. The living, when ignorant of the higher worlds,
suppose themselves to have “lost” those who have laid aside their physical
bodies; but the dead are never for a moment under the impression that they have
lost the living.
Functioning as they are
in the astral body, the dead can no longer see the physical bodies of those
whom they have left behind; but they do see their astral bodies, and as those
are exactly the same in outline as the physical, they are perfectly aware of
the presence of their friends. They see each one surrounded by a faint ovoid of
luminous mist, and if they happen to be observant, they may notice various
other small changes in the surroundings; but it is at least quite clear to them
that they have not gone away to some distant heaven or hell, but still remain
in touch with the world which they know, although they see it at a somewhat
different angle.
The dead man has the
astral body of his living friends obviously before him, so he cannot think of
him as lost; but while the friend is awake, the dead man will not be able to
make any impression upon him, for the consciousness of the friend is then in
the physical world, and his astral body is being used only as a
bridge. The dead man
cannot therefore communicate with his friend, nor can he read his friend’s
higher thoughts; but he will see by the change in color in the astral body any
emotion which that friend may feel, and with a little practice and observation
he may easily learn to read all those thoughts of his friend which have in them
anything of self or of desire.
When the friend falls
asleep the whole position is changed. He is then also conscious in the astral
world side by side with the dead man, and they can communicate in every respect
as freely as they could during physical life. The emotions felt by the living
react strongly upon the dead who love them. If the former give way to grief,
the latter cannot but suffer severely.
The conditions of life
after death are almost infinite in their variety, but they can be calculated
without difficulty by any one who will take the trouble to understand the
astral world and to consider the character of the person concerned. That
character is not in the slightest degree changed by death; the man’s thoughts,
emotions and desires are exactly the same as before.
He is in every way the
same man, minus his physical body, and his happiness or misery depends upon the
extent to which this loss of the physical body affects him.If
his longings have been such as need a physical body for their gratification, he
is likely to suffer considerably. Such a craving manifests itself as a
vibration in the astral
body, and while we are still in this world most of its strength is employed in
setting in motion the heavy physical particles. Desire is therefore a far
greater force in the astral life than in the physical, and if the man has not
been in the habit of controlling it, and if in this new life it cannot be
satisfied, it may cause him great and long-continued trouble.
Take as an illustration
the extreme case of a drunkard or a sensualist. Here we have a lust which has
been strong enough during physical life to overpower reason, common-sense and
all the feelings of decency and of family affection.
After death the man
finds himself in the astral world feeling the appetite perhaps a hundred times
more strongly, yet absolutely unable to satisfy it because he has lost the
physical body. Such a life is a very real hell – the only hell there is; yet no
one is punishing him; he is reaping the perfectly natural result of his own
action. Gradually as time passes this force of desire wears out, but only at
the cost of terrible suffering for the man, because to him every day seems as a
thousand years. He has no measure of time such as we have in the physical
world. He can measure it only by his sensations. From a distortion of this fact
has come the blasphemous idea of eternal damnation.
Many other cases less
extreme than this will readily suggest themselves, in which a hankering which
cannot be fulfilled may prove itself a torture. A more ordinary case is that of
a man who has no particular vices, such as drink or sensuality, but yet has
been attached entirely to things of the physical world,
and has lived a life
devoted to business or to aimless social functions. For him the astral world is
a place of weariness; the only things for which he craves are no longer
possible for him, for in the astral world there is no business to be done, and,
though he may have as much companionship as he wishes, society is now for him a
very different matter, because all the pretences upon which it is usually based
in this world are no longer possible.
These cases, however,
are only the few, and for most people the state after death is much happier
than life upon earth. The first feeling of which the dead man is usually
conscious is one of the most wonderful and delightful freedom. He has
absolutely nothing to worry about, and no duties rest upon him, except those
which he chooses to impose upon himself. For all but a very smallminority,
physical life is spent in doing what the man would much rather not do; but he
has to do it in order to support himself or his wife and family. In the astral
world no support is necessary; food is no longer needed, shelter is not
required, since he is entirely unaffected by heat or cold; and each man by the
mere exercise of his thought clothes himself as he wishes. For the first time
since early childhood the man is entirely free to spend the whole of his time
in doing exactly just what he likes.
