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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Death--and After?, by Annie Besant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Death--and After?
+
+Author: Annie Besant
+
+Release Date: April 27, 2006 [EBook #18266]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH--AND AFTER? ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
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+
+
+                    _Theosophical Manuals. No. 3._
+
+
+
+
+                          DEATH--AND AFTER?
+
+                                  BY
+
+                            ANNIE BESANT.
+
+
+
+                           (20TH THOUSAND)
+
+
+
+
+                   Theosophical Publishing Society
+
+                          London and Benares
+
+               City Agents, Percy Lund Humphries & Co.
+
+                      Amen Corner, London, E.C.
+
+
+                                 1906
+
+
+                         _PRICE ONE SHILLING_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+_Few words are needed in sending this little book out into the world.
+It is the third of a series of Manuals designed to meet the public
+demand for a simple exposition of Theosophical teachings. Some have
+complained that our literature is at once too abstruse, too technical,
+and too expensive for the ordinary reader, and it is our hope that the
+present series may succeed in supplying what is a very real want.
+Theosophy is not only for the learned; it is for all. Perhaps among
+those who in these little books catch their first glimpse of its
+teachings, there may be a few who will be led by them to penetrate
+more deeply into its philosophy, its science, and its religion, facing
+its abstruser problems with the student's zeal and the neophyte's
+ardour. But these Manuals are not written for the eager student, whom
+no initial difficulties can daunt; they are written for the busy men
+and women of the work-a-day world, and seek to make plain some of the
+great truths that render life easier to bear and death easier to face.
+Written by servants of the Masters who are the Elder Brothers of our
+race, they can have no other object than to serve our fellow-men._
+
+
+DEATH--AND AFTER?
+
+Who does not remember the story of the Christian missionary in
+Britain, sitting one evening in the vast hall of a Saxon king,
+surrounded by his thanes, having come thither to preach the gospel of
+his Master; and as he spoke of life and death and immortality, a bird
+flew in through an unglazed window, circled the hall in its flight,
+and flew out once more into the darkness of the night. The Christian
+priest bade the king see in the flight of the bird within the hall the
+transitory life of man, and claimed for his faith that it showed the
+soul, in passing from the hall of life, winging its way not into the
+darkness of night, but into the sunlit radiance of a more glorious
+world. Out of the darkness, through the open window of Birth, the life
+of a man comes to the earth; it dwells for a while before our eyes;
+into the darkness, through the open window of Death, it vanishes out
+of our sight. And man has questioned ever of Religion, Whence comes
+it? Whither goes it? and the answers have varied with the faiths.
+To-day, many a hundred year since Paulinus talked with Edwin, there
+are more people in Christendom who question whether man has a spirit
+to come anywhence or to go anywhither than, perhaps, in the world's
+history could ever before have been found at one time. And the very
+Christians who claim that Death's terrors have been abolished, have
+surrounded the bier and the tomb with more gloom and more dismal
+funeral pomp than have the votaries of any other creed. What can be
+more depressing than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded,
+while the dead body is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent than
+the sweeping robes of lustreless crape, and the purposed hideousness
+of the heavy cap in which the widow laments the "deliverance" of her
+husband "from the burden of the flesh"? What more revolting than the
+artificially long faces of the undertaker's men, the drooping
+"weepers", the carefully-arranged white handkerchiefs, and, until
+lately, the pall-like funeral cloaks? During the last few years, a
+great and marked improvement has been made. The plumes, cloaks, and
+weepers have well-nigh disappeared. The grotesquely ghastly hearse is
+almost a thing of the past, and the coffin goes forth heaped over with
+flowers instead of shrouded in the heavy black velvet pall. Men and
+women, though still wearing black, do not roll themselves up in
+shapeless garments like sable winding-sheets, as if trying to see how
+miserable they could make themselves by the imposition of artificial
+discomforts. Welcome common-sense has driven custom from its throne,
+and has refused any longer to add these gratuitous annoyances to
+natural human grief.
+
+In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding
+Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted
+as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening
+figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking
+an hour-glass--all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round
+this rightly-named King of Terrors. Milton, who has done so much with
+his stately rhythm to mould the popular conceptions of modern
+Christianity, has used all the sinewy strength of his magnificent
+diction to surround with horror the figure of Death.
+
+                              The other shape,
+    If shape it might be called, that shape had none
+    Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
+    Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
+    For each seemed either; black it stood as night,
+    Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
+    And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head
+    The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
+    Satan was now at hand, and from his seat
+    The monster moving onward came as fast,
+    With horrid strides; hell trembled as he strode....
+    ... So spoke the grisly terror: and in shape
+    So speaking, and so threatening, grew tenfold
+    More dreadful and deform....
+    ... but he, my inbred enemy,
+    Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,
+    Made to destroy: I fled, and cried out _Death!_
+    Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed
+    From all her caves, and back resounded _Death_.[1]
+
+That such a view of Death should be taken by the professed followers
+of a Teacher said to have "brought life and immortality to light" is
+passing strange. The claim, that as late in the history of the world
+as a mere eighteen centuries ago the immortality of the Spirit in man
+was brought to light, is of course transparently absurd, in the face
+of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary available on all hands.
+The stately Egyptian Ritual with its _Book of the Dead_, in which are
+traced the post-mortem journeys of the Soul, should be enough, if it
+stood alone, to put out of court for ever so preposterous a claim.
+Hear the cry of the Soul of the righteous:
+
+    O ye, who make the escort of the God, stretch out to me your
+    arms, for I become one of you. (xvii. 22.)
+
+    Hail to thee, Osiris, Lord of Light, dwelling in the mighty
+    abode, in the bosom of the absolute darkness. I come to thee,
+    a purified Soul; my two hands are around thee. (xxi. 1.)
+
+    I open heaven; I do what was commanded in Memphis. I have
+    knowledge of my heart; I am in possession of my heart, I am
+    in possession of my arms, I am in possession of my legs, at
+    the will of myself. My Soul is not imprisoned in my body at
+    the gates of Amenti. (xxvi. 5, 6.)
+
+Not to multiply to weariness quotations from a book that is wholly
+composed of the doings and sayings of the disembodied man, let it
+suffice to give the final judgment on the victorious Soul:
+
+    The defunct shall be deified among the Gods in the lower
+    divine region, he shall never be rejected.... He shall drink
+    from the current of the celestial river.... His Soul shall
+    not be imprisoned, since it is a Soul that brings salvation
+    to those near it. The worms shall not devour it. (clxiv.
+    14-16.)
+
+The general belief in Re-incarnation is enough to prove that the
+religions of which it formed a central doctrine believed in the
+survival of the Soul after Death; but one may quote as an example a
+passage from the _Ordinances of Manu_, following on a disquisition on
+metempsychosis, and answering the question of deliverance from
+rebirths.
+
+    Amid all these holy acts, the knowledge of self [should be
+    translated, knowledge of the _Self_, Atmâ] is said (to be)
+    the highest; this indeed is the foremost of all sciences,
+    since from it immortality is obtained.[2]
+
+The testimony of the great Zarathustrean Religion is clear, as is
+shown by the following, translated from the _Avesta_, in which, the
+journey of the Soul after death having been described, the ancient
+Scripture proceeds:
+
+    The soul of the pure man goes the first step and arrives at
+    (the Paradise) Humata; the soul of the pure man takes the
+    second step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hukhta; it goes the
+    third step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hvarst; the soul of
+    the pure man takes the fourth step and arrives at the Eternal
+    Lights.
+
+    To it speaks a pure one deceased before, asking it: How art
+    thou, O pure deceased, come away from the fleshy dwellings,
+    from the earthly possessions, from the corporeal world hither
+    to the invisible, from the perishable world hither to the
+    imperishable, as it happened to thee--to whom hail!
+
+    Then speaks Ahura-Mazda: Ask not him whom thou asketh, (for)
+    he is come on the fearful, terrible, trembling way, the
+    separation of body and soul.[3]
+
+The Persian _Desatir_ speaks with equal definiteness. This work
+consists of fifteen books, written by Persian prophets, and was
+written originally in the Avestaic language; "God" is Ahura-Mazda, or
+Yazdan:
+
+    God selected man from animals to confer on him the soul,
+    which is a substance free, simple, immaterial, non-compounded
+    and non-appetitive. And that becomes an angel by improvement.
+
+    By his profound wisdom and most sublime intelligence, he
+    connected the soul with the material body.
+
+    If he (man) does good in the material body, and has a good
+    knowledge and religion he is _Hartasp_....
+
+    As soon as he leaves this material body, I (God) take him up
+    to the world of angels, that he may have an interview with
+    the angels, and behold me.
+
+    And if he is not Hartasp, but has wisdom and abstains from
+    vice, I will promote him to the rank of angels.
+
+    Every person in proportion to his wisdom and piety will find
+    a place in the rank of wise men, among the heavens and stars.
+    And in that region of happiness he will remain for ever.[4]
+
+In China, the immemorial custom of worshipping the Souls of ancestors
+shows how completely the life of man was regarded as extending beyond
+the tomb. The _Shû King_--placed by Mr. James Legge as the most
+ancient of Chinese classics, containing historical documents ranging
+from B.C. 2357-627--is full of allusions to these Souls, who with
+other spiritual beings, watch over the affairs of their descendants
+and the welfare of the kingdom. Thus Pan-kang, ruling from B.C.
+1401-1374, exhorts his subjects:
+
+    My object is to support and nourish you all. I think of my
+    ancestors (who are now) the spiritual sovereigns.... Were I
+    to err in my government, and remain long here, my high
+    sovereign (the founder of our dynasty) would send down on me
+    great punishment for my crime, and say, "Why do you oppress
+    my people?" If you, the myriads of the people, do not attend
+    to the perpetuation of your lives, and cherish one mind with
+    me, the One man, in my plans, the former kings will send down
+    on you great punishment for your crime, and say, "Why do you
+    not agree with our young grandson, but go on to forfeit your
+    virtue?" When they punish you from above, you will have no
+    way of escape.... Your ancestors and fathers will (now) cut
+    you off and abandon you, and not save you from death.[5]
+
+Indeed, so practical is this Chinese belief, held to-day as in those
+long-past ages, that "the change that men call Death" seems to play a
+very small part in the thoughts and lives of the people of the Flowery
+Land.
+
+These quotations, which might be multiplied a hundred-fold, may
+suffice to prove the folly of the idea that immortality came to "light
+through the gospel". The whole ancient world basked in the full
+sunshine of belief in the immortality of man, lived in it daily,
+voiced it in its literature, went with it in calm serenity through the
+gate of Death.
+
+It remains a problem why Christianity, which vigorously and joyously
+re-affirmed it, should have growing in its midst the unique terror of
+Death that has played so large a part in its social life, its
+literature, and its art. It is not simply the belief in hell that has
+surrounded the grave with horror, for other Religions have had their
+hells, and yet their followers have not been harassed by this shadowy
+Fear. The Chinese, for instance, who take Death as such a light and
+trivial thing, have a collection of hells quite unique in their varied
+unpleasantness. Maybe the difference is a question of race rather than
+of creed; that the vigorous life of the West shrinks from its
+antithesis, and that its unimaginative common-sense finds a bodiless
+condition too lacking in solidity of comfort; whereas the more dreamy,
+mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever seeking to escape from
+the thraldom of the senses during earthly life, looks on the
+disembodied state as eminently desirable, and as most conducive to
+unfettered thought.
+
+Ere passing to the consideration of the history of man in the
+post-mortem state, it is necessary, however briefly, to state the
+constitution of man, as viewed by the Esoteric Philosophy, for we must
+have in mind the constituents of his being ere we can understand their
+disintegration. Man then consists of
+
+_The Immortal Triad_:
+
+Atmâ.
+Buddhi.
+Manas.
+
+_The Perishable Quaternary_:
+
+Kâma.
+Prâna.
+Etheric Double.
+Dense Body.
+
+The dense body is the physical body, the visible, tangible outer form,
+composed of various tissues. The etheric double is the ethereal
+counterpart of the body, composed of the physical ethers. Prâna is
+vitality, the integrating energy that co-ordinates the physical
+molecules and holds them together in a definite organism; it is the
+life-breath within the organism, the portion of the universal
+Life-Breath, appropriated by the organism during the span of existence
+that we speak of as "a life". Kâma is the aggregate of appetites,
+passions, and emotions, common to man and brute. Manas is the Thinker
+in us, the Intelligence. Buddhi is the vehicle wherein Atmâ, the
+Spirit, dwells, and in which alone it can manifest.
+
+Now the link between the Immortal Triad and the Perishable Quaternary
+is Manas, which is dual during earth life, or incarnation, and
+functions as Higher Manas and Lower Manas. Higher Manas sends out a
+Ray, Lower Manas, which works in and through the human brain,
+functioning there as brain-consciousness, as the ratiocinating
+intelligence. This mingles with Kâma, the passional nature, the
+passions and emotions thus becoming a part of Mind, as defined in
+Western Psychology. And so we have the link formed between the higher
+and lower natures in man, this Kâma-Manas belonging to the higher by
+its mânasic, and to the lower by its kâmic, elements. As this forms
+the battleground during life, so does it play an important part in
+post-mortem existence. We might now classify our seven principles a
+little differently, having in view this mingling in Kâma-Manas of
+perishable and imperishable elements:
+
+                          { Atmâ.
+      _Immortal_.         { Buddhi.
+                          { Higher-Manas.
+
+_Conditionally Immortal_. Kâma-Manas.
+
+                          { Prâna.
+      _Mortal_.           { Etheric Double.
+                          { Dense Body.
+
+Some Christian writers have adopted a classification similar to this,
+declaring Spirit to be inherently immortal, as being Divine; Soul to
+be conditionally immortal, _i.e._, capable of winning immortality by
+uniting itself with Spirit; Body to be inherently mortal. The majority
+of uninstructed Christians chop man into two, the Body that perishes
+at Death, and the something--called indifferently Soul or
+Spirit--that survives Death. This last classification--if
+classification it may be called--is entirely inadequate, if we are to
+seek any rational explanation, or even lucid statement, of the
+phenomena of post-mortem existence. The tripartite view of man's
+nature gives a more reasonable representation of his constitution, but
+is inadequate to explain many phenomena. The septenary division alone
+gives a reasonable theory consistent with the facts we have to deal
+with, and therefore, though it may seem elaborate, the student will do
+wisely to make himself familiar with it. If he were studying only the
+body, and desired to understand its activities, he would have to
+classify its tissues at far greater length and with far more
+minuteness than I am using here. He would have to learn the
+differences between muscular, nervous, glandular, bony, cartilaginous,
+epithelial, connective, tissues, and all their varieties; and if he
+rebelled, in his ignorance, against such an elaborate division, it
+would be explained to him that only by such an analysis of the
+different components of the body can the varied and complicated
+phenomena of life-activity be understood. One kind of tissue is wanted
+for support, another for movement, another for secretion, another for
+absorption, and so on; and if each kind does not have its own
+distinctive name, dire confusion and misunderstanding must result, and
+physical functions remain unintelligible. In the long run time is
+gained, as well as clearness, by learning a few necessary technical
+terms, and as clearness is above all things needed in trying to
+explain and to understand very complicated post-mortem phenomena, I
+find myself compelled--contrary to my habit in these elementary
+papers--to resort to these technical names at the outset, for the
+English language has as yet no equivalents for them, and the use of
+long descriptive phrases is extremely cumbersome and inconvenient.
+
+For myself, I believe that very much of the antagonism between the
+adherents of the Esoteric Philosophy and those of Spiritualism has
+arisen from confusion of terms, and consequent misunderstanding of
+each others meaning. One eminent Spiritualist lately impatiently said
+that he did not see the need of exact definition, and that he meant by
+Spirit all the part of man's nature that survived Death, and was not
+body. One might as well insist on saying that man's body consists of
+bone and blood, and asked to define blood, answer: "Oh! I mean
+everything that is not bone." A clear definition of terms, and a rigid
+adherence to them when once adopted, will at least enable us all to
+understand each other, and that is the first step to any fruitful
+comparison of experiences.
+
+
+THE FATE OF THE BODY.
+
+The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of
+reconstruction. First builded into the etheric form in the womb of the
+mother, it is built up continually by the insetting of fresh
+materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away from it;
+with every moment tiny molecules are streaming into it. The outgoing
+stream is scattered over the environment, and helps to rebuild bodies
+of all kinds in the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms,
+the physical basis of all these being one and the same.
+
+    The idea that the human tabernacle is built by countless
+    _lives_, just in the same way as the rocky crust of our Earth
+    was, has nothing repulsive in it for the true mystic....
+    Science teaches us that the living as well as the dead
+    organism of both man and animal are swarming with bacteria of
+    a hundred various kinds; that from without we are threatened
+    with the invasion of microbes with every breath we draw, and
+    from within by leucomaines, robes, ærobes, anærobes, and what
+    not. But Science never yet went so far as to assert with the
+    Occult Doctrine that our bodies, as well as those of animals,
+    plants, and stones, are themselves altogether built up of
+    such beings, which, except larger species, no microscope can
+    detect. So far as regards the purely animal and material
+    portion of man, Science is on its way to discoveries that
+    will go far towards corroborating this theory. Chemistry and
+    physiology are the two great magicians of the future, who are
+    destined to open the eyes of mankind to the great physical
+    truths. With every day, the identity between the animal and
+    physical man, between the plant and man, and even between the
+    reptile and its nest, the rock, and man, is more and more
+    clearly shown. The physical and chemical constituents of all
+    being found to be identical, chemical Science may well say
+    that there is no difference between the matter which composes
+    the ox and that which forms man. But the Occult Doctrine is
+    far more explicit. It says: Not only the chemical compounds
+    are the same, but the same infinitesimal _invisible lives_
+    compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the
+    daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant, and of the tree
+    which shelters him from the sun. Each particle--whether you
+    call it organic or inorganic--_is a life_.[6]
+
+These "lives" which, separate and independent, are the minute vehicles
+of Prâna, aggregated together form the molecules and cells of the
+physical body, and they stream in and stream out, during all the years
+of bodily life, thus forming a continual bridge between man and his
+environment. Controlling these are the "Fiery Lives," the Devourers,
+which constrain these to their work of building up the cells of the
+body, so that they work harmoniously and in order, subordinated to the
+higher manifestation of life in the complex organism called Man. These
+Fiery Lives on our plane correspond, in this controlling and
+organising function, with the One Life of the Universe,[7] and when
+they no longer exercise this function in the human body, the lower
+lives run rampant, and begin to break down the hitherto definitely
+organised body. During bodily life they are marshalled as an army;
+marching in regular order under the command of a general, performing
+various evolutions, keeping step, moving as a single body. At "Death"
+they become a disorganised and tumultuous mob, rushing hither and
+thither, jostling each other, tumbling over each other, with no common
+object, no generally recognised authority. The body is never more
+alive than when it is dead; but it is alive in its units, and dead in
+its totality; alive as a congeries, dead as an organism.
+
+    Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily
+    united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To
+    the Materialist, the only difference between a living and a
+    dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in
+    the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the
+    molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them
+    asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must
+    be Death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as
+    Death, where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an
+    intense vital energy.... Says Eliphas Levi: "Change attests
+    movement, and movement only reveals life. The corpse would
+    not decompose if it were dead; all the molecules which
+    compose it are living and struggle to separate."[8]
+
+Those who have read _The Seven Principles of Man_,[9] know that the
+etheric double is the vehicle of Prâna, the life-principle, or
+vitality. Through the etheric double Prâna exercises the controlling
+and co-ordinating force spoken of above, and "Death" takes triumphant
+possession of the body when the etheric double is finally withdrawn
+and the delicate cord which unites it with the body is snapped. The
+process of withdrawal has been watched by clairvoyants, and definitely
+described. Thus Andrew Jackson Davis, "the Poughkeepsie Seer",
+describes how he himself watched this escape of the ethereal body, and
+he states that the magnetic cord did not break for some thirty-six
+hours after apparent death. Others have described, in similar terms,
+how they saw a faint violet mist rise from the dying body, gradually
+condensing into a figure which was the counterpart of the expiring
+person, and attached to that person by a glistening thread. The
+snapping of the thread means the breaking of the last magnetic link
+between the dense body and the remaining principles of the human
+constitution; the body has dropped away from the man; he is
+excarnated, disembodied; six principles still remain as his
+constitution immediately after death, the seventh, or the dense body,
+being left as a cast-off garment.
+
+Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or
+unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one
+after the other, its outer casings, and--as the snake from its skin,
+the butterfly from its chrysalis--emerges from one after another,
+passing into a higher state of consciousness. Now it is the fact that
+this escape from the body, and this dwelling of the conscious entity
+either in the vehicle called the body of desire, the kâmic or astral
+body, or in a yet more ethereal Thought Body, can be effected during
+earth-life; so that man may become familiar with the excarnated
+condition, and it may lose for him all the terrors that encircle the
+unknown. He can know himself as a conscious entity in either of these
+vehicles, and so prove to his own satisfaction that "life" does not
+depend on his functioning through the physical body. Why should a man
+who has thus repeatedly "shed" his lower bodies, and has found the
+process result, not in unconsciousness, but in a vastly extended
+freedom and vividness of life--why should he fear the final casting
+away of his fetters, and the freeing of his Immortal Self from what he
+realises as the prison of the flesh?
+
+This view of human life is an essential part of the Esoteric
+Philosophy. Man is primarily divine, a spark of the Divine Life. This
+living flame, passing out from the Central Fire, weaves for itself
+coverings within which it dwells, and thus becomes the Triad, the
+Atmâ-Buddhi-Manas, the reflection of the Immortal Self. This sends out
+its Ray, which becomes encased in grosser matter, in the desire body,
+or kâmic elements, the passional nature, and in the etheric double and
+the physical body. The once free immortal Intelligence thus entangled,
+enswathed, enchained, works heavily and laboriously through the
+coatings that enwrap it. In its own nature it remains ever the free
+Bird of Heaven, but its wings are bound to its side by the matter into
+which it is plunged. When man recognises his own inherent nature, he
+learns to open his prison doors occasionally and escapes from his
+encircling gaol; first he learns to identify himself with the
+Immortal Triad, and rises above the body and its passions into a pure
+mental and moral life; then he learns that the conquered body cannot
+hold him prisoner, and he unlocks its door and steps out into the
+sunshine of his true life. So when Death unlocks the door for him, he
+knows the country into which he emerges, having trodden its ways at
+his own will. And at last he grows to recognise that fact of supreme
+importance, that "Life" has nothing to do with body and with this
+material plane; that Life is his conscious existence, unbroken,
+unbreakable, and that the brief interludes in that Life, during which
+he sojourns on Earth, are but a minute fraction of his conscious
+existence, and a fraction, moreover, during which he is less alive,
+because of the heavy coverings which weigh him down. For only during
+these interludes (save in exceptional cases) may he wholly lose his
+consciousness of continued life, being surrounded by these coverings
+which delude him and blind him to the truth of things, making that
+real which is illusion, and that stable which is transitory. The
+sunlight ranges over the universe, and at incarnation we step out of
+it into the twilight of the body, and see but dimly during the period
+of our incarceration; at Death we step out of the prison again into
+the sunlight, and are nearer to the reality. Short are the twilight
+periods, and long the periods of the sunlight; but in our blinded
+state we call the twilight life, and to us it is the real existence,
+while we call the sunlight Death, and shiver at the thought of passing
+into it. Well did Giordano Bruno, one of the greatest teachers of our
+Philosophy in the Middle Ages, state the truth as to the body and Man.
+Of the real Man he says:
+
+    He will be present in the body in such wise that the best
+    part of himself will be absent from it, and will join himself
+    by an indissoluble sacrament to divine things, in such a way
+    that he will not feel either love or hatred of things mortal.
+    Considering himself as master, and that he ought not to be
+    servant and slave to his body, which he would regard only as
+    the prison which holds his liberty in confinement, the glue
+    which smears his wings, chains which bind fast his hands,
+    stocks which fix his feet, veil which hides his view. Let him
+    not be servant, captive, ensnared, chained, idle, stolid, and
+    blind, for the body which he himself abandons cannot
+    tyrannise over him, so that thus the spirit in a certain
+    degree comes before him as the corporeal world, and matter is
+    subject to the divinity and to nature.[10]
+
+When once we thus come to regard the body, and by conquering it we
+gain our liberty, Death loses for us all his terrors, and at his touch
+the body slips from us as a garment, and we stand out from it erect
+and free.
+
+On the same lines of thought Dr. Franz Hartmann writes:
+
+    According to certain views of the West man is a developed
+    ape. According to the views of Indian Sages, which also
+    coincide with those of the Philosophers of past ages and with
+    the teachings of the Christian Mystics, man is a God, who is
+    united during his earthly life, through his own carnal
+    tendencies, to an animal (his animal nature). The God who
+    dwells within him endows man with wisdom. The animal endows
+    him with force. After death, _the God effects his own release
+    from the man_ by departing from the animal body. As man
+    carries within him this divine consciousness, it is his task
+    to battle with his animal inclinations, and to raise himself
+    above them, by the help of the divine principle, a task which
+    the animal cannot achieve, and which therefore is not
+    demanded of it.[11]
+
+The "man", using the word in the sense of personality, as it is used
+in the latter half of this sentence, is only conditionally immortal;
+the true man, the evolving God, releases himself, and so much of the
+personality goes with him as has raised itself into union with the
+divine.
+
+The body thus left to the rioting of the countless lives--previously
+held in constraint by Prâna, acting through its vehicle the etheric
+double--begins to decay, that is to break up, and with the
+disintegration of its cells and molecules, its particles pass away
+into other combinations.
+
+On our return to Earth we may meet again some of those same countless
+lives that in a previous incarnation made of our then body their
+passing dwelling; but all that we are just now concerned with is the
+breaking up of the body whose life-span is over, and its fate is
+complete disintegration. To the dense body, then, Death means
+dissolution as an organism, the loosing of the bonds that united the
+many into one.
+
+
+THE FATE OF THE ETHERIC DOUBLE.
+
+The etheric double is the ethereal counterpart of the gross body of
+man. It is the double that is sometimes seen during life in the
+neighbourhood of the body, and its absence from the body is generally
+marked by the heaviness or semi-lethargy of the latter. Acting as the
+reservoir, or vehicle, of the life-principle during earth-life, its
+withdrawal from the body is naturally marked by the lowering of all
+vital functions, even while the cord which unites the two is still
+unbroken. As has been already said, the snapping of the cord means the
+death of the body.
+
+When the etheric double finally quits the body, it does not travel to
+any distance from it. Normally it remains floating over the body, the
+state of consciousness being dreamy and peaceful, unless tumultuous
+distress and violent emotion surround the corpse from which it has
+just issued. And here it may be well to say that during the slow
+process of dying, while the etheric double is withdrawing from the
+body, taking with it the higher principles, as after it has withdrawn,
+extreme quiet and self-control should be observed in the chamber of
+Death. For during this time the whole life passes swiftly in review
+before the Ego, the individual, as those have related who have passed
+in drowning into this unconscious and pulseless state. A Master has
+written:
+
+    _At the last moment the whole life is reflected in our
+    memory, and emerges from all the forgotten nooks and corners,
+    picture after picture, one event after another.... The man
+    may often appear dead, yet from the last pulsation, from and
+    between the last throbbing of his heart and the moment when
+    the last spark of animal heat leaves the body_, the brain
+    thinks, _and the Ego lives over in those few brief seconds
+    his whole life. Speak in whispers, ye who assist at a
+    deathbed, and find yourselves in the solemn presence of
+    death. Especially have ye to keep quiet just after death has
+    laid her clammy hand upon the body. Speak in whispers, I say,
+    lest ye disturb the quiet ripple of thought, and hinder the
+    busy work of the past, casting its reflection upon the veil
+    of the future._[12]
+
+This is the time during which the thought-images of the ended
+earth-life, clustering around their maker, group and interweave
+themselves into the completed image of that life, and are impressed in
+their totality on the Astral Light. The dominant tendencies, the
+strongest thought-habits, assert their pre-eminence, and stamp
+themselves as the characteristics which will appear as "innate
+qualities" in the succeeding incarnation. This balancing-up of the
+life-issues, this reading of the kârmic records, is too solemn and
+momentous a thing to be disturbed by the ill-timed wailings of
+personal relatives and friends.
+
+    At the solemn moment of death every man, even when death is
+    sudden, sees the whole of his past life marshalled before
+    him, in its minutest details. For one short instant the
+    _personal_ become one with the _individual_ and all-knowing
+    Ego. But this instant is enough to show to him the whole
+    chain of causes which have been at work during his life. He
+    sees and now understands himself as he is, unadorned by
+    flattery or self-deception. He reads his life, remaining as a
+    spectator, looking down into the arena he is quitting.[13]
+
+This vivid sight is succeeded, in the ordinary person, by the dreamy,
+peaceful semi-consciousness spoken of above, as the etheric double
+floats above the body to which it has belonged, now completely
+separated from it.
+
+Sometimes this double is seen by persons in the house, or in the
+neighbourhood, when the thought of the dying has been strongly turned
+to some one left behind, when some anxiety has been in the mind at the
+last, something left undone which needed doing, or when some local
+disturbance has shaken the tranquillity of the passing entity. Under
+these conditions, or others of a similar nature, the double may be
+seen or heard; when seen, it shows the dreamy, hazy consciousness
+alluded to, is silent, vague in its aspect, unresponsive.
+
+As the days go on, the five higher principles gradually disengage
+themselves from the etheric double, and shake this off as they
+previously shook off the grosser body. They pass on, as a fivefold
+entity, into a state to be next studied, leaving the etheric double,
+with the dense body of which it is the counterpart, thus becoming an
+ethereal corpse, as much as the body had become a dense corpse. This
+ethereal corpse remains near the dense one, and they disintegrate
+together; clairvoyants see these ethereal wraiths in churchyards,
+sometimes showing likeness to the dead dense body, sometimes as violet
+mists or lights. Such an ethereal corpse has been seen by a friend of
+my own, passing through the horribly repulsive stages of
+decomposition, a ghastly vision in face of which clairvoyance was
+certainly no blessing. The process goes on _pari passu_, until all but
+the actual bony skeleton of the dense body is completely
+disintegrated, and the particles have gone to form other combinations.
+
+One of the great advantages of cremation--apart from all sanitary
+conditions--lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the
+physical elements composing the dense and ethereal corpses, brought
+about by the burning. Instead of slow and gradual decomposition, swift
+dissociation takes place, and no physical remnants are left, working
+possible mischief.
+
+The ethereal corpse may to some extent be revivified for a short
+period after its death. Dr. Hartmann says:
+
+    The fresh corpse of a person who has suddenly been killed may
+    be galvanised into a semblance of life by the application of
+    a galvanic battery. Likewise the astral corpse of a person
+    may be brought back into an artificial life by being infused
+    with a part of the life principle of the medium. If that
+    corpse is one of a very intellectual person, it may talk
+    very intellectually; and if it was that of a fool it will
+    talk like a fool.[14]
+
+This mischievous procedure can only be carried out in the
+neighbourhood of the corpse, and for a very limited time after death,
+but there are cases on record of such galvanising of the ethereal
+corpse, performed at the grave of the departed person. Needless to say
+that such a process belongs distinctly to "Black" Magic, and is wholly
+evil. Ethereal corpses, like dense ones, if not swiftly destroyed by
+burning, should be left in the silence and the darkness, a silence and
+a darkness that it is the worst profanity to break.
+
+
+KÂMALOKA, AND THE FATE OF PRÂNA AND KÂMA.
+
+Loka is a Sanskrit word that may be translated as place, world, land,
+so that Kâmaloka is literally the place or the world of Kâma, Kâma
+being the name of that part of the human organism that includes all
+the passions, desires, and emotions which man has in common with the
+lower animals.[15] In this division of the universe, the Kâmaloka,
+dwell all the human entities that have shaken off the dense body and
+its ethereal double, but have not yet disentangled themselves from the
+passional and emotional nature. Kâmaloka has many other tenants, but
+we are concerned only with the human beings who have lately passed
+through the gateway of Death, and it is on these that we must
+concentrate our study.
+
+A momentary digression may be pardoned on the question of the
+existence of regions in the universe, other than the physical,
+peopled with intelligent beings. The existence of such regions is
+postulated by the Esoteric Philosophy, and is known to the Adepts and
+to very many less highly evolved men and women by personal experience;
+all that is needed for the study of these regions is the evolution of
+the faculties latent in every man; a "living" man, in ordinary
+parlance, can leave his dense and ethereal bodies behind him, and
+explore these regions without going through Death's gateway. Thus we
+read in the _Theosophist_ that real knowledge may be acquired by the
+Spirit in the living man coming into conscious relations with the
+world of Spirit.
+
+    As in the case, say, of an initiated Adept, who brings back
+    upon earth with him the clear and distinct
+    recollection--correct to a detail--of facts gathered, and the
+    information obtained, in the invisible sphere of
+    _Realities_.[16]
+
+In this way those regions become to him matters of knowledge as
+definite, as certain, as familiar, as if he should travel to Africa in
+ordinary fashion, explore its deserts, and return to his own land the
+richer for the knowledge and experience gained. A seasoned African
+explorer would care but little for the criticisms passed on his report
+by persons who had never been thither; he might tell what he saw,
+describe the animals whose habits he had studied, sketch the country
+he had traversed, sum up its products and its characteristics. If he
+was contradicted, laughed at, set right, by untravelled critics, he
+would be neither ruffled nor distressed, but would merely leave them
+alone. Ignorance cannot convince knowledge by repeated asseveration
+of its nescience. The opinion of a hundred persons on a subject on
+which they are wholly ignorant is of no more weight than the opinion
+of one such person. Evidence is strengthened by many consenting
+witnesses, testifying each to his knowledge of a fact, but nothing
+multiplied a thousand times remains nothing. Strange, indeed, would it
+be if all the Space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the
+inhabitants of earth the only forms in which intelligence could clothe
+itself. As Dr. Huxley said:
+
+    Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known,
+    it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending
+    scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable
+    from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience.[17]
+
+If these entities did not have organs of sense like our own, if their
+senses responded to vibrations different from those which affect ours,
+they and we might walk side by side, pass each other, meet each other,
+pass through each other, and yet be never the wiser as to each other's
+existence. Mr. Crookes gives us a glimpse of the possibility of such
+unconscious co-existence of intelligent beings, and but a very slight
+effort of imagination is needed to realise the conception.
+
+    It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs
+    of sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to
+    which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate
+    other vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would
+    practically be living in a different world to our own.
+    Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of
+    surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive
+    to the ordinary rays of light, but sensitive to the
+    vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic phenomena.
+    Glass and crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies.
+    Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph
+    wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole
+    drilled through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active
+    work would resemble a conflagration, whilst a permanent
+    magnet would realise the dream of mediæval mystics, and
+    become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or
+    consumption of fuel.[18]
+
+Kâmaloka is a region peopled by intelligent and semi-intelligent
+entities, just as our own is thus peopled; it is crowded, like our
+world, with many types and forms of living things, as diverse from
+each other as a blade of grass is different from a tiger, a tiger from
+a man. It interpenetrates our own world and is interpenetrated by it,
+but, as the states of matter in the two worlds differ, they co-exist
+without the knowledge of the intelligent beings in either. Only under
+abnormal circumstances can consciousness of each other's presence
+arise among the inhabitants of the two worlds; by certain peculiar
+training a living human being can come into conscious contact with and
+control many of the sub-human denizens of Kâmaloka; human beings, who
+have quitted earth and in whom the kâmic elements were strong, may
+very readily be attracted by the kâmic elements in embodied men, and
+by their help become conscious again of the presence of the scenes
+they had left; and human beings still embodied may set up methods of
+communication with the disembodied, and may, as said, leave their own
+bodies for awhile, and become conscious in Kâmaloka by the use of
+faculties through which they have accustomed their consciousness to
+act. The point which is here to be clearly grasped is the existence
+of Kâmaloka as a definite region, inhabited by a large diversity of
+entities, among whom are disembodied human beings.