His capacity for every
kind of enjoyment is greatly enhanced, if only that enjoyment does not need a
physical body for expression. If he loves the beauties of Nature, it is now within
his power to travel with great rapidity and without fatigue over the whole
world, to contemplate all its loveliest spots, and to explore its most secret
recesses. If he delights in art, all the world’s masterpieces are at his
disposal. If he loves music, he can go where he will to hear it, and it will
now mean much more to him than it has ever meant before; for though he can no
longer hear the physical sounds, he can receive the whole effect of the music
into himself in far fuller measure than in this lower world. If he is a student
of science, he not only can visit the great scientific men of the world, and
catch from them such thoughts and ideas as may be within his comprehension, but
also he can undertake the researches of his own into the science of this higher
world, seeing much more of what he is doing than has ever before been possible
to him. Best of all, he whose great delight in this world has been to help his
fellow men will still find ample scope for his philanthropic efforts.
Men are no longer
hungry, cold, or suffering from disease in this astral world; but there are
vast numbers who, being ignorant, desire knowledge – who, being still in the
grip of desire for earthly things, need the explanation which will turn their
thought to higher levels – who have entangled themselves in a web of
their own imaginings,
and can be set free only by one who understands these new surroundings and can
help them distinguish the facts of the world from their own ignorant
misrepresentation of them. All these can be helped by the man of
intelligence and of
kindly heart. Many men arrive in the astral world in utter ignorance of its
conditions, not realizing at first that they are dead, and when they do realize
it fearing the fate that may be in store for them, because of false and wicked
theological teaching. All of these need the cheer and
comfort which can only
be given to them by a man of common sense who possesses some knowledge of the
facts of nature.
There is thus no lack of
the most profitable occupation for any man whose interests during his physical
life have been rational; nor is there any lack of companionship. Men whose
tastes and pursuits are similar drift naturally together there just as they do
here; and many realms of Nature, which during our physical life are concealed
by the dense veil of matter, now lie open for the
detailed study of those
who care to examine them.
To a large extent people
make their own surroundings. We have already referred to the seven subdivisions
of this astral world. Numbering these from the highest and least material
downwards, we find that they fall naturally into three classes – division one,
two and three forming one such class, and four, five and six another; while the
seventh and lowest of all stands alone. As I have said,although
they all interpenetrate, their substance has a general tendency to arrange
itself according to its specific gravity, so that most of the matter belonging
to the higher subdivisions is found at a greater elevation above the surface of
the earth than the bulk of the matter of the lower portions.
Hence, although any
person inhabiting the astral world can move into any part of it, his natural
tendency is to float at the level which corresponds with the specific gravity
of the heaviest matter in his astral body. The man who has not permitted the
rearrangement of the matter of his astral body after death is entirely free of
the whole astral world; but the majority, who do permit it, are not equally
free – not because there is anything to prevent them from rising to the highest
level or sinking to the lowest, but because they are able to sense clearly only
a certain part of that world.
I have described
something of the fate of a man who is on the lowest level, shut in by a strong
shell of coarse matter. Because of the extreme comparative density of that
matter he is conscious of less outside of his own subdivision than a man at any
other level. The general specific gravity of his own astral body tends to make
him float below the surface of the earth. The physical matter of the earth is
absolutely non-existent to his astral senses, and his natural attraction is to
that least delicate form of astral matter which is the counterpart of that
solid earth. A man who has confined himself to that lowest subdivision will
therefore usually find himself floating in darkness and cut off to a great
extent from others of the dead, whose lives have been such as to keep them on a
higher level.
Divisions four, and six
of the astral world (to which most people are attracted) have for their
background the astral counterpart of the physical world in which we live, and
all its familiar accessories. Life in the sixth subdivision is simply like our
ordinary life on this earth minus the physical body and its necessities while
as it ascends through the fifth and fourth divisions it becomes less and less
material and is more and more withdrawn from our lower world and its interests.
The first, second and
third sections, though occupying the same space, yet give the impression of
being much further removed from the physical, and correspondingly less
material. Men who inhabit these levels lose sight of the earth and its
belongings; they are usually deeply self-absorbed, and to a large extent create
their own surroundings, though these are sufficiently objective to be
perceptible to other men of their level, and also to clairvoyant vision.
This region is the summerland of which we hear in spiritualistic circles – the
world in which, by the exercise of their thought, the dead call into temporary
existence their houses and schools and cities. These surroundings, though
fanciful from our point of view, are to the dead as real as houses, temples or
churches built of stone are to us, and many people live very contentedly there
for a number of years in
the midst of all these thought creations.
Some of the scenery thus
produced is very beautiful; it includes lovely lakes, magnificent mountains,
pleasant gardens, decidedly superior to anything in the physical world; though
on the other hand it also contains much which to the trained clairvoyant (who
has learned to see things as they are) appears ridiculous – as, for example,
the endeavors of the unlearned to make a thought form of some of the curious
symbolic descriptions contained in their various scriptures. An ignorant
peasant’s thought image of a beast full of eyes within, or of a sea of glass
mingled with fire, is naturally often grotesque, although to its maker it is
perfectly satisfactory. This astral world is full of thought-created figures
and landscapes. Men of all religions image here their deities and their
respective conceptions of paradise, and enjoy themselves greatly among these
dream forms until they pass into the mental world and come into touch with
something nearer to reality.
Every one after death –
any ordinary person, that is, in whose case the rearrangement of the matter of
the astral body has been made – has to pass through all these subdivisions in
turn. It does not follow that every one is conscious in all of them. The
ordinary decent person has in his astral body but little of the matter of its
lowest portion – by no means enough to construct a
heavy shell. The
redistribution puts on the outside of the body its densest matter; in the
ordinary man this is usually matter of the sixth subdivision, mixed with a
little of the seventh, and so he finds himself viewing the counterpart of the
physical world.
The ego is steadily
withdrawing into himself, and as he withdraws he leaves behind him level after
level of this astral matter. So the length of the man’s detention in any
section of the astral world is precisely in proportion to the amount of its
matter which is found in his astral body, and that in turn depends upon the
life he has lived, the desires he has indulged, and the class of matter which
by so doing he has attracted towards him and built into himself. Finding
himself then in the sixth section, still hovering about the places and
persons with which he was
most closely connected while on earth, the average man as time passes on finds
the earthly surroundings gradually growing dimmer and becoming of less and less
importance to him, and he tends more and more to mould his entourage into
agreement with the more persistent of his thoughts. By the time that he reaches
the third level he finds that this characteristic has entirely superseded the
vision of the realities of the astral world.
The second subdivision
is a shade less material than the third, for if the latter is the summerland of the spiritualists, the former is the material
heaven of the more ignorant orthodox; while the first or highest level appears
to be the special home of those who during life have devoted themselves to
materialistic but intellectual pursuits, following them not for the sake of
benefiting their fellow men, but either from motives of selfish ambition or
simply for the sake of intellectual exercise.
All these people are
perfectly happy. Later on they will reach a stage when they can appreciate
something much higher, and when that stage comes they will find the higher
ready for them.
In this astral life
people of the same nation and of the same interests tend to keep together,
precisely as they do here. The religious people, for example, who imagine for
themselves a material heaven, do not at all interfere with men of other faiths
whose ideas of celestial joy are different. There is nothing to prevent a
Christian from drifting into the heaven of the Hindu or the Mohammedan, but he
is little likely to do so, because his interests and attractions are all in the
heaven of his own faith, along with friends who have shared that faith with
him. This is by no means the true heaven described by any of the religions, but
only a gross and material misrepresentation of it; the real thing will be found
when we come to consider the mental world.