+
+From this necessary digression we return to the particular human being
+whose fate, as a type, we may be said to be tracing, and of whose
+dense body and etheric double we have already disposed. Let us
+contemplate him in the state of very brief duration that follows the
+shaking off of these two casings. Says H.P. Blavatsky, after quoting
+from Plutarch a description of the man after death:
+
+    Here you have our doctrine, which shows man a _septenary_
+    during life; a _quintile_ just after death, in Kâmaloka.[19]
+
+Prâna, the portion of the life-energy appropriated by the man in his
+embodied state, having lost its vehicle, the ethereal double, which,
+with the physical body, has slipped away from its controlling energy,
+must pass back into the great life-reservoir of the universe. As water
+enclosed in a glass vessel and plunged into a tank mingles with the
+surrounding water if the vessel be broken, so Prâna, as the bodies
+drop from it, mingles again with the Life Universal. It is only "just
+after death" that man is a quintile, or fivefold in his constitution,
+for Prâna, as a distinctively human principle, cannot remain
+appropriated when its vehicle disintegrates.
+
+The man now is clothed, but with the Kâma Rûpa, or body of Kâma, the
+desire body, a body of astral matter, often termed "fluidic," so
+easily does it, during earth-life, take any form impressed upon it
+from without or moulded from within. The living man is there, the
+immortal Triad, still clad in the last of its terrestrial garments, in
+the subtle, sensitive, responsive form which lent it during embodiment
+the power to feel, to desire, to enjoy, to suffer, in the physical
+world.
+
+    When the man dies, his three lower principles leave him for
+    ever; _i.e._, body, life, and the vehicle of the latter, the
+    etheric body, or the double of the living man. And then his
+    four principles--the central or middle principle (the animal
+    soul or Kâma Rûpa, with what it has assimilated from the
+    lower Manas) and the higher Triad--find themselves in
+    Kâmaloka.[20]
+
+This desire body undergoes a marked change soon after death. The
+different densities of the astral matter of which it is composed
+arrange themselves in a series of shells or envelopes, the densest
+being outside, shutting the consciousness away from all but very
+limited contact and expression. The consciousness turns in on itself,
+if left undisturbed, and prepares itself for the next step onwards,
+while the desire body gradually disintegrates, shell after shell.
+
+Up to the point of this re-arrangement of the matter of the desire
+body, the post-mortem experience of all is much the same; it is a
+"dreamy, peaceful semi-consciousness," as before said, and this, in
+the happiest cases, passes without vivid awakening into the deeper
+"pre-devachanic unconsciousness" which ends with the blissful wakening
+in Devachan, for the period of repose that intervenes between two
+incarnations. But as, at this point, different possibilities arise,
+let us trace a normal uninterrupted progression in Kâmaloka, up to the
+threshold of Devachan, and then we can return to consider other
+classes of circumstances.
+
+If a person has led a pure life, and has steadfastly striven to rise
+and to identify himself with the higher rather than the lower parts of
+his nature, after shaking off the dense body and the etheric double,
+and after Prâna has re-mingled with the ocean of Life, and he is
+clothed only with the Kâma Rûpa, the passional elements in him, being
+but weak and accustomed to comparatively little activity, will not be
+able to assert themselves strongly in Kâmaloka. Now during earth-life
+Kâma and the Lower Manas are strongly united and interwoven with each
+other; in the case we are considering Kâma is weak, and the Lower
+Manas has purified Kâma to a great extent. The mind, woven with the
+passions, emotions, and desires, has purified them, and has
+assimilated their pure part, absorbed it into itself, so that all that
+is left of Kâma is a mere residue, easily to be gotten rid of, from
+which the Immortal Triad can readily free itself. Slowly this Immortal
+Triad, the true Man, draws in all his forces; he draws into himself
+the memories of the earth-life just ended, its loves, its hopes, its
+aspirations, and prepares to pass out of Kâmaloka into the blissful
+rest of Devachan, the "abode of the Gods", or as some say, "the land
+of bliss". Kâmaloka
+
+    Is an astral locality, the Limbus of scholastic theology, the
+    Hades of the ancients, and, strictly speaking, a _locality_
+    only in a relative sense. It has neither a definite area, nor
+    boundary, but exists _within_ subjective space, _i.e._, is
+    beyond our sensuous perceptions. Still it exists, and it is
+    there that the astral _eidolons_ of all the beings that have
+    lived, animals included, await their _second death_. For the
+    animals it comes with the disintegration and the entire
+    fading out of their astral particles to the last. For the
+    human _eidolon_ it begins when the Atmâ-Buddhi-Mânasic Triad
+    is said to "separate" itself from its lower principles or the
+    reflection of the ex-personality, by falling into the
+    Devachanic state.[21]
+
+This second death is the passage, then, of the Immortal Triad from the
+kâmalokic sphere, so closely related to the earth sphere, into the
+higher state of Devachan, of which we must speak later. The type of
+man we are considering passes through this, in the peaceful dreamy
+state already described, and, if left undisturbed, will not regain
+full consciousness until these stages are passed through, and peace
+gives way to bliss.
+
+But during the whole period that the four principles--the Immortal
+Triad and Kâma--remain in Kâmaloka, whether the period be long or
+short, days or centuries, they are within the reach of the
+earth-influences. In the case of such a person as we have been
+describing, an awakening may be caused by the passionate sorrow and
+desires of friends left on earth, and these violently vibrating kâmic
+elements in the embodied persons may set up vibrations in the desire
+body of the disembodied, and so reach and rouse the lower Manas, not
+yet withdrawn to and reunited with its parent, the Spiritual
+Intelligence. Thus it may be roused from its dreamy state to vivid
+remembrance of the earth-life so lately left, and may--if any
+sensitive or medium is concerned, either directly, or indirectly
+through one of these grieving friends in communication with the
+medium--use the medium's etheric and dense bodies to speak or write to
+those left behind. This awakening is often accompanied with acute
+suffering, and even if this be avoided, the natural process of the
+Triad freeing itself is rudely disturbed, and the completion of its
+freedom is delayed. In speaking of this possibility of communication
+during the period immediately succeeding death and before the freed
+Man passes on into Devachan, H.P. Blavatsky says:
+
+    Whether any living mortal, save a few exceptional cases--when
+    the intensity of the desire in the dying person to return for
+    some purpose forced the higher consciousness _to remain
+    awake_, and, therefore, it was really the _individuality_,
+    the "Spirit", that communicated--has derived much benefit
+    from the return of the Spirit into the _objective_ plane is
+    another question. The Spirit is dazed after death, and falls
+    very soon into what we call "pre-devachanic
+    unconsciousness."[22]
+
+Intense desire may move the disembodied entity to spontaneously return
+to the sorrowing ones left behind, but this spontaneous return is rare
+in the case of persons of the type we are just now considering. If
+they are left at peace, they will generally sleep themselves quietly
+into Devachan, and so avoid any struggle or suffering in connection
+with the second death. On the final escape of the Immortal Triad there
+is left behind in Kâmaloka only the desire body, the "shell" or mere
+empty phantom, which gradually disintegrates; but it will be better to
+deal with this in considering the next type, the average man or woman,
+without marked spirituality of an elevated kind, but also without
+marked evil tendencies.
+
+When an average man or woman reaches Kâmaloka, the spiritual
+Intelligence is clothed with a desire body, which possesses
+considerable vigour and vitality; the lower Manas, closely interwoven
+with Kâma during the earth-life just ended, having lived much in the
+enjoyment of objects of sense and in the pleasures of the emotions,
+cannot quickly disentangle itself from the web of its own weaving, and
+return to its Parent Mind, the source of its own being. Hence a
+considerable delay in the world of transition, in Kâmaloka, while the
+desires wear out and fade away to a point at which they can no longer
+detain the Soul with their clinging arms.
+
+As said, during the period that the Immortal Triad and Kâma remain
+together in Kâmaloka, communication between the disembodied entity and
+the embodied entities on earth is possible. Such communication will
+generally be welcomed by these disembodied ones, because their desires
+and emotions still cling to the earth they have left, and the mind has
+not sufficiently lived on its own plane to find therein full
+satisfaction and contentment. The lower Manas still yearns towards
+kâmic gratifications and the vivid highly coloured sensations of
+earth-life, and can by these yearnings be drawn back to the scenes it
+has regretfully quitted. Speaking of the possibility of communication
+between the Ego of the deceased person and a medium, H.P. Blavatsky
+says in the _Theosophist_,[23] as from the teachings received by her
+from the Adept Brothers, that such communication may occur during two
+intervals:
+
+    Interval the first is that period between the physical death
+    and the merging of the spiritual Ego into that state which is
+    known in the Arhat esoteric doctrine as Bar-do. We have
+    translated this as the "gestation" period [pre-devachanic].
+
+Some of the communications made through mediums are from this source,
+from the disembodied entity, thus drawn back to the earth-sphere--a
+cruel kindness, delaying its forward evolution and introducing an
+element of disharmony into what should be an orderly progression. The
+period in Kâmaloka is thus lengthened, the desire body is fed and its
+hold on the Ego is maintained, and thus is the freedom of the Soul
+deferred, the immortal Swallow being still held down by the bird-lime
+of earth.
+
+Persons who have led an evil life, who have gratified and stimulated
+their animal passions, and have full fed the desire body while they
+have starved even the lower mind--these remain for long, denizens of
+Kâmaloka, and are filled with yearnings for the earth-life they have
+left, and for the animal delights that they can no longer--in the
+absence of the physical body--directly taste. These gather round the
+medium and the sensitive, endeavouring to utilise them for their own
+gratification, and these are among the more dangerous of the forces so
+rashly confronted in their ignorance by the thoughtless and the
+curious.
+
+Another class of disembodied entities includes those whose lives on
+earth have been prematurely cut short, by their own act, the act of
+others, or by accident. Their fate in Kâmaloka depends on the
+conditions which surrounded their outgoings from earthly life, for not
+all suicides are guilty of _felo de se_, and the measure of
+responsibility may vary within very wide limits. The condition of such
+has been thus described:
+
+    _Suicides, although not wholly dissevered from their sixth
+    and seventh principles, and quite potent in the séance room,
+    nevertheless to the day when they would have died a natural
+    death, are separated from their higher principles by a gulf.
+    The sixth and seventh principles remain passive and negative,
+    whereas in cases of_ accidental death _the higher and the
+    lower groups actually attract each other. In cases of good
+    and innocent Egos, moreover, the latter gravitates
+    irresistibly toward the sixth and seventh, and thus either
+    slumbers surrounded by happy dreams, or sleeps a dreamless
+    profound sleep until the hour strikes. With a little
+    reflection and an eye to the eternal justice and fitness of
+    things, you will see why. The victim, whether good or bad, is
+    irresponsible for his death. Even if his death were due to
+    some action in a previous life or an antecedent birth, was an
+    act, in short, of the Law of Retribution, still it was not
+    the_ direct _result of an act deliberately committed by the_
+    personal _Ego of that life during which he happened to be
+    killed. Had he been allowed to live longer he might have
+    atoned for his antecedent sins still more effectually, and
+    even now, the Ego having been made to pay off the debt of his
+    maker, the personal Ego is free from the blows of retributive
+    justice. The Dhyân Chohans, who have no hand in the guidance
+    of the living human Ego, protect the helpless victim when it
+    is violently thrust out of its element into a new one, before
+    it is matured and made fit and ready for it._
+
+These, whether suicides or killed by accident, can communicate with
+those in earth-life, but much to their own injury. As said above, the
+good and innocent sleep happily till the life-period is over. But
+where the victim of an accident is depraved and gross, his fate is a
+sad one.
+
+    _Unhappy shades, if sinful and sensual, they wander about
+    (not shells, for their connection with their two higher
+    principles is not quite broken) until their_ death-_hour
+    comes. Cut off in the full flush of earthly passions which
+    bind them to familiar scenes, they are enticed by the
+    opportunities which mediums afford to gratify them
+    vicariously. They are the Pishâchas, the Incubi and Succubæ
+    of mediæval times; the demons of thirst, gluttony, lust, and
+    avarice--Elementaries of intensified craft, wickedness, and
+    cruelty; provoking their victims to horrid crimes, and
+    revelling 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Now the causes producing the "new being" and determining the
+    nature of Karma are Trishnâ (Tanhâ)--thirst, desire for
+    sentient existence--and Upâdâna, which is the realisation or
+    consummation of Trishnâ, or that desire. And both of these
+    the medium helps to develop_ ne plus ultra _in an Elementary,
+    be he a suicide or a victim. The rule is that a person who
+    dies a natural death will remain from "a few hours to several
+    short years" within the earth's attraction--_i.e._, the
+    Kâmaloka. But exceptions are the cases of suicides and those
+    who die a violent death in general. Hence, one of such Egos
+    who was destined to live, say, eighty or ninety years--but
+    who either killed himself or was killed by some accident, let
+    us suppose at the age of twenty--would have to pass in the
+    Kâmaloka not "a few years," but in his case sixty or seventy
+    years, as an Elementary, or rather an "earth-walker," since
+    he is not, unfortunately for him, even a "Shell." Happy,
+    thrice happy, in comparison, are those disembodied entities
+    who sleep their long slumber and live in dream in the bosom
+    of Space! And woe to those whose Trishnâ will attract them to
+    mediums, and woe to the latter who tempt them with such an
+    easy Upâdâna. For, in grasping them and satisfying their
+    thirst for life, the medium helps to develop in them--is, in
+    fact, the cause of--a new set of Skandhas, a new body with
+    far worse tendencies and passions than the one they lost. All
+    the future of this new body will be determined thus, not only
+    by the Karma of demerit of the previous set or group, but
+    also by that of the new set of the future being. Were the
+    mediums and spiritualists but to know, as I said, that with
+    every new "angel-guide" they welcome with rapture, they
+    entice the latter into a Upâdâna, which will be productive of
+    untold evils for the new Ego that will be reborn under its
+    nefarious shadow, and that with every séance, especially for
+    materialization, they multiply the causes for misery, causes
+    that will make the unfortunate Ego fail in his spiritual
+    birth, or be reborn into a far worse existence than
+    ever--they would, perhaps, be less lavish in their
+    hospitality._
+
+Premature death brought on by vicious courses, by over-study, or by
+voluntary sacrifice for some great cause, will bring about delay in
+Kâmaloka, but the state of the disembodied entity will depend on the
+motive that cut short the life.
+
+    _There are very few, if any, of the men who indulge in these
+    vices, who feel perfectly sure that such a course of action
+    will lead them eventually to premature death. Such is the
+    penalty of Mâyâ. The "vices" will not escape their
+    punishment; but it is the_ cause, _not the effect, that will
+    be punished, especially an unforeseen, though probable
+    effect. As well call a man a "suicide" who meets his death in
+    a storm at sea, as one who kills himself with "over-study".
+    Water is liable to drown a man, and too much brain work to
+    produce a softening of the brain matter which may carry him
+    away. In such a case no one ought to cross the_ Kâlapâni,
+    _nor even to take a bath for fear of getting faint in it and
+    drowned (for we all know of such cases), nor should a man do
+    his duty, least of all sacrifice himself for even a laudable
+    and highly beneficial cause as many of us do. Motive is
+    everything, and man is punished in a case of direct
+    responsibility, never otherwise. In the victim's case the
+    natural hour of death was anticipated_ accidentally, _while
+    in that of the suicide death is brought on voluntarily and
+    with a full and deliberate knowledge of its immediate
+    consequences. Thus a man who causes his death in a fit of
+    temporary insanity is_ not _a_ felo de se, _to the great
+    grief and often trouble of the Life Insurance Companies. Nor
+    is he left a prey to the temptations of the Kâmaloka, but
+    falls_ asleep _like any other victim._
+
+The population of Kâmaloka is thus recruited with a peculiarly
+dangerous element by all the acts of violence, legal and illegal,
+which wrench the physical body from the soul and send the latter into
+Kâmaloka clad in the desire body, throbbing with pulses of hatred,
+passion, emotion, palpitating with longings for revenge, with
+unsatiated lusts. A murderer in the body is not a pleasant member of
+society, but a murderer suddenly expelled from the body is a far more
+dangerous entity; society may protect itself against the first, but in
+its present state of ignorance it is defenceless as against the
+second.
+
+Finally, the Immortal Triad sets itself free from the desire body, and
+passes out of Kâmaloka; the Higher Manas draws back its Ray, coloured
+with the life-scenes it has passed through, and carrying with it the
+experiences gained through the personality it has informed. The
+labourer is called in from the field, and he returns home bearing his
+sheaves with him, rich or poor, according to the fruitage of the life.
+When the Triad has quitted Kâmaloka, it passes wholly out of the
+sphere of earth attractions:
+
+    _As soon as it has stepped outside the Kâmaloka--crossed the
+    "Golden Bridge" leading to the "Seven Golden Mountains"--the
+    Ego can confabulate no more with easy-going mediums._
+
+There are some exceptional possibilities of reaching such an Ego, that
+will be explained later, but the Ego is out of the reach of the
+ordinary medium and cannot be recalled into the earth-sphere. But ere
+we follow the further course of the Triad, we must consider the fate
+of the now deserted desire body, left as a mere _reliquum_ in
+Kâmaloka.
+
+
+KÂMALOKA. THE SHELLS.
+
+The Shell is the desire body, emptied of the Triad, which has now
+passed onwards; it is the third of the transitory garments of Soul,
+cast aside and left in Kâmaloka to disintegrate.
+
+When the past earth-life has been noble, or even when it has been of
+average purity and utility, this Shell retains but little vitality
+after the passing onwards of the Triad, and rapidly dissolves. Its
+molecules, however, retain, during this process of disintegration, the
+impressions made upon them during the earth-life, the tendency to
+vibrate in response to stimuli constantly experienced during that
+period. Every student of physiology is familiar with what is termed
+automatic action, with the tendency of cells to repeat vibrations
+originally set up by purposive action; thus are formed what we term
+habits, and we unconsciously repeat motions which at first were done
+with thought. So strong is this automatism of the body, that, as
+everyone knows by experience, it is difficult to break off the use of
+a phrase or of a gesture that has become "habitual."
+
+Now the desire body is during earth-life the recipient of and the
+respondent to all stimuli from without, and it also continually
+receives and responds to stimuli from the lower Manas. In it are set
+up habits, tendencies to repeat automatically familiar vibrations,
+vibrations of love and desire, vibrations imaging past experiences of
+all kinds. Just as the hand may repeat a familiar gesture, so may the
+desire body repeat a familiar feeling or thought. And when the Triad
+has left it, this automatism remains, and the Shell may thus simulate
+feelings and thoughts which are empty of all true intelligence and
+will. Many of the responses to eager enquiries at _séances_ come from
+such Shells, drawn to the neighbourhood of friends and relatives by
+the magnetic attractions so long familiar and dear, and automatically
+responding to the waves of emotion and remembrance, to the impulse of
+which they had so often answered during the lately closed earth-life.
+Phrases of affection, moral platitudes, memories of past events, will
+be all the communications such Shells can make, but these may be
+literally poured out under favourable conditions under the magnetic
+stimuli freely applied by the embodied friends and relatives.
+
+In cases where the lower Manas during earth-life has been strongly
+attached to material objects and to intellectual pursuits directed by
+a self-seeking motive, the desire body may have acquired a very
+considerable automatism of an intellectual character, and may give
+forth responses of considerable intellectual merit. But still the mark
+of non-originality will be present: the apparent intellectuality will
+only give out reproductions, and there will be no sign of the new and
+independent thought which would be the inevitable outcome of a strong
+intelligence working with originality amid new surroundings.
+Intellectual sterility brands the great majority of communications
+from the "spirit world"; reflections of earthly scenes, earthly
+conditions, earthly arrangements, are plentiful, but we usually seek
+in vain for strong, new thought, worthy of Intelligences freed from
+the prison of the flesh. The communications of a loftier kind
+occasionally granted are, for the most part, from non-human
+Intelligences, attracted by the pure atmosphere of the medium or
+sitters.
+
+And there is an ever-present danger in this commerce with the Shells.
+Just because they are Shells, and nothing more, they answer to the
+impulses that strike on them from without, and easily become malicious
+and mischievous, automatically responding to evil vibrations. Thus a
+medium, or sitters of poor moral character, will impress the Shells
+that flock around them with impulses of a low order, and any animal
+desires, petty and foolish thoughts, will set up similar vibrations in
+the blindly responsive Shells.
+
+Again, the Shell is very easily taken possession of by Elementals, the
+semi-conscious forces working in the kingdoms of Nature, and may be
+used by them as a convenient vehicle for many a prank and trick. The
+etheric double of the medium, and the desire bodies emptied of their
+immortal Tenants, give the material basis by which Elementals can work
+many a curious and startling result; and frequenters of _séances_ may
+be confidently appealed to, and asked whether many of the childish
+freaks with which they are familiar--pullings of hair, pinchings,
+slaps, throwing about of objects, piling up of furniture, playing on
+accordions, &c.--are not more rationally accounted for as the tricky
+vagaries of sub-human forces, than as the actions of "spirits" who,
+while in the body, were certainly incapable of such vulgarities.
+
+Let us leave the Shells alone to peacefully dissolve into their
+elements, and mingle once again in the crucible of Nature. The authors
+of the _Perfect Way_ put very well the real character of the Shell.
+
+    The true "ghost" consists of the exterior and earthly portion
+    of the Soul, that portion which, being weighted with cares,
+    attachments, and memories merely mundane, is detached by the
+    Soul and remains in the astral sphere, an existence more or
+    less definite and personal, and capable of holding, through a
+    sensitive, converse with the living. It is, however, but as a
+    cast-off vestment of the Soul, and is incapable of endurance
+    _as ghost_. The true Soul and real person, the _anima
+    divina_, parts at death with all those lower affections
+    which would have retained it near its earthly haunts.[24]
+
+If we would find our beloved, it is not among the decaying remnants in
+Kâmaloka that we should seek them. "Why seek ye the living among the
+dead?"
+
+
+KÂMALOKA. THE ELEMENTARIES.
+
+The word "Elementary" has been so loosely used that it has given rise
+to a good deal of confusion. It is thus defined by H.P. Blavatsky:
+
+    Properly, the disembodied _souls_ of the depraved; these
+    souls having, at some time prior to death, separated from
+    themselves their divine spirits, and so lost their chance for
+    immortality. But at the present stage of learning it has been
+    thought best to apply the term to the spooks or phantoms of
+    disembodied persons, in general to those whose temporary
+    habitation is the Kâmaloka.... Once divorced from their
+    higher Triads and their bodies, these souls remain in their
+    Kâma Rûpic envelopes, and are irresistibly drawn to the earth
+    amid elements congenial to their gross natures. Their stay in
+    the Kâmaloka varies as to its duration; but ends invariably
+    in disintegration, dissolving like a column of mist, atom by
+    atom, in the surrounding elements.[25]
+
+Students of this series of Manuals know that it is possible for the
+lower Manas to so entangle itself with Kâma as to wrench itself away
+from its source, and this is spoken of in Occultism as "the loss of
+the Soul."[26] It is, in other words, the loss of the personal self,
+which has separated itself from its Parent, the Higher Ego, and has
+thus doomed itself to perish. Such a Soul, having thus separated
+itself from the Immortal Triad during its earth-life, becomes a true
+Elementary, after it has quitted the dense and etheric bodies. Then,
+clad in its desire body, it lives for awhile, for a longer or shorter
+time according to the vigour of its vitality, a wholly evil thing,
+dangerous and malignant, seeking to renew its fading vitality by any
+means laid open to it by the folly or ignorance of still embodied
+souls. Its ultimate fate is, indeed, destruction, but it may work much
+evil on its way to its self-chosen doom.
+
+The word Elementary is, however, very often used to describe the lower
+Manas in its garment the desire body, not broken away from the higher
+Principles, but not yet absorbed into its Parent, the Higher Manas.
+Such Elementaries may be in any stage of progress, harmless or
+mischievous.
+
+Some writers, again, use Elementary as a synonym for Shell, and so
+cause increased confusion. The word should at least be restricted to
+the desire body _plus_ lower Manas, whether that lower Manas be
+disentangling itself from the kâmic elements, in order that it may be
+re-absorbed into its source, or separated from the Higher Ego, and
+therefore on the road to destruction.
+
+
+DEVACHAN.
+
+Among the various conceptions presented by the Esoteric Philosophy,
+there are few, perhaps, which the Western mind has found more
+difficulty in grasping than that of Devachan, or Devasthân, the
+Devaland, or land of the Gods.[27] And one of the chief difficulties
+has arisen from the free use of the words illusion, dream-state, and
+other similar terms, as denoting the devachanic consciousness--a
+general sense of unreality having thus come to pervade the whole
+conception of Devachan. When the Eastern thinker speaks of the present
+earthly life as Mâyâ, illusion, dream, the solid Western at once puts
+down the phrases as allegorical and fanciful, for what can be less
+illusory, he thinks, than this world of buying and selling, of
+beefsteaks and bottled stout. But when similar terms are applied to a
+state beyond Death--a state which to him is misty and unreal in his
+own religion, and which, as he sadly feels, is lacking in all the
+substantial comforts dear to the family man--then he accepts the words
+in their most literal and prosaic meaning, and speaks of Devachan as a
+delusion in his own sense of the word. It may be well, therefore, on
+the threshold of Devachan to put this question of "illusion" in its
+true light.
+
+In a deep metaphysical sense all that is conditioned is illusory. All
+phenomena are literally "appearances", the outer masks in which the
+One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more
+"material" and solid the appearance, the further is it from Reality,
+and therefore the more illusory it is. What can be a greater fraud
+than our body, so apparently solid, stable, visible and tangible? It
+is a constantly changing congeries of minute living particles, an
+attractive centre into which stream continually myriads of tiny
+invisibles, that become visible by their aggregation at this centre,
+and then stream away again, becoming invisible by reason of their
+minuteness as they separate off from this aggregation. In comparison
+with this ever-shifting but apparently stable body how much less
+illusory is the mind, which is able to expose the pretensions of the
+body and put it in its true light. The mind is constantly imposed on
+by the senses, and Consciousness, the most real thing in us, is apt to
+regard itself as the unreal. In truth, it is the thought-world that is
+the nearest to reality, and things become more and more illusory as
+they take on more and more of a phenomenal character.
+
+Again, the mind is permanent as compared with the transitory physical
+world. For the "mind" is only a clumsy name for the living Thinker in
+us, the true and conscious Entity, the inner Man, "that was, that is,
+and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike". The less deeply
+this inner Man is plunged into matter, the less unreal is his life;
+and when he has shaken off the garments he donned at incarnation, his
+physical, ethereal, and passional bodies, then he is nearer to the
+Soul of Things than he was before, and though veils of illusion still
+dim his vision they are far thinner than those which clouded it when
+round him was wrapped the garment of the flesh. His freer and less
+illusory life is that which is without the body, and the disembodied
+is, comparatively speaking, his normal state. Out of this normal state
+he plunges into physical life for brief periods in order that he may
+gain experiences otherwise unattainable, and bring them back to enrich
+his more abiding condition. As a diver may plunge into the depths of
+the ocean to seek a pearl, so the Thinker plunges into the depths of
+the ocean of life to seek the pearl of experience; but he does not
+stay there long; it is not his own element; he rises up again into his
+own atmosphere and shakes off from him the heavier element he leaves.
+And therefore it is truly said of the Soul that has escaped from earth
+that it has returned to its own place, for its home is the "land of
+the Gods", and here on earth it is an exile and a prisoner. This view
+was very clearly put by a Master of Wisdom in a conversation reported
+by H.P. Blavatsky, and printed under the title "Life and Death."[28]
+The following extracts state the case:
+
+    _The Vedântins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious
+    existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to
+    the latter as an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial
+    life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing
+    but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual
+    spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that
+    lives our endless, never-changing immortal I, the Sûtrâtmâ.
+    Whereas in every new incarnation it clothes itself in a
+    perfectly different personality, a temporary and short-lived
+    one.... The very essence of all this, that is to say, spirit,
+    force, and matter, has neither end nor beginning, but the
+    shape acquired by this triple unity during its incarnations,
+    their  exterior, so to speak, is nothing but a mere illusion
+    of personal conceptions. This is why we call the posthumous
+    life the only reality, and the terrestrial one, including the
+    personality itself, only imaginary._
+
+    Why in this case should we call the reality sleep, and the
+    phantasm waking?
+
+    _This comparison was made by me to facilitate your
+    comprehension. From the standpoint of your terrestrial
+    notions it is perfectly accurate._
+
+Note the words: "From the standpoint of your terrestrial notions," for
+they are the key to all the phrases used about Devachan as an
+"illusion." Our gross physical matter is not there; the limitations
+imposed by it are not there; the mind is in its own realm, where to
+will is to create, where to think is to see. And so, when the Master
+was asked: "Would it not be better to say that death is nothing but a
+birth for a new life, or still better, a going back to eternity?" he
+answered:
+
+    _This is how it really is, and I have nothing to say against
+    such a way of putting it. Only with our accepted views of
+    material life the words "live" and "exist" are not applicable
+    to the purely subjective condition after death; and were they
+    employed in our Philosophy without a rigid definition of
+    their meanings, the Vedântins would soon arrive at the ideas
+    which are common in our times among the American
+    Spiritualists, who preach about spirits marrying among
+    themselves and with mortals. As amongst the true, not
+    nominal, Christians so amongst the Vedântins--the life on the
+    other side of the grave is the land where there are no_
+    _tears, no sighs, where there is neither marrying nor giving
+    in marriage, and where the just realise their full
+    perfection._
+
+The dread of materialising mental and spiritual conceptions has always
+been very strong among the Philosophers and oral Teachers of the far
+East. Their constant effort has been to free the Thinker as far as
+possible from the bonds of matter even while he is embodied, to open
+the cage for the Divine Swallow, even though he must return to it for
+awhile. They are ever seeking "to spiritualise the material", while in
+the West the continual tendency has been "to materialise the
+spiritual". So the Indian describes the life of the freed Soul in all
+the terms that make it least material--illusion, dream, and so
+on--whereas the Hebrew endeavours to delineate it in terms descriptive
+of the material luxury and splendour of earth--marriage feast, streets
+of gold, thrones and crowns of solid metal and precious stones; the
+Western has followed the materialising conceptions of the Hebrew, and
+pictures a heaven which is merely a double of earth with earth's
+sorrows extracted, until we reach the grossest of all, the modern
+Summerland, with its "spirit-husbands", "spirit-wives", and
+"spirit-infants" that go to school and college, and grow up into
+spirit-adults.
+
+In "Notes on Devachan",[29] someone who evidently writes with knowledge
+remarks of the Devachanî:
+
+    _The_ à priori _ideas of space and time do not control his
+    perceptions; for he absolutely creates and annihilates them
+    at the same time. Physical existence has its cumulative
+    intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy
+    from dotage to death; so the dream-life of Devachan is lived
+    correspondentially. Nature cheats no more the Devachanî 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.
+    To call the Devachan existence a "dream" in any other sense
+    than that of a conventional term, is to renounce for ever the
+    knowledge of the Esoteric Doctrine, the sole custodian of
+    truth._
+
+"Dream" only in the sense that it is not of this plane of gross
+matter, that it belongs not to the physical world.
+
+Let us try and take a general view of the life of the Eternal Pilgrim,
+the inner Man, the human Soul, during a cycle of incarnation. Before he
+commences his new pilgrimage--for many pilgrimages lie behind him in the
+past, during which he gained the powers which enable him to tread the
+present one--he is a spiritual Being, but one who has already passed out
+of the passive condition of pure Spirit, and who by previous experience
+of matter in past ages has evolved intellect, the self-conscious mind.
+But this evolution by experience is far from being complete, even so far
+as to make him master of matter; his ignorance leaves him a prey to all
+the illusions of gross matter, so soon as he comes into contact with it,
+and he is not fit to be a builder of a universe, being subject to the
+deceptive visions caused by gross matter--as a child, looking through a
+piece of blue glass, imagines all the outside world to be blue. The
+object of a cycle of incarnation is to free him from these illusions, so
+that when he is surrounded by and working in gross matter he may retain
+clear vision and not be blinded by illusion. Now the cycle of
+incarnation is made up of two alternating states: a short one called
+life on earth, during which the Pilgrim-God is plunged into gross
+matter, and a comparatively long one, called life in Devachan, during
+which he is encircled by subtle matter, illusive still, but far less
+illusive than that of earth. The second state may fairly be called his
+normal one, as it is of enormous extent as compared with the breaks in
+it that he spends upon earth; it is comparatively normal also, as being
+less removed from his essential Divine life; he is less encased in
+matter, less deluded by its swiftly-changing appearances. Slowly and
+gradually, by reiterated experiences, gross matter loses its power over
+him and becomes his servant instead of his tyrant. In the partial
+freedom of Devachan he assimilates his experiences on earth, still
+partly dominated by them--at first, indeed, almost completely dominated
+by them so that the devachanic life is merely a sublimated continuation
+of the earth-life--but gradually freeing himself more and more as he
+recognises them as transitory and external, until he can move through
+any region of our universe with unbroken self-consciousness, a true Lord
+of Mind, the free and triumphant God. Such is the triumph of the Divine
+Nature manifested in the flesh, the subduing of every form of matter to
+be the obedient instrument of Spirit. Thus the Master said:
+
+    _The spiritual Ego of the man moves in eternity like a
+    pendulum between the hours of life and death, but if these_
+    _hours, the periods of life terrestrial and life posthumous,
+    are limited in their continuation, and even the very number
+    of such breaks in eternity between sleep and waking, between
+    illusion and reality, have their beginning as well as their
+    end, the spiritual Pilgrim himself is eternal. Therefore the_
+    hours of his posthumous life, _when unveiled he stands face
+    to face with truth, and the short-lived mirages of his
+    terrestrial existence are far from him,_ compose _or make up,
+    in our ideas,_ the only reality. _Such breaks, in spite of
+    the fact that they are finite, do double service to the
+    Sûtrâtmâ, which, perfecting itself constantly, follows
+    without vacillation, though very slowly, the road leading to
+    its last transformation, when, reaching its aim at last, it
+    becomes a Divine Being. They not only contribute to the
+    reaching of this goal, but without these finite breaks
+    Sûtrâtmâ-Buddhi could never reach it. Sûtrâtmâ is the actor,
+    and its numerous and different incarnations are the actor's
+    parts. I suppose you would not apply to these parts, and so
+    much the less to their costumes, the term of personality.
+    Like an actor the soul is bound to play, during the cycle of
+    births up to the very threshold of Parinirvâna, many such
+    parts, which often are disagreeable to it, but like a bee,
+    collecting its honey from every flower, and leaving the rest
+    to feed the worms of the earth, our spiritual individuality,
+    the Sûtrâtmâ, collecting only the nectar of moral qualities
+    and consciousness from every terrestrial personality in which
+    it has to clothe itself, forced by Karma, unites at last all
+    these qualities in one, having then become a perfect being, a
+    Dhyân Chohan._[30]
+
+It is very significant, in this connection, that every devachanic
+stage is conditioned by the earth-stage that precedes it, and the Man
+can only assimilate in Devachan the kinds of experience he has been
+gathering on earth.
+
+    _A colourless, flavourless personality has a colourless,
+    feeble Devachanic state._[31]
+
+Husband, father, student, patriot, artist, Christian, Buddhist--he
+must work out the effects of his earth-life in his devachanic life; he
+cannot eat and assimilate more food than he has gathered; he cannot
+reap more harvest than he has sown seed. It takes but a moment to cast
+a seed into a furrow; it takes many a month for that seed to grow into
+the ripened ear; but according to the kind of the seed is the ear that
+grows from it, and according to the nature of the brief earth-life is
+the grain reaped in the field of Aanroo.
+
+    _There is a change of occupation, a continual change in
+    Devachan, just as much and far more than there is in the life
+    of any man or woman who happens to follow in his or her whole
+    life one sole occupation, whatever it may be, with this
+    difference, that to the Devachanî this spiritual occupation
+    is always pleasant and fills his life with rapture. Life in
+    Devachan is the function of the aspirations of earth-life;
+    not the indefinite prolongation of that "single instant," but
+    its infinite developments, the various incidents and events
+    based upon and outflowing from that one "single moment" or
+    moments. The dreams of the objective become the realities of
+    the subjective existence.... The reward provided by Nature
+    for men who are benevolent in a large systematic way, and who
+    have not focussed their affections on an individual or
+    speciality, is that, if pure, they pass the  quicker for
+    that through the Kâma and Rûpa Lokas into the higher sphere
+    of Tribhuvana, since it is one where the formulation of
+    abstract ideas and the consideration of general principles
+    fill the thought of its occupant._[32]
+
+Into Devachan enters nothing that defileth, for gross matter has been
+left behind with all its attributes on earth and in Kâmaloka. But if
+the sower has sowed but little seed, the devachanic harvest will be
+meagre, and the growth of the Soul will be delayed by the paucity of
+the nutriment on which it has to feed. Hence the enormous importance
+of the earth-life, _the field of sowing, the place where experience is
+to be gathered_. It conditions, regulates, limits, the growth of the
+Soul; it yields the rough ore which the Soul then takes in hand, and
+works upon during the devachanic stage, smelting it, forging it,
+tempering it, into the weapons it will take back with it for its next
+earth-life. The experienced Soul in Devachan will make for itself a
+splendid instrument for its next earth-life; the inexperienced one
+will forge a poor blade enough; but in each case the only material
+available is that brought from earth. In Devachan the Soul, as it
+were, sifts and sorts out its experiences; it lives a comparatively
+free life, and gradually gains the power to estimate the earthly
+experiences at their real value; it works out thoroughly and
+completely as objective realities all the ideas of which it only
+conceived the germ on earth. Thus, noble aspiration is a germ which
+the Soul would work out into a splendid realisation in Devachan, and
+it would bring back with it to earth for its next incarnation that
+mental image, to be materialised on earth when opportunity offers and
+suitable environment presents itself. For the mind sphere is the
+sphere of creation, and earth only the place for materialising the
+pre-existent thought. And the soul is as an architect that works out
+his plans in silence and deep meditation, and then brings them forth
+into the outer world where his edifice is to be builded; out of the
+knowledge gained in his past life, the Soul draws his plans for the
+next, and he returns to earth to put into objective material form the
+edifices he has planned. This is the description of a Logos in
+creative activity:
+
+    Whilst Brahmâ formerly, in the beginning of the Kalpas, was
+    meditating on creation, there appeared a creation beginning
+    with ignorance and consisting of darkness.... Brahmâ,
+    beholding that it was defective, designed another; and whilst
+    he thus meditated, the animal creation was manifested....
+    Beholding this creation also imperfect, Brahmâ again
+    meditated, and a third creation appeared, abounding with the
+    quality of goodness.[33]
+
+The objective manifestation follows the mental meditation; first idea,
+then form. Hence it will be seen that the notion current among many
+Theosophists that Devachan is waste time, is but one of the illusions
+due to the gross matter that blinds them, and that their impatience of
+the idea of Devachan arises from the delusion that fussing about in
+gross matter is the only real activity. Whereas, in truth, all
+effective action has its source in deep meditation, and out of the
+Silence comes ever the creative Word. Action on this plane would be
+less feeble and inefficient if it were the mere blossom of the
+profound root of meditation, and if the Soul embodied passed oftener
+out of the body into Devachan during earth-life, there would be less
+foolish action and consequent waste of time. For Devachan is a state
+of consciousness, the consciousness of the Soul escaped for awhile
+from the net of gross matter, and may be entered at any time by one
+who has learned to withdraw his Soul from the senses as the tortoise
+withdraws itself within its shell. And then, coming forth once more,
+action is prompt, direct, purposeful, and the time "wasted" in
+meditation is more than saved by the directness and strength of the
+mind-engendered act.
+
+Devachan is the sphere of the mind, as said, it is the land of the
+Gods, or the Souls. In the before quoted "Notes on Devachan" we read:
+
+    _There are two fields of causal manifestations: the objective
+    and the subjective. The grosser energies find their outcome
+    in the new personality of each birth in the cycle of
+    evoluting individuality. The moral and spiritual activities
+    find their sphere of effects in Devachan._
+
+As the moral and spiritual activities are the most important, and as
+on the development of these depends the growth of the true Man, and
+therefore the accomplishing of "the object of creation, the liberation
+of Soul", we may begin to understand something of the vast importance
+of the devachanic state.
+
+
+THE DEVACHANÎ.
+
+When the Triad has shaken off its last garment, it crosses the
+threshold of Devachan, and becomes "a Devachanî". We have seen that
+it is in a peaceful dreamy state before this passage out of the earth
+sphere, the "second death", or "pre-devachanic unconsciousness". This
+condition is otherwise spoken of as the "gestation" period, because it
+precedes the birth of the Ego into the devachanic life. Regarded from
+the earth-sphere the passage is death, while regarded from that of
+Devachan it is birth. Thus we find in "Notes on Devachan":
+
+    _As in actual earth-life, so there is for the Ego in Devachan
+    the first flutter of psychic life, the attainment of prime,
+    the gradual exhaustion of force passing into
+    semi-consciousness and lethargy, total oblivion, and--not
+    death but birth, birth into another personality, and the
+    resumption of action which daily begets new congeries of
+    causes that must be worked out in another term of Devachan,
+    and still another physical birth as a new personality. What
+    the lives in Devachan and upon earth shall be respectively in
+    each instance is determined by Karma, and this weary round of
+    birth must be ever and ever run through until the being
+    reaches the end of the seventh Round, or attains in the
+    interim the wisdom of an Arhat, then that of a Buddha, and
+    thus gets relieved for a Round or two._
+
+When the devachanic entity is born into this new sphere it has passed
+beyond recall to earth. The embodied Soul may rise to it, but it
+cannot be drawn back to our world. On this a Master has spoken
+decisively:
+
+    _From Sukhâvatî down to the "Territory of Doubt," there is a
+    variety of spiritual states, but ... as soon as it has
+    stepped outside the Kâmaloka, crossed the "Golden Bridge"
+    leading to the "Seven Golden Mountains," the Ego can
+    confabulate no more with easy-going mediums. No Ernest or
+    Joey has ever returned from the Rûpa Loka, let alone the
+    Arupa Loka, to hold sweet intercourse with men._
+
+In the "Notes on Devachan," again, we read:
+
+    _Certainly the new Ego, once that it is reborn (in Devachan),
+    retains for a certain time--proportionate to its
+    earth-life--a complete recollection "of his life on earth";
+    but it can never revisit the Earth from Devachan except in
+    Re-incarnation._
+
+The Devachanî is generally spoken of as the Immortal Triad,
+Atmâ-Buddhi-Manas, but it is well always to bear in mind that
+
+    Atman is no individual property of any man, but is the Divine
+    Essence which has no body, no form, which is imponderable,
+    invisible, and indivisible, that which does not _exist_ and
+    yet _is_, as the Buddhists say of Nirvâna. It only
+    overshadows the mortal; that which enters into him and
+    pervades the whole body being only it's omni-present rays or
+    light, radiated through Buddhi, its vehicle and direct
+    emanation.[34]
+
+Buddhi and Manas united, with this overshadowing of Atmâ, form the
+Devachanî; now, as we have seen in studying the Seven Principles,
+Manas is dual during earth-life, and the Lower Manas is redrawn into
+the Higher during the kâmalokic interlude. By this reuniting of the
+Ray and its Source, Manas re-becomes one, and carries the pure and
+noble experiences of the earth-life into Devachan with it, thus
+maintaining the past personality as the marked characteristic of the
+Devachanî, and it is in this prolongation of the "personal Ego", so
+to speak, that the "illusion" of the Devachanî consists. Were the
+mânasic entity free from all illusion, it would see all Egos as its
+brother-Souls, and looking back over its past would recognise all the
+varied relationships it had borne to others in many lives, as the
+actor would remember the many parts he had played with other actors,
+and would think of each brother actor as a man, and not in the parts
+he had played as his father, his son, his judge, his murderer, his
+master, his friend. The deeper human relationship would prevent the
+brother actors from identifying each other with their parts, and so
+the perfected spiritual Egos, recognising their deep unity and full
+brotherhood, would no longer be deluded by the trappings of earthly
+relationships. But the Devachanî, at least in the lower stages, is
+still within the personal boundaries of his past earth-life; he is
+shut into the relationships of the one incarnation; his paradise is
+peopled with those he "_loved best with an undying love, that holy
+feeling that alone survives_," and thus the purified personal Ego is
+the salient feature, as above said, in the Devachanî. Again quoting
+from the "Notes on Devachan":
+
+    "_Who goes to Devachan?" The personal Ego, of course; but
+    beatified, purified, holy. Every Ego--the combination of the
+    sixth and seventh principles[35]--which after the period of
+    unconscious gestation is reborn into the Devachan, is of
+    necessity as innocent and pure as a new-born babe. The  fact
+    of his being reborn at all shows the preponderance of good
+    over evil in his old personality. And while the Karma [of
+    Evil] steps aside for the time being to follow him in his
+    future earth re-incarnation, he brings along with him but the
+    Karma of his good deeds, words and thoughts into this
+    Devachan. "Bad" is a relative term for us--as you were told
+    more than once before--and the Law of Retribution is the only
+    law that never errs. Hence all those who have not slipped
+    down into the mire of unredeemable sin and bestiality go to
+    the Devachan. They will have to pay for their sins, voluntary
+    and involuntary, later on. Meanwhile they are rewarded;
+    receive the effects of the causes produced by them._
+
+Now in some people a sense of repulsion arises at the idea that the
+ties they form on earth in one life are not to be permanent in
+eternity. But let us look at the question calmly for a moment. When a
+mother first clasps her baby-son in her arms, that one relationship
+seems perfect, and if the child should die, her longing would be to
+re-possess him as her babe; but as he lives on through youth to
+manhood the tie changes, and the protective love of the mother and the
+clinging obedience of the child merge into a different love of friends
+and comrades, richer than ordinary friendship from the old
+recollections; yet later, when the mother is aged and the son in the
+prime of middle life, their positions are reversed and the son
+protects while the mother depends on him for guidance. Would the
+relation have been more perfect had it ceased in infancy with only the
+one tie, or is it not the richer and the sweeter from the different
+strands of which the tie is woven? And so with Egos; in many lives
+they may hold to each other many relationships, and finally, standing
+as Brothers of the Lodge closely knit together, may look back over
+past lives and see themselves in earth-life related in the many ways
+possible to human beings, till the cord is woven of every strand of
+love and duty; would not the final unity be the richer not the poorer
+for the many-stranded tie? "Finally", I say; but the word is only of
+this cycle, for what lies beyond, of wider life and less separateness,
+no mind of man may know. To me it seems that this very variety of
+experiences makes the tie stronger, not weaker, and that it is a
+rather thin and poor thing to know oneself and another in only one
+little aspect of many-sided humanity for endless ages of years; a
+thousand or so years of one person in one character would, to me, be
+ample, and I should prefer to know him or her in some new aspect of
+his nature. But those who object to this view need not feel
+distressed, for they will enjoy the presence of their beloved in the
+one personal aspect held by him or her in the one incarnation they are
+conscious of _for as long as the desire for that presence remains_.
+Only let them not desire to impose their own form of bliss on
+everybody else, nor insist that the kind of happiness which seems to
+them at this stage the only one desirable and satisfying, must be
+stereotyped to all eternity, through all the millions of years that
+lie before us. Nature gives to each in Devachan the satisfaction of
+all pure desires, and Manas there exercises that faculty of his innate
+divinity, that he "never wills in vain". Will not this suffice?
+
+But leaving aside disputes as to what may be to us "happiness" in a
+future separated from our present by millions of years, so that we are
+no more fitted now to formulate its conditions than is a child,
+playing with its dolls, to formulate the deeper joys and interests of
+its maturity, let us understand that, according to the teachings of
+the Esoteric Philosophy, the Devachanî is surrounded by all he loved
+on earth, with pure affection, and the union being on the plane of the
+Ego, not on the physical plane, it is free from all the sufferings
+which would be inevitable were the Devachanî present in consciousness
+on the physical plane with all its illusory and transitory joys and
+sorrows. It is surrounded by its beloved in the higher consciousness,
+but is not agonised by the knowledge of what they are suffering in the
+lower consciousness, held in the bonds of the flesh. According to the
+orthodox Christian view, Death is a separation, and the "spirits of
+the dead" wait for reunion until those they love also pass through
+Death's gateway, or--according to some--until after the judgment-day
+is over. As against this the Esoteric Philosophy teaches that Death
+cannot touch the higher consciousness of man, and that it can only
+separate those who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are
+concerned; the man living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated
+from those who have passed onwards, but the Devachanî, says H.P.
+Blavatsky, has a complete conviction "that there is no such thing as
+Death at all", having left behind it all those vehicles over which
+Death has power. Therefore, to its less blinded eyes, its beloved are
+still with it; for it, the veil of matter that separates has been torn
+away.
+
+    A mother dies, leaving behind her little helpless children,
+    whom she adores, perhaps a beloved husband also. We say that
+    her "Spirit" or Ego--that individuality which is now wholly
+    impregnated, for the entire Devachanic period, with the
+    noblest feelings held by its late _personality, i.e._, love
+    for her children, pity for those who suffer, and so on--is
+    now entirely separated from the "vale of tears," that its
+    future bliss consists in that blessed ignorance of all the
+    woes it left behind ... that the _post-mortem_ spiritual
+    consciousness of the mother will represent to her that she
+    lives surrounded by her children and all those whom she
+    loved; that no gap, no link will be missing to make her
+    disembodied state the most perfect and absolute
+    happiness.[36]
+
+And so again:
+
+    As to the ordinary mortal his bliss in Devachan is complete.
+    It is an absolute oblivion of all that gave it pain or sorrow
+    in the past incarnation, and even oblivion of the fact that
+    such things as pain or sorrow exist at all. The Devachanî
+    lives its intermediate cycle between two incarnations
+    surrounded by everything it had aspired to in vain, and in
+    the companionship of everything it loved on earth. It has
+    reached the fulfilment of all its soul-yearnings. And thus it
+    lives throughout long centuries an existence of _unalloyed_
+    happiness, which is the reward for its sufferings in
+    earth-life. In short, it bathes in a sea of uninterrupted
+    felicity spanned only by events of still greater felicity in
+    degree.[37]
+
+When we take the wider sweep in thought demanded by the Esoteric
+Philosophy, a far more fascinating prospect of persistent love and
+union between individual Egos rolls itself out before our eyes than
+was offered to us by the more limited creed of exoteric Christendom.
+"Mothers love their children with an immortal love," says H.P.
+Blavatsky, and the reason for this immortality in love is easily
+grasped when we realise that it is the same Egos that play so many
+parts in the drama of life, that the experience of each part is
+recorded in the memory of the Soul, and that between the Souls there
+is no separation, though during incarnation they may not realise the
+fact in its fulness and beauty.
+
+    We are with those whom we have lost in material form, and
+    far, far nearer to them now than when they were alive. And it
+    is not only in the fancy of the Devachanî, as some may
+    imagine, but in reality. For pure divine love is not merely
+    the blossom of a human heart, but has its roots in eternity.
+    Spiritual holy love is immortal, and Karma brings sooner or
+    later all those who loved each other with such a spiritual
+    affection to incarnate once more in the same family
+    group.[38]
+
+Love "has its roots in eternity", and those to whom on earth we are
+strongly drawn are the Egos we have loved in past earth-lives and
+dwelt with in Devachan; coming back to earth these enduring bonds of
+love draw us together yet again, and add to the strength and beauty of
+the tie, and so on and on till all illusions are lived down, and the
+strong and perfected Egos stand side by side, sharing the experience
+of their well-nigh illimitable past.
+
+
+THE RETURN TO EARTH.
+
+At length the causes that carried the Ego into Devachan are exhausted,
+the experiences gathered have been wholly assimilated, and the Soul
+begins to feel again the thirst for sentient material life that can be
+gratified only on the physical plane. The greater the degree of
+spirituality reached, the purer and loftier the preceding earth-life,
+the longer the stay in Devachan, the world of spiritual, pure, and
+lofty effects. [I am here ignoring the special conditions surrounding
+one who is forcing his own evolution, and has entered on the Path
+that leads to Adeptship within a very limited number of lives.] The
+"average time [in Devachan] is from ten to fifteen centuries", H.P.
+Blavatsky tells us, and the fifteen centuries cycle is the one most
+plainly marked in history.[39] But in modern life this period has much
+shortened, in consequence of the greater attraction exercised by
+physical objects over the heart of man. Further, it must be remembered
+that the "average time" is not the time spent in Devachan by any
+person. If one person spends there 1000 years, and another fifty, the
+"average" is 525. The devachanic period is longer or shorter according
+to the type of life which preceded it; the more there was of
+spiritual, intellectual, and emotional activity of a lofty kind, the
+longer will be the gathering in of the harvest; the more there was of
+activity directed to selfish gain on earth, the shorter will be the
+devachanic period.
+
+When the experiences are assimilated, be the time long or short, the
+Ego is ready to return, and he brings back with him his now increased
+experience, and any further gains he may have made in Devachan along
+the lines of abstract thought; for, while in Devachan,
+
+    In one sense we can acquire more knowledge; that is, we can
+    develop further any faculty which we loved and strove after
+    during life, provided it is concerned with abstract and ideal
+    things, such as music, painting, poetry, &c.[40]
+
+But the Ego meets, as he crosses the threshold of Devachan on his way
+outwards--dying out of Devachan to be reborn on earth--he meets in the
+"atmosphere of the terrestrial plane", the seeds of evil sown in his
+preceding life on earth. During the devachanic rest he has been free
+from all pain, all sorrow, but the evil he did in his past has been in
+a state of suspended animation, not of death. As seeds sown in the
+autumn for the spring-time lie dormant beneath the surface of the
+soil, but touched by the soft rain and penetrating warmth of sun begin
+to swell and the embryo expands and grows, so do the seeds of evil we
+have sown lie dormant while the Soul takes its rest in Devachan, but
+shoot out their roots into the new personality which begins
+to form itself for the incarnation of the returning man. The Ego has
+to take up the burden of his past, and these germs or seeds, coming
+over as the harvest of the past life, are the Skandhas, to borrow a
+convenient word from our Buddhist brethren. They consist of material
+qualities, sensations, abstract ideas, tendencies of mind, mental
+powers, and while the pure aroma of these attached itself to the Ego
+and passed with it into Devachan, all that was gross, base and evil
+remained in the state of suspended animation spoken of above. These
+are taken up by the Ego as he passes outwards towards terrestrial
+life, and are built into the new "man of flesh" which the true man is
+to inhabit. And so the round of births and deaths goes on, the turning
+of the Wheel of Life; the treading of the Cycle of Necessity, until
+the work is done and the building of the Perfect Man is completed.
+
+
+NIRVÂNA.
+
+What Devachan is to each earth-life, Nirvâna is to the finished cycle
+of Re-incarnation, but any effective discussion of that glorious
+state would here be out of place. It is mentioned only to round off
+the "After" of Death, for no word of man, strictly limited within the
+narrow bounds of his lower consciousness, may avail to explain what
+Nirvâna is, can do aught save disfigure it in striving to describe.
+What it is not may be roughly, baldly stated--it is not
+"annihilation", it is not destruction of consciousness. Mr. A.P.
+Sinnett has put effectively and briefly the absurdity of many of the
+ideas current in the West about Nirvâna. He has been speaking of
+absolute consciousness, and proceeds:
+
+    We may use such phrases as intellectual counters, but for no
+    ordinary mind--dominated by its physical brain and brain-born
+    intellect--can they have a living signification. All that
+    words can convey is that Nirvâna is a sublime state of
+    conscious rest in omniscience. It would be ludicrous, after
+    all that has gone before, to turn to the various discussions
+    which have been carried on by students of exoteric Buddhism
+    as to whether Nirvâna does or does not mean annihilation.
+    Worldly similes fall short of indicating the feeling with
+    which the graduates of Esoteric Science regard such a
+    question. Does the last penalty of the law mean the highest
+    honour of the peerage? Is a wooden spoon the emblem of the
+    most illustrious pre-eminence in learning? Such questions as
+    these but faintly symbolise the extravagance of the question
+    whether Nirvâna is held by Buddhism to be equivalent to
+    annihilation.[41]
+
+So we learn from the _Secret Doctrine_ that the Nirvânî returns to
+cosmic activity in a new cycle of manifestation, and that
+
+    _The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves
+    only in Nirvâna, re-emerges from it in its integrity  on the
+    day when the Great Law calls all things back into
+    action._[42]
+
+
+COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN THE EARTH AND OTHER SPHERES.
+
+We are now in position to discriminate between the various kinds of
+communication possible between those whom we foolishly divide into
+"dead" and "living," as though the body were the man, or the man could
+die. "Communications between the embodied and the disembodied" would
+be a more satisfactory phrase.
+
+First, let us put aside as unsuitable the word Spirit: Spirit does not
+communicate with Spirit in any way conceivable by us. That highest
+principle is not yet manifest in the flesh; it remains the hidden
+fount of all, the eternal Energy, one of the poles of Being in
+manifestation. The word is loosely used to denote lofty Intelligences,
+who live and move beyond all conditions of matter imaginable by us,
+but pure Spirit is at present as inconceivable by us as pure matter.
+And as in dealing with possible "communications" we have average human
+beings as recipients, we may as well exclude the word Spirit as much
+as possible, and so get rid of ambiguity. But in quotations the word
+often occurs, in deference to the habit of the day, and it then
+denotes the Ego.
+
+Taking the stages through which the living man passes after "Death",
+or the shaking off of the body, we can readily classify the
+communications that may be received, or the appearances that may be
+seen:
+
+I. While the Soul has shaken off only the dense body, and remains
+still clothed in the etheric double. This is a brief period only, but
+during it the disembodied Soul may show itself, clad in this ethereal
+garment.
+
+    For a very short period after death, while the incorporeal
+    principles remain within the sphere of our earth's
+    attraction, it is _possible_ for spirit, under _peculiar_ and
+    _favourable_ conditions, to appear.[43]
+
+It makes no communications during this brief interval, nor while
+dwelling in this form. Such "ghosts" are silent, dreamy, like
+sleep-walkers, and indeed they are nothing more than astral
+sleep-walkers. Equally irresponsive, but capable of expressing a
+single thought, as of sorrow, anxiety, accident, murder, &c., are
+apparitions which are merely a thought of the dying, taking shape in
+the astral world, and carried by the dying person's will to some
+particular person, with whom the dying intensely longs to communicate.
+Such a thought, sometimes called a Mayâvi Rûpa, or illusory form
+
+    _May be often thrown into objectivity, as in the case of
+    apparitions after death; but, unless it is projected with the
+    knowledge of (whether latent or potential), or owing to the
+    intensity of the desire to see or appear to some one shooting
+    through, the dying brain, the apparition will be simply
+    automatical; it will not be due to any sympathetic
+    attraction, or to any act of volition, any more than the
+    reflection of a person passing unconsciously near a mirror is
+    due to the desire of the latter._
+
+When the Soul has left the etheric double, shaking it  off as it
+shook off the dense body, the double thus left as a mere empty corpse
+may be galvanised into an "artificial life"; but fortunately the
+method of such galvanisation is known to few.
+
+II. While the Soul is in Kâmaloka. This period is of very variable
+duration. The Soul is clad in an astral body, the last but one of its
+perishable garments, and while thus clad it can utilise the physical
+bodies of a medium, thus consciously procuring for itself an
+instrument whereby it can act on the world it has left, and
+communicate with those living in the body. In this way it may give
+information as to facts known to itself only, or to itself and another
+person, in the earth-life just closed; and for as long as it remains
+within the terrestrial atmosphere such communication is possible. The
+harm and the peril of such communication has been previously
+explained, whether the Lower Manas be united with the Divine Triad and
+so on its way to Devachan, or wrenched from it and on its way to
+destruction.
+
+III. While the Soul is in Devachan, if an embodied Soul is capable of
+rising to its sphere, or of coming into _rapport_ with it. To the
+Devachanî, as we have seen, the beloved are present in consciousness
+and full communication, the Egos being in touch with each other,
+though one is embodied and one is disembodied, but the higher
+consciousness of the embodied rarely affects the brain. As a matter of
+fact, all that we know on the physical plane of our friend, while we
+both are embodied, is the mental image caused by the impression he
+makes on us. This is, to our consciousness, our friend, and lacks
+nothing in objectivity. A similar image is present to the
+consciousness of the Devachanî, and to him lacks nothing in
+objectivity. As the physical plane friend is visible to an observer on
+earth, so is the mental plane friend visible to an observer on that
+plane. The amount of the friend that ensouls the image is dependent on
+his own evolution, a highly evolved person being capable of far more
+communication with a Devachanî than one who is unevolved.
+Communication when the body is sleeping is easier than when it is
+awake, and many a vivid "dream" of one on the other side of death is a
+real interview with him in Kâmaloka or in Devachan.
+
+    Love beyond the grave, illusion though you may call it,[44]
+    has a magic and divine potency that re-acts on the living. A
+    mother's Ego, filled with love for the imaginary children it
+    sees near itself, living a life of happiness, as real to it
+    as when on earth--that love will always be felt by the
+    children in flesh. It will manifest in their dreams and often
+    in various events--in providential protections and escapes,
+    for love is a strong shield, and is not limited by space or
+    time. As with this Devachanic "mother", so with the rest of
+    human relationships and attachments, save the purely selfish
+    or material.[45]
+
+Remembering that a thought becomes an active entity, capable of
+working good or evil, we easily see that as embodied Souls can send to
+those they love helping and protecting forces, so the Devachanî,
+thinking of those dear to him, may send out such helpful and
+protective thoughts, to act as veritable guardian angels round his
+beloved on earth. But this is a very different thing from the "Spirit"
+of the mother coming back to earth to be the almost helpless spectator
+of the child's woes.
+
+The Soul embodied may sometimes escape from its prison of flesh, and
+come into relations with the Devachanî. H.P. Blavatsky writes:
+
+    Whenever years after the death of a person his spirit is
+    claimed to have "wandered back to earth" to give advice to
+    those it loved, it is always in a subjective vision, in dream
+    or in trance, and in that case it is the Soul of the living
+    seer that is drawn to the _disembodied_ spirit, and not the
+    latter which wanders back to our spheres.[46]
+
+Where the sensitive, or medium, is of a pure and lofty nature, this
+rising of the freed Ego to the Devachanî is practicable, and naturally
+gives the impression to the sensitive that the departed Ego has come
+back to him. The Devachanî is wrapped in its happy "illusion", and
+
+    _The Souls, or astral Egos, of pure loving sensitives,
+    labouring under the same delusion, think their loved ones
+    come down to them on earth, while it is their own spirits
+    that are raised towards those in the Devachan._[47]
+
+This attraction can be exercised by the departed Soul from Kâmaloka or
+from Devachan:
+
+    A "spirit" or the spiritual Ego, cannot _descend_ to the
+    medium, but it can _attract_ the spirit of the latter to
+    itself, and it can do this only during the two
+    intervals--before and after its "gestation period". Interval
+    the first is that period between the physical death and the
+    merging of the spiritual Ego into that state which is known
+    in the Arhat Esoteric Doctrine as "Bar-do". We have
+    translated this as the "gestation period", and it lasts from
+    a few days to several years, according to the evidence of the
+    Adepts. Interval the second lasts so long as the merits of
+    the old [personal] Ego entitle the being to reap the fruit of
+    its reward in its new regenerated Egoship. It occurs after
+    the gestation period is over, and the new spiritual Ego is
+    reborn--like the fabled Phoenix from its ashes--from the
+    old one. The locality which the former inhabits is called by
+    the northern Buddhist Occultists "Devachan."[48]
+
+So also may the incorporeal principles of pure sensitives be placed
+_en rapport_ with disembodied Souls, although information thus
+obtained is not reliable, partly in consequence of the difficulty of
+transferring to the physical brain the impressions received, and
+partly from the difficulty of observing accurately, when the seer is
+untrained.[49]
+
+    A pure medium's Ego can be drawn to and made, for an instant,
+    to unite in a magnetic(?) relation with a real disembodied
+    spirit, whereas the soul of an impure medium can only
+    confabulate with the _Astral Soul_, or Shell, of the
+    deceased. The former possibility explains those extremely
+    rare cases of direct writing in recognised autographs, and of
+    messages from the higher class of disembodied intelligences.
+
+But the confusion in messages thus obtained is considerable, not only
+from the causes above-named, but also because
+
+    Even the best and purest sensitive can at most only be placed
+    at any time _en rapport_ with a particular spiritual entity,
+    and can only know, see, and feel what that particular entity
+    knows, sees, and feels.
+
+Hence much possibility of error if generalisations are indulged in,
+since each Devachanî lives in his own paradise, and there is no
+"peeping down to earth,"
+
+    Nor is there any _conscious_ communication with the flying
+    Souls that come as it were to learn where the Spirits are,
+    what they are doing, and what they think, feel, and see.
+
+    What then is being _en rapport_? It is simply an identity of
+    molecular  vibration between the astral part of the
+    incarnated sensitive and the astral part of the
+    dis-incarnated personality. The spirit of the sensitive gets
+    "odylised", so to speak, by the aura of the spirit, whether
+    this be hybernating in the earthly region or dreaming in the
+    Devachan; identity of molecular vibration is established, and
+    for a brief space the sensitive becomes the departed
+    personality, and writes in its handwriting, uses its
+    language, and thinks its thoughts. At such times sensitives
+    may believe that those with whom they are for the moment _en
+    rapport_ descend to earth and communicate with them, whereas,
+    in reality, it is merely their own spirits which, being
+    correctly attuned to those others, are for the time blended
+    with them.[50]
+
+In a special case under examination, H.P. Blavatsky said that the
+communication might have come from an Elementary, but that it was
+
+    Far more likely that the medium's spirit really became _en
+    rapport_ with some spiritual entity in Devachan, the
+    thoughts, knowledge, and sentiments of which formed the
+    substance, while the medium's own personality and
+    pre-existing ideas more or less governed the forms of the
+    communication.[51]
+
+While these communications are not reliable in the facts and opinions
+stated,
+
+    We would remark that it may _possibly_ be that there really
+    is a distinct spiritual entity impressing our correspondent's
+    mind. In other words, there may, for all we know, be some
+    spirit, with whom his spiritual nature becomes habitually,
+    for the time, thoroughly harmonised, and whose thoughts,
+    language, &c., become his for the time, the result being that
+    this spirit seems to communicate with him.... It is possible
+    (though by no means probable) that he habitually passes into
+    a state of _rapport_ with a genuine spirit, and, for the
+    time, is assimilated therewith, thinking (to a great extent
+    if not entirely) the thoughts that spirit would think,
+    writing in its handwriting, &c. But even so, Mr. Terry must
+    not fancy that that spirit is consciously communicating with
+    him, or knows in any way  anything of him, or any other
+    person or thing on earth. It is simply that, the _rapport_
+    established, he, Mr. Terry, becomes for the nonce assimilated
+    with that other personality, and thinks, speaks, and writes
+    as it would have done on earth.... The molecules of his
+    astral nature may from time to time vibrate in perfect unison
+    with those of some spirit of such a person, now in Devachan,
+    and the result may be that he appears to be in communication
+    with that spirit, and to be advised, &c., by him, and
+    clairvoyants may see in the Astral Light a picture of the
+    earth-life form of that spirit.
+
+IV. Communications other than those from disembodied Souls, passing
+through normal _post mortem_ states.
+
+(a) _From Shells._ These, while but the cast-off garment of the
+liberated Soul, retain for some time the impress of their late
+inhabitant, and reproduce automatically his habits of thought and
+expression, just as a physical body will automatically repeat habitual
+gestures. Reflex action is as possible to the desire body as to the
+physical, but all reflex action is marked by its character of
+repetition, and absence of all power to initiate movement. It answers
+to a stimulus with an appearance of purposive action, but it initiates
+nothing. When people "sit for development", or when at a _séance_ they
+anxiously hope and wait for messages from departed friends, they
+supply just the stimulus needed, and obtain the signs of recognition
+for which they expectantly watch.
+
+(b) _From Elementaries._ These, possessing the lower capacities of the
+mind, _i.e._, all the intellectual faculties that found their
+expression through the physical brain during life, may produce
+communications of a highly intellectual character. These, however, are
+rare, as may be seen from a survey of the messages published as
+received from "departed Spirits".
+
+(c) _From Elementals._ These semi-conscious centres of force play a
+great part at _séances_, and are mostly the agents who are active in
+producing physical phenomena. They throw about or carry objects, make
+noises, ring bells, etc., etc. Sometimes they play pranks with Shells,
+animating them and representing them to be the spirits of great
+personalities who have lived on earth, but who have sadly degenerated
+in the "spirit-world", judging by their effusions. Sometimes, in
+materialising _séances_, they busy themselves in throwing pictures
+from the Astral Light on the fluidic forms produced, so causing them
+to assume likenesses of various persons. There are also Elementals of
+a high type who occasionally communicate with very gifted mediums,
+"Shining Ones" from other spheres.
+
+(d) _From Nirmânakâyas._ For these communications, as for the two
+classes next mentioned, the medium must be of a very pure and lofty
+nature. The Nirmânakâya is a perfected man, who has cast aside his
+physical body but retains his other lower principles, and remains in
+the earth-sphere for the sake of helping forward the evolution of
+mankind. Nirmânakâyas
+
+    Have, out of pity for mankind and those they left on earth,
+    renounced the Nirvânic state. Such an Adept, or Saint, or
+    whatever you may call him, believing it a selfish act to rest
+    in bliss while mankind groans under the burden of misery
+    produced by ignorance, renounces Nirvâna and determines to
+    remain invisible _in spirit_ on this earth. They have no
+    material body, as they have left it behind; but otherwise
+    they remain with all their principles even _in astral life_
+    in our sphere. And such can and do communicate with a few
+    elect ones, only surely not with _ordinary_ mediums.[52]
+
+(e) _From Adepts now living on earth._ These often communicate with
+Their disciples, without using the ordinary methods of communication,
+and when any tie exists, perchance from some past incarnation, between
+an Adept and a medium, constituting that medium a disciple, a message
+from the Adept might readily be mistaken for a message from a
+"Spirit". The receipt of such messages by precipitated writing or
+spoken words is within the knowledge of some.
+
+(f) _From the medium's Higher Ego._ Where a pure and earnest man or
+woman is striving after the light, this upward striving is met by a
+downward reaching of the higher nature, and light from the higher
+streams downward, illuminating the lower consciousness. Then the lower
+mind is, for the time, united with its parent, and transmits as much
+of its knowledge as it is able to retain.
+
+From this brief sketch it will be seen how varied may be the sources
+from which communications apparently from "the other side of Death"
+may be received. As said by H.P. Blavatsky:
+
+    The variety of the causes of phenomena is great, and one need
+    be an Adept, and actually look into and examine what
+    transpires, in order to be able to explain in each case what
+    really underlies it.[53]
+
+To complete the statement it may be added that what the average Soul
+can do when it has passed through the gateway of Death, it can do on
+this side, and communications may be as readily obtained by writing,
+in trance, and by the other means of receiving messages, from embodied
+as from disembodied Souls. If each developed within himself the
+powers of his own Soul, instead of drifting about aimlessly, or
+ignorantly plunging into dangerous experiments, knowledge might be
+safely accumulated and the evolution of the Soul might be accelerated.
+This one thing is sure: Man is to-day a living Soul, over whom Death
+has no power, and the key of the prison-house of the body is in his
+own hands, so that he may learn its use if he will. It is because his
+true Self, while blinded by the body, has lost touch with other
+Selves, that Death has been a gulf instead of a gateway between
+embodied and disembodied Souls.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+
+     The following passage on the fate of suicides is taken from the
+     _Theosophist_, September, 1882.
+
+We do not pretend--we are not permitted--to deal exhaustively with the
+question at present, but we may refer to one of the most important
+classes of entities, who can participate in objective phenomena, other
+than Elementaries and Elementals.
+
+This class comprises the Spirits of conscious sane suicides. They are
+_Spirits_, and not _Shells_, because there is not in their cases, at
+any rate until later, a total and permanent divorce between the fourth
+and fifth principles on the one hand, and the sixth and seventh on the
+other. The two duads are divided, they exist apart, but a line of
+connection still unites them, they may yet reunite, and the sorely
+threatened personality avert its doom; the fifth principle still holds
+in its hands the clue by which, traversing the labyrinth of earthly
+sins and passions, it may regain the sacred penetralia. But for the
+time, though really a Spirit, and therefore so designated, it is
+practically not far removed from a Shell.
+
+This class of Spirit can undoubtedly communicate with men, but, as a
+rule, its members have to pay dearly for exercising the privilege,
+while it is scarcely possible for them to do otherwise than lower and
+debase the moral nature of those with and through whom they have much
+communication. It is merely, broadly speaking, a question of degree;
+of much or little injury resulting from such communication; the cases
+in which real, permanent good can arise are too absolutely exceptional
+to require consideration.
+
+Understand how the case stands. The unhappy being revolting against
+the trials of life--trials, the results of its own former actions,
+trials, heaven's merciful medicine for the mentally and spiritually
+diseased--determines, instead of manfully taking arms against a sea of
+troubles, to let the curtain drop, and, as it fancies, end them. It
+destroys the body, but finds itself precisely as much alive mentally
+as before. It had an appointed life-term determined by an intricate
+web of prior causes, which its own wilful sudden act cannot shorten.