The dead man who has not
permitted the rearrangement of the matter of his astral body is free of the
entire world, and can wander all over it at will, seeing the whole of whatever
he examines, instead of only a part of it as the others do. He does not find it
inconveniently crowded, for the astral world is much larger than the surface of
the physical earth, while its population is somewhat smaller, because the
average life of humanity in the astral world is shorter than the average of the
physical.
Not only the dead,
however, are the inhabitants of this astral world, but always about one third
of the living as well, who have temporarily left their physical bodies behind
them in sleep. The astral world has also a great number of non-human
inhabitants, some of them far below the level of man, and some
considerably above him.
The nature spirits form an enormous kingdom, some of whose members exist in the
astral world, and make a large part of its population.
This vast kingdom exists
in the physical world also, for many of its orders wear etheric bodies, and are
only just beyond the range of ordinary physical sight. Indeed, circumstances
not infrequently occur under which they can be seen, and in many lonely
mountain districts these appearances are traditional among the peasants, by
whom they are commonly spoken of as fairies, good people, pixies or brownies.
They are protéan, but usually prefer to wear a miniature human form.
Since they are not yet individualized, they may be thought of almost as etheric
and astral animals; yet many of them are intellectually quite equal to average
humanity.
They have their nations
and types just as we have, and they are often grouped into four great classes,
and called the spirits of earth, water, fire and air.
Only the members of the
last of these four divisions normally reside in the astral world, but their
numbers as so prodigious that they are everywhere present in it.
Another great kingdom
has its representatives here – the kingdom of the angels (called in
development of what we
should call a distinctly good man.
We are neither the only
nor even the principal inhabitants of our solar system; there are other lines
of evolution running parallel with our own which do not pass through humanity
at all, though they must all pass through a level corresponding to that of
humanity. On one of these other lines of evolution are the nature spirits above
described, and at a higher level of that line comes
this great kingdom of
the angels.(Page 85 ) At our present level of evolution they come into obvious
contact with us only very rarely, but as we develop we shall be likely to see
more of them - especially as the cyclic progress of the world is now bringing
it more and more under the influence of the Seventh Ray.
This Seventh Ray has
ceremonial for one of its characteristics, and it is through ceremonial such as
that of the Church or of Free-masonry that we come most easily into touch with
the angelic kingdom.
When all the man’s lower
emotions have worn themselves out – all emotions, I mean, which have in them
any thought of self – his life in the astral world is over, and the ego passes on
into the mental world. This is not in any sense a movement in space; it is
simply that the steady process of withdrawal has now
passed beyond even the
finest kind of astral matter; so that the man’s consciousness is focused in the
mental world. His astral body has not entirely disintegrated, though it is in
process of doing so, and he leaves behind him an astral corpse, just as at a
previous stage of the withdrawal he left behind him a physical corpse. There is
a certain difference between the two which should be noticed, because of the
consequences which ensue from it.
When the man leaves his
physical body his separation from it should be complete, and generally is so;
but this is not the case with the much finer matter of the astral body. In the
course of his physical life the ordinary man usually entangles himself so much
in astral matter (which, from another point of view,
means that he identifies
himself so closely with his lower desires) that the indrawing force of the ego
cannot entirely separate him from it again.
Consequently, when he
finally breaks away from the astral body and transfers his activities to the
mental, he loses a little of himself, he leaves some of himself behind
imprisoned in the matter of the astral body.This
gives a certain remnant of vitality to the astral corpse, so that it still
moves freely in the astral world, and may easily be mistaken by the ignorant
for the man himself – the more so as such fragmentary consciousness as still
remains to it is part of the man, and therefore it naturally regards itself and
speaks of itself as the man. It retains his memories but is only a partial and
unsatisfactory representation of him. Sometimes in spiritualistic séances one
comes into contact with an entity of this description, and wonders how it is
that one’s friend has deteriorated so much since his death. To this fragmentary
entity we give the name “shade”.