+That term must run out its appointed sands. You may smash the lower
+half of the hand hour-glass, so that the impalpable sand shooting from
+the upper bell is dissipated by the passing aerial currents as it
+issues; but that stream will run on, unnoticed though it remain, until
+the whole store in that upper receptacle is exhausted.
+
+So you may destroy the body, but not the appointed period of sentient
+existence, foredoomed (because simply the effect of a plexus of
+causes) to intervene before the dissolution of the personality; this
+must run on for its appointed period.
+
+This is so in other cases, _e.g._, those of the victims of accident or
+violence; they, too, have to complete their life-term, and of these,
+too, we may speak on another occasion--but here it is sufficient to
+notice that, whether good or bad, their mental attitude at the time of
+death alters wholly their subsequent position. They, too, have to wait
+on within the "Region of Desires" until their wave of life runs on to
+and reaches its appointed shore, but they wait on, wrapped in dreams
+soothing and blissful, or the reverse, according to their mental and
+moral state at, and prior to the fatal hour, but nearly exempt from
+further material temptations, and, broadly speaking, incapable (except
+just at the moment of real death) of communicating _scio motu_ with
+mankind, though not wholly beyond the possible reach of the higher
+forms of the "Accursed Science," Necromancy. The question is a
+profoundly abstruse one; it would be impossible to explain within the
+brief space still remaining to us, how the conditions immediately
+after death differ so entirely as they do in the case (1) of the man
+who deliberately _lays down_ (not merely _risks_) his life from
+altruistic motives in the hope of saving those of others; and (2) of
+him who deliberately sacrifices his life from selfish motives, in the
+hope of escaping trials and troubles which loom before him. Nature or
+Providence, Fate, or God, being merely a self-adjusting machine, it
+would at first sight seem as if the results must be identical in both
+cases. But, machine though it be, we must remember that it is a
+machine _sui generis_--
+
+    Out of himself he span
+      The eternal web of right and wrong;
+    And ever feels the subtlest thrill,
+      The slenderest thread along.
+
+A machine compared with whose perfect sensitiveness and adjustment the
+highest human intellect is but a coarse clumsy replica, _in petto_.
+
+And we must remember that thoughts and motives are material, and at
+times marvellously potent material, forces, and we may then begin to
+comprehend why the hero, sacrificing his life on pure altruistic
+grounds, sinks as his life-blood ebbs away into a sweet dream, wherein
+
+    All that he wishes and all that he loves,
+    Come smiling round his sunny way,
+
+only to wake into active or objective consciousness when reborn in the
+Region of Happiness, while the poor unhappy and misguided mortal who,
+seeking to elude fate, selfishly loosens the silver string and breaks
+the golden bowl, finds himself terribly alive and awake, instinct with
+all the evil cravings and desires that embittered his world-life,
+without a body in which to gratify these, and capable of only such
+partial alleviation as is possible by more or less vicarious
+gratification, and this only at the cost of the ultimate complete
+rupture with his sixth and seventh principles, and consequent ultimate
+annihilation after, alas! prolonged periods of suffering.
+
+Let it not be supposed that there is no hope for this class--the sane
+deliberate suicide. If, bearing steadfastly his cross, he suffers
+patiently his punishment, striving against carnal appetites still
+alive in him, in all their intensity, though, of course, each in
+proportion to the degree to which it had been indulged in earth-life.
+If, we say, he bears this humbly, never allowing himself to be tempted
+here or there into unlawful gratifications of unholy desires, then
+when his fated death-hour strikes, his four higher principles reunite,
+and, in the final separation that then ensues, it may well be that all
+may be well with him, and that he passes on to the gestation period
+and its subsequent developments.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Book ii., from lines 666-789. The whole passage bristles
+with horrors.]
+
+[Footnote 2: xii. 85. Trans., of Burnell and Hopkins.]
+
+[Footnote 3: From the translation of Dhunjeebhoy Jamsetjee Medhora,
+_Zoroastrian and some other Ancient Systems_, xxvii.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Trans., by Mirza Mohamed Hadi. _The Platonist_, 306.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _The Sacred Books of the East_, iii, 109, 110.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Secret Doctrine_, vol. i. p. 281.]
+
+[Footnote 7: See _ibid._, p. 283.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Isis Unveiled_, vol. i. p. 480.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Theosophical Manuals, No. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _The Heroic Enthusiasts_, Trans., by L. Williams. part ii.
+pp. 22, 23.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Cremation_, Theosophical Siftings, vol. iii.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Man: Fragments of Forgotten History_, pp. 119, 120.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Key to Theosophy_, H.P. Blavatsky, p. 109. Third
+Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Magic, White and Black_, Dr. Franz Hartmann, pp. 109,
+110. Third Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 15: See _The Seven Principles of Man_, pp. 17-21.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _Theosophist_, March, 1882, p. 158, note.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _Essays upon some Controverted Questions_, p. 36.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Fortnightly Review_, 1892, p. 176.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 67.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Ibid._, p. 97.]
+
+[Footnote 21: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 97]
+
+[Footnote 22: _Ibid._, p. 102.]
+
+[Footnote 23: June, 1882, art. "Seeming Discrepancies."]
+
+[Footnote 24: Pp. 73, 74. Ed. 1887.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _Theosophical Glossary_, Elementaries.]
+
+[Footnote 26: See _The Seven Principles of Man_, p.p. 44-46.]
+
+[Footnote 27: The name Sukhâvatî, borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, is
+sometimes used instead of that of Devachan. Sukhâvatî, according to
+Schlagintweit, is "the abode of the blessed, into which ascend those
+who have accumulated much merit by the practice of virtues", and
+"involves the deliverance from metempsychosis" (_Buddhism in Tibet_,
+p. 99). According to the Prasanga school, the higher Path leads to
+Nirvâna, the lower to Sukhâvatî. But Eitel calls Sukhâvatî "the
+Nirvâna of the common people, where the saints revel in physical bliss
+for æons, until they reënter the circle of transmigration"
+(_Sanskrit-Chinese Dictionary_). Eitel, however, under "Amitâbha"
+states that the "popular mind" regards the "paradise of the West" as
+"the haven of final redemption from the eddies of transmigration".
+When used by one of the Teachers of the Esoteric Philosophy it covers
+the higher Devachanic states, but from all of these the Soul comes
+back to earth.]
+
+[Footnote 28: See _Lucifer_, Oct, 1892, Vol. XI. No. 62.]
+
+[Footnote 29: _The Path_, May, 1890.]
+
+[Footnote 30: _Ibid._]
+
+[Footnote 31: "Notes on Devachan," as cited.]
+
+[Footnote 32: "Notes on Devachan," as before. There are a variety of
+stages in Devachan; the Rûpa Loka is an inferior stage, where the Soul
+is still surrounded by forms. It has escaped from these personalities
+in the Tribhuvana.]
+
+[Footnote 33: _Vishnu Purâna_, Bk. I. ch. v.]
+
+[Footnote 34: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 69. Third Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Sixth and seventh in the older nomenclature, fifth and
+sixth in the later--_i.e._, Manas and Buddhi.]
+
+[Footnote 36: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 99. Third Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 37: _Ibid._, p. 100.]
+
+[Footnote 38: _Ibid._, p. 101.]
+
+[Footnote 39: See Manual No. 2 _Re-incarnation_, pp. 60, 61. Third
+Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 40: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 105. Third Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 41: _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 197. Eighth
+Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 42: Quoted in the _Secret Doctrine_, vol. ii. p. 83. The
+student will do well to read, for a fair presentation of the subject,
+G.R.S. Mead's "Note on Nirvâna" in _Lucifer_, for March, April, and
+May, 1893. (Re-printed in _Theosophical Siftings_).]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Theosophist_, Sept., 1882, p. 310.]
+
+[Footnote 44: See on "illusion" what was said under the heading
+"Devachan".]
+
+[Footnote 45: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 102. Third Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 46: _Theosophist_, Sept. 1881.]
+
+[Footnote 47: "Notes on Devachan", _Path_, June, 1890, p. 80.]
+
+[Footnote 48: _Theosophist_, June, 1882, p. 226.]
+
+[Footnote 49: Summarised from article in _Theosophist_, Sept., 1882.]
+
+[Footnote 50: _Ibid._, p. 309.]
+
+[Footnote 51: _Ibid._, p. 310.]
+
+[Footnote 52: _Key to Theosophy,_ p. 151.]
+
+[Footnote 53: _Theosophist_, Sept., 1882, p. 310.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+Accident, Death by, 37.
+
+Appendix, 81.
+
+Astral Body, 19,
+  Fate of, 31.
+
+Astral Shell or Soul, 75.
+
+_Avesta_, quoted, 9.
+
+
+Blavatsky, H.P., quoted, 16, 17, 24, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 45, 49, 60,
+                         65, 66, 67, 73, 74, 78.
+
+_Book of the Dead_, quoted, 8.
+
+Bruno, Giordano, quoted, 21.
+
+_Buddhism in Tibet_, quoted, 47, (note).
+
+
+Communications between Earth and other Spheres, 70.
+      "        between Earth and Soul in Etheric Body, 71.
+      "        between Earth, and soul in Devachan, 72,
+      "        between Earth and soul in Kâmaloka, 72.
+      "        from Adepts now living, 79.
+      "        from Elementals, 78.
+      "        from Elementaries, 77.
+      "        from Medium's Higher Ego, 79.
+      "        from Nirmânakâyas, 78.
+      "        from Shells, 43, 77.
+
+_Controverted Questions, Essays upon some_, quoted, 28.
+
+_Cremation_, quoted, 21.
+
+Cycle of Incarnation, 52 et seq.
+
+
+Death, a Gateway, 79.
+  "    Chinese Ideas of, 11.
+  "    Christian Ideas of, 6.
+  "    Egyptian Ideas of, 8.
+  "    Theosophic Ideas of, 18.
+
+_Desatir_, quoted, 9.
+
+Devachan, 33, 46. et seq.
+
+Devachan, Passing into, of the average-living, 33.
+
+Devachan, The Soul in, 72.
+
+Devachanî, The, 58 et seq.
+
+
+Earth, The return to, 66.
+
+Egos, Many lives of, 63 et seq.
+
+Elementals, 44, 78.
+
+Elementaries, 45, 77.
+
+_Esoteric Buddhism_, quoted, 69.
+
+Etheric Double, 12, 22 et seq., 24, 25, 71 et seq.
+
+
+Fiery Lives, 17.
+
+_Fortnightly Review_, quoted, 29.
+
+
+_Heroic Enthusiasts, The_, quoted, 21.
+
+
+Immortal Triad, The, 12, 13, 31, 33, 58, 60.
+
+_Isis Unveiled_, quoted, 17.
+
+
+Kâmaloka, 26, 27, 29, 32, 34, 41.
+
+Kâmaloka, The Soul in, 72.
+
+Kâma Rûpa, 30.
+
+_Key to Theosophy_, quoted, 24, 30, 31, 33, 60, 65, 67, 73, 78.
+
+
+_Lucifer_, quoted, 49, 70.
+
+
+_Magic, White and Black_, quoted, 26.
+
+_Man: Fragments of Forgotten History_, quoted, 23.
+
+Man: How Made, 12 et seq.
+
+Mâyâ, 47.
+
+Medium, Communications from Higher Egos of, 79.
+
+
+Nirvâna, 69.
+
+
+_Ordinances of Manu_, quoted, 9.
+
+
+_Paradise Lost_, quoted, 7.
+
+_Path_, quoted, 51, 54, 55, 56, 59 et seq.
+
+_Perfect Way_, quoted, 44.
+
+Perishable Quaternary, 12.
+
+Pishâchas, 38.
+
+Prâna, 26, 30.
+
+Premature Death, 36, 39.
+
+
+Re-incarnation, 8, 67.
+
+
+_Sanskrit-Chinese Dictionary_, quoted, 47 (Footnote: 27).
+
+_Seven principles of Man_, quoted, 26, 45.
+
+Shell, Astral Soul, or, 75.
+
+Shells, The, 41.
+
+_Shû King_, quoted, 10.
+
+Soul, Growth of, in Devachan, 56,
+
+  "   Powers of the, 80.
+
+  "   Relations of, with Devachanî, 74 et seq.
+
+  "   The Disembodied, 71 et seq.
+
+Spiritualism and Esoteric Philosophy, 15.
+
+Suicides, 36, et seq., 81.
+
+
+_Theosophical Glossary_, quoted, 45.
+
+_Theosophical Siftings_, quoted, 21.
+
+_Theosophist, The_, quoted, 27, 35, 71, 74, 75 et seq.
+
+_Theosophist. The_, summarised, 75, 79, 81.
+
+
+Unconscious co-existence of intelligent beings, 28 et seq.
+
+
+_Vishnu Purâna_, quoted, 57.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Death--and After?, by Annie Besant
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Death&mdash;and After?, by Annie Besant.
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Death--and After?, by Annie Besant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Death--and After?
+
+Author: Annie Besant
+
+Release Date: April 27, 2006 [EBook #18266]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH--AND AFTER? ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h4><span class="u"> <i>Theosophical Manuals. No. 3.</i></span>
+
+
+
+</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>DEATH&mdash;AND AFTER?</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>ANNIE BESANT.</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h5 >(20TH THOUSAND)</h5>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3 >Theosophical Publishing Society</h3>
+<h3 >London and Benares</h3>
+<h3 >City Agents, Percy Lund Humphries &amp; Co.</h3>
+<h3 >Amen Corner, London, E.C.</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3 >1906</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>PRICE ONE SHILLING</i>
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PREFACE.</h2>
+<p><i>Few words are needed in sending this little book out into the world.
+It is the third of a series of Manuals designed to meet the public
+demand for a simple exposition of Theosophical teachings. Some have
+complained that our literature is at once too abstruse, too technical,
+and too expensive for the ordinary reader, and it is our hope that the
+present series may succeed in supplying what is a very real want.
+Theosophy is not only for the learned; it is for all. Perhaps among
+those who in these little books catch their first glimpse of its
+teachings, there may be a few who will be led by them to penetrate
+more deeply into its philosophy, its science, and its religion, facing
+its abstruser problems with the student's zeal and the neophyte's
+ardour. But these Manuals are not written for the eager student, whom
+no initial difficulties can daunt; they are written for the busy men
+and women of the work-a-day world, and seek to make plain some of the
+great truths that render life easier to bear and death easier to face.
+Written by servants of the Masters who are the Elder Brothers of our
+race, they can have no other object than to serve our fellow-men.</i></p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="DEATH_AND_AFTER" id="DEATH_AND_AFTER"></a>DEATH&mdash;AND AFTER?</h2>
+
+
+<p>Who does not remember the story of the Christian missionary in
+Britain, sitting one evening in the vast hall of a Saxon king,
+surrounded by his thanes, having come thither to preach the gospel of
+his Master; and as he spoke of life and death and immortality, a bird
+flew in through an unglazed window, circled the hall in its flight,
+and flew out once more into the darkness of the night. The Christian
+priest bade the king see in the flight of the bird within the hall the
+transitory life of man, and claimed for his faith that it showed the
+soul, in passing from the hall of life, winging its way not into the
+darkness of night, but into the sunlit radiance of a more glorious
+world. Out of the darkness, through the open window of Birth, the life
+of a man comes to the earth; it dwells for a while before our eyes;
+into the darkness, through the open window of Death, it vanishes out
+of our sight. And man has questioned ever of Religion, Whence comes
+it? Whither goes it? and the answers have varied with the faiths.
+To-day, many a hundred year since Paulinus talked with Edwin, there
+are more people in Christendom who question whether<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> man has a spirit
+to come anywhence or to go anywhither than, perhaps, in the world's
+history could ever before have been found at one time. And the very
+Christians who claim that Death's terrors have been abolished, have
+surrounded the bier and the tomb with more gloom and more dismal
+funeral pomp than have the votaries of any other creed. What can be
+more depressing than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded,
+while the dead body is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent than
+the sweeping robes of lustreless crape, and the purposed hideousness
+of the heavy cap in which the widow laments the "deliverance" of her
+husband "from the burden of the flesh"? What more revolting than the
+artificially long faces of the undertaker's men, the drooping
+"weepers", the carefully-arranged white handkerchiefs, and, until
+lately, the pall-like funeral cloaks? During the last few years, a
+great and marked improvement has been made. The plumes, cloaks, and
+weepers have well-nigh disappeared. The grotesquely ghastly hearse is
+almost a thing of the past, and the coffin goes forth heaped over with
+flowers instead of shrouded in the heavy black velvet pall. Men and
+women, though still wearing black, do not roll themselves up in
+shapeless garments like sable winding-sheets, as if trying to see how
+miserable they could make themselves by the imposition of artificial
+discomforts. Welcome common-sense has driven custom from its throne,
+and has refused any longer to add these gratuitous annoyances to
+natural human grief.</p>
+
+<p>In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding
+Death has been characteristic of Christianity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> Death has been painted
+as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening
+figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking
+an hour-glass&mdash;all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round
+this rightly-named King of Terrors. Milton, who has done so much with
+his stately rhythm to mould the popular conceptions of modern
+Christianity, has used all the sinewy strength of his magnificent
+diction to surround with horror the figure of Death.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">The other shape,<br />
+</span>
+<span class="i0">If shape it might be called, that shape had none<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For each seemed either; black it stood as night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The likeness of a kingly crown had on.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Satan was now at hand, and from his seat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The monster moving onward came as fast,<br />
+</span>
+<span class="i0">With horrid strides; hell trembled as he strode....<br />
+</span>
+<span class="i0">... So spoke the grisly terror: and in shape<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So speaking, and so threatening, grew tenfold<br />
+</span>
+<span class="i0">More dreadful and deform....<br />
+</span>
+<span class="i0">... but he, my inbred enemy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Made to destroy: I fled, and cried out <i>Death!</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From all her caves, and back resounded <i>Death</i>.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That such a view of Death should be taken by the professed followers
+of a Teacher said to have "brought life and immortality to light" is
+passing strange. The claim, that as late in the history of the world
+as a mere <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>eighteen centuries ago the immortality of the Spirit in man
+was brought to light, is of course transparently absurd, in the face
+of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary available on all hands.
+The stately Egyptian Ritual with its <i>Book of the Dead</i>, in which are
+traced the post-mortem journeys of the Soul, should be enough, if it
+stood alone, to put out of court for ever so preposterous a claim.
+Hear the cry of the Soul of the righteous:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>O ye, who make the escort of the God, stretch out to me your
+arms, for I become one of you. (xvii. 22.)</p>
+
+<p>Hail to thee, Osiris, Lord of Light, dwelling in the mighty
+abode, in the bosom of the absolute darkness. I come to thee,
+a purified Soul; my two hands are around thee. (xxi. 1.)</p>
+
+<p>I open heaven; I do what was commanded in Memphis. I have
+knowledge of my heart; I am in possession of my heart, I am
+in possession of my arms, I am in possession of my legs, at
+the will of myself. My Soul is not imprisoned in my body at
+the gates of Amenti. (xxvi. 5, 6.)</p></div>
+
+<p>Not to multiply to weariness quotations from a book that is wholly
+composed of the doings and sayings of the disembodied man, let it
+suffice to give the final judgment on the victorious Soul:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The defunct shall be deified among the Gods in the lower
+divine region, he shall never be rejected.... He shall drink
+from the current of the celestial river.... His Soul shall
+not be imprisoned, since it is a Soul that brings salvation
+to those near it. The worms shall not devour it. (clxiv.
+14-16.)</p></div>
+
+<p>The general belief in Re-incarnation is enough to prove that the
+religions of which it formed a central doctrine believed in the
+survival of the Soul after Death; but one may quote as an example a
+passage from the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span><i>Ordinances of Manu</i>, following on a disquisition on
+metempsychosis, and answering the question of deliverance from
+rebirths.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Amid all these holy acts, the knowledge of self [should be
+translated, knowledge of the <i>Self</i>, Atm&acirc;] is said (to be)
+the highest; this indeed is the foremost of all sciences,
+since from it immortality is obtained.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The testimony of the great Zarathustrean Religion is clear, as is
+shown by the following, translated from the <i>Avesta</i>, in which, the
+journey of the Soul after death having been described, the ancient
+Scripture proceeds:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The soul of the pure man goes the first step and arrives at
+(the Paradise) Humata; the soul of the pure man takes the
+second step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hukhta; it goes the
+third step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hvarst; the soul of
+the pure man takes the fourth step and arrives at the Eternal
+Lights.</p>
+
+<p>To it speaks a pure one deceased before, asking it: How art
+thou, O pure deceased, come away from the fleshy dwellings,
+from the earthly possessions, from the corporeal world hither
+to the invisible, from the perishable world hither to the
+imperishable, as it happened to thee&mdash;to whom hail!</p>
+
+<p>Then speaks Ahura-Mazda: Ask not him whom thou asketh, (for)
+he is come on the fearful, terrible, trembling way, the
+separation of body and soul.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The Persian <i>Desatir</i> speaks with equal definiteness. This work
+consists of fifteen books, written by Persian prophets, and was
+written originally in the Avestaic language; "God" is Ahura-Mazda, or
+Yazdan:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>God selected man from animals to confer on him the soul,
+which is a substance free, simple, immaterial, non-compounded
+and non-appetitive. And that becomes an angel by improvement.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span></p>
+<p>By his profound wisdom and most sublime intelligence, he
+connected the soul with the material body.</p>
+
+<p>If he (man) does good in the material body, and has a good
+knowledge and religion he is <i>Hartasp</i>....</p>
+
+<p>As soon as he leaves this material body, I (God) take him up
+to the world of angels, that he may have an interview with
+the angels, and behold me.</p>
+
+<p>And if he is not Hartasp, but has wisdom and abstains from
+vice, I will promote him to the rank of angels.</p>
+
+<p>Every person in proportion to his wisdom and piety will find
+a place in the rank of wise men, among the heavens and stars.
+And in that region of happiness he will remain for ever.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>In China, the immemorial custom of worshipping the Souls of ancestors
+shows how completely the life of man was regarded as extending beyond
+the tomb. The <i>Sh&ucirc; King</i>&mdash;placed by Mr. James Legge as the most
+ancient of Chinese classics, containing historical documents ranging
+from B.C. 2357-627&mdash;is full of allusions to these Souls, who with
+other spiritual beings, watch over the affairs of their descendants
+and the welfare of the kingdom. Thus Pan-kang, ruling from B.C.
+1401-1374, exhorts his subjects:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>My object is to support and nourish you all. I think of my
+ancestors (who are now) the spiritual sovereigns.... Were I
+to err in my government, and remain long here, my high
+sovereign (the founder of our dynasty) would send down on me
+great punishment for my crime, and say, "Why do you oppress
+my people?" If you, the myriads of the people, do not attend
+to the perpetuation of your lives, and cherish one mind with
+me, the One man, in my plans, the former kings will send down
+on you great punishment for your crime, and say, "Why do you
+not agree with our young grandson, but go on to forfeit your
+virtue?" When they punish you from above, you will have no
+way of escape.... Your ancestors and fathers will (now) cut
+you off and abandon you, and not save you from death.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span></p><p>Indeed, so practical is this Chinese belief, held to-day as in those
+long-past ages, that "the change that men call Death" seems to play a
+very small part in the thoughts and lives of the people of the Flowery
+Land.</p>
+
+<p>These quotations, which might be multiplied a hundred-fold, may
+suffice to prove the folly of the idea that immortality came to "light
+through the gospel". The whole ancient world basked in the full
+sunshine of belief in the immortality of man, lived in it daily,
+voiced it in its literature, went with it in calm serenity through the
+gate of Death.</p>
+
+<p>It remains a problem why Christianity, which vigorously and joyously
+re-affirmed it, should have growing in its midst the unique terror of
+Death that has played so large a part in its social life, its
+literature, and its art. It is not simply the belief in hell that has
+surrounded the grave with horror, for other Religions have had their
+hells, and yet their followers have not been harassed by this shadowy
+Fear. The Chinese, for instance, who take Death as such a light and
+trivial thing, have a collection of hells quite unique in their varied
+unpleasantness. Maybe the difference is a question of race rather than
+of creed; that the vigorous life of the West shrinks from its
+antithesis, and that its unimaginative common-sense finds a bodiless
+condition too lacking in solidity of comfort; whereas the more dreamy,
+mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever seeking to escape from
+the thraldom of the senses during earthly life, looks on the
+disembodied state as eminently desirable, and as most conducive to
+unfettered thought.</p>
+
+<p>Ere passing to the consideration of the history of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> man in the
+post-mortem state, it is necessary, however briefly, to state the
+constitution of man, as viewed by the Esoteric Philosophy, for we must
+have in mind the constituents of his being ere we can understand their
+disintegration. Man then consists of</p>
+
+<table class="tb1" >
+  <tr>
+  <td><i>The Immortal Triad</i>:</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Atm&acirc;.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Buddhi.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Manas.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td><i>The Perishable Quaternary</i>:</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>K&acirc;ma.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Pr&acirc;na.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Etheric Double.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Dense Body.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<p>The dense body is the physical body, the visible, tangible outer form,
+composed of various tissues. The etheric double is the ethereal
+counterpart of the body, composed of the physical ethers. Pr&acirc;na is
+vitality, the integrating energy that co-ordinates the physical
+molecules and holds them together in a definite organism; it is the
+life-breath within the organism, the portion of the universal
+Life-Breath, appropriated by the organism during the span of existence
+that we speak of as "a life". K&acirc;ma is the aggregate of appetites,
+passions, and emotions, common to man and brute. Manas is the Thinker
+in us, the Intelligence. Buddhi is the vehicle wherein Atm&acirc;, the
+Spirit, dwells, and in which alone it can manifest.</p>
+
+<p>Now the link between the Immortal Triad and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> Perishable Quaternary
+is Manas, which is dual during earth life, or incarnation, and
+functions as Higher Manas and Lower Manas. Higher Manas sends out a
+Ray, Lower Manas, which works in and through the human brain,
+functioning there as brain-consciousness, as the ratiocinating
+intelligence. This mingles with K&acirc;ma, the passional nature, the
+passions and emotions thus becoming a part of Mind, as defined in
+Western Psychology. And so we have the link formed between the higher
+and lower natures in man, this K&acirc;ma-Manas belonging to the higher by
+its m&acirc;nasic, and to the lower by its k&acirc;mic, elements. As this forms
+the battleground during life, so does it play an important part in
+post-mortem existence. We might now classify our seven principles a
+little differently, having in view this mingling in K&acirc;ma-Manas of
+perishable and imperishable elements:</p>
+<table class="tb1">
+  <tr>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="td1">{ Atm&acirc;.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Immortal</i>.</td>
+    <td class="td1">{ Buddhi.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="td1">{ Higher-Manas.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Conditionally Immortal</i>.</td>
+    <td class="td1">K&acirc;ma-Manas.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="td1">{ Pr&acirc;na.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Mortal</i>.</td>
+    <td class="td1">{ Etheric Double.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="td1">{ Dense Body.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<p>Some Christian writers have adopted a classification similar to this,
+declaring Spirit to be inherently immortal, as being Divine; Soul to
+be conditionally immortal, <i>i.e.</i>, capable of winning immortality by
+uniting itself with Spirit; Body to be inherently mortal. The majority
+of uninstructed Christians chop man into two, the Body that perishes
+at Death, and the something&mdash;called indifferently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span> Soul or
+Spirit&mdash;that survives Death. This last classification&mdash;if
+classification it may be called&mdash;is entirely inadequate, if we are to
+seek any rational explanation, or even lucid statement, of the
+phenomena of post-mortem existence. The tripartite view of man's
+nature gives a more reasonable representation of his constitution, but
+is inadequate to explain many phenomena. The septenary division alone
+gives a reasonable theory consistent with the facts we have to deal
+with, and therefore, though it may seem elaborate, the student will do
+wisely to make himself familiar with it. If he were studying only the
+body, and desired to understand its activities, he would have to
+classify its tissues at far greater length and with far more
+minuteness than I am using here. He would have to learn the
+differences between muscular, nervous, glandular, bony, cartilaginous,
+epithelial, connective, tissues, and all their varieties; and if he
+rebelled, in his ignorance, against such an elaborate division, it
+would be explained to him that only by such an analysis of the
+different components of the body can the varied and complicated
+phenomena of life-activity be understood. One kind of tissue is wanted
+for support, another for movement, another for secretion, another for
+absorption, and so on; and if each kind does not have its own
+distinctive name, dire confusion and misunderstanding must result, and
+physical functions remain unintelligible. In the long run time is
+gained, as well as clearness, by learning a few necessary technical
+terms, and as clearness is above all things needed in trying to
+explain and to understand very complicated post-mortem phenomena, I
+find myself compelled&mdash;contrary to my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span> habit in these elementary
+papers&mdash;to resort to these technical names at the outset, for the
+English language has as yet no equivalents for them, and the use of
+long descriptive phrases is extremely cumbersome and inconvenient.</p>
+
+<p>For myself, I believe that very much of the antagonism between the
+adherents of the Esoteric Philosophy and those of Spiritualism has
+arisen from confusion of terms, and consequent misunderstanding of
+each others meaning. One eminent Spiritualist lately impatiently said
+that he did not see the need of exact definition, and that he meant by
+Spirit all the part of man's nature that survived Death, and was not
+body. One might as well insist on saying that man's body consists of
+bone and blood, and asked to define blood, answer: "Oh! I mean
+everything that is not bone." A clear definition of terms, and a rigid
+adherence to them when once adopted, will at least enable us all to
+understand each other, and that is the first step to any fruitful
+comparison of experiences.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Fate of the Body.</span></h3>
+<p>The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of
+reconstruction. First builded into the etheric form in the womb of the
+mother, it is built up continually by the insetting of fresh
+materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away from it;
+with every moment tiny molecules are streaming into it. The outgoing
+stream is scattered over the environment, and helps to rebuild bodies
+of all kinds in the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms,
+the physical basis of all these being one and the same.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The idea that the human tabernacle is built by countless
+<i>lives</i>, just in the same way as the rocky crust of our Earth
+was, has nothing repulsive in it for the true mystic....
+Science teaches us that the living as well as the dead
+organism of both man and animal are swarming with bacteria of
+a hundred various kinds; that from without we are threatened
+with the invasion of microbes with every breath we draw, and
+from within by leucomaines, robes, &aelig;robes, an&aelig;robes, and what
+not. But Science never yet went so far as to assert with the
+Occult Doctrine that our bodies, as well as those of animals,
+plants, and stones, are themselves altogether built up of
+such beings, which, except larger species, no microscope can
+detect. So far as regards the purely animal and material
+portion of man, Science is on its way to discoveries that
+will go far towards corroborating this theory. Chemistry and
+physiology are the two great magicians of the future, who are
+destined to open the eyes of mankind to the great physical
+truths. With every day, the identity between the animal and
+physical man, between the plant and man, and even between the
+reptile and its nest, the rock, and man, is more and more
+clearly shown. The physical and chemical constituents of all
+being found to be identical, chemical Science may well say
+that there is no difference between the matter which composes
+the ox and that which forms man. But the Occult Doctrine is
+far more explicit. It says: Not only the chemical compounds
+are the same, but the same infinitesimal <i>invisible lives</i>
+compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the
+daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant, and of the tree
+which shelters him from the sun. Each particle&mdash;whether you
+call it organic or inorganic&mdash;<i>is a life</i>.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>These "lives" which, separate and independent, are the minute vehicles
+of Pr&acirc;na, aggregated together form the molecules and cells of the
+physical body, and they stream in and stream out, during all the years
+of bodily life, thus forming a continual bridge between man and his
+environment. Controlling these are the "Fiery Lives," the Devourers,
+which constrain these to their work of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>building up the cells of the
+body, so that they work harmoniously and in order, subordinated to the
+higher manifestation of life in the complex organism called Man. These
+Fiery Lives on our plane correspond, in this controlling and
+organising function, with the One Life of the Universe,<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> and when
+they no longer exercise this function in the human body, the lower
+lives run rampant, and begin to break down the hitherto definitely
+organised body. During bodily life they are marshalled as an army;
+marching in regular order under the command of a general, performing
+various evolutions, keeping step, moving as a single body. At "Death"
+they become a disorganised and tumultuous mob, rushing hither and
+thither, jostling each other, tumbling over each other, with no common
+object, no generally recognised authority. The body is never more
+alive than when it is dead; but it is alive in its units, and dead in
+its totality; alive as a congeries, dead as an organism.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily
+united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To
+the Materialist, the only difference between a living and a
+dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in
+the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the
+molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them
+asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must
+be Death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as
+Death, where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an
+intense vital energy.... Says Eliphas Levi: "Change attests
+movement, and movement only reveals life. The corpse would
+not decompose if it were dead; all the molecules which
+compose it are living and struggle to separate."<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Those who have read <i>The Seven Principles of Man</i>,<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>know that the
+etheric double is the vehicle of Pr&acirc;na, the life-principle, or
+vitality. Through the etheric double Pr&acirc;na exercises the controlling
+and co-ordinating force spoken of above, and "Death" takes triumphant
+possession of the body when the etheric double is finally withdrawn
+and the delicate cord which unites it with the body is snapped. The
+process of withdrawal has been watched by clairvoyants, and definitely
+described. Thus Andrew Jackson Davis, "the Poughkeepsie Seer",
+describes how he himself watched this escape of the ethereal body, and
+he states that the magnetic cord did not break for some thirty-six
+hours after apparent death. Others have described, in similar terms,
+how they saw a faint violet mist rise from the dying body, gradually
+condensing into a figure which was the counterpart of the expiring
+person, and attached to that person by a glistening thread. The
+snapping of the thread means the breaking of the last magnetic link
+between the dense body and the remaining principles of the human
+constitution; the body has dropped away from the man; he is
+excarnated, disembodied; six principles still remain as his
+constitution immediately after death, the seventh, or the dense body,
+being left as a cast-off garment.</p>
+
+<p>Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or
+unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one
+after the other, its outer casings, and&mdash;as the snake from its skin,
+the butterfly from its chrysalis&mdash;emerges from one after another,
+passing into a higher state of consciousness. Now it is the fact that
+this escape from the body, and this dwelling of the conscious entity
+either in the vehicle called the body of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> desire, the k&acirc;mic or astral
+body, or in a yet more ethereal Thought Body, can be effected during
+earth-life; so that man may become familiar with the excarnated
+condition, and it may lose for him all the terrors that encircle the
+unknown. He can know himself as a conscious entity in either of these
+vehicles, and so prove to his own satisfaction that "life" does not
+depend on his functioning through the physical body. Why should a man
+who has thus repeatedly "shed" his lower bodies, and has found the
+process result, not in unconsciousness, but in a vastly extended
+freedom and vividness of life&mdash;why should he fear the final casting
+away of his fetters, and the freeing of his Immortal Self from what he
+realises as the prison of the flesh?</p>
+
+<p>This view of human life is an essential part of the Esoteric
+Philosophy. Man is primarily divine, a spark of the Divine Life. This
+living flame, passing out from the Central Fire, weaves for itself
+coverings within which it dwells, and thus becomes the Triad, the
+Atm&acirc;-Buddhi-Manas, the reflection of the Immortal Self. This sends out
+its Ray, which becomes encased in grosser matter, in the desire body,
+or k&acirc;mic elements, the passional nature, and in the etheric double and
+the physical body. The once free immortal Intelligence thus entangled,
+enswathed, enchained, works heavily and laboriously through the
+coatings that enwrap it. In its own nature it remains ever the free
+Bird of Heaven, but its wings are bound to its side by the matter into
+which it is plunged. When man recognises his own inherent nature, he
+learns to open his prison doors occasionally and escapes from his
+encircling gaol; first he learns to identify him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>self with the
+Immortal Triad, and rises above the body and its passions into a pure
+mental and moral life; then he learns that the conquered body cannot
+hold him prisoner, and he unlocks its door and steps out into the
+sunshine of his true life. So when Death unlocks the door for him, he
+knows the country into which he emerges, having trodden its ways at
+his own will. And at last he grows to recognise that fact of supreme
+importance, that "Life" has nothing to do with body and with this
+material plane; that Life is his conscious existence, unbroken,
+unbreakable, and that the brief interludes in that Life, during which
+he sojourns on Earth, are but a minute fraction of his conscious
+existence, and a fraction, moreover, during which he is less alive,
+because of the heavy coverings which weigh him down. For only during
+these interludes (save in exceptional cases) may he wholly lose his
+consciousness of continued life, being surrounded by these coverings
+which delude him and blind him to the truth of things, making that
+real which is illusion, and that stable which is transitory. The
+sunlight ranges over the universe, and at incarnation we step out of
+it into the twilight of the body, and see but dimly during the period
+of our incarceration; at Death we step out of the prison again into
+the sunlight, and are nearer to the reality. Short are the twilight
+periods, and long the periods of the sunlight; but in our blinded
+state we call the twilight life, and to us it is the real existence,
+while we call the sunlight Death, and shiver at the thought of passing
+into it. Well did Giordano Bruno, one of the greatest teachers of our
+Philosophy in the Middle Ages, state the truth as to the body and Man.
+Of the real Man he says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He will be present in the body in such wise that the best
+part of himself will be absent from it, and will join himself
+by an indissoluble sacrament to divine things, in such a way
+that he will not feel either love or hatred of things mortal.
+Considering himself as master, and that he ought not to be
+servant and slave to his body, which he would regard only as
+the prison which holds his liberty in confinement, the glue
+which smears his wings, chains which bind fast his hands,
+stocks which fix his feet, veil which hides his view. Let him
+not be servant, captive, ensnared, chained, idle, stolid, and
+blind, for the body which he himself abandons cannot
+tyrannise over him, so that thus the spirit in a certain
+degree comes before him as the corporeal world, and matter is
+subject to the divinity and to nature.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>When once we thus come to regard the body, and by conquering it we
+gain our liberty, Death loses for us all his terrors, and at his touch
+the body slips from us as a garment, and we stand out from it erect
+and free.</p>
+
+<p>On the same lines of thought Dr. Franz Hartmann writes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>According to certain views of the West man is a developed
+ape. According to the views of Indian Sages, which also
+coincide with those of the Philosophers of past ages and with
+the teachings of the Christian Mystics, man is a God, who is
+united during his earthly life, through his own carnal
+tendencies, to an animal (his animal nature). The God who
+dwells within him endows man with wisdom. The animal endows
+him with force. After death, <i>the God effects his own release
+from the man</i> by departing from the animal body. As man
+carries within him this divine consciousness, it is his task
+to battle with his animal inclinations, and to raise himself
+above them, by the help of the divine principle, a task which
+the animal cannot achieve, and which therefore is not
+demanded of it.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The "man", using the word in the sense of personality, as it is used
+in the latter half of this sentence, is only <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>conditionally immortal;
+the true man, the evolving God, releases himself, and so much of the
+personality goes with him as has raised itself into union with the
+divine.</p>
+
+<p>The body thus left to the rioting of the countless lives&mdash;previously
+held in constraint by Pr&acirc;na, acting through its vehicle the etheric
+double&mdash;begins to decay, that is to break up, and with the
+disintegration of its cells and molecules, its particles pass away
+into other combinations.</p>
+
+<p>On our return to Earth we may meet again some of those same countless
+lives that in a previous incarnation made of our then body their
+passing dwelling; but all that we are just now concerned with is the
+breaking up of the body whose life-span is over, and its fate is
+complete disintegration. To the dense body, then, Death means
+dissolution as an organism, the loosing of the bonds that united the
+many into one.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Fate of the Etheric Double.</span></h3>
+<p>The etheric double is the ethereal counterpart of the gross body of
+man. It is the double that is sometimes seen during life in the
+neighbourhood of the body, and its absence from the body is generally
+marked by the heaviness or semi-lethargy of the latter. Acting as the
+reservoir, or vehicle, of the life-principle during earth-life, its
+withdrawal from the body is naturally marked by the lowering of all
+vital functions, even while the cord which unites the two is still
+unbroken. As has been already said, the snapping of the cord means the
+death of the body.</p>
+
+<p>When the etheric double finally quits the body, it does not travel to
+any distance from it. Normally it remains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span> floating over the body, the
+state of consciousness being dreamy and peaceful, unless tumultuous
+distress and violent emotion surround the corpse from which it has
+just issued. And here it may be well to say that during the slow
+process of dying, while the etheric double is withdrawing from the
+body, taking with it the higher principles, as after it has withdrawn,
+extreme quiet and self-control should be observed in the chamber of
+Death. For during this time the whole life passes swiftly in review
+before the Ego, the individual, as those have related who have passed
+in drowning into this unconscious and pulseless state. A Master has
+written:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>At the last moment the whole life is reflected in our
+memory, and emerges from all the forgotten nooks and corners,
+picture after picture, one event after another.... The man
+may often appear dead, yet from the last pulsation, from and
+between the last throbbing of his heart and the moment when
+the last spark of animal heat leaves the body</i>, the brain
+thinks, <i>and the Ego lives over in those few brief seconds
+his whole life. Speak in whispers, ye who assist at a
+deathbed, and find yourselves in the solemn presence of
+death. Especially have ye to keep quiet just after death has
+laid her clammy hand upon the body. Speak in whispers, I say,
+lest ye disturb the quiet ripple of thought, and hinder the
+busy work of the past, casting its reflection upon the veil
+of the future.</i><a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>This is the time during which the thought-images of the ended
+earth-life, clustering around their maker, group and interweave
+themselves into the completed image of that life, and are impressed in
+their totality on the Astral <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>Light. The dominant tendencies, the
+strongest thought-habits, assert their pre-eminence, and stamp
+themselves as the characteristics which will appear as "innate
+qualities" in the succeeding incarnation. This balancing-up of the
+life-issues, this reading of the k&acirc;rmic records, is too solemn and
+momentous a thing to be disturbed by the ill-timed wailings of
+personal relatives and friends.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>At the solemn moment of death every man, even when death is
+sudden, sees the whole of his past life marshalled before
+him, in its minutest details. For one short instant the
+<i>personal</i> become one with the <i>individual</i> and all-knowing
+Ego. But this instant is enough to show to him the whole
+chain of causes which have been at work during his life. He
+sees and now understands himself as he is, unadorned by
+flattery or self-deception. He reads his life, remaining as a
+spectator, looking down into the arena he is quitting.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>This vivid sight is succeeded, in the ordinary person, by the dreamy,
+peaceful semi-consciousness spoken of above, as the etheric double
+floats above the body to which it has belonged, now completely
+separated from it.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes this double is seen by persons in the house, or in the
+neighbourhood, when the thought of the dying has been strongly turned
+to some one left behind, when some anxiety has been in the mind at the
+last, something left undone which needed doing, or when some local
+disturbance has shaken the tranquillity of the passing entity. Under
+these conditions, or others of a similar nature, the double may be
+seen or heard; when seen, it shows the dreamy, hazy consciousness
+alluded to, is silent, vague in its aspect, unresponsive.</p>
+
+<p>As the days go on, the five higher principles gradually <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>disengage
+themselves from the etheric double, and shake this off as they
+previously shook off the grosser body. They pass on, as a fivefold
+entity, into a state to be next studied, leaving the etheric double,
+with the dense body of which it is the counterpart, thus becoming an
+ethereal corpse, as much as the body had become a dense corpse. This
+ethereal corpse remains near the dense one, and they disintegrate
+together; clairvoyants see these ethereal wraiths in churchyards,
+sometimes showing likeness to the dead dense body, sometimes as violet
+mists or lights. Such an ethereal corpse has been seen by a friend of
+my own, passing through the horribly repulsive stages of
+decomposition, a ghastly vision in face of which clairvoyance was
+certainly no blessing. The process goes on <i>pari passu</i>, until all but
+the actual bony skeleton of the dense body is completely
+disintegrated, and the particles have gone to form other combinations.</p>
+
+<p>One of the great advantages of cremation&mdash;apart from all sanitary
+conditions&mdash;lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the
+physical elements composing the dense and ethereal corpses, brought
+about by the burning. Instead of slow and gradual decomposition, swift
+dissociation takes place, and no physical remnants are left, working
+possible mischief.</p>
+
+<p>The ethereal corpse may to some extent be revivified for a short
+period after its death. Dr. Hartmann says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The fresh corpse of a person who has suddenly been killed may
+be galvanised into a semblance of life by the application of
+a galvanic battery. Likewise the astral corpse of a person
+may be brought back into an artificial life by being infused
+with a part of the life principle of the medium. If that
+corpse is one of a very <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>intellectual person, it may talk
+very intellectually; and if it was that of a fool it will
+talk like a fool.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>This mischievous procedure can only be carried out in the
+neighbourhood of the corpse, and for a very limited time after death,
+but there are cases on record of such galvanising of the ethereal
+corpse, performed at the grave of the departed person. Needless to say
+that such a process belongs distinctly to "Black" Magic, and is wholly
+evil. Ethereal corpses, like dense ones, if not swiftly destroyed by
+burning, should be left in the silence and the darkness, a silence and
+a darkness that it is the worst profanity to break.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">K&acirc;maloka, and the Fate of Pr&acirc;na and K&acirc;ma.</span></h3>
+<p>Loka is a Sanskrit word that may be translated as place, world, land,
+so that K&acirc;maloka is literally the place or the world of K&acirc;ma, K&acirc;ma
+being the name of that part of the human organism that includes all
+the passions, desires, and emotions which man has in common with the
+lower animals.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> In this division of the universe, the K&acirc;maloka,
+dwell all the human entities that have shaken off the dense body and
+its ethereal double, but have not yet disentangled themselves from the
+passional and emotional nature. K&acirc;maloka has many other tenants, but
+we are concerned only with the human beings who have lately passed
+through the gateway of Death, and it is on these that we must
+concentrate our study.</p>
+
+<p>A momentary digression may be pardoned on the question of the
+existence of regions in the universe, other <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>than the physical,
+peopled with intelligent beings. The existence of such regions is
+postulated by the Esoteric Philosophy, and is known to the Adepts and
+to very many less highly evolved men and women by personal experience;
+all that is needed for the study of these regions is the evolution of
+the faculties latent in every man; a "living" man, in ordinary
+parlance, can leave his dense and ethereal bodies behind him, and
+explore these regions without going through Death's gateway. Thus we
+read in the <i>Theosophist</i> that real knowledge may be acquired by the
+Spirit in the living man coming into conscious relations with the
+world of Spirit.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As in the case, say, of an initiated Adept, who brings back
+upon earth with him the clear and distinct
+recollection&mdash;correct to a detail&mdash;of facts gathered, and the
+information obtained, in the invisible sphere of
+<i>Realities</i>.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>In this way those regions become to him matters of knowledge as
+definite, as certain, as familiar, as if he should travel to Africa in
+ordinary fashion, explore its deserts, and return to his own land the
+richer for the knowledge and experience gained. A seasoned African
+explorer would care but little for the criticisms passed on his report
+by persons who had never been thither; he might tell what he saw,
+describe the animals whose habits he had studied, sketch the country
+he had traversed, sum up its products and its characteristics. If he
+was contradicted, laughed at, set right, by untravelled critics, he
+would be neither ruffled nor distressed, but would merely leave them
+alone. Ignorance cannot convince knowledge <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>by repeated asseveration
+of its nescience. The opinion of a hundred persons on a subject on
+which they are wholly ignorant is of no more weight than the opinion
+of one such person. Evidence is strengthened by many consenting
+witnesses, testifying each to his knowledge of a fact, but nothing
+multiplied a thousand times remains nothing. Strange, indeed, would it
+be if all the Space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the
+inhabitants of earth the only forms in which intelligence could clothe
+itself. As Dr. Huxley said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known,
+it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending
+scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable
+from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>If these entities did not have organs of sense like our own, if their
+senses responded to vibrations different from those which affect ours,
+they and we might walk side by side, pass each other, meet each other,
+pass through each other, and yet be never the wiser as to each other's
+existence. Mr. Crookes gives us a glimpse of the possibility of such
+unconscious co-existence of intelligent beings, and but a very slight
+effort of imagination is needed to realise the conception.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs
+of sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to
+which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate
+other vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would
+practically be living in a different world to our own.
+Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of
+surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive
+to the ordinary rays of light, but sensitive to the
+vibrations concerned in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>electric and magnetic phenomena.
+Glass and crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies.
+Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph
+wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole
+drilled through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active
+work would resemble a conflagration, whilst a permanent
+magnet would realise the dream of medi&aelig;val mystics, and
+become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or
+consumption of fuel.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>K&acirc;maloka is a region peopled by intelligent and semi-intelligent
+entities, just as our own is thus peopled; it is crowded, like our
+world, with many types and forms of living things, as diverse from
+each other as a blade of grass is different from a tiger, a tiger from
+a man. It interpenetrates our own world and is interpenetrated by it,
+but, as the states of matter in the two worlds differ, they co-exist
+without the knowledge of the intelligent beings in either. Only under
+abnormal circumstances can consciousness of each other's presence
+arise among the inhabitants of the two worlds; by certain peculiar
+training a living human being can come into conscious contact with and
+control many of the sub-human denizens of K&acirc;maloka; human beings, who
+have quitted earth and in whom the k&acirc;mic elements were strong, may
+very readily be attracted by the k&acirc;mic elements in embodied men, and
+by their help become conscious again of the presence of the scenes
+they had left; and human beings still embodied may set up methods of
+communication with the disembodied, and may, as said, leave their own
+bodies for awhile, and become conscious in K&acirc;maloka by the use of
+faculties through which they have accustomed their consciousness to
+act. The point which is here to be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>clearly grasped is the existence
+of K&acirc;maloka as a definite region, inhabited by a large diversity of
+entities, among whom are disembodied human beings.</p>
+
+<p>From this necessary digression we return to the particular human being
+whose fate, as a type, we may be said to be tracing, and of whose
+dense body and etheric double we have already disposed. Let us
+contemplate him in the state of very brief duration that follows the
+shaking off of these two casings. Says H.P. Blavatsky, after quoting
+from Plutarch a description of the man after death:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Here you have our doctrine, which shows man a <i>septenary</i>
+during life; a <i>quintile</i> just after death, in K&acirc;maloka.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Pr&acirc;na, the portion of the life-energy appropriated by the man in his
+embodied state, having lost its vehicle, the ethereal double, which,
+with the physical body, has slipped away from its controlling energy,
+must pass back into the great life-reservoir of the universe. As water
+enclosed in a glass vessel and plunged into a tank mingles with the
+surrounding water if the vessel be broken, so Pr&acirc;na, as the bodies
+drop from it, mingles again with the Life Universal. It is only "just
+after death" that man is a quintile, or fivefold in his constitution,
+for Pr&acirc;na, as a distinctively human principle, cannot remain
+appropriated when its vehicle disintegrates.</p>
+
+<p>The man now is clothed, but with the K&acirc;ma R&ucirc;pa, or body of K&acirc;ma, the
+desire body, a body of astral matter, often termed "fluidic," so
+easily does it, during earth-life, take any form impressed upon it
+from without <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>or moulded from within. The living man is there, the
+immortal Triad, still clad in the last of its terrestrial garments, in
+the subtle, sensitive, responsive form which lent it during embodiment
+the power to feel, to desire, to enjoy, to suffer, in the physical
+world.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When the man dies, his three lower principles leave him for
+ever; <i>i.e.</i>, body, life, and the vehicle of the latter, the
+etheric body, or the double of the living man. And then his
+four principles&mdash;the central or middle principle (the animal
+soul or K&acirc;ma R&ucirc;pa, with what it has assimilated from the
+lower Manas) and the higher Triad&mdash;find themselves in
+K&acirc;maloka.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>This desire body undergoes a marked change soon after death. The
+different densities of the astral matter of which it is composed
+arrange themselves in a series of shells or envelopes, the densest
+being outside, shutting the consciousness away from all but very
+limited contact and expression. The consciousness turns in on itself,
+if left undisturbed, and prepares itself for the next step onwards,
+while the desire body gradually disintegrates, shell after shell.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the point of this re-arrangement of the matter of the desire
+body, the post-mortem experience of all is much the same; it is a
+"dreamy, peaceful semi-consciousness," as before said, and this, in
+the happiest cases, passes without vivid awakening into the deeper
+"pre-devachanic unconsciousness" which ends with the blissful wakening
+in Devachan, for the period of repose that intervenes between two
+incarnations. But as, at this point, different possibilities arise,
+let us trace a normal uninterrupted progression in K&acirc;maloka, up to the
+threshold of Devachan, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>and then we can return to consider other
+classes of circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>If a person has led a pure life, and has steadfastly striven to rise
+and to identify himself with the higher rather than the lower parts of
+his nature, after shaking off the dense body and the etheric double,
+and after Pr&acirc;na has re-mingled with the ocean of Life, and he is
+clothed only with the K&acirc;ma R&ucirc;pa, the passional elements in him, being
+but weak and accustomed to comparatively little activity, will not be
+able to assert themselves strongly in K&acirc;maloka. Now during earth-life
+K&acirc;ma and the Lower Manas are strongly united and interwoven with each
+other; in the case we are considering K&acirc;ma is weak, and the Lower
+Manas has purified K&acirc;ma to a great extent. The mind, woven with the
+passions, emotions, and desires, has purified them, and has
+assimilated their pure part, absorbed it into itself, so that all that
+is left of K&acirc;ma is a mere residue, easily to be gotten rid of, from
+which the Immortal Triad can readily free itself. Slowly this Immortal
+Triad, the true Man, draws in all his forces; he draws into himself
+the memories of the earth-life just ended, its loves, its hopes, its
+aspirations, and prepares to pass out of K&acirc;maloka into the blissful
+rest of Devachan, the "abode of the Gods", or as some say, "the land
+of bliss". K&acirc;maloka</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Is an astral locality, the Limbus of scholastic theology, the
+Hades of the ancients, and, strictly speaking, a <i>locality</i>
+only in a relative sense. It has neither a definite area, nor
+boundary, but exists <i>within</i> subjective space, <i>i.e.</i>, is
+beyond our sensuous perceptions. Still it exists, and it is
+there that the astral <i>eidolons</i> of all the beings that have
+lived, animals included, await their <i>second death</i>. For the
+animals it comes with the disintegration and the entire
+fading out <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>of their astral particles to the last. For the
+human <i>eidolon</i> it begins when the Atm&acirc;-Buddhi-M&acirc;nasic Triad
+is said to "separate" itself from its lower principles or the
+reflection of the ex-personality, by falling into the
+Devachanic state.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>This second death is the passage, then, of the Immortal Triad from the
+k&acirc;malokic sphere, so closely related to the earth sphere, into the
+higher state of Devachan, of which we must speak later. The type of
+man we are considering passes through this, in the peaceful dreamy
+state already described, and, if left undisturbed, will not regain
+full consciousness until these stages are passed through, and peace
+gives way to bliss.</p>
+
+<p>But during the whole period that the four principles&mdash;the Immortal
+Triad and K&acirc;ma&mdash;remain in K&acirc;maloka, whether the period be long or
+short, days or centuries, they are within the reach of the
+earth-influences. In the case of such a person as we have been
+describing, an awakening may be caused by the passionate sorrow and
+desires of friends left on earth, and these violently vibrating k&acirc;mic
+elements in the embodied persons may set up vibrations in the desire
+body of the disembodied, and so reach and rouse the lower Manas, not
+yet withdrawn to and reunited with its parent, the Spiritual
+Intelligence. Thus it may be roused from its dreamy state to vivid
+remembrance of the earth-life so lately left, and may&mdash;if any
+sensitive or medium is concerned, either directly, or indirectly
+through one of these grieving friends in communication with the
+medium&mdash;use the medium's etheric and dense bodies to speak or write to
+those left behind. This awakening is often accompanied with acute
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>suffering, and even if this be avoided, the natural process of the
+Triad freeing itself is rudely disturbed, and the completion of its
+freedom is delayed. In speaking of this possibility of communication
+during the period immediately succeeding death and before the freed
+Man passes on into Devachan, H.P. Blavatsky says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Whether any living mortal, save a few exceptional cases&mdash;when
+the intensity of the desire in the dying person to return for
+some purpose forced the higher consciousness <i>to remain
+awake</i>, and, therefore, it was really the <i>individuality</i>,
+the "Spirit", that communicated&mdash;has derived much benefit
+from the return of the Spirit into the <i>objective</i> plane is
+another question. The Spirit is dazed after death, and falls
+very soon into what we call "pre-devachanic
+unconsciousness."<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Intense desire may move the disembodied entity to spontaneously return
+to the sorrowing ones left behind, but this spontaneous return is rare
+in the case of persons of the type we are just now considering. If
+they are left at peace, they will generally sleep themselves quietly
+into Devachan, and so avoid any struggle or suffering in connection
+with the second death. On the final escape of the Immortal Triad there
+is left behind in K&acirc;maloka only the desire body, the "shell" or mere
+empty phantom, which gradually disintegrates; but it will be better to
+deal with this in considering the next type, the average man or woman,
+without marked spirituality of an elevated kind, but also without
+marked evil tendencies.</p>
+
+<p>When an average man or woman reaches K&acirc;maloka, the spiritual
+Intelligence is clothed with a desire body, which possesses
+considerable vigour and vitality; the lower Manas, closely interwoven
+with K&acirc;ma during the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>earth-life just ended, having lived much in the
+enjoyment of objects of sense and in the pleasures of the emotions,
+cannot quickly disentangle itself from the web of its own weaving, and
+return to its Parent Mind, the source of its own being. Hence a
+considerable delay in the world of transition, in K&acirc;maloka, while the
+desires wear out and fade away to a point at which they can no longer
+detain the Soul with their clinging arms.</p>
+
+<p>As said, during the period that the Immortal Triad and K&acirc;ma remain
+together in K&acirc;maloka, communication between the disembodied entity and
+the embodied entities on earth is possible. Such communication will
+generally be welcomed by these disembodied ones, because their desires
+and emotions still cling to the earth they have left, and the mind has
+not sufficiently lived on its own plane to find therein full
+satisfaction and contentment. The lower Manas still yearns towards
+k&acirc;mic gratifications and the vivid highly coloured sensations of
+earth-life, and can by these yearnings be drawn back to the scenes it
+has regretfully quitted. Speaking of the possibility of communication
+between the Ego of the deceased person and a medium, H.P. Blavatsky
+says in the <i>Theosophist</i>,<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> as from the teachings received by her
+from the Adept Brothers, that such communication may occur during two
+intervals:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Interval the first is that period between the physical death
+and the merging of the spiritual Ego into that state which is
+known in the Arhat esoteric doctrine as Bar-do. We have
+translated this as the "gestation" period [pre-devachanic].</p></div>
+
+<p>Some of the communications made through mediums <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>are from this source,
+from the disembodied entity, thus drawn back to the earth-sphere&mdash;a
+cruel kindness, delaying its forward evolution and introducing an
+element of disharmony into what should be an orderly progression. The
+period in K&acirc;maloka is thus lengthened, the desire body is fed and its
+hold on the Ego is maintained, and thus is the freedom of the Soul
+deferred, the immortal Swallow being still held down by the bird-lime
+of earth.</p>
+
+<p>Persons who have led an evil life, who have gratified and stimulated
+their animal passions, and have full fed the desire body while they
+have starved even the lower mind&mdash;these remain for long, denizens of
+K&acirc;maloka, and are filled with yearnings for the earth-life they have
+left, and for the animal delights that they can no longer&mdash;in the
+absence of the physical body&mdash;directly taste. These gather round the
+medium and the sensitive, endeavouring to utilise them for their own
+gratification, and these are among the more dangerous of the forces so
+rashly confronted in their ignorance by the thoughtless and the
+curious.</p>
+
+<p>Another class of disembodied entities includes those whose lives on
+earth have been prematurely cut short, by their own act, the act of
+others, or by accident. Their fate in K&acirc;maloka depends on the
+conditions which surrounded their outgoings from earthly life, for not
+all suicides are guilty of <i>felo de se</i>, and the measure of
+responsibility may vary within very wide limits. The condition of such
+has been thus described:</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Suicides, although not wholly dissevered from their sixth
+and seventh principles, and quite potent in the s&eacute;ance room,nevertheless to the day when they would have died a natural
+death, are separated from their higher principles by a gulf.
+The sixth and seventh principles remain passive and negative,
+whereas in cases of</i> accidental death <i>the higher and the
+lower groups actually attract each other. In cases of good
+and innocent Egos, moreover, the latter gravitates
+irresistibly toward the sixth and seventh, and thus either
+slumbers surrounded by happy dreams, or sleeps a dreamless
+profound sleep until the hour strikes. With a little
+reflection and an eye to the eternal justice and fitness of
+things, you will see why. The victim, whether good or bad, is
+irresponsible for his death. Even if his death were due to
+some action in a previous life or an antecedent birth, was an
+act, in short, of the Law of Retribution, still it was not
+the</i> direct <i>result of an act deliberately committed by the</i>
+personal <i>Ego of that life during which he happened to be
+killed. Had he been allowed to live longer he might have
+atoned for his antecedent sins still more effectually, and
+even now, the Ego having been made to pay off the debt of his
+maker, the personal Ego is free from the blows of retributive
+justice. The Dhy&acirc;n Chohans, who have no hand in the guidance
+of the living human Ego, protect the helpless victim when it
+is violently thrust out of its element into a new one, before
+it is matured and made fit and ready for it.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These, whether suicides or killed by accident, can communicate with
+those in earth-life, but much to their own injury. As said above, the
+good and innocent sleep happily till the life-period is over. But
+where the victim of an accident is depraved and gross, his fate is a
+sad one.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Unhappy shades, if sinful and sensual, they wander about
+(not shells, for their connection with their two higher
+principles is not quite broken) until their</i> death-<i>hour
+comes. Cut off in the full flush of earthly passions which
+bind them to familiar scenes, they are enticed by the
+opportunities which mediums afford to gratify them
+vicariously. They are the Pish&acirc;chas, the Incubi and Succub&aelig;
+of medi&aelig;val times; the demons of thirst, gluttony, lust, and
+avarice&mdash;Elementaries of intensified craft, wickedness, and
+cruelty; provoking their victims to horrid crimes, and
+revelling in their commission! They not only ruin their
+victims, but these psychic vampires, borne along by the
+torrent of their hellish impulses, at last&mdash;at the fixed
+close of their natural period of life&mdash;they are carried out
+of the earth's aura into regions where for ages they endure
+exquisite suffering and end with entire destruction.</i></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Now the causes producing the "new being" and determining the
+nature of Karma are Trishn&acirc; (Tanh&acirc;)&mdash;thirst, desire for
+sentient existence&mdash;and Up&acirc;d&acirc;na, which is the realisation or
+consummation of Trishn&acirc;, or that desire. And both of these
+the medium helps to develop</i> ne plus ultra <i>in an Elementary,
+be he a suicide or a victim. The rule is that a person who
+dies a natural death will remain from "a few hours to several
+short years" within the earth's attraction&mdash;</i>i.e.<i>, the
+K&acirc;maloka. But exceptions are the cases of suicides and those
+who die a violent death in general. Hence, one of such Egos
+who was destined to live, say, eighty or ninety years&mdash;but
+who either killed himself or was killed by some accident, let
+us suppose at the age of twenty&mdash;would have to pass in the
+K&acirc;maloka not "a few years," but in his case sixty or seventy
+years, as an Elementary, or rather an </i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span><i>"earth-walker," since
+he is not, unfortunately for him, even a "Shell." Happy,
+thrice happy, in comparison, are those disembodied entities
+who sleep their long slumber and live in dream in the bosom
+of Space! And woe to those whose Trishn&acirc; will attract them to
+mediums, and woe to the latter who tempt them with such an
+easy Up&acirc;d&acirc;na. For, in grasping them and satisfying their
+thirst for life, the medium helps to develop in them&mdash;is, in
+fact, the cause of&mdash;a new set of Skandhas, a new body with
+far worse tendencies and passions than the one they lost. All
+the future of this new body will be determined thus, not only
+by the Karma of demerit of the previous set or group, but
+also by that of the new set of the future being. Were the
+mediums and spiritualists but to know, as I said, that with
+every new "angel-guide" they welcome with rapture, they
+entice the latter into a Up&acirc;d&acirc;na, which will be productive of
+untold evils for the new Ego that will be reborn under its
+nefarious shadow, and that with every s&eacute;ance, 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 far worse existence than
+ever&mdash;they would, perhaps, be less lavish in their
+hospitality.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Premature death brought on by vicious courses, by over-study, or by
+voluntary sacrifice for some great cause, will bring about delay in
+K&acirc;maloka, but the state of the disembodied entity will depend on the
+motive that cut short the life.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>There are very few, if any, of the men who indulge in these
+vices, who feel perfectly sure that such a course of action
+will lead them eventually to premature death. Such</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> <i>is the
+penalty of M&acirc;y&acirc;. The "vices" will not escape their
+punishment; but it is the</i> cause, <i>not the effect, that will
+be punished, especially an unforeseen, though probable
+effect. As well call a man a "suicide" who meets his death in
+a storm at sea, as one who kills himself with "over-study".
+Water is liable to drown a man, and too much brain work to
+produce a softening of the brain matter which may carry him
+away. In such a case no one ought to cross the</i> K&acirc;lap&acirc;ni,
+<i>nor even to take a bath for fear of getting faint in it and
+drowned (for we all know of such cases), nor should a man do
+his duty, least of all sacrifice himself for even a laudable
+and highly beneficial cause as many of us do. Motive is
+everything, and man is punished in a case of direct
+responsibility, never otherwise. In the victim's case the
+natural hour of death was anticipated</i> accidentally, <i>while
+in that of the suicide death is brought on voluntarily and
+with a full and deliberate knowledge of its immediate
+consequences. Thus a man who causes his death in a fit of
+temporary insanity is</i> not <i>a</i> felo de se, <i>to the great
+grief and often trouble of the Life Insurance Companies. Nor
+is he left a prey to the temptations of the K&acirc;maloka, but
+falls</i> asleep <i>like any other victim.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>The population of K&acirc;maloka is thus recruited with a peculiarly
+dangerous element by all the acts of violence, legal and illegal,
+which wrench the physical body from the soul and send the latter into
+K&acirc;maloka clad in the desire body, throbbing with pulses of hatred,
+passion, emotion, palpitating with longings for revenge, with
+unsatiated lusts. A murderer in the body is not a pleasant member of
+society, but a murderer suddenly expelled from the body is a far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> more
+dangerous entity; society may protect itself against the first, but in
+its present state of ignorance it is defenceless as against the
+second.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the Immortal Triad sets itself free from the desire body, and
+passes out of K&acirc;maloka; the Higher Manas draws back its Ray, coloured
+with the life-scenes it has passed through, and carrying with it the
+experiences gained through the personality it has informed. The
+labourer is called in from the field, and he returns home bearing his
+sheaves with him, rich or poor, according to the fruitage of the life.
+When the Triad has quitted K&acirc;maloka, it passes wholly out of the
+sphere of earth attractions:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>As soon as it has stepped outside the K&acirc;maloka&mdash;crossed the
+"Golden Bridge" leading to the "Seven Golden Mountains"&mdash;the
+Ego can confabulate no more with easy-going mediums.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>There are some exceptional possibilities of reaching such an Ego, that
+will be explained later, but the Ego is out of the reach of the
+ordinary medium and cannot be recalled into the earth-sphere. But ere
+we follow the further course of the Triad, we must consider the fate
+of the now deserted desire body, left as a mere <i>reliquum</i> in
+K&acirc;maloka.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">K&acirc;maloka. The Shells.</span></h3>
+<p>The Shell is the desire body, emptied of the Triad, which has now
+passed onwards; it is the third of the transitory garments of Soul,
+cast aside and left in K&acirc;maloka to disintegrate.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When the past earth-life has been noble, or even when it has been of
+average purity and utility, this Shell retains but little vitality
+after the passing onwards of the Triad, and rapidly dissolves. Its
+molecules, however, retain, during this process of disintegration, the
+impressions made upon them during the earth-life, the tendency to
+vibrate in response to stimuli constantly experienced during that
+period. Every student of physiology is familiar with what is termed
+automatic action, with the tendency of cells to repeat vibrations
+originally set up by purposive action; thus are formed what we term
+habits, and we unconsciously repeat motions which at first were done
+with thought. So strong is this automatism of the body, that, as
+everyone knows by experience, it is difficult to break off the use of
+a phrase or of a gesture that has become "habitual."</p>
+
+<p>Now the desire body is during earth-life the recipient of and the
+respondent to all stimuli from without, and it also continually
+receives and responds to stimuli from the lower Manas. In it are set
+up habits, tendencies to repeat automatically familiar vibrations,
+vibrations of love and desire, vibrations imaging past experiences of
+all kinds. Just as the hand may repeat a familiar gesture, so may the
+desire body repeat a familiar feeling or thought. And when the Triad
+has left it, this automatism remains, and the Shell may thus simulate
+feelings and thoughts which are empty of all true intelligence and
+will. Many of the responses to eager enquiries at <i>s&eacute;ances</i> come from
+such Shells, drawn to the neighbourhood of friends and relatives by
+the magnetic attractions so long familiar and dear, and automatically
+responding to the waves of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span> emotion and remembrance, to the impulse of
+which they had so often answered during the lately closed earth-life.
+Phrases of affection, moral platitudes, memories of past events, will
+be all the communications such Shells can make, but these may be
+literally poured out under favourable conditions under the magnetic
+stimuli freely applied by the embodied friends and relatives.</p>
+
+<p>In cases where the lower Manas during earth-life has been strongly
+attached to material objects and to intellectual pursuits directed by
+a self-seeking motive, the desire body may have acquired a very
+considerable automatism of an intellectual character, and may give
+forth responses of considerable intellectual merit. But still the mark
+of non-originality will be present: the apparent intellectuality will
+only give out reproductions, and there will be no sign of the new and
+independent thought which would be the inevitable outcome of a strong
+intelligence working with originality amid new surroundings.
+Intellectual sterility brands the great majority of communications
+from the "spirit world"; reflections of earthly scenes, earthly
+conditions, earthly arrangements, are plentiful, but we usually seek
+in vain for strong, new thought, worthy of Intelligences freed from
+the prison of the flesh. The communications of a loftier kind
+occasionally granted are, for the most part, from non-human
+Intelligences, attracted by the pure atmosphere of the medium or
+sitters.</p>
+
+<p>And there is an ever-present danger in this commerce with the Shells.
+Just because they are Shells, and nothing more, they answer to the
+impulses that strike on them from without, and easily become malicious
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> mischievous, automatically responding to evil vibrations. Thus a
+medium, or sitters of poor moral character, will impress the Shells
+that flock around them with impulses of a low order, and any animal
+desires, petty and foolish thoughts, will set up similar vibrations in
+the blindly responsive Shells.</p>
+
+<p>Again, the Shell is very easily taken possession of by Elementals, the
+semi-conscious forces working in the kingdoms of Nature, and may be
+used by them as a convenient vehicle for many a prank and trick. The
+etheric double of the medium, and the desire bodies emptied of their
+immortal Tenants, give the material basis by which Elementals can work
+many a curious and startling result; and frequenters of <i>s&eacute;ances</i> may
+be confidently appealed to, and asked whether many of the childish
+freaks with which they are familiar&mdash;pullings of hair, pinchings,
+slaps, throwing about of objects, piling up of furniture, playing on
+accordions, &amp;c.&mdash;are not more rationally accounted for as the tricky
+vagaries of sub-human forces, than as the actions of "spirits" who,
+while in the body, were certainly incapable of such vulgarities.</p>
+
+<p>Let us leave the Shells alone to peacefully dissolve into their
+elements, and mingle once again in the crucible of Nature. The authors
+of the <i>Perfect Way</i> put very well the real character of the Shell.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The true "ghost" consists of the exterior and earthly portion
+of the Soul, that portion which, being weighted with cares,
+attachments, and memories merely mundane, is detached by the
+Soul and remains in the astral sphere, an existence more or
+less definite and personal, and capable of holding, through a
+sensitive, converse with the living. It is, however, but as a
+cast-off vestment of the Soul, and is incapable of endurance
+<i>as ghost</i>. The true Soul and real person, the <i>anima
+divina</i>, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>parts at death with all those lower affections
+which would have retained it near its earthly haunts.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>If we would find our beloved, it is not among the decaying remnants in
+K&acirc;maloka that we should seek them. "Why seek ye the living among the
+dead?"</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">K&acirc;maloka. The Elementaries</span>.</h3>
+<p>The word "Elementary" has been so loosely used that it has given rise
+to a good deal of confusion. It is thus defined by H.P. Blavatsky:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Properly, the disembodied <i>souls</i> of the depraved; these
+souls having, at some time prior to death, separated from
+themselves their divine spirits, and so lost their chance for
+immortality. But at the present stage of learning it has been
+thought best to apply the term to the spooks or phantoms of
+disembodied persons, in general to those whose temporary
+habitation is the K&acirc;maloka.... Once divorced from their
+higher Triads and their bodies, these souls remain in their
+K&acirc;ma R&ucirc;pic envelopes, and are irresistibly drawn to the earth
+amid elements congenial to their gross natures. Their stay in
+the K&acirc;maloka varies as to its duration; but ends invariably
+in disintegration, dissolving like a column of mist, atom by
+atom, in the surrounding elements.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Students of this series of Manuals know that it is possible for the
+lower Manas to so entangle itself with K&acirc;ma as to wrench itself away
+from its source, and this is spoken of in Occultism as "the loss of
+the Soul."<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> It is, in other words, the loss of the personal self,
+which has separated itself from its Parent, the Higher Ego, and has
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>thus doomed itself to perish. Such a Soul, having thus separated
+itself from the Immortal Triad during its earth-life, becomes a true
+Elementary, after it has quitted the dense and etheric bodies. Then,
+clad in its desire body, it lives for awhile, for a longer or shorter
+time according to the vigour of its vitality, a wholly evil thing,
+dangerous and malignant, seeking to renew its fading vitality by any
+means laid open to it by the folly or ignorance of still embodied
+souls. Its ultimate fate is, indeed, destruction, but it may work much
+evil on its way to its self-chosen doom.</p>
+
+<p>The word Elementary is, however, very often used to describe the lower
+Manas in its garment the desire body, not broken away from the higher
+Principles, but not yet absorbed into its Parent, the Higher Manas.