At a later stage even
this fragment of consciousness dies out of the astral body, but does not return
to the ego to whom it originally belonged. Even then the astral corpse still
remains, but when it is quite without any trace of its former life we call it a
“shell”. Of itself a shell cannot communicate at a séance, or take any action
of any sort; but such shells are frequently seized upon by sportive nature
spirits and used as temporary habitations. A shell so occupied can communicate
at a séance and masquerade as its original owner, since some of his
characteristics and
certain portions of his memory can be evoked by the nature spirit from his
astral corpse.
When a man falls asleep,
he withdraws in his astral body, leaving the whole of the physical vehicle
behind him. When he dies, he draws out with him the etheric part of the
physical body, and consequently has usually at least a moment of
unconsciousness while he
is freeing himself from it. The etheric double is not a vehicle, and cannot be
used as such; so when the man is surrounded by it, he is for the moment able to
function neither in the physical world nor the astral. Some men succeed in
shaking themselves free of this etheric envelope in a few minutes; other rest
within it for hours, days or even weeks.
Nor is it certain that,
when the man is free from this, he will at once become conscious of the astral
world. For there is in him a good deal of the lowest kind of astral matter, so
that a shell of this may be made around him. But he may be quite unable to use
that matter. If he had lived a reasonably decent life he is little in the habit
of employing it or responding to its vibrations, and he cannot instantly
acquire this habit. For that reason, he may remain unconscious until that
matter gradually wears away, and some matter which he is in the habit of using
comes on the surface. Such an occlusion, however, is scarcely ever complete,
for even in the most carefully made shell some particles of the finer matter
occasionally find their way to the surface and give him fleeting glimpses of
his surroundings.
There are some men who
cling so desperately to their physical vehicles that they will not relax their
hold upon the etheric double, but strive with all their might to retain it.
They may be successful in doing so for a considerable time, but only at the
cost of great discomfort to themselves. They are shut out from both worlds, to
find themselves surrounded by a dense grey mist, through which they see very
dimly the things of the physical world, but with all the colour gone from them.
It is a terrible struggle to them to maintain their position in this miserable
condition, and yet they will not relax their hold upon the etheric double,
feeling that that is at least some sort of link with the only world that they
know. Thus they drift about in a condition of loneliness and misery until from
sheer fatigue their hold fails them, and they slip into the comparative
happiness of astral life.
Sometimes in their
desperation they grasp blindly at other bodies, and try to enter into them, and
occasionally they are successful in such an attempt. They may seize upon a baby
body, ousting the feeble personality for whom it was intended, or sometimes
they grasp even the body of an animal. All this trouble arises entirely from
ignorance, and it can never happen to anyone who understands the laws of life
and death.
When the astral life is
over, the man dies to that world in turn, and awakens in the mental world. With
him it is not at all what it is to the trained clairvoyant, who ranges through
it and lives amidst the surroundings which he finds there, precisely as he
would in the physical or astral worlds. The ordinary man has all through his
life been encompassing himself with a mass of thought-forms. Some which are
transitory, to which he pays little attention, have fallen away from his long
ago, but those which represent the main interests of his life are always with
him, and grow ever stronger and stronger. If some of these have been selfish,
their force pours down into astral matter, and he has exhausted them during his
life in the astral world. But those which are entirely unselfish belong purely
to his mental body, and so when he finds himself in the mental world it is
through these special thoughts that he is able to appreciate it.
His mental body is by no
means fully developed; only those parts of it are really in action to their
fullest extent which he has used in this altruistic manner. When he awakens
again after the second death his first sense is one of indescribable bliss and
vitality – a feeling of such utter joy in living that he needs for the time
nothing but just to live. Such bliss is of the essence of life in all the
higher worlds of the system. Even astral life has possibilities of happiness
far greater than anything that we can know in the dense body; but the heaven
life in the mental world is out of all proportions more blissful than the
astral. In each higher world the same experience is repeated. Merely to live in
any one them seems the uttermost conceivable bliss; and yet, when the next one
is reached, it is seen that it far surpasses the last.