+Such Elementaries may be in any stage of progress, harmless or
+mischievous.</p>
+
+<p>Some writers, again, use Elementary as a synonym for Shell, and so
+cause increased confusion. The word should at least be restricted to
+the desire body <i>plus</i> lower Manas, whether that lower Manas be
+disentangling itself from the k&acirc;mic elements, in order that it may be
+re-absorbed into its source, or separated from the Higher Ego, and
+therefore on the road to destruction.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Devachan</span>.</h3>
+<p>Among the various conceptions presented by the Esoteric Philosophy,
+there are few, perhaps, which the Western mind has found more
+difficulty in grasping than that of Devachan, or Devasth&acirc;n, the
+Devaland, or land of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span> the Gods.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> And one of the chief difficulties
+has arisen from the free use of the words illusion, dream-state, and
+other similar terms, as denoting the devachanic consciousness&mdash;a
+general sense of unreality having thus come to pervade the whole
+conception of Devachan. When the Eastern thinker speaks of the present
+earthly life as M&acirc;y&acirc;, illusion, dream, the solid Western at once puts
+down the phrases as allegorical and fanciful, for what can be less
+illusory, he thinks, than this world of buying and selling, of
+beefsteaks and bottled stout. But when similar terms are applied to a
+state beyond Death&mdash;a state which to him is misty and unreal in his
+own religion, and which, as he sadly feels, is lacking in all the
+substantial comforts dear to the family man&mdash;then he accepts the words
+in their most literal and prosaic meaning, and speaks of Devachan as a
+delusion in his own sense of the word. It may be well, therefore, on
+the threshold of Devachan to put this question of "illusion" in its
+true light.</p>
+
+<p>In a deep metaphysical sense all that is conditioned is illusory. All
+phenomena are literally "appearances", the outer masks in which the
+One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more
+"material" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>and solid the appearance, the further is it from Reality,
+and therefore the more illusory it is. What can be a greater fraud
+than our body, so apparently solid, stable, visible and tangible? It
+is a constantly changing congeries of minute living particles, an
+attractive centre into which stream continually myriads of tiny
+invisibles, that become visible by their aggregation at this centre,
+and then stream away again, becoming invisible by reason of their
+minuteness as they separate off from this aggregation. In comparison
+with this ever-shifting but apparently stable body how much less
+illusory is the mind, which is able to expose the pretensions of the
+body and put it in its true light. The mind is constantly imposed on
+by the senses, and Consciousness, the most real thing in us, is apt to
+regard itself as the unreal. In truth, it is the thought-world that is
+the nearest to reality, and things become more and more illusory as
+they take on more and more of a phenomenal character.</p>
+
+<p>Again, the mind is permanent as compared with the transitory physical
+world. For the "mind" is only a clumsy name for the living Thinker in
+us, the true and conscious Entity, the inner Man, "that was, that is,
+and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike". The less deeply
+this inner Man is plunged into matter, the less unreal is his life;
+and when he has shaken off the garments he donned at incarnation, his
+physical, ethereal, and passional bodies, then he is nearer to the
+Soul of Things than he was before, and though veils of illusion still
+dim his vision they are far thinner than those which clouded it when
+round him was wrapped the garment of the flesh. His freer and less
+illusory life is that which is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> without the body, and the disembodied
+is, comparatively speaking, his normal state. Out of this normal state
+he plunges into physical life for brief periods in order that he may
+gain experiences otherwise unattainable, and bring them back to enrich
+his more abiding condition. As a diver may plunge into the depths of
+the ocean to seek a pearl, so the Thinker plunges into the depths of
+the ocean of life to seek the pearl of experience; but he does not
+stay there long; it is not his own element; he rises up again into his
+own atmosphere and shakes off from him the heavier element he leaves.
+And therefore it is truly said of the Soul that has escaped from earth
+that it has returned to its own place, for its home is the "land of
+the Gods", and here on earth it is an exile and a prisoner. This view
+was very clearly put by a Master of Wisdom in a conversation reported
+by H.P. Blavatsky, and printed under the title "Life and Death."<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a>
+The following extracts state the case:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>The Ved&acirc;ntins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious
+existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to
+the latter as an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial
+life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing
+but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual
+spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that
+lives our endless, never-changing immortal I, the S&ucirc;tr&acirc;tm&acirc;.
+Whereas in every new incarnation it clothes itself in a
+perfectly different personality, a temporary and short-lived
+one.... The very essence of all this, that is to say, spirit,
+force, and matter, has neither end nor beginning, but the
+shape acquired by this triple unity during its incarnations,
+their</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> <i>exterior, so to speak, is nothing but a mere illusion
+of personal conceptions. This is why we call the posthumous
+life the only reality, and the terrestrial one, including the
+personality itself, only imaginary.</i></p>
+
+<p>Why in this case should we call the reality sleep, and the
+phantasm waking?</p>
+
+<p><i>This comparison was made by me to facilitate your
+comprehension. From the standpoint of your terrestrial
+notions it is perfectly accurate.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Note the words: "From the standpoint of your terrestrial notions," for
+they are the key to all the phrases used about Devachan as an
+"illusion." Our gross physical matter is not there; the limitations
+imposed by it are not there; the mind is in its own realm, where to
+will is to create, where to think is to see. And so, when the Master
+was asked: "Would it not be better to say that death is nothing but a
+birth for a new life, or still better, a going back to eternity?" he
+answered:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>This is how it really is, and I have nothing to say against
+such a way of putting it. Only with our accepted views of
+material life the words "live" and "exist" are not applicable
+to the purely subjective condition after death; and were they
+employed in our Philosophy without a rigid definition of
+their meanings, the Ved&acirc;ntins would soon arrive at the ideas
+which are common in our times among the American
+Spiritualists, who preach about spirits marrying among
+themselves and with mortals. As amongst the true, not
+nominal, Christians so amongst the Ved&acirc;ntins&mdash;the life on the
+other side of the grave is the land where there are no</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
+<i>tears, no sighs, where there is neither marrying nor giving
+in marriage, and where the just realise their full
+perfection.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>The dread of materialising mental and spiritual conceptions has always
+been very strong among the Philosophers and oral Teachers of the far
+East. Their constant effort has been to free the Thinker as far as
+possible from the bonds of matter even while he is embodied, to open
+the cage for the Divine Swallow, even though he must return to it for
+awhile. They are ever seeking "to spiritualise the material", while in
+the West the continual tendency has been "to materialise the
+spiritual". So the Indian describes the life of the freed Soul in all
+the terms that make it least material&mdash;illusion, dream, and so
+on&mdash;whereas the Hebrew endeavours to delineate it in terms descriptive
+of the material luxury and splendour of earth&mdash;marriage feast, streets
+of gold, thrones and crowns of solid metal and precious stones; the
+Western has followed the materialising conceptions of the Hebrew, and
+pictures a heaven which is merely a double of earth with earth's
+sorrows extracted, until we reach the grossest of all, the modern
+Summerland, with its "spirit-husbands", "spirit-wives", and
+"spirit-infants" that go to school and college, and grow up into
+spirit-adults.</p>
+
+<p>In "Notes on Devachan",<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> someone who evidently writes with knowledge
+remarks of the Devachan&icirc;:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>The</i> &agrave; priori <i>ideas of space and time do not control his
+perceptions; for he absolutely creates and annihilates them
+at the same time. Physical existence has its cumulative</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+<i>intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy
+from dotage to death; so the dream-life of Devachan is lived
+correspondentially. Nature cheats no more the Devachan&icirc; than
+she does the living physical man. Nature provides for him far
+more</i> real <i>bliss and happiness</i> there <i>than she does</i> here,
+<i>where all the conditions of evil and chance are against him.
+To call the Devachan existence a "dream" in any other sense
+than that of a conventional term, is to renounce for ever the
+knowledge of the Esoteric Doctrine, the sole custodian of
+truth.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>"Dream" only in the sense that it is not of this plane of gross
+matter, that it belongs not to the physical world.</p>
+
+<p>Let us try and take a general view of the life of the Eternal Pilgrim,
+the inner Man, the human Soul, during a cycle of incarnation. Before he
+commences his new pilgrimage&mdash;for many pilgrimages lie behind him in the
+past, during which he gained the powers which enable him to tread the
+present one&mdash;he is a spiritual Being, but one who has already passed out
+of the passive condition of pure Spirit, and who by previous experience
+of matter in past ages has evolved intellect, the self-conscious mind.
+But this evolution by experience is far from being complete, even so far
+as to make him master of matter; his ignorance leaves him a prey to all
+the illusions of gross matter, so soon as he comes into contact with it,
+and he is not fit to be a builder of a universe, being subject to the
+deceptive visions caused by gross matter&mdash;as a child, looking through a
+piece of blue glass, imagines all the outside world to be blue. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+object of a cycle of incarnation is to free him from these illusions, so
+that when he is surrounded by and working in gross matter he may retain
+clear vision and not be blinded by illusion. Now the cycle of
+incarnation is made up of two alternating states: a short one called
+life on earth, during which the Pilgrim-God is plunged into gross
+matter, and a comparatively long one, called life in Devachan, during
+which he is encircled by subtle matter, illusive still, but far less
+illusive than that of earth. The second state may fairly be called his
+normal one, as it is of enormous extent as compared with the breaks in
+it that he spends upon earth; it is comparatively normal also, as being
+less removed from his essential Divine life; he is less encased in
+matter, less deluded by its swiftly-changing appearances. Slowly and
+gradually, by reiterated experiences, gross matter loses its power over
+him and becomes his servant instead of his tyrant. In the partial
+freedom of Devachan he assimilates his experiences on earth, still
+partly dominated by them&mdash;at first, indeed, almost completely dominated
+by them so that the devachanic life is merely a sublimated continuation
+of the earth-life&mdash;but gradually freeing himself more and more as he
+recognises them as transitory and external, until he can move through
+any region of our universe with unbroken self-consciousness, a true Lord
+of Mind, the free and triumphant God. Such is the triumph of the Divine
+Nature manifested in the flesh, the subduing of every form of matter to
+be the obedient instrument of Spirit. Thus the Master said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>The spiritual Ego of the man moves in eternity like a
+pendulum between the hours of life and death, but if these</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
+<i>hours, the periods of life terrestrial and life posthumous,
+are limited in their continuation, and even the very number
+of such breaks in eternity between sleep and waking, between
+illusion and reality, have their beginning as well as their
+end, the spiritual Pilgrim himself is eternal. Therefore the</i>
+hours of his posthumous life, <i>when unveiled he stands face
+to face with truth, and the short-lived mirages of his
+terrestrial existence are far from him,</i> compose <i>or make up,
+in our ideas,</i> the only reality. <i>Such breaks, in spite of
+the fact that they are finite, do double service to the
+S&ucirc;tr&acirc;tm&acirc;, which, perfecting itself constantly, follows
+without vacillation, though very slowly, the road leading to
+its last transformation, when, reaching its aim at last, it
+becomes a Divine Being. They not only contribute to the
+reaching of this goal, but without these finite breaks
+S&ucirc;tr&acirc;tm&acirc;-Buddhi could never reach it. S&ucirc;tr&acirc;tm&acirc; is the actor,
+and its numerous and different incarnations are the actor's
+parts. I suppose you would not apply to these parts, and so
+much the less to their costumes, the term of personality.
+Like an actor the soul is bound to play, during the cycle of
+births up to the very threshold of Parinirv&acirc;na, many such
+parts, which often are disagreeable to it, but like a bee,
+collecting its honey from every flower, and leaving the rest
+to feed the worms of the earth, our spiritual individuality,
+the S&ucirc;tr&acirc;tm&acirc;, collecting only the nectar of moral qualities
+and consciousness from every terrestrial personality in which
+it has to clothe itself, forced by Karma, unites at last all
+these qualities in one, having then become a perfect being, a
+Dhy&acirc;n Chohan.</i><a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>It is very significant, in this connection, that every devachanic
+stage is conditioned by the earth-stage that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>precedes it, and the Man
+can only assimilate in Devachan the kinds of experience he has been
+gathering on earth.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>A colourless, flavourless personality has a colourless,
+feeble Devachanic state.</i><a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Husband, father, student, patriot, artist, Christian, Buddhist&mdash;he
+must work out the effects of his earth-life in his devachanic life; he
+cannot eat and assimilate more food than he has gathered; he cannot
+reap more harvest than he has sown seed. It takes but a moment to cast
+a seed into a furrow; it takes many a month for that seed to grow into
+the ripened ear; but according to the kind of the seed is the ear that
+grows from it, and according to the nature of the brief earth-life is
+the grain reaped in the field of Aanroo.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>There is a change of occupation, a continual change in
+Devachan, just as much and far more than there is in the life
+of any man or woman who happens to follow in his or her whole
+life one sole occupation, whatever it may be, with this
+difference, that to the Devachan&icirc; this spiritual occupation
+is always pleasant and fills his life with rapture. Life in
+Devachan is the function of the aspirations of earth-life;
+not the indefinite prolongation of that "single instant," but
+its infinite developments, the various incidents and events
+based upon and outflowing from that one "single moment" or
+moments. The dreams of the objective become the realities of
+the subjective existence.... The reward provided by Nature
+for men who are benevolent in a large systematic way, and who
+have not focussed their affections on an individual or
+speciality, is that, if pure, they pass the</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span> <i>quicker for
+that through the K&acirc;ma and R&ucirc;pa Lokas into the higher sphere
+of Tribhuvana, since it is one where the formulation of
+abstract ideas and the consideration of general principles
+fill the thought of its occupant.</i><a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Into Devachan enters nothing that defileth, for gross matter has been
+left behind with all its attributes on earth and in K&acirc;maloka. But if
+the sower has sowed but little seed, the devachanic harvest will be
+meagre, and the growth of the Soul will be delayed by the paucity of
+the nutriment on which it has to feed. Hence the enormous importance
+of the earth-life, <i>the field of sowing, the place where experience is
+to be gathered</i>. It conditions, regulates, limits, the growth of the
+Soul; it yields the rough ore which the Soul then takes in hand, and
+works upon during the devachanic stage, smelting it, forging it,
+tempering it, into the weapons it will take back with it for its next
+earth-life. The experienced Soul in Devachan will make for itself a
+splendid instrument for its next earth-life; the inexperienced one
+will forge a poor blade enough; but in each case the only material
+available is that brought from earth. In Devachan the Soul, as it
+were, sifts and sorts out its experiences; it lives a comparatively
+free life, and gradually gains the power to estimate the earthly
+experiences at their real value; it works out thoroughly and
+completely as objective realities all the ideas of which it only
+conceived the germ on earth. Thus, noble aspiration is a germ which
+the Soul would work out into a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>splendid realisation in Devachan, and
+it would bring back with it to earth for its next incarnation that
+mental image, to be materialised on earth when opportunity offers and
+suitable environment presents itself. For the mind sphere is the
+sphere of creation, and earth only the place for materialising the
+pre-existent thought. And the soul is as an architect that works out
+his plans in silence and deep meditation, and then brings them forth
+into the outer world where his edifice is to be builded; out of the
+knowledge gained in his past life, the Soul draws his plans for the
+next, and he returns to earth to put into objective material form the
+edifices he has planned. This is the description of a Logos in
+creative activity:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Whilst Brahm&acirc; formerly, in the beginning of the Kalpas, was
+meditating on creation, there appeared a creation beginning
+with ignorance and consisting of darkness.... Brahm&acirc;,
+beholding that it was defective, designed another; and whilst
+he thus meditated, the animal creation was manifested....
+Beholding this creation also imperfect, Brahm&acirc; again
+meditated, and a third creation appeared, abounding with the
+quality of goodness.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The objective manifestation follows the mental meditation; first idea,
+then form. Hence it will be seen that the notion current among many
+Theosophists that Devachan is waste time, is but one of the illusions
+due to the gross matter that blinds them, and that their impatience of
+the idea of Devachan arises from the delusion that fussing about in
+gross matter is the only real activity. Whereas, in truth, all
+effective action has its source in deep meditation, and out of the
+Silence comes ever the creative Word. Action on this plane would be
+less feeble <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>and inefficient if it were the mere blossom of the
+profound root of meditation, and if the Soul embodied passed oftener
+out of the body into Devachan during earth-life, there would be less
+foolish action and consequent waste of time. For Devachan is a state
+of consciousness, the consciousness of the Soul escaped for awhile
+from the net of gross matter, and may be entered at any time by one
+who has learned to withdraw his Soul from the senses as the tortoise
+withdraws itself within its shell. And then, coming forth once more,
+action is prompt, direct, purposeful, and the time "wasted" in
+meditation is more than saved by the directness and strength of the
+mind-engendered act.</p>
+
+<p>Devachan is the sphere of the mind, as said, it is the land of the
+Gods, or the Souls. In the before quoted "Notes on Devachan" we read:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>There are two fields of causal manifestations: the objective
+and the subjective. The grosser energies find their outcome
+in the new personality of each birth in the cycle of
+evoluting individuality. The moral and spiritual activities
+find their sphere of effects in Devachan.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>As the moral and spiritual activities are the most important, and as
+on the development of these depends the growth of the true Man, and
+therefore the accomplishing of "the object of creation, the liberation
+of Soul", we may begin to understand something of the vast importance
+of the devachanic state.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Devachan&icirc;.</span></h3>
+<p>When the Triad has shaken off its last garment, it crosses the
+threshold of Devachan, and becomes "a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> Devachan&icirc;". We have seen that
+it is in a peaceful dreamy state before this passage out of the earth
+sphere, the "second death", or "pre-devachanic unconsciousness". This
+condition is otherwise spoken of as the "gestation" period, because it
+precedes the birth of the Ego into the devachanic life. Regarded from
+the earth-sphere the passage is death, while regarded from that of
+Devachan it is birth. Thus we find in "Notes on Devachan":</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>As in actual earth-life, so there is for the Ego in Devachan
+the first flutter of psychic life, the attainment of prime,
+the gradual exhaustion of force passing into
+semi-consciousness and lethargy, total oblivion, and&mdash;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 birth as a new personality. What
+the lives in Devachan and upon earth shall be respectively in
+each instance is determined by Karma, and this weary round of
+birth must be ever and ever run through until the being
+reaches the end of the seventh Round, or attains in the
+interim the wisdom of an Arhat, then that of a Buddha, and
+thus gets relieved for a Round or two.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>When the devachanic entity is born into this new sphere it has passed
+beyond recall to earth. The embodied Soul may rise to it, but it
+cannot be drawn back to our world. On this a Master has spoken
+decisively:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>From Sukh&acirc;vat&icirc; down to the "Territory of Doubt," there is a
+variety of spiritual states, but ... as soon as it has
+stepped outside the K&acirc;maloka, crossed the "Golden</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> <i>Bridge"
+leading to the "Seven Golden Mountains," the Ego can
+confabulate no more with easy-going mediums. No Ernest or
+Joey has ever returned from the R&ucirc;pa Loka, let alone the
+Arupa Loka, to hold sweet intercourse with men.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>In the "Notes on Devachan," again, we read:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Certainly the new Ego, once that it is reborn (in Devachan),
+retains for a certain time&mdash;proportionate to its
+earth-life&mdash;a complete recollection "of his life on earth";
+but it can never revisit the Earth from Devachan except in
+Re-incarnation.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>The Devachan&icirc; is generally spoken of as the Immortal Triad,
+Atm&acirc;-Buddhi-Manas, but it is well always to bear in mind that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Atman is no individual property of any man, but is the Divine
+Essence which has no body, no form, which is imponderable,
+invisible, and indivisible, that which does not <i>exist</i> and
+yet <i>is</i>, as the Buddhists say of Nirv&acirc;na. It only
+overshadows the mortal; that which enters into him and
+pervades the whole body being only it's omni-present rays or
+light, radiated through Buddhi, its vehicle and direct
+emanation.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Buddhi and Manas united, with this overshadowing of Atm&acirc;, form the
+Devachan&icirc;; now, as we have seen in studying the Seven Principles,
+Manas is dual during earth-life, and the Lower Manas is redrawn into
+the Higher during the k&acirc;malokic interlude. By this reuniting of the
+Ray and its Source, Manas re-becomes one, and carries the pure and
+noble experiences of the earth-life into Devachan with it, thus
+maintaining the past personality as the marked characteristic of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>Devachan&icirc;, and it is in this prolongation of the "personal Ego", so
+to speak, that the "illusion" of the Devachan&icirc; consists. Were the
+m&acirc;nasic entity free from all illusion, it would see all Egos as its
+brother-Souls, and looking back over its past would recognise all the
+varied relationships it had borne to others in many lives, as the
+actor would remember the many parts he had played with other actors,
+and would think of each brother actor as a man, and not in the parts
+he had played as his father, his son, his judge, his murderer, his
+master, his friend. The deeper human relationship would prevent the
+brother actors from identifying each other with their parts, and so
+the perfected spiritual Egos, recognising their deep unity and full
+brotherhood, would no longer be deluded by the trappings of earthly
+relationships. But the Devachan&icirc;, at least in the lower stages, is
+still within the personal boundaries of his past earth-life; he is
+shut into the relationships of the one incarnation; his paradise is
+peopled with those he "<i>loved best with an undying love, that holy
+feeling that alone survives</i>," and thus the purified personal Ego is
+the salient feature, as above said, in the Devachan&icirc;. Again quoting
+from the "Notes on Devachan":</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>Who goes to Devachan?" The personal Ego, of course; but
+beatified, purified, holy. Every Ego&mdash;the combination of the
+sixth and seventh principles<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a>&mdash;which after the period of
+unconscious gestation is reborn into the Devachan, is of
+necessity as innocent and pure as a new-born babe. The</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> <i>fact
+of his being reborn at all shows the preponderance of good
+over evil in his old personality. And while the Karma [of
+Evil] steps aside for the time being to follow him in his
+future earth re-incarnation, he brings along with him but the
+Karma of his good deeds, words and thoughts into this
+Devachan. "Bad" is a relative term for us&mdash;as you were told
+more than once before&mdash;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.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Now in some people a sense of repulsion arises at the idea that the
+ties they form on earth in one life are not to be permanent in
+eternity. But let us look at the question calmly for a moment. When a
+mother first clasps her baby-son in her arms, that one relationship
+seems perfect, and if the child should die, her longing would be to
+re-possess him as her babe; but as he lives on through youth to
+manhood the tie changes, and the protective love of the mother and the
+clinging obedience of the child merge into a different love of friends
+and comrades, richer than ordinary friendship from the old
+recollections; yet later, when the mother is aged and the son in the
+prime of middle life, their positions are reversed and the son
+protects while the mother depends on him for guidance. Would the
+relation have been more perfect had it ceased in infancy with only the
+one tie, or is it not the richer and the sweeter from the different
+strands<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> of which the tie is woven? And so with Egos; in many lives
+they may hold to each other many relationships, and finally, standing
+as Brothers of the Lodge closely knit together, may look back over
+past lives and see themselves in earth-life related in the many ways
+possible to human beings, till the cord is woven of every strand of
+love and duty; would not the final unity be the richer not the poorer
+for the many-stranded tie? "Finally", I say; but the word is only of
+this cycle, for what lies beyond, of wider life and less separateness,
+no mind of man may know. To me it seems that this very variety of
+experiences makes the tie stronger, not weaker, and that it is a
+rather thin and poor thing to know oneself and another in only one
+little aspect of many-sided humanity for endless ages of years; a
+thousand or so years of one person in one character would, to me, be
+ample, and I should prefer to know him or her in some new aspect of
+his nature. But those who object to this view need not feel
+distressed, for they will enjoy the presence of their beloved in the
+one personal aspect held by him or her in the one incarnation they are
+conscious of <i>for as long as the desire for that presence remains</i>.
+Only let them not desire to impose their own form of bliss on
+everybody else, nor insist that the kind of happiness which seems to
+them at this stage the only one desirable and satisfying, must be
+stereotyped to all eternity, through all the millions of years that
+lie before us. Nature gives to each in Devachan the satisfaction of
+all pure desires, and Manas there exercises that faculty of his innate
+divinity, that he "never wills in vain". Will not this suffice?</p>
+
+<p>But leaving aside disputes as to what may be to us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> "happiness" in a
+future separated from our present by millions of years, so that we are
+no more fitted now to formulate its conditions than is a child,
+playing with its dolls, to formulate the deeper joys and interests of
+its maturity, let us understand that, according to the teachings of
+the Esoteric Philosophy, the Devachan&icirc; is surrounded by all he loved
+on earth, with pure affection, and the union being on the plane of the
+Ego, not on the physical plane, it is free from all the sufferings
+which would be inevitable were the Devachan&icirc; present in consciousness
+on the physical plane with all its illusory and transitory joys and
+sorrows. It is surrounded by its beloved in the higher consciousness,
+but is not agonised by the knowledge of what they are suffering in the
+lower consciousness, held in the bonds of the flesh. According to the
+orthodox Christian view, Death is a separation, and the "spirits of
+the dead" wait for reunion until those they love also pass through
+Death's gateway, or&mdash;according to some&mdash;until after the judgment-day
+is over. As against this the Esoteric Philosophy teaches that Death
+cannot touch the higher consciousness of man, and that it can only
+separate those who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are
+concerned; the man living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated
+from those who have passed onwards, but the Devachan&icirc;, says H.P.
+Blavatsky, has a complete conviction "that there is no such thing as
+Death at all", having left behind it all those vehicles over which
+Death has power. Therefore, to its less blinded eyes, its beloved are
+still with it; for it, the veil of matter that separates has been torn
+away.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A mother dies, leaving behind her little helpless children,
+whom <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>she adores, perhaps a beloved husband also. We say that
+her "Spirit" or Ego&mdash;that individuality which is now wholly
+impregnated, for the entire Devachanic period, with the
+noblest feelings held by its late <i>personality, i.e.</i>, love
+for her children, pity for those who suffer, and so on&mdash;is
+now entirely separated from the "vale of tears," that its
+future bliss consists in that blessed ignorance of all the
+woes it left behind ... that the <i>post-mortem</i> spiritual
+consciousness of the mother will represent to her that she
+lives surrounded by her children and all those whom she
+loved; that no gap, no link will be missing to make her
+disembodied state the most perfect and absolute
+happiness.<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>And so again:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As to the ordinary mortal his bliss in Devachan is complete.
+It is an absolute oblivion of all that gave it pain or sorrow
+in the past incarnation, and even oblivion of the fact that
+such things as pain or sorrow exist at all. The Devachan&icirc;
+lives its intermediate cycle between two incarnations
+surrounded by everything it had aspired to in vain, and in
+the companionship of everything it loved on earth. It has
+reached the fulfilment of all its soul-yearnings. And thus it
+lives throughout long centuries an existence of <i>unalloyed</i>
+happiness, which is the reward for its sufferings in
+earth-life. In short, it bathes in a sea of uninterrupted
+felicity spanned only by events of still greater felicity in
+degree.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>When we take the wider sweep in thought demanded by the Esoteric
+Philosophy, a far more fascinating prospect of persistent love and
+union between individual Egos rolls itself out before our eyes than
+was offered to us by the more limited creed of exoteric Christendom.
+"Mothers love their children with an immortal love," says H.P.
+Blavatsky, and the reason for this immortality in love is easily
+grasped when we realise that it is the same Egos that play so many
+parts in the drama of life, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>that the experience of each part is
+recorded in the memory of the Soul, and that between the Souls there
+is no separation, though during incarnation they may not realise the
+fact in its fulness and beauty.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We are with those whom we have lost in material form, and
+far, far nearer to them now than when they were alive. And it
+is not only in the fancy of the Devachan&icirc;, as some may
+imagine, but in reality. For pure divine love is not merely
+the blossom of a human heart, but has its roots in eternity.
+Spiritual holy love is immortal, and Karma brings sooner or
+later all those who loved each other with such a spiritual
+affection to incarnate once more in the same family
+group.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Love "has its roots in eternity", and those to whom on earth we are
+strongly drawn are the Egos we have loved in past earth-lives and
+dwelt with in Devachan; coming back to earth these enduring bonds of
+love draw us together yet again, and add to the strength and beauty of
+the tie, and so on and on till all illusions are lived down, and the
+strong and perfected Egos stand side by side, sharing the experience
+of their well-nigh illimitable past.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Return To Earth.</span></h3>
+<p>At length the causes that carried the Ego into Devachan are exhausted,
+the experiences gathered have been wholly assimilated, and the Soul
+begins to feel again the thirst for sentient material life that can be
+gratified only on the physical plane. The greater the degree of
+spirituality reached, the purer and loftier the preceding earth-life,
+the longer the stay in Devachan, the world of spiritual, pure, and
+lofty effects. [I am here ignoring the special conditions surrounding
+one who is forcing his own evolution, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>and has entered on the Path
+that leads to Adeptship within a very limited number of lives.] The
+"average time [in Devachan] is from ten to fifteen centuries", H.P.
+Blavatsky tells us, and the fifteen centuries cycle is the one most
+plainly marked in history.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> But in modern life this period has much
+shortened, in consequence of the greater attraction exercised by
+physical objects over the heart of man. Further, it must be remembered
+that the "average time" is not the time spent in Devachan by any
+person. If one person spends there 1000 years, and another fifty, the
+"average" is 525. The devachanic period is longer or shorter according
+to the type of life which preceded it; the more there was of
+spiritual, intellectual, and emotional activity of a lofty kind, the
+longer will be the gathering in of the harvest; the more there was of
+activity directed to selfish gain on earth, the shorter will be the
+devachanic period.</p>
+
+<p>When the experiences are assimilated, be the time long or short, the
+Ego is ready to return, and he brings back with him his now increased
+experience, and any further gains he may have made in Devachan along
+the lines of abstract thought; for, while in Devachan,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In one sense we can acquire more knowledge; that is, we can
+develop further any faculty which we loved and strove after
+during life, provided it is concerned with abstract and ideal
+things, such as music, painting, poetry, &amp;c.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>But the Ego meets, as he crosses the threshold of Devachan on his way
+outwards&mdash;dying out of Devachan to be reborn on earth&mdash;he meets in the
+"atmosphere of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>the terrestrial plane", the seeds of evil sown in his
+preceding life on earth. During the devachanic rest he has been free
+from all pain, all sorrow, but the evil he did in his past has been in
+a state of suspended animation, not of death. As seeds sown in the
+autumn for the spring-time lie dormant beneath the surface of the
+soil, but touched by the soft rain and penetrating warmth of sun begin
+to swell and the embryo expands and grows, so do the seeds of evil we
+have sown lie dormant while the Soul takes its rest in Devachan, but
+shoot out their roots into the new personality which begins
+to form itself for the incarnation of the returning man. The Ego has
+to take up the burden of his past, and these germs or seeds, coming
+over as the harvest of the past life, are the Skandhas, to borrow a
+convenient word from our Buddhist brethren. They consist of material
+qualities, sensations, abstract ideas, tendencies of mind, mental
+powers, and while the pure aroma of these attached itself to the Ego
+and passed with it into Devachan, all that was gross, base and evil
+remained in the state of suspended animation spoken of above. These
+are taken up by the Ego as he passes outwards towards terrestrial
+life, and are built into the new "man of flesh" which the true man is
+to inhabit. And so the round of births and deaths goes on, the turning
+of the Wheel of Life; the treading of the Cycle of Necessity, until
+the work is done and the building of the Perfect Man is completed.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Nirv&acirc;na.</span></h3>
+<p>What Devachan is to each earth-life, Nirv&acirc;na is to the finished cycle
+of Re-incarnation, but any effective<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> discussion of that glorious
+state would here be out of place. It is mentioned only to round off
+the "After" of Death, for no word of man, strictly limited within the
+narrow bounds of his lower consciousness, may avail to explain what
+Nirv&acirc;na is, can do aught save disfigure it in striving to describe.
+What it is not may be roughly, baldly stated&mdash;it is not
+"annihilation", it is not destruction of consciousness. Mr. A.P.
+Sinnett has put effectively and briefly the absurdity of many of the
+ideas current in the West about Nirv&acirc;na. He has been speaking of
+absolute consciousness, and proceeds:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We may use such phrases as intellectual counters, but for no
+ordinary mind&mdash;dominated by its physical brain and brain-born
+intellect&mdash;can they have a living signification. All that
+words can convey is that Nirv&acirc;na is a sublime state of
+conscious rest in omniscience. It would be ludicrous, after
+all that has gone before, to turn to the various discussions
+which have been carried on by students of exoteric Buddhism
+as to whether Nirv&acirc;na does or does not mean annihilation.
+Worldly similes fall short of indicating the feeling with
+which the graduates of Esoteric Science regard such a
+question. Does the last penalty of the law mean the highest
+honour of the peerage? Is a wooden spoon the emblem of the
+most illustrious pre-eminence in learning? Such questions as
+these but faintly symbolise the extravagance of the question
+whether Nirv&acirc;na is held by Buddhism to be equivalent to
+annihilation.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>So we learn from the <i>Secret Doctrine</i> that the Nirv&acirc;n&icirc; returns to
+cosmic activity in a new cycle of manifestation, and that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves
+only in Nirv&acirc;na, re-emerges from it in its integrity</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> <i>on the
+day when the Great Law calls all things back into
+action.</i><a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a></p></div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Communications between the Earth and other Spheres.</span></h3>
+<p>We are now in position to discriminate between the various kinds of
+communication possible between those whom we foolishly divide into
+"dead" and "living," as though the body were the man, or the man could
+die. "Communications between the embodied and the disembodied" would
+be a more satisfactory phrase.</p>
+
+<p>First, let us put aside as unsuitable the word Spirit: Spirit does not
+communicate with Spirit in any way conceivable by us. That highest
+principle is not yet manifest in the flesh; it remains the hidden
+fount of all, the eternal Energy, one of the poles of Being in
+manifestation. The word is loosely used to denote lofty Intelligences,
+who live and move beyond all conditions of matter imaginable by us,
+but pure Spirit is at present as inconceivable by us as pure matter.
+And as in dealing with possible "communications" we have average human
+beings as recipients, we may as well exclude the word Spirit as much
+as possible, and so get rid of ambiguity. But in quotations the word
+often occurs, in deference to the habit of the day, and it then
+denotes the Ego.</p>
+
+<p>Taking the stages through which the living man passes after "Death",
+or the shaking off of the body, we can readily classify the
+communications that may be received, or the appearances that may be
+seen:</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span></p>
+<p>I. While the Soul has shaken off only the dense body, and remains
+still clothed in the etheric double. This is a brief period only, but
+during it the disembodied Soul may show itself, clad in this ethereal
+garment.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>For a very short period after death, while the incorporeal
+principles remain within the sphere of our earth's
+attraction, it is <i>possible</i> for spirit, under <i>peculiar</i> and
+<i>favourable</i> conditions, to appear.<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>It makes no communications during this brief interval, nor while
+dwelling in this form. Such "ghosts" are silent, dreamy, like
+sleep-walkers, and indeed they are nothing more than astral
+sleep-walkers. Equally irresponsive, but capable of expressing a
+single thought, as of sorrow, anxiety, accident, murder, &amp;c., are
+apparitions which are merely a thought of the dying, taking shape in
+the astral world, and carried by the dying person's will to some
+particular person, with whom the dying intensely longs to communicate.
+Such a thought, sometimes called a May&acirc;vi R&ucirc;pa, or illusory form</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>May be often thrown into objectivity, as in the case of
+apparitions after death; but, unless it is projected with the
+knowledge of (whether latent or potential), or owing to the
+intensity of the desire to see or appear to some one shooting
+through, the dying brain, the apparition will be simply
+automatical; it will not be due to any sympathetic
+attraction, or to any act of volition, any more than the
+reflection of a person passing unconsciously near a mirror is
+due to the desire of the latter.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>When the Soul has left the etheric double, shaking it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> off as it
+shook off the dense body, the double thus left as a mere empty corpse
+may be galvanised into an "artificial life"; but fortunately the
+method of such galvanisation is known to few.</p>
+
+<p>II. While the Soul is in K&acirc;maloka. This period is of very variable
+duration. The Soul is clad in an astral body, the last but one of its
+perishable garments, and while thus clad it can utilise the physical
+bodies of a medium, thus consciously procuring for itself an
+instrument whereby it can act on the world it has left, and
+communicate with those living in the body. In this way it may give
+information as to facts known to itself only, or to itself and another
+person, in the earth-life just closed; and for as long as it remains
+within the terrestrial atmosphere such communication is possible. The
+harm and the peril of such communication has been previously
+explained, whether the Lower Manas be united with the Divine Triad and
+so on its way to Devachan, or wrenched from it and on its way to
+destruction.</p>
+
+<p>III. While the Soul is in Devachan, if an embodied Soul is capable of
+rising to its sphere, or of coming into <i>rapport</i> with it. To the
+Devachan&icirc;, as we have seen, the beloved are present in consciousness
+and full communication, the Egos being in touch with each other,
+though one is embodied and one is disembodied, but the higher
+consciousness of the embodied rarely affects the brain. As a matter of
+fact, all that we know on the physical plane of our friend, while we
+both are embodied, is the mental image caused by the impression he
+makes on us. This is, to our consciousness, our friend, and lacks
+nothing in objectivity. A similar image is present to the
+conscious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>ness of the Devachan&icirc;, and to him lacks nothing in
+objectivity. As the physical plane friend is visible to an observer on
+earth, so is the mental plane friend visible to an observer on that
+plane. The amount of the friend that ensouls the image is dependent on
+his own evolution, a highly evolved person being capable of far more
+communication with a Devachan&icirc; than one who is unevolved.
+Communication when the body is sleeping is easier than when it is
+awake, and many a vivid "dream" of one on the other side of death is a
+real interview with him in K&acirc;maloka or in Devachan.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Love beyond the grave, illusion though you may call it,<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a>
+has a magic and divine potency that re-acts on the living. A
+mother's Ego, filled with love for the imaginary children it
+sees near itself, living a life of happiness, as real to it
+as when on earth&mdash;that love will always be felt by the
+children in flesh. It will manifest in their dreams and often
+in various events&mdash;in providential protections and escapes,
+for love is a strong shield, and is not limited by space or
+time. As with this Devachanic "mother", so with the rest of
+human relationships and attachments, save the purely selfish
+or material.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Remembering that a thought becomes an active entity, capable of
+working good or evil, we easily see that as embodied Souls can send to
+those they love helping and protecting forces, so the Devachan&icirc;,
+thinking of those dear to him, may send out such helpful and
+protective thoughts, to act as veritable guardian angels round his
+beloved on earth. But this is a very different thing from the "Spirit"
+of the mother coming back to earth to be the almost helpless spectator
+of the child's woes.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span></p><p>The Soul embodied may sometimes escape from its prison of flesh, and
+come into relations with the Devachan&icirc;. H.P. Blavatsky writes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Whenever years after the death of a person his spirit is
+claimed to have "wandered back to earth" to give advice to
+those it loved, it is always in a subjective vision, in dream
+or in trance, and in that case it is the Soul of the living
+seer that is drawn to the <i>disembodied</i> spirit, and not the
+latter which wanders back to our spheres.<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Where the sensitive, or medium, is of a pure and lofty nature, this
+rising of the freed Ego to the Devachan&icirc; is practicable, and naturally
+gives the impression to the sensitive that the departed Ego has come
+back to him. The Devachan&icirc; is wrapped in its happy "illusion", and</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>The Souls, or astral Egos, of pure loving sensitives,
+labouring under the same delusion, think their loved ones
+come down to them on earth, while it is their own spirits
+that are raised towards those in the Devachan.</i><a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>This attraction can be exercised by the departed Soul from K&acirc;maloka or
+from Devachan:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A "spirit" or the spiritual Ego, cannot <i>descend</i> to the
+medium, but it can <i>attract</i> the spirit of the latter to
+itself, and it can do this only during the two
+intervals&mdash;before and after its "gestation period". Interval
+the first is that period between the physical death and the
+merging of the spiritual Ego into that state which is known
+in the Arhat Esoteric Doctrine as "Bar-do". We have
+translated this as the "gestation period", and it lasts from
+a few days to several years, according to the evidence of the
+Adepts. Interval the second lasts so long as the merits of
+the old [personal] Ego entitle the being to reap the fruit of
+its reward in its new regenerated Egoship. It occurs after
+the gestation period is over, and the new spiritual Ego is
+reborn&mdash;like <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span> the fabled Ph&oelig;nix from its ashes&mdash;from the
+old one. The locality which the former inhabits is called by
+the northern Buddhist Occultists "Devachan."<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>So also may the incorporeal principles of pure sensitives be placed
+<i>en rapport</i> with disembodied Souls, although information thus
+obtained is not reliable, partly in consequence of the difficulty of
+transferring to the physical brain the impressions received, and
+partly from the difficulty of observing accurately, when the seer is
+untrained.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A pure medium's Ego can be drawn to and made, for an instant,
+to unite in a magnetic(?) relation with a real disembodied
+spirit, whereas the soul of an impure medium can only
+confabulate with the <i>Astral Soul</i>, or Shell, of the
+deceased. The former possibility explains those extremely
+rare cases of direct writing in recognised autographs, and of
+messages from the higher class of disembodied intelligences.
+</p></div>
+
+<p>But the confusion in messages thus obtained is considerable, not only
+from the causes above-named, but also because</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Even the best and purest sensitive can at most only be placed
+at any time <i>en rapport</i> with a particular spiritual entity,
+and can only know, see, and feel what that particular entity
+knows, sees, and feels.
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Hence much possibility of error if generalisations are indulged in,
+since each Devachan&icirc; lives in his own paradise, and there is no
+"peeping down to earth,"</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Nor is there any <i>conscious</i> communication with the flying
+Souls that come as it were to learn where the Spirits are,
+what they are doing, and what they think, feel, and see.</p>
+
+<p>What then is being <i>en rapport</i>? It is simply an identity of
+molecular <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> vibration between the astral part of the
+incarnated sensitive and the astral part of the
+dis-incarnated personality. The spirit of the sensitive gets
+"odylised", so to speak, by the aura of the spirit, whether
+this be hybernating in the earthly region or dreaming in the
+Devachan; identity of molecular vibration is established, and
+for a brief space the sensitive becomes the departed
+personality, and writes in its handwriting, uses its
+language, and thinks its thoughts. At such times sensitives
+may believe that those with whom they are for the moment <i>en
+rapport</i> descend to earth and communicate with them, whereas,
+in reality, it is merely their own spirits which, being
+correctly attuned to those others, are for the time blended
+with them.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>In a special case under examination, H.P. Blavatsky said that the
+communication might have come from an Elementary, but that it was</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Far more likely that the medium's spirit really became <i>en
+rapport</i> with some spiritual entity in Devachan, the
+thoughts, knowledge, and sentiments of which formed the
+substance, while the medium's own personality and
+pre-existing ideas more or less governed the forms of the
+communication.<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a>
+</p></div>
+
+<p>While these communications are not reliable in the facts and opinions
+stated,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We would remark that it may <i>possibly</i> be that there really
+is a distinct spiritual entity impressing our correspondent's
+mind. In other words, there may, for all we know, be some
+spirit, with whom his spiritual nature becomes habitually,
+for the time, thoroughly harmonised, and whose thoughts,
+language, &amp;c., become his for the time, the result being that
+this spirit seems to communicate with him.... It is possible
+(though by no means probable) that he habitually passes into
+a state of <i>rapport</i> with a genuine spirit, and, for the
+time, is assimilated therewith, thinking (to a great extent
+if not entirely) the thoughts that spirit would think,
+writing in its handwriting, &amp;c. But even so, Mr. Terry must
+not fancy that that spirit is consciously communicating with
+him, or knows in any way <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> anything of him, or any other
+person or thing on earth. It is simply that, the <i>rapport</i>
+established, he, Mr. Terry, becomes for the nonce assimilated
+with that other personality, and thinks, speaks, and writes
+as it would have done on earth.... The molecules of his
+astral nature may from time to time vibrate in perfect unison
+with those of some spirit of such a person, now in Devachan,
+and the result may be that he appears to be in communication
+with that spirit, and to be advised, &amp;c., by him, and
+clairvoyants may see in the Astral Light a picture of the
+earth-life form of that spirit.</p></div>
+
+<p>IV. Communications other than those from disembodied Souls, passing
+through normal <i>post mortem</i> states.</p>
+
+<p>(a) <i>From Shells.</i> These, while but the cast-off garment of the
+liberated Soul, retain for some time the impress of their late
+inhabitant, and reproduce automatically his habits of thought and
+expression, just as a physical body will automatically repeat habitual
+gestures. Reflex action is as possible to the desire body as to the
+physical, but all reflex action is marked by its character of
+repetition, and absence of all power to initiate movement. It answers
+to a stimulus with an appearance of purposive action, but it initiates
+nothing. When people "sit for development", or when at a <i>s&eacute;ance</i> they
+anxiously hope and wait for messages from departed friends, they
+supply just the stimulus needed, and obtain the signs of recognition
+for which they expectantly watch.</p>
+
+<p>(b) <i>From Elementaries.</i> These, possessing the lower capacities of the
+mind, <i>i.e.</i>, all the intellectual faculties that found their
+expression through the physical brain during life, may produce
+communications of a highly intellectual character. These, however, are
+rare, as may be seen from a survey of the messages published as
+received from "departed Spirits".</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span></p>
+<p>(c) <i>From Elementals.</i> These semi-conscious centres of force play a
+great part at <i>s&eacute;ances</i>, and are mostly the agents who are active in
+producing physical phenomena. They throw about or carry objects, make
+noises, ring bells, etc., etc. Sometimes they play pranks with Shells,
+animating them and representing them to be the spirits of great
+personalities who have lived on earth, but who have sadly degenerated
+in the "spirit-world", judging by their effusions. Sometimes, in
+materialising <i>s&eacute;ances</i>, they busy themselves in throwing pictures
+from the Astral Light on the fluidic forms produced, so causing them
+to assume likenesses of various persons. There are also Elementals of
+a high type who occasionally communicate with very gifted mediums,
+"Shining Ones" from other spheres.</p>
+
+<p>(d) <i>From Nirm&acirc;nak&acirc;yas.</i> For these communications, as for the two
+classes next mentioned, the medium must be of a very pure and lofty
+nature. The Nirm&acirc;nak&acirc;ya is a perfected man, who has cast aside his
+physical body but retains his other lower principles, and remains in
+the earth-sphere for the sake of helping forward the evolution of
+mankind. Nirm&acirc;nak&acirc;yas</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Have, out of pity for mankind and those they left on earth,
+renounced the Nirv&acirc;nic state. Such an Adept, or Saint, or
+whatever you may call him, believing it a selfish act to rest
+in bliss while mankind groans under the burden of misery
+produced by ignorance, renounces Nirv&acirc;na and determines to
+remain invisible <i>in spirit</i> on this earth. They have no
+material body, as they have left it behind; but otherwise
+they remain with all their principles even <i>in astral life</i>
+in our sphere. And such can and do communicate with a few
+elect ones, only surely not with <i>ordinary</i> mediums.<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a></p></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span></p>
+<p>(e) <i>From Adepts now living on earth.</i> These often communicate with
+Their disciples, without using the ordinary methods of communication,
+and when any tie exists, perchance from some past incarnation, between
+an Adept and a medium, constituting that medium a disciple, a message
+from the Adept might readily be mistaken for a message from a
+"Spirit". The receipt of such messages by precipitated writing or
+spoken words is within the knowledge of some.</p>
+
+<p>(f) <i>From the medium's Higher Ego.</i> Where a pure and earnest man or
+woman is striving after the light, this upward striving is met by a
+downward reaching of the higher nature, and light from the higher
+streams downward, illuminating the lower consciousness. Then the lower
+mind is, for the time, united with its parent, and transmits as much
+of its knowledge as it is able to retain.</p>
+
+<p>From this brief sketch it will be seen how varied may be the sources
+from which communications apparently from "the other side of Death"
+may be received. As said by H.P. Blavatsky:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The variety of the causes of phenomena is great, and one need
+be an Adept, and actually look into and examine what
+transpires, in order to be able to explain in each case what
+really underlies it.<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>To complete the statement it may be added that what the average Soul
+can do when it has passed through the gateway of Death, it can do on
+this side, and communications may be as readily obtained by writing,
+in trance, and by the other means of receiving messages, from embodied
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+as from disembodied Souls. If each developed within himself the
+powers of his own Soul, instead of drifting about aimlessly, or
+ignorantly plunging into dangerous experiments, knowledge might be
+safely accumulated and the evolution of the Soul might be accelerated.
+This one thing is sure: Man is to-day a living Soul, over whom Death
+has no power, and the key of the prison-house of the body is in his
+own hands, so that he may learn its use if he will. It is because his
+true Self, while blinded by the body, has lost touch with other
+Selves, that Death has been a gulf instead of a gateway between
+embodied and disembodied Souls.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX" id="APPENDIX"></a>APPENDIX.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The following passage on the fate of suicides is taken from the
+<i>Theosophist</i>, September, 1882.</p></div>
+
+<p>We do not pretend&mdash;we are not permitted&mdash;to deal exhaustively with the
+question at present, but we may refer to one of the most important
+classes of entities, who can participate in objective phenomena, other
+than Elementaries and Elementals.</p>
+
+<p>This class comprises the Spirits of conscious sane suicides. They are
+<i>Spirits</i>, and not <i>Shells</i>, because there is not in their cases, at
+any rate until later, a total and permanent divorce between the fourth
+and fifth principles on the one hand, and the sixth and seventh on the
+other. The two duads are divided, they exist apart, but a line of
+connection still unites them, they may yet reunite, and the sorely
+threatened personality avert its doom; the fifth principle still holds
+in its hands the clue by which, traversing the labyrinth of earthly
+sins and passions, it may regain the sacred penetralia. But for the
+time, though really a Spirit, and therefore so designated, it is
+practically not far removed from a Shell.</p>
+
+<p>This class of Spirit can undoubtedly communicate with men, but, as a
+rule, its members have to pay dearly for exercising the privilege,
+while it is scarcely possible for them to do otherwise than lower and
+debase the moral nature of those with and through whom they have much
+communication. It is merely, broadly speaking, a question of degree;
+of much or little injury result<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>ing from such communication; the cases
+in which real, permanent good can arise are too absolutely exceptional
+to require consideration.</p>
+
+<p>Understand how the case stands. The unhappy being revolting against
+the trials of life&mdash;trials, the results of its own former actions,
+trials, heaven's merciful medicine for the mentally and spiritually
+diseased&mdash;determines, instead of manfully taking arms against a sea of
+troubles, to let the curtain drop, and, as it fancies, end them. It
+destroys the body, but finds itself precisely as much alive mentally
+as before. It had an appointed life-term determined by an intricate
+web of prior causes, which its own wilful sudden act cannot shorten.
+That term must run out its appointed sands. You may smash the lower
+half of the hand hour-glass, so that the impalpable sand shooting from
+the upper bell is dissipated by the passing aerial currents as it
+issues; but that stream will run on, unnoticed though it remain, until
+the whole store in that upper receptacle is exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>So you may destroy the body, but not the appointed period of sentient
+existence, foredoomed (because simply the effect of a plexus of
+causes) to intervene before the dissolution of the personality; this
+must run on for its appointed period.</p>
+
+<p>This is so in other cases, <i>e.g.</i>, those of the victims of accident or
+violence; they, too, have to complete their life-term, and of these,
+too, we may speak on another occasion&mdash;but here it is sufficient to
+notice that, whether good or bad, their mental attitude at the time of
+death alters wholly their subsequent position. They, too, have to wait
+on within the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> "Region of Desires" until their wave of life runs on to
+and reaches its appointed shore, but they wait on, wrapped in dreams
+soothing and blissful, or the reverse, according to their mental and
+moral state at, and prior to the fatal hour, but nearly exempt from
+further material temptations, and, broadly speaking, incapable (except
+just at the moment of real death) of communicating <i>scio motu</i> with
+mankind, though not wholly beyond the possible reach of the higher
+forms of the "Accursed Science," Necromancy. The question is a
+profoundly abstruse one; it would be impossible to explain within the
+brief space still remaining to us, how the conditions immediately
+after death differ so entirely as they do in the case (1) of the man
+who deliberately <i>lays down</i> (not merely <i>risks</i>) his life from
+altruistic motives in the hope of saving those of others; and (2) of
+him who deliberately sacrifices his life from selfish motives, in the
+hope of escaping trials and troubles which loom before him. Nature or
+Providence, Fate, or God, being merely a self-adjusting machine, it
+would at first sight seem as if the results must be identical in both
+cases. But, machine though it be, we must remember that it is a
+machine <i>sui generis</i>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Out of himself he span<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The eternal web of right and wrong;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ever feels the subtlest thrill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The slenderest thread along.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A machine compared with whose perfect sensitiveness and adjustment the
+highest human intellect is but a coarse clumsy replica, <i>in petto</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And we must remember that thoughts and motives are material, and at
+times marvellously potent material, forces,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> and we may then begin to
+comprehend why the hero, sacrificing his life on pure altruistic
+grounds, sinks as his life-blood ebbs away into a sweet dream, wherein</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All that he wishes and all that he loves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come smiling round his sunny way,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>only to wake into active or objective consciousness when reborn in the
+Region of Happiness, while the poor unhappy and misguided mortal who,
+seeking to elude fate, selfishly loosens the silver string and breaks
+the golden bowl, finds himself terribly alive and awake, instinct with
+all the evil cravings and desires that embittered his world-life,
+without a body in which to gratify these, and capable of only such
+partial alleviation as is possible by more or less vicarious
+gratification, and this only at the cost of the ultimate complete
+rupture with his sixth and seventh principles, and consequent ultimate
+annihilation after, alas! prolonged periods of suffering.</p>
+
+<p>Let it not be supposed that there is no hope for this class&mdash;the sane
+deliberate suicide. If, bearing steadfastly his cross, he suffers
+patiently his punishment, striving against carnal appetites still
+alive in him, in all their intensity, though, of course, each in
+proportion to the degree to which it had been indulged in earth-life.
+If, we say, he bears this humbly, never allowing himself to be tempted
+here or there into unlawful gratifications of unholy desires, then
+when his fated death-hour strikes, his four higher principles reunite,
+and, in the final separation that then ensues, it may well be that all
+may be well with him, and that he passes on to the gestation period
+and its subsequent developments.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Book ii., from lines 666-789. The whole passage bristles
+with horrors.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+  <p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> xii. 85. Trans., of Burnell and Hopkins.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> From the translation of Dhunjeebhoy Jamsetjee Medhora,
+<i>Zoroastrian and some other Ancient Systems</i>, xxvii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+  <p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Trans., by Mirza Mohamed Hadi. <i>The Platonist</i>, 306.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>The Sacred Books of the East</i>, iii, 109, 110.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Secret Doctrine</i>, vol. i. p. 281.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> See <i>ibid.</i>, p. 283.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> <i>Isis Unveiled</i>, vol. i. p. 480.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Theosophical Manuals, No. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+  <p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>The Heroic Enthusiasts</i>, Trans., by L. Williams. part ii.
+pp. 22, 23.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>Cremation</i>, Theosophical Siftings, vol. iii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> <i>Man: Fragments of Forgotten History</i>, pp. 119, 120.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> <i>Key to Theosophy</i>, H.P. Blavatsky, p. 109. Third
+Edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Magic, White and Black</i>, Dr. Franz Hartmann, pp. 109,
+110. Third Edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> See <i>The Seven Principles of Man</i>, pp. 17-21.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Theosophist</i>, March, 1882, p. 158, note.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>Essays upon some Controverted Questions</i>, p. 36.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <i>Fortnightly Review</i>, 1892, p. 176.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> <i>Key to Theosophy</i>, p. 67.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 97.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> <i>Key to Theosophy</i>, p. 97</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 102.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> June, 1882, art. "Seeming Discrepancies."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> Pp. 73, 74. Ed. 1887.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> <i>Theosophical Glossary</i>, Elementaries.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> See <i>The Seven Principles of Man</i>, p.p. 44-46.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> The name Sukh&acirc;vat&icirc;, borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, is
+sometimes used instead of that of Devachan. Sukh&acirc;vat&icirc;, according to
+Schlagintweit, is "the abode of the blessed, into which ascend those
+who have accumulated much merit by the practice of virtues", and
+"involves the deliverance from metempsychosis" (<i>Buddhism in Tibet</i>,
+p. 99). According to the Prasanga school, the higher Path leads to
+Nirv&acirc;na, the lower to Sukh&acirc;vat&icirc;. But Eitel calls Sukh&acirc;vat&icirc; "the
+Nirv&acirc;na of the common people, where the saints revel in physical bliss
+for &aelig;ons, until they re&euml;nter the circle of transmigration"
+(<i>Sanskrit-Chinese Dictionary</i>). Eitel, however, under "Amit&acirc;bha"
+states that the "popular mind" regards the "paradise of the West" as
+"the haven of final redemption from the eddies of transmigration".
+When used by one of the Teachers of the Esoteric Philosophy it covers
+the higher Devachanic states, but from all of these the Soul comes
+back to earth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> See <i>Lucifer</i>, Oct, 1892, Vol. XI. No. 62.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> <i>The Path</i>, May, 1890.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> "Notes on Devachan," as cited.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> "Notes on Devachan," as before. There are a variety of
+stages in Devachan; the R&ucirc;pa Loka is an inferior stage, where the Soul
+is still surrounded by forms. It has escaped from these personalities
+in the Tribhuvana.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> <i>Vishnu Pur&acirc;na</i>, Bk. I. ch. v.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> <i>Key to Theosophy</i>, p. 69. Third Edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> Sixth and seventh in the older nomenclature, fifth and
+sixth in the later&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, Manas and Buddhi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> <i>Key to Theosophy</i>, p. 99. Third Edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 100.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 101.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> See Manual No. 2 <i>Re-incarnation</i>, pp. 60, 61. Third
+Edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> <i>Key to Theosophy</i>, p. 105. Third Edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> <i>Esoteric Buddhism</i>, p. 197. Eighth
+Edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Quoted in the <i>Secret Doctrine</i>, vol ii. p. 83. The
+student will do well to read, for a fair presentation of the subject,
+G.R.S. Mead's "Note on Nirv&acirc;na" in <i>Lucifer</i>, for March, April, and
+May, 1893. (Re-printed in <i>Theosophical Siftings</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> <i>Theosophist</i>, Sept., 1882, p. 310.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> See on "illusion" what was said under the heading
+"Devachan".</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> <i>Key to Theosophy</i>, p. 102. Third Edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> <i>Theosophist</i>, Sept. 1881.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> "Notes on Devachan", <i>Path</i>, June, 1890, p. 80.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> <i>Theosophist</i>, June, 1882, p. 226.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> Summarised from article in <i>Theosophist</i>, Sept., 1882.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 309.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 310.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> <i>Key to Theosophy,</i> p. 151.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> <i>Theosophist</i>, Sept., 1882, p. 310.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="index">
+<ul class="IX"><li>Accident, Death by, <a href="#Page_37">37</a> .</li>
+<li>Appendix, <a href="#Page_81">81</a> .</li>
+<li>Astral Body, <a href="#Page_19">19</a> ,</li>
+<li>  Fate of, <a href="#Page_31">31</a> .</li>
+<li>Astral Shell or Soul, <a href="#Page_75">75</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Avesta</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_9">9</a> .</li>
+
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Blavatsky, H.P., quoted, <a href="#Page_16">16</a> , <a href="#Page_17">17</a> , <a href="#Page_24">24</a> , <a href="#Page_30">30</a> , <a href="#Page_31">31</a> , <a href="#Page_33">33</a> , <a href="#Page_34">34</a> , <a href="#Page_35">35</a> , <a href="#Page_45">45</a> , <a href="#Page_49">49</a> , <a href="#Page_60">60</a> , <a href="#Page_65">65</a> , <a href="#Page_66">66</a> , <a href="#Page_67">67</a> , <a href="#Page_73">73</a> , <a href="#Page_74">74</a> , <a href="#Page_78">78</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Book of the Dead</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_8">8</a> .</li>
+<li>Bruno, Giordano, quoted, <a href="#Page_21">21</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Buddhism in Tibet</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_47">47</a> , (note).</li>
+
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+
+
+
+
+<li>Communications between Earth and other Spheres, <a href="#Page_70">70</a> .
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;between Earth and Soul in Etheric Body, <a href="#Page_71">71</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;between Earth, and soul in Devachan, <a href="#Page_72">72</a> ,</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;between Earth and soul in K&acirc;maloka, <a href="#Page_72">72</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;from Adepts now living, <a href="#Page_79">79</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;from Elementals, <a href="#Page_78">78</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;from Elementaries, <a href="#Page_77">77</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;from Medium's Higher Ego, <a href="#Page_79">79</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;from Nirm&acirc;nak&acirc;yas, <a href="#Page_78">78</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;from Shells, <a href="#Page_43">43</a> , <a href="#Page_77">77</a> .</li></ul></li>
+<li><i>Controverted Questions, Essays upon some</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_28">28</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Cremation</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_21">21</a> .</li>
+<li>Cycle of Incarnation, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>  et seq.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Death, a Gateway, <a href="#Page_79">79</a> .</li>
+
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chinese Ideas of, <a href="#Page_11">11</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Christian Ideas of, <a href="#Page_6">6</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Egyptian Ideas of, <a href="#Page_8">8</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Theosophic Ideas of, <a href="#Page_18">18</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Desatir</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_9">9</a> .</li>
+<li>Devachan, <a href="#Page_33">33</a> , <a href="#Page_46">46</a> . et seq.</li>
+<li>Devachan, Passing into, of the average-living, <a href="#Page_33">33</a> .</li>
+<li>Devachan, The Soul in, <a href="#Page_72">72</a> .</li>
+<li>Devachan&icirc;, The, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>  et seq.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Earth, The return to, <a href="#Page_66">66</a> .</li>
+<li>Egos, Many lives of, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>  et seq.</li>
+<li>Elementals, <a href="#Page_44">44</a> , <a href="#Page_78">78</a> .</li>
+<li>Elementaries, <a href="#Page_45">45</a> , <a href="#Page_77">77</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Esoteric Buddhism</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_69">69</a> .</li>
+<li>Etheric Double, <a href="#Page_12">12</a> , <a href="#Page_22">22</a>  et seq., <a href="#Page_24">24</a> , <a href="#Page_25">25</a> , <a href="#Page_71">71</a>  et seq.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Fiery Lives, <a href="#Page_17">17</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Fortnightly Review</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_29">29</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><i>Heroic Enthusiasts, The</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_21">21</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Immortal Triad, The, <a href="#Page_12">12</a> , <a href="#Page_13">13</a> , <a href="#Page_31">31</a> , <a href="#Page_33">33</a> , <a href="#Page_58">58</a> , <a href="#Page_60">60</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Isis Unveiled</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_17">17</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>K&acirc;maloka, <a href="#Page_26">26</a> , <a href="#Page_27">27</a> , <a href="#Page_29">29</a> , <a href="#Page_32">32</a> , <a href="#Page_34">34</a> , <a href="#Page_41">41</a> .</li>
+<li>K&acirc;maloka, The Soul in, <a href="#Page_72">72</a> .</li>
+<li>K&acirc;ma R&ucirc;pa, <a href="#Page_30">30</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Key to Theosophy</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_24">24</a> , <a href="#Page_30">30</a> , <a href="#Page_31">31</a> , <a href="#Page_33">33</a> , <a href="#Page_60">60</a> , <a href="#Page_65">65</a> , <a href="#Page_67">67</a> , <a href="#Page_73">73</a> , <a href="#Page_78">78</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><i>Lucifer</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_49">49</a> , <a href="#Page_70">70</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><i>Magic, White and Black</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_26">26</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Man: Fragments of Forgotten History</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_23">23</a> .</li>
+<li>Man: How Made, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>  et seq.</li>
+<li>M&acirc;y&acirc;, <a href="#Page_47">47</a> .</li>
+<li>Medium, Communications from Higher Egos of, <a href="#Page_79">79</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Nirv&acirc;na, <a href="#Page_69">69</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><i>Ordinances of Manu</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_9">9</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><i>Paradise Lost</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_7">7</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Path</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_51">51</a> , <a href="#Page_54">54</a> , <a href="#Page_55">55</a> , <a href="#Page_56">56</a> , <a href="#Page_59">59</a>  et seq.</li>
+<li><i>Perfect Way</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_44">44</a> .</li>
+<li>Perishable Quaternary, <a href="#Page_12">12</a> .</li>
+<li>Pish&acirc;chas, <a href="#Page_38">38</a> .</li>
+<li>Pr&acirc;na, <a href="#Page_26">26</a> , <a href="#Page_30">30</a> .</li>
+<li>Premature Death, <a href="#Page_36">36</a> , <a href="#Page_39">39</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Re-incarnation, <a href="#Page_8">8</a> , <a href="#Page_67">67</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><i>Sanskrit-Chinese Dictionary</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>  <a href="#Footnote_27_27">(Foot note 27</a>).</li>
+<li><i>Seven principles of Man</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_26">26</a> , <a href="#Page_45">45</a> .</li>
+<li>Shell, Astral Soul, or, <a href="#Page_75">75</a> .</li>
+<li>Shells, The, <a href="#Page_41">41</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Sh&ucirc; King</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_10">10</a> .</li>
+<li>Soul, Growth of, in Devachan, <a href="#Page_56">56</a> ,</li>
+
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Powers of the, <a href="#Page_80">80</a> .</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Relations of, with Devachan&icirc;, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>  et seq.</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Disembodied, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>  et seq.</li>
+<li>Spiritualism and Esoteric Philosophy, <a href="#Page_15">15</a> .</li>
+<li>Suicides, <a href="#Page_36">36</a> , et seq., <a href="#Page_81">81</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><i>Theosophical Glossary</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_45">45</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Theosophical Siftings</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_21">21</a> .</li>
+<li><i>Theosophist, The</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_27">27</a> , <a href="#Page_35">35</a> , <a href="#Page_71">71</a> , <a href="#Page_74">74</a> , <a href="#Page_75">75</a>  et seq.</li>
+<li><i>Theosophist. The</i>, summarised, <a href="#Page_75">75</a> , <a href="#Page_79">79</a> , <a href="#Page_81">81</a> .</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Unconscious co-existence of intelligent beings, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>  et seq.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><i>Vishnu Pur&acirc;na</i>, quoted, <a href="#Page_57">57</a> .</li></ul></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Death--and After?, by Annie Besant
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Death--and After?, by Annie Besant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Death--and After?
+
+Author: Annie Besant
+
+Release Date: April 27, 2006 [EBook #18266]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH--AND AFTER? ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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+
+
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+
+
+
+
+
+                    _Theosophical Manuals. No. 3._
+
+
+
+
+                          DEATH--AND AFTER?
+
+                                  BY
+
+                            ANNIE BESANT.
+
+
+
+                           (20TH THOUSAND)
+
+
+
+
+                   Theosophical Publishing Society
+
+                          London and Benares
+
+               City Agents, Percy Lund Humphries & Co.
+
+                      Amen Corner, London, E.C.
+
+
+                                 1906
+
+
+                         _PRICE ONE SHILLING_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+_Few words are needed in sending this little book out into the world.
+It is the third of a series of Manuals designed to meet the public
+demand for a simple exposition of Theosophical teachings. Some have
+complained that our literature is at once too abstruse, too technical,
+and too expensive for the ordinary reader, and it is our hope that the
+present series may succeed in supplying what is a very real want.
+Theosophy is not only for the learned; it is for all. Perhaps among
+those who in these little books catch their first glimpse of its
+teachings, there may be a few who will be led by them to penetrate
+more deeply into its philosophy, its science, and its religion, facing
+its abstruser problems with the student's zeal and the neophyte's
+ardour. But these Manuals are not written for the eager student, whom
+no initial difficulties can daunt; they are written for the busy men
+and women of the work-a-day world, and seek to make plain some of the
+great truths that render life easier to bear and death easier to face.
+Written by servants of the Masters who are the Elder Brothers of our
+race, they can have no other object than to serve our fellow-men._
+
+
+DEATH--AND AFTER?
+
+Who does not remember the story of the Christian missionary in
+Britain, sitting one evening in the vast hall of a Saxon king,
+surrounded by his thanes, having come thither to preach the gospel of
+his Master; and as he spoke of life and death and immortality, a bird
+flew in through an unglazed window, circled the hall in its flight,
+and flew out once more into the darkness of the night. The Christian
+priest bade the king see in the flight of the bird within the hall the
+transitory life of man, and claimed for his faith that it showed the
+soul, in passing from the hall of life, winging its way not into the
+darkness of night, but into the sunlit radiance of a more glorious
+world. Out of the darkness, through the open window of Birth, the life
+of a man comes to the earth; it dwells for a while before our eyes;
+into the darkness, through the open window of Death, it vanishes out
+of our sight. And man has questioned ever of Religion, Whence comes
+it? Whither goes it? and the answers have varied with the faiths.
+To-day, many a hundred year since Paulinus talked with Edwin, there
+are more people in Christendom who question whether man has a spirit
+to come anywhence or to go anywhither than, perhaps, in the world's
+history could ever before have been found at one time. And the very
+Christians who claim that Death's terrors have been abolished, have
+surrounded the bier and the tomb with more gloom and more dismal
+funeral pomp than have the votaries of any other creed. What can be
+more depressing than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded,
+while the dead body is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent than
+the sweeping robes of lustreless crape, and the purposed hideousness
+of the heavy cap in which the widow laments the "deliverance" of her
+husband "from the burden of the flesh"? What more revolting than the
+artificially long faces of the undertaker's men, the drooping
+"weepers", the carefully-arranged white handkerchiefs, and, until
+lately, the pall-like funeral cloaks? During the last few years, a
+great and marked improvement has been made. The plumes, cloaks, and
+weepers have well-nigh disappeared. The grotesquely ghastly hearse is
+almost a thing of the past, and the coffin goes forth heaped over with
+flowers instead of shrouded in the heavy black velvet pall. Men and
+women, though still wearing black, do not roll themselves up in
+shapeless garments like sable winding-sheets, as if trying to see how
+miserable they could make themselves by the imposition of artificial
+discomforts. Welcome common-sense has driven custom from its throne,
+and has refused any longer to add these gratuitous annoyances to
+natural human grief.
+
+In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding
+Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted
+as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening
+figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking
+an hour-glass--all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round
+this rightly-named King of Terrors. Milton, who has done so much with
+his stately rhythm to mould the popular conceptions of modern
+Christianity, has used all the sinewy strength of his magnificent
+diction to surround with horror the figure of Death.
+
+                              The other shape,
+    If shape it might be called, that shape had none
+    Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
+    Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
+    For each seemed either; black it stood as night,
+    Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
+    And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head
+    The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
+    Satan was now at hand, and from his seat
+    The monster moving onward came as fast,
+    With horrid strides; hell trembled as he strode....
+    ... So spoke the grisly terror: and in shape
+    So speaking, and so threatening, grew tenfold
+    More dreadful and deform....