Just as the bliss
increases, so does the wisdom and the breadth of view. A man fusses about in
the physical world and thinks himself so busy and so wise; but when he touches
even the astral, he realizes at once that he has been all the time only a
caterpillar crawling about and seeing nothing but his own leaf, whereas now he
has spread his wings like the butterfly and flown away into the sunshine of a
wider world. Yet, impossible as it may seem, the same experience is repeated
when he passes into the (Page 90) mental world, for this life is in turn so
much fuller and wider and more intense than the astral that once more no
comparison is possible.
And yet beyond all these there is still another life, that of the intuitional
world, unto which even this is but as moonlight unto sunlight.
The man’s position in
the mental world differs widely from that in the astral. There he was using a
body to which he was thoroughly accustomed, a body which he had been in the
habit of employing every night during sleep. Here he finds himself living in a
vehicle which he has never used before – a vehicle
furthermore which is
very far from being fully developed – a vehicle which shuts him out to a great
extent from the world about him, instead of enabling him to see it. The lower
part of his nature burnt itself away during his purgatorial life, and now there
remains to him only his higher and more refined thoughts, the noble and
unselfish aspirations which he poured out during earth life. These cluster
round him, and make a sort of shell about him, through the medium of which he
is able to respond to certain types of vibrations in this refined matter.
These thoughts which
surround him are the powers by which he draws upon the wealth of the heaven-world,
and he finds it to be a storehouse of infinite extent, upon which he is able to
draw just according to the power of those thoughts and aspirations; for in this
world is existing the infinite fullness of the Divine Mind, open in all its
limitless affluence to every soul, just in proportion as that soul has
qualified itself to receive. A man who has already completed his human
evolution, who has fully realized and unfolded the divinity whose germ is
within him, finds the whole of this glory within his reach; but since none of
us has yet done that, since we are only gradually rising toward that splendid
consummation, it follows that none of us as yet can grasp that entirety.
But each draws from it
and cognizes so much of it as he has by previous effort prepared himself to
take. Different individuals bring different capacities; they tell us in the
East that each man brings his own cup, and some of the cups are large and some
are small, but small or large every cup is filled to its utmost
capacity; the sea of
bliss holds far more than enough for all.
A man can look out upon
this glory and beauty only through the windows which he himself has made. Every
one of these thought-forms is such a window, through which response may come to
him from the forces without. If during his earth life he has chiefly regarded
physical things, then he has made for himself but few windows through which
this higher glory can shine in upon him. Yet every man who is above the lowest
savage must have had some touch of pure unselfish feeling, even if it were but
once in all his life, and that will be a window for him now.
The ordinary man is not
capable of any great activity in this mental world; his condition is chiefly
receptive, and his vision of anything outside his own shell of thought is of
the most limited character. He is surrounded by living forces, mighty angelic
inhabitants of this glorious world, and many of their orders are very sensitive
to certain aspirations of man and readily respond to them. But a man can take
advantage of these only in so far as he has already prepared himself to profit
by them, for his thoughts and aspirations are only along certain lines, and he
cannot suddenly form new lines. There are many directions which the higher
thought may take – some of them personal and some impersonal.
Among the latter are
art, music and philosophy; and a man whose interest lay along any one of these
lines finds both measureless enjoyment and unlimited instruction waiting for
him – that is, the amount of enjoyment and instruction is limited only by his
power of perception.
We find a large number
of people whose only higher thoughts are those connected with affection and
devotion. If a man loves another deeply or if he feels strong devotion to a
personal deity, he makes a strong mental image of that friend or the deity, and
the object of his feeling is often present in his mind.
Inevitably he takes that
mental image into the heaven world with him, because it is to that level of
matter that it naturally belongs.Take first the
feeling of affection. The love which forms and retains such an image is very
powerful force – a force which is strong enough to reach and to act upon the
ego of his friend in the higher part of the mental world. It is that ego that
is the real man whom he loves – not the physical body which is so partial a
representation of him. The ego of the friend, feeling this vibration, at once
and eagerly responds to it, and pours himself into the thought form which has
been made for him; so that the man’s friend is truly present with him more
vividly than ever before. To this result it makes no difference whatever
whether the friend is what we call living or dead; the appeal is made not to
the fragment of the friend which is sometimes imprisoned in a physical body,
but to the man himself on his own true level; and he always responds. A man who
has a hundred friends can simultaneously and fully respond to the affection of
every one of them, for no number of representations on a lower level can
exhaust the infinity of the ego.
Thus every man in his
heaven life has around him all the friends for whose company he wishes, and
they are for him always at their best, because he himself makes for them in the
thought-form through which they manifest to him. In our limited physical world
we are so accustomed to thinking of our friend as only the limited
manifestation which we know in the physical world, that it is at first
difficult for us to realize the grandeur of the conception; when we can realize
it, we shall see how much nearer we are in truth to our friends in the heaven
life than we ever were on earth. The same is true in the case of devotion. The
man in the heaven world is two great stages nearer to the object of his
devotion than he was during physical life, and so his experiences are of a far
more transcendent character.
In this mental world, as
in the astral, there are seven subdivisions. The first, second and third are
the habitat of the ego in his causal body, so the mental body contains matter
of the remaining four only, and it is in those sections that his heaven life is
passed. Man does not, however, pass from one to the other of these, as in the
case in the astral world, for there is nothing in this life corresponding to
the rearrangement. Rather is the man drawn to the level which best corresponds
to the degree of his development, and on that level he spends the whole of his
life in the mental body. Each man makes his own conditions, so that the number
of varieties is infinite.
Speaking broadly, we may
say that the dominant characteristic observed in the lowest portion is
unselfish family affection. Unselfish it must be, or it would find no place
here; all selfish tinges, if there were any, worked out their results in the
astral world. The dominant characteristic of the sixth level may be said to be anthropomorphical religious devotion; whilst that of the
fifth section is devotion expressing itself in active work of some sort. All
these – the fifth, sixth and seventh subdivisions – are concerned with the
working out of devotion to personalities (either to one’s family and friends or
to a personal deity) rather than the wider devotion to humanity for its own
sake, which finds its expression in the next section. The activities of this
fourth stage are varied. They can best be arranged in four main divisions:
unselfish pursuit of spiritual knowledge; high philosophy or scientific
thought; literary or artistic ability exercised for unselfish purposes; and
service for the sake of service.
Even to this glorious
heaven life there comes an end, and then the mental body in its turn drops away
as the others have done, and the man’s life in his causal body begins. Here the
man needs no windows, for this is his true home and all his walls have fallen
away. The majority of men have as yet but very little consciousness at such a
height as this; they rest dreamily unobservant and scarcely awake, but such
vision as they have is true, however limited it may be by their lack of
development. Still, every time they return, these limitations will be smaller,
and they themselves will be greater; so that this truest life will be wider and
fuller for them.
As this improvement
continues, this casual life grows longer and longer, assuming an ever larger
proportion as compared to the existence at lower levels. And as he grows, the
man becomes capable not only of receiving but also of giving. Then indeed is
his triumph approaching, for he is learning the lesson of the Christ, learning
the crowning glory of sacrifice, the supreme delight of pouring out all his
life for the helping of his fellow-men, the devotion of the self to the all, of
celestial strength to human service, of all those splendid heavenly forces to
the aid of the struggling sons of earth. That is part of the life that lies
before us; these are some of the steps which even we who are
still so near the bottom
of the golden ladder may see rising above us, so that we may report them to
those who have not seen as yet, in order that they too may open their eyes to
the unimaginable splendor which surrounds them here and now in this dull daily
life. This is a part of the gospel of Theosophy – the certainty of this sublime
future for all. It is certain because it is here already; because to inherit it
we have only to fit ourselves for it.
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Tekels Park to be Sold to a Developer
Concerns are raised about the fate of the wildlife as
The Spiritual Retreat, Tekels Park in Camberley,
Surrey, England is to be sold to a developer
Tekels Park is a 50 acre woodland park, purchased
for the Adyar
Theosophical Society in England in 1929.
In addition to concern about the park, many are
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Many feel that the sale of a
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Confusion as the Theoversity
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Future of Tekels Park Badgers in Doubt
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