+    ... but he, my inbred enemy,
+    Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,
+    Made to destroy: I fled, and cried out _Death!_
+    Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed
+    From all her caves, and back resounded _Death_.[1]
+
+That such a view of Death should be taken by the professed followers
+of a Teacher said to have "brought life and immortality to light" is
+passing strange. The claim, that as late in the history of the world
+as a mere eighteen centuries ago the immortality of the Spirit in man
+was brought to light, is of course transparently absurd, in the face
+of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary available on all hands.
+The stately Egyptian Ritual with its _Book of the Dead_, in which are
+traced the post-mortem journeys of the Soul, should be enough, if it
+stood alone, to put out of court for ever so preposterous a claim.
+Hear the cry of the Soul of the righteous:
+
+    O ye, who make the escort of the God, stretch out to me your
+    arms, for I become one of you. (xvii. 22.)
+
+    Hail to thee, Osiris, Lord of Light, dwelling in the mighty
+    abode, in the bosom of the absolute darkness. I come to thee,
+    a purified Soul; my two hands are around thee. (xxi. 1.)
+
+    I open heaven; I do what was commanded in Memphis. I have
+    knowledge of my heart; I am in possession of my heart, I am
+    in possession of my arms, I am in possession of my legs, at
+    the will of myself. My Soul is not imprisoned in my body at
+    the gates of Amenti. (xxvi. 5, 6.)
+
+Not to multiply to weariness quotations from a book that is wholly
+composed of the doings and sayings of the disembodied man, let it
+suffice to give the final judgment on the victorious Soul:
+
+    The defunct shall be deified among the Gods in the lower
+    divine region, he shall never be rejected.... He shall drink
+    from the current of the celestial river.... His Soul shall
+    not be imprisoned, since it is a Soul that brings salvation
+    to those near it. The worms shall not devour it. (clxiv.
+    14-16.)
+
+The general belief in Re-incarnation is enough to prove that the
+religions of which it formed a central doctrine believed in the
+survival of the Soul after Death; but one may quote as an example a
+passage from the _Ordinances of Manu_, following on a disquisition on
+metempsychosis, and answering the question of deliverance from
+rebirths.
+
+    Amid all these holy acts, the knowledge of self [should be
+    translated, knowledge of the _Self_, Atma] is said (to be)
+    the highest; this indeed is the foremost of all sciences,
+    since from it immortality is obtained.[2]
+
+The testimony of the great Zarathustrean Religion is clear, as is
+shown by the following, translated from the _Avesta_, in which, the
+journey of the Soul after death having been described, the ancient
+Scripture proceeds:
+
+    The soul of the pure man goes the first step and arrives at
+    (the Paradise) Humata; the soul of the pure man takes the
+    second step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hukhta; it goes the
+    third step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hvarst; the soul of
+    the pure man takes the fourth step and arrives at the Eternal
+    Lights.
+
+    To it speaks a pure one deceased before, asking it: How art
+    thou, O pure deceased, come away from the fleshy dwellings,
+    from the earthly possessions, from the corporeal world hither
+    to the invisible, from the perishable world hither to the
+    imperishable, as it happened to thee--to whom hail!
+
+    Then speaks Ahura-Mazda: Ask not him whom thou asketh, (for)
+    he is come on the fearful, terrible, trembling way, the
+    separation of body and soul.[3]
+
+The Persian _Desatir_ speaks with equal definiteness. This work
+consists of fifteen books, written by Persian prophets, and was
+written originally in the Avestaic language; "God" is Ahura-Mazda, or
+Yazdan:
+
+    God selected man from animals to confer on him the soul,
+    which is a substance free, simple, immaterial, non-compounded
+    and non-appetitive. And that becomes an angel by improvement.
+
+    By his profound wisdom and most sublime intelligence, he
+    connected the soul with the material body.
+
+    If he (man) does good in the material body, and has a good
+    knowledge and religion he is _Hartasp_....
+
+    As soon as he leaves this material body, I (God) take him up
+    to the world of angels, that he may have an interview with
+    the angels, and behold me.
+
+    And if he is not Hartasp, but has wisdom and abstains from
+    vice, I will promote him to the rank of angels.
+
+    Every person in proportion to his wisdom and piety will find
+    a place in the rank of wise men, among the heavens and stars.
+    And in that region of happiness he will remain for ever.[4]
+
+In China, the immemorial custom of worshipping the Souls of ancestors
+shows how completely the life of man was regarded as extending beyond
+the tomb. The _Shu King_--placed by Mr. James Legge as the most
+ancient of Chinese classics, containing historical documents ranging
+from B.C. 2357-627--is full of allusions to these Souls, who with
+other spiritual beings, watch over the affairs of their descendants
+and the welfare of the kingdom. Thus Pan-kang, ruling from B.C.
+1401-1374, exhorts his subjects:
+
+    My object is to support and nourish you all. I think of my
+    ancestors (who are now) the spiritual sovereigns.... Were I
+    to err in my government, and remain long here, my high
+    sovereign (the founder of our dynasty) would send down on me
+    great punishment for my crime, and say, "Why do you oppress
+    my people?" If you, the myriads of the people, do not attend
+    to the perpetuation of your lives, and cherish one mind with
+    me, the One man, in my plans, the former kings will send down
+    on you great punishment for your crime, and say, "Why do you
+    not agree with our young grandson, but go on to forfeit your
+    virtue?" When they punish you from above, you will have no
+    way of escape.... Your ancestors and fathers will (now) cut
+    you off and abandon you, and not save you from death.[5]
+
+Indeed, so practical is this Chinese belief, held to-day as in those
+long-past ages, that "the change that men call Death" seems to play a
+very small part in the thoughts and lives of the people of the Flowery
+Land.
+
+These quotations, which might be multiplied a hundred-fold, may
+suffice to prove the folly of the idea that immortality came to "light
+through the gospel". The whole ancient world basked in the full
+sunshine of belief in the immortality of man, lived in it daily,
+voiced it in its literature, went with it in calm serenity through the
+gate of Death.
+
+It remains a problem why Christianity, which vigorously and joyously
+re-affirmed it, should have growing in its midst the unique terror of
+Death that has played so large a part in its social life, its
+literature, and its art. It is not simply the belief in hell that has
+surrounded the grave with horror, for other Religions have had their
+hells, and yet their followers have not been harassed by this shadowy
+Fear. The Chinese, for instance, who take Death as such a light and
+trivial thing, have a collection of hells quite unique in their varied
+unpleasantness. Maybe the difference is a question of race rather than
+of creed; that the vigorous life of the West shrinks from its
+antithesis, and that its unimaginative common-sense finds a bodiless
+condition too lacking in solidity of comfort; whereas the more dreamy,
+mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever seeking to escape from
+the thraldom of the senses during earthly life, looks on the
+disembodied state as eminently desirable, and as most conducive to
+unfettered thought.
+
+Ere passing to the consideration of the history of man in the
+post-mortem state, it is necessary, however briefly, to state the
+constitution of man, as viewed by the Esoteric Philosophy, for we must
+have in mind the constituents of his being ere we can understand their
+disintegration. Man then consists of
+
+_The Immortal Triad_:
+
+Atma.
+Buddhi.
+Manas.
+
+_The Perishable Quaternary_:
+
+Kama.
+Prana.
+Etheric Double.
+Dense Body.
+
+The dense body is the physical body, the visible, tangible outer form,
+composed of various tissues. The etheric double is the ethereal
+counterpart of the body, composed of the physical ethers. Prana is
+vitality, the integrating energy that co-ordinates the physical
+molecules and holds them together in a definite organism; it is the
+life-breath within the organism, the portion of the universal
+Life-Breath, appropriated by the organism during the span of existence
+that we speak of as "a life". Kama is the aggregate of appetites,
+passions, and emotions, common to man and brute. Manas is the Thinker
+in us, the Intelligence. Buddhi is the vehicle wherein Atma, the
+Spirit, dwells, and in which alone it can manifest.
+
+Now the link between the Immortal Triad and the Perishable Quaternary
+is Manas, which is dual during earth life, or incarnation, and
+functions as Higher Manas and Lower Manas. Higher Manas sends out a
+Ray, Lower Manas, which works in and through the human brain,
+functioning there as brain-consciousness, as the ratiocinating
+intelligence. This mingles with Kama, the passional nature, the
+passions and emotions thus becoming a part of Mind, as defined in
+Western Psychology. And so we have the link formed between the higher
+and lower natures in man, this Kama-Manas belonging to the higher by
+its manasic, and to the lower by its kamic, elements. As this forms
+the battleground during life, so does it play an important part in
+post-mortem existence. We might now classify our seven principles a
+little differently, having in view this mingling in Kama-Manas of
+perishable and imperishable elements:
+
+                          { Atma.
+      _Immortal_.         { Buddhi.
+                          { Higher-Manas.
+
+_Conditionally Immortal_. Kama-Manas.
+
+                          { Prana.
+      _Mortal_.           { Etheric Double.
+                          { Dense Body.
+
+Some Christian writers have adopted a classification similar to this,
+declaring Spirit to be inherently immortal, as being Divine; Soul to
+be conditionally immortal, _i.e._, capable of winning immortality by
+uniting itself with Spirit; Body to be inherently mortal. The majority
+of uninstructed Christians chop man into two, the Body that perishes
+at Death, and the something--called indifferently Soul or
+Spirit--that survives Death. This last classification--if
+classification it may be called--is entirely inadequate, if we are to
+seek any rational explanation, or even lucid statement, of the
+phenomena of post-mortem existence. The tripartite view of man's
+nature gives a more reasonable representation of his constitution, but
+is inadequate to explain many phenomena. The septenary division alone
+gives a reasonable theory consistent with the facts we have to deal
+with, and therefore, though it may seem elaborate, the student will do
+wisely to make himself familiar with it. If he were studying only the
+body, and desired to understand its activities, he would have to
+classify its tissues at far greater length and with far more
+minuteness than I am using here. He would have to learn the
+differences between muscular, nervous, glandular, bony, cartilaginous,
+epithelial, connective, tissues, and all their varieties; and if he
+rebelled, in his ignorance, against such an elaborate division, it
+would be explained to him that only by such an analysis of the
+different components of the body can the varied and complicated
+phenomena of life-activity be understood. One kind of tissue is wanted
+for support, another for movement, another for secretion, another for
+absorption, and so on; and if each kind does not have its own
+distinctive name, dire confusion and misunderstanding must result, and
+physical functions remain unintelligible. In the long run time is
+gained, as well as clearness, by learning a few necessary technical
+terms, and as clearness is above all things needed in trying to
+explain and to understand very complicated post-mortem phenomena, I
+find myself compelled--contrary to my habit in these elementary
+papers--to resort to these technical names at the outset, for the
+English language has as yet no equivalents for them, and the use of
+long descriptive phrases is extremely cumbersome and inconvenient.
+
+For myself, I believe that very much of the antagonism between the
+adherents of the Esoteric Philosophy and those of Spiritualism has
+arisen from confusion of terms, and consequent misunderstanding of
+each others meaning. One eminent Spiritualist lately impatiently said
+that he did not see the need of exact definition, and that he meant by
+Spirit all the part of man's nature that survived Death, and was not
+body. One might as well insist on saying that man's body consists of
+bone and blood, and asked to define blood, answer: "Oh! I mean
+everything that is not bone." A clear definition of terms, and a rigid
+adherence to them when once adopted, will at least enable us all to
+understand each other, and that is the first step to any fruitful
+comparison of experiences.
+
+
+THE FATE OF THE BODY.
+
+The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of
+reconstruction. First builded into the etheric form in the womb of the
+mother, it is built up continually by the insetting of fresh
+materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away from it;
+with every moment tiny molecules are streaming into it. The outgoing
+stream is scattered over the environment, and helps to rebuild bodies
+of all kinds in the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms,
+the physical basis of all these being one and the same.
+
+    The idea that the human tabernacle is built by countless
+    _lives_, just in the same way as the rocky crust of our Earth
+    was, has nothing repulsive in it for the true mystic....
+    Science teaches us that the living as well as the dead
+    organism of both man and animal are swarming with bacteria of
+    a hundred various kinds; that from without we are threatened
+    with the invasion of microbes with every breath we draw, and
+    from within by leucomaines, robes, aerobes, anaerobes, and what
+    not. But Science never yet went so far as to assert with the
+    Occult Doctrine that our bodies, as well as those of animals,
+    plants, and stones, are themselves altogether built up of
+    such beings, which, except larger species, no microscope can
+    detect. So far as regards the purely animal and material
+    portion of man, Science is on its way to discoveries that
+    will go far towards corroborating this theory. Chemistry and
+    physiology are the two great magicians of the future, who are
+    destined to open the eyes of mankind to the great physical
+    truths. With every day, the identity between the animal and
+    physical man, between the plant and man, and even between the
+    reptile and its nest, the rock, and man, is more and more
+    clearly shown. The physical and chemical constituents of all
+    being found to be identical, chemical Science may well say
+    that there is no difference between the matter which composes
+    the ox and that which forms man. But the Occult Doctrine is
+    far more explicit. It says: Not only the chemical compounds
+    are the same, but the same infinitesimal _invisible lives_
+    compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the
+    daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant, and of the tree
+    which shelters him from the sun. Each particle--whether you
+    call it organic or inorganic--_is a life_.[6]
+
+These "lives" which, separate and independent, are the minute vehicles
+of Prana, aggregated together form the molecules and cells of the
+physical body, and they stream in and stream out, during all the years
+of bodily life, thus forming a continual bridge between man and his
+environment. Controlling these are the "Fiery Lives," the Devourers,
+which constrain these to their work of building up the cells of the
+body, so that they work harmoniously and in order, subordinated to the
+higher manifestation of life in the complex organism called Man. These
+Fiery Lives on our plane correspond, in this controlling and
+organising function, with the One Life of the Universe,[7] and when
+they no longer exercise this function in the human body, the lower
+lives run rampant, and begin to break down the hitherto definitely
+organised body. During bodily life they are marshalled as an army;
+marching in regular order under the command of a general, performing
+various evolutions, keeping step, moving as a single body. At "Death"
+they become a disorganised and tumultuous mob, rushing hither and
+thither, jostling each other, tumbling over each other, with no common
+object, no generally recognised authority. The body is never more
+alive than when it is dead; but it is alive in its units, and dead in
+its totality; alive as a congeries, dead as an organism.
+
+    Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily
+    united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To
+    the Materialist, the only difference between a living and a
+    dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in
+    the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the
+    molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them
+    asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must
+    be Death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as
+    Death, where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an
+    intense vital energy.... Says Eliphas Levi: "Change attests
+    movement, and movement only reveals life. The corpse would
+    not decompose if it were dead; all the molecules which
+    compose it are living and struggle to separate."[8]
+
+Those who have read _The Seven Principles of Man_,[9] know that the
+etheric double is the vehicle of Prana, the life-principle, or
+vitality. Through the etheric double Prana exercises the controlling
+and co-ordinating force spoken of above, and "Death" takes triumphant
+possession of the body when the etheric double is finally withdrawn
+and the delicate cord which unites it with the body is snapped. The
+process of withdrawal has been watched by clairvoyants, and definitely
+described. Thus Andrew Jackson Davis, "the Poughkeepsie Seer",
+describes how he himself watched this escape of the ethereal body, and
+he states that the magnetic cord did not break for some thirty-six
+hours after apparent death. Others have described, in similar terms,
+how they saw a faint violet mist rise from the dying body, gradually
+condensing into a figure which was the counterpart of the expiring
+person, and attached to that person by a glistening thread. The
+snapping of the thread means the breaking of the last magnetic link
+between the dense body and the remaining principles of the human
+constitution; the body has dropped away from the man; he is
+excarnated, disembodied; six principles still remain as his
+constitution immediately after death, the seventh, or the dense body,
+being left as a cast-off garment.
+
+Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or
+unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one
+after the other, its outer casings, and--as the snake from its skin,
+the butterfly from its chrysalis--emerges from one after another,
+passing into a higher state of consciousness. Now it is the fact that
+this escape from the body, and this dwelling of the conscious entity
+either in the vehicle called the body of desire, the kamic or astral
+body, or in a yet more ethereal Thought Body, can be effected during
+earth-life; so that man may become familiar with the excarnated
+condition, and it may lose for him all the terrors that encircle the
+unknown. He can know himself as a conscious entity in either of these
+vehicles, and so prove to his own satisfaction that "life" does not
+depend on his functioning through the physical body. Why should a man
+who has thus repeatedly "shed" his lower bodies, and has found the
+process result, not in unconsciousness, but in a vastly extended
+freedom and vividness of life--why should he fear the final casting
+away of his fetters, and the freeing of his Immortal Self from what he
+realises as the prison of the flesh?
+
+This view of human life is an essential part of the Esoteric
+Philosophy. Man is primarily divine, a spark of the Divine Life. This
+living flame, passing out from the Central Fire, weaves for itself
+coverings within which it dwells, and thus becomes the Triad, the
+Atma-Buddhi-Manas, the reflection of the Immortal Self. This sends out
+its Ray, which becomes encased in grosser matter, in the desire body,
+or kamic elements, the passional nature, and in the etheric double and
+the physical body. The once free immortal Intelligence thus entangled,
+enswathed, enchained, works heavily and laboriously through the
+coatings that enwrap it. In its own nature it remains ever the free
+Bird of Heaven, but its wings are bound to its side by the matter into
+which it is plunged. When man recognises his own inherent nature, he
+learns to open his prison doors occasionally and escapes from his
+encircling gaol; first he learns to identify himself with the
+Immortal Triad, and rises above the body and its passions into a pure
+mental and moral life; then he learns that the conquered body cannot
+hold him prisoner, and he unlocks its door and steps out into the
+sunshine of his true life. So when Death unlocks the door for him, he
+knows the country into which he emerges, having trodden its ways at
+his own will. And at last he grows to recognise that fact of supreme
+importance, that "Life" has nothing to do with body and with this
+material plane; that Life is his conscious existence, unbroken,
+unbreakable, and that the brief interludes in that Life, during which
+he sojourns on Earth, are but a minute fraction of his conscious
+existence, and a fraction, moreover, during which he is less alive,
+because of the heavy coverings which weigh him down. For only during
+these interludes (save in exceptional cases) may he wholly lose his
+consciousness of continued life, being surrounded by these coverings
+which delude him and blind him to the truth of things, making that
+real which is illusion, and that stable which is transitory. The
+sunlight ranges over the universe, and at incarnation we step out of
+it into the twilight of the body, and see but dimly during the period
+of our incarceration; at Death we step out of the prison again into
+the sunlight, and are nearer to the reality. Short are the twilight
+periods, and long the periods of the sunlight; but in our blinded
+state we call the twilight life, and to us it is the real existence,
+while we call the sunlight Death, and shiver at the thought of passing
+into it. Well did Giordano Bruno, one of the greatest teachers of our
+Philosophy in the Middle Ages, state the truth as to the body and Man.
+Of the real Man he says:
+
+    He will be present in the body in such wise that the best
+    part of himself will be absent from it, and will join himself
+    by an indissoluble sacrament to divine things, in such a way
+    that he will not feel either love or hatred of things mortal.
+    Considering himself as master, and that he ought not to be
+    servant and slave to his body, which he would regard only as
+    the prison which holds his liberty in confinement, the glue
+    which smears his wings, chains which bind fast his hands,
+    stocks which fix his feet, veil which hides his view. Let him
+    not be servant, captive, ensnared, chained, idle, stolid, and
+    blind, for the body which he himself abandons cannot
+    tyrannise over him, so that thus the spirit in a certain
+    degree comes before him as the corporeal world, and matter is
+    subject to the divinity and to nature.[10]
+
+When once we thus come to regard the body, and by conquering it we
+gain our liberty, Death loses for us all his terrors, and at his touch
+the body slips from us as a garment, and we stand out from it erect
+and free.
+
+On the same lines of thought Dr. Franz Hartmann writes:
+
+    According to certain views of the West man is a developed
+    ape. According to the views of Indian Sages, which also
+    coincide with those of the Philosophers of past ages and with
+    the teachings of the Christian Mystics, man is a God, who is
+    united during his earthly life, through his own carnal
+    tendencies, to an animal (his animal nature). The God who
+    dwells within him endows man with wisdom. The animal endows
+    him with force. After death, _the God effects his own release
+    from the man_ by departing from the animal body. As man
+    carries within him this divine consciousness, it is his task
+    to battle with his animal inclinations, and to raise himself
+    above them, by the help of the divine principle, a task which
+    the animal cannot achieve, and which therefore is not
+    demanded of it.[11]
+
+The "man", using the word in the sense of personality, as it is used
+in the latter half of this sentence, is only conditionally immortal;
+the true man, the evolving God, releases himself, and so much of the
+personality goes with him as has raised itself into union with the
+divine.
+
+The body thus left to the rioting of the countless lives--previously
+held in constraint by Prana, acting through its vehicle the etheric
+double--begins to decay, that is to break up, and with the
+disintegration of its cells and molecules, its particles pass away
+into other combinations.
+
+On our return to Earth we may meet again some of those same countless
+lives that in a previous incarnation made of our then body their
+passing dwelling; but all that we are just now concerned with is the
+breaking up of the body whose life-span is over, and its fate is
+complete disintegration. To the dense body, then, Death means
+dissolution as an organism, the loosing of the bonds that united the
+many into one.
+
+
+THE FATE OF THE ETHERIC DOUBLE.
+
+The etheric double is the ethereal counterpart of the gross body of
+man. It is the double that is sometimes seen during life in the
+neighbourhood of the body, and its absence from the body is generally
+marked by the heaviness or semi-lethargy of the latter. Acting as the
+reservoir, or vehicle, of the life-principle during earth-life, its
+withdrawal from the body is naturally marked by the lowering of all
+vital functions, even while the cord which unites the two is still
+unbroken. As has been already said, the snapping of the cord means the
+death of the body.
+
+When the etheric double finally quits the body, it does not travel to
+any distance from it. Normally it remains floating over the body, the
+state of consciousness being dreamy and peaceful, unless tumultuous
+distress and violent emotion surround the corpse from which it has
+just issued. And here it may be well to say that during the slow
+process of dying, while the etheric double is withdrawing from the
+body, taking with it the higher principles, as after it has withdrawn,
+extreme quiet and self-control should be observed in the chamber of
+Death. For during this time the whole life passes swiftly in review
+before the Ego, the individual, as those have related who have passed
+in drowning into this unconscious and pulseless state. A Master has
+written:
+
+    _At the last moment the whole life is reflected in our
+    memory, and emerges from all the forgotten nooks and corners,
+    picture after picture, one event after another.... The man
+    may often appear dead, yet from the last pulsation, from and
+    between the last throbbing of his heart and the moment when
+    the last spark of animal heat leaves the body_, the brain
+    thinks, _and the Ego lives over in those few brief seconds
+    his whole life. Speak in whispers, ye who assist at a
+    deathbed, and find yourselves in the solemn presence of
+    death. Especially have ye to keep quiet just after death has
+    laid her clammy hand upon the body. Speak in whispers, I say,
+    lest ye disturb the quiet ripple of thought, and hinder the
+    busy work of the past, casting its reflection upon the veil
+    of the future._[12]
+
+This is the time during which the thought-images of the ended
+earth-life, clustering around their maker, group and interweave
+themselves into the completed image of that life, and are impressed in
+their totality on the Astral Light. The dominant tendencies, the
+strongest thought-habits, assert their pre-eminence, and stamp
+themselves as the characteristics which will appear as "innate
+qualities" in the succeeding incarnation. This balancing-up of the
+life-issues, this reading of the karmic records, is too solemn and
+momentous a thing to be disturbed by the ill-timed wailings of
+personal relatives and friends.
+
+    At the solemn moment of death every man, even when death is
+    sudden, sees the whole of his past life marshalled before
+    him, in its minutest details. For one short instant the
+    _personal_ become one with the _individual_ and all-knowing
+    Ego. But this instant is enough to show to him the whole
+    chain of causes which have been at work during his life. He
+    sees and now understands himself as he is, unadorned by
+    flattery or self-deception. He reads his life, remaining as a
+    spectator, looking down into the arena he is quitting.[13]
+
+This vivid sight is succeeded, in the ordinary person, by the dreamy,
+peaceful semi-consciousness spoken of above, as the etheric double
+floats above the body to which it has belonged, now completely
+separated from it.
+
+Sometimes this double is seen by persons in the house, or in the
+neighbourhood, when the thought of the dying has been strongly turned
+to some one left behind, when some anxiety has been in the mind at the
+last, something left undone which needed doing, or when some local
+disturbance has shaken the tranquillity of the passing entity. Under
+these conditions, or others of a similar nature, the double may be
+seen or heard; when seen, it shows the dreamy, hazy consciousness
+alluded to, is silent, vague in its aspect, unresponsive.
+
+As the days go on, the five higher principles gradually disengage
+themselves from the etheric double, and shake this off as they
+previously shook off the grosser body. They pass on, as a fivefold
+entity, into a state to be next studied, leaving the etheric double,
+with the dense body of which it is the counterpart, thus becoming an
+ethereal corpse, as much as the body had become a dense corpse. This
+ethereal corpse remains near the dense one, and they disintegrate
+together; clairvoyants see these ethereal wraiths in churchyards,
+sometimes showing likeness to the dead dense body, sometimes as violet
+mists or lights. Such an ethereal corpse has been seen by a friend of
+my own, passing through the horribly repulsive stages of
+decomposition, a ghastly vision in face of which clairvoyance was
+certainly no blessing. The process goes on _pari passu_, until all but
+the actual bony skeleton of the dense body is completely
+disintegrated, and the particles have gone to form other combinations.
+
+One of the great advantages of cremation--apart from all sanitary
+conditions--lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the
+physical elements composing the dense and ethereal corpses, brought
+about by the burning. Instead of slow and gradual decomposition, swift
+dissociation takes place, and no physical remnants are left, working
+possible mischief.
+
+The ethereal corpse may to some extent be revivified for a short
+period after its death. Dr. Hartmann says:
+
+    The fresh corpse of a person who has suddenly been killed may
+    be galvanised into a semblance of life by the application of
+    a galvanic battery. Likewise the astral corpse of a person
+    may be brought back into an artificial life by being infused
+    with a part of the life principle of the medium. If that
+    corpse is one of a very intellectual person, it may talk
+    very intellectually; and if it was that of a fool it will
+    talk like a fool.[14]
+
+This mischievous procedure can only be carried out in the
+neighbourhood of the corpse, and for a very limited time after death,
+but there are cases on record of such galvanising of the ethereal
+corpse, performed at the grave of the departed person. Needless to say
+that such a process belongs distinctly to "Black" Magic, and is wholly
+evil. Ethereal corpses, like dense ones, if not swiftly destroyed by
+burning, should be left in the silence and the darkness, a silence and
+a darkness that it is the worst profanity to break.
+
+
+KAMALOKA, AND THE FATE OF PRANA AND KAMA.
+
+Loka is a Sanskrit word that may be translated as place, world, land,
+so that Kamaloka is literally the place or the world of Kama, Kama
+being the name of that part of the human organism that includes all
+the passions, desires, and emotions which man has in common with the
+lower animals.[15] In this division of the universe, the Kamaloka,
+dwell all the human entities that have shaken off the dense body and
+its ethereal double, but have not yet disentangled themselves from the
+passional and emotional nature. Kamaloka has many other tenants, but
+we are concerned only with the human beings who have lately passed
+through the gateway of Death, and it is on these that we must
+concentrate our study.
+
+A momentary digression may be pardoned on the question of the
+existence of regions in the universe, other than the physical,
+peopled with intelligent beings. The existence of such regions is
+postulated by the Esoteric Philosophy, and is known to the Adepts and
+to very many less highly evolved men and women by personal experience;
+all that is needed for the study of these regions is the evolution of
+the faculties latent in every man; a "living" man, in ordinary
+parlance, can leave his dense and ethereal bodies behind him, and
+explore these regions without going through Death's gateway. Thus we
+read in the _Theosophist_ that real knowledge may be acquired by the
+Spirit in the living man coming into conscious relations with the
+world of Spirit.
+
+    As in the case, say, of an initiated Adept, who brings back
+    upon earth with him the clear and distinct
+    recollection--correct to a detail--of facts gathered, and the
+    information obtained, in the invisible sphere of
+    _Realities_.[16]
+
+In this way those regions become to him matters of knowledge as
+definite, as certain, as familiar, as if he should travel to Africa in
+ordinary fashion, explore its deserts, and return to his own land the
+richer for the knowledge and experience gained. A seasoned African
+explorer would care but little for the criticisms passed on his report
+by persons who had never been thither; he might tell what he saw,
+describe the animals whose habits he had studied, sketch the country
+he had traversed, sum up its products and its characteristics. If he
+was contradicted, laughed at, set right, by untravelled critics, he
+would be neither ruffled nor distressed, but would merely leave them
+alone. Ignorance cannot convince knowledge by repeated asseveration
+of its nescience. The opinion of a hundred persons on a subject on
+which they are wholly ignorant is of no more weight than the opinion
+of one such person. Evidence is strengthened by many consenting
+witnesses, testifying each to his knowledge of a fact, but nothing
+multiplied a thousand times remains nothing. Strange, indeed, would it
+be if all the Space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the
+inhabitants of earth the only forms in which intelligence could clothe
+itself. As Dr. Huxley said:
+
+    Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known,
+    it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending
+    scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable
+    from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience.[17]
+
+If these entities did not have organs of sense like our own, if their
+senses responded to vibrations different from those which affect ours,
+they and we might walk side by side, pass each other, meet each other,
+pass through each other, and yet be never the wiser as to each other's
+existence. Mr. Crookes gives us a glimpse of the possibility of such
+unconscious co-existence of intelligent beings, and but a very slight
+effort of imagination is needed to realise the conception.
+
+    It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs
+    of sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to
+    which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate
+    other vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would
+    practically be living in a different world to our own.
+    Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of
+    surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive
+    to the ordinary rays of light, but sensitive to the
+    vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic phenomena.
+    Glass and crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies.
+    Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph
+    wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole
+    drilled through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active
+    work would resemble a conflagration, whilst a permanent
+    magnet would realise the dream of mediaeval mystics, and
+    become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or
+    consumption of fuel.[18]
+
+Kamaloka is a region peopled by intelligent and semi-intelligent
+entities, just as our own is thus peopled; it is crowded, like our
+world, with many types and forms of living things, as diverse from
+each other as a blade of grass is different from a tiger, a tiger from
+a man. It interpenetrates our own world and is interpenetrated by it,
+but, as the states of matter in the two worlds differ, they co-exist
+without the knowledge of the intelligent beings in either. Only under
+abnormal circumstances can consciousness of each other's presence
+arise among the inhabitants of the two worlds; by certain peculiar
+training a living human being can come into conscious contact with and
+control many of the sub-human denizens of Kamaloka; human beings, who
+have quitted earth and in whom the kamic elements were strong, may
+very readily be attracted by the kamic elements in embodied men, and
+by their help become conscious again of the presence of the scenes
+they had left; and human beings still embodied may set up methods of
+communication with the disembodied, and may, as said, leave their own
+bodies for awhile, and become conscious in Kamaloka by the use of
+faculties through which they have accustomed their consciousness to
+act. The point which is here to be clearly grasped is the existence
+of Kamaloka as a definite region, inhabited by a large diversity of
+entities, among whom are disembodied human beings.
+
+From this necessary digression we return to the particular human being
+whose fate, as a type, we may be said to be tracing, and of whose
+dense body and etheric double we have already disposed. Let us
+contemplate him in the state of very brief duration that follows the
+shaking off of these two casings. Says H.P. Blavatsky, after quoting
+from Plutarch a description of the man after death:
+
+    Here you have our doctrine, which shows man a _septenary_
+    during life; a _quintile_ just after death, in Kamaloka.[19]
+
+Prana, the portion of the life-energy appropriated by the man in his
+embodied state, having lost its vehicle, the ethereal double, which,
+with the physical body, has slipped away from its controlling energy,
+must pass back into the great life-reservoir of the universe. As water
+enclosed in a glass vessel and plunged into a tank mingles with the
+surrounding water if the vessel be broken, so Prana, as the bodies
+drop from it, mingles again with the Life Universal. It is only "just
+after death" that man is a quintile, or fivefold in his constitution,
+for Prana, as a distinctively human principle, cannot remain
+appropriated when its vehicle disintegrates.
+
+The man now is clothed, but with the Kama Rupa, or body of Kama, the
+desire body, a body of astral matter, often termed "fluidic," so
+easily does it, during earth-life, take any form impressed upon it
+from without or moulded from within. The living man is there, the
+immortal Triad, still clad in the last of its terrestrial garments, in
+the subtle, sensitive, responsive form which lent it during embodiment
+the power to feel, to desire, to enjoy, to suffer, in the physical
+world.
+
+    When the man dies, his three lower principles leave him for
+    ever; _i.e._, body, life, and the vehicle of the latter, the
+    etheric body, or the double of the living man. And then his
+    four principles--the central or middle principle (the animal
+    soul or Kama Rupa, with what it has assimilated from the
+    lower Manas) and the higher Triad--find themselves in
+    Kamaloka.[20]
+
+This desire body undergoes a marked change soon after death. The
+different densities of the astral matter of which it is composed
+arrange themselves in a series of shells or envelopes, the densest
+being outside, shutting the consciousness away from all but very
+limited contact and expression. The consciousness turns in on itself,
+if left undisturbed, and prepares itself for the next step onwards,
+while the desire body gradually disintegrates, shell after shell.
+
+Up to the point of this re-arrangement of the matter of the desire
+body, the post-mortem experience of all is much the same; it is a
+"dreamy, peaceful semi-consciousness," as before said, and this, in
+the happiest cases, passes without vivid awakening into the deeper
+"pre-devachanic unconsciousness" which ends with the blissful wakening
+in Devachan, for the period of repose that intervenes between two
+incarnations. But as, at this point, different possibilities arise,
+let us trace a normal uninterrupted progression in Kamaloka, up to the
+threshold of Devachan, and then we can return to consider other
+classes of circumstances.
+
+If a person has led a pure life, and has steadfastly striven to rise
+and to identify himself with the higher rather than the lower parts of
+his nature, after shaking off the dense body and the etheric double,
+and after Prana has re-mingled with the ocean of Life, and he is
+clothed only with the Kama Rupa, the passional elements in him, being
+but weak and accustomed to comparatively little activity, will not be
+able to assert themselves strongly in Kamaloka. Now during earth-life
+Kama and the Lower Manas are strongly united and interwoven with each
+other; in the case we are considering Kama is weak, and the Lower
+Manas has purified Kama to a great extent. The mind, woven with the
+passions, emotions, and desires, has purified them, and has
+assimilated their pure part, absorbed it into itself, so that all that
+is left of Kama is a mere residue, easily to be gotten rid of, from
+which the Immortal Triad can readily free itself. Slowly this Immortal
+Triad, the true Man, draws in all his forces; he draws into himself
+the memories of the earth-life just ended, its loves, its hopes, its
+aspirations, and prepares to pass out of Kamaloka into the blissful
+rest of Devachan, the "abode of the Gods", or as some say, "the land
+of bliss". Kamaloka
+
+    Is an astral locality, the Limbus of scholastic theology, the
+    Hades of the ancients, and, strictly speaking, a _locality_
+    only in a relative sense. It has neither a definite area, nor
+    boundary, but exists _within_ subjective space, _i.e._, is
+    beyond our sensuous perceptions. Still it exists, and it is
+    there that the astral _eidolons_ of all the beings that have
+    lived, animals included, await their _second death_. For the
+    animals it comes with the disintegration and the entire
+    fading out of their astral particles to the last. For the
+    human _eidolon_ it begins when the Atma-Buddhi-Manasic Triad
+    is said to "separate" itself from its lower principles or the
+    reflection of the ex-personality, by falling into the
+    Devachanic state.[21]
+
+This second death is the passage, then, of the Immortal Triad from the
+kamalokic sphere, so closely related to the earth sphere, into the
+higher state of Devachan, of which we must speak later. The type of
+man we are considering passes through this, in the peaceful dreamy
+state already described, and, if left undisturbed, will not regain
+full consciousness until these stages are passed through, and peace
+gives way to bliss.
+
+But during the whole period that the four principles--the Immortal
+Triad and Kama--remain in Kamaloka, whether the period be long or
+short, days or centuries, they are within the reach of the
+earth-influences. In the case of such a person as we have been
+describing, an awakening may be caused by the passionate sorrow and
+desires of friends left on earth, and these violently vibrating kamic
+elements in the embodied persons may set up vibrations in the desire
+body of the disembodied, and so reach and rouse the lower Manas, not
+yet withdrawn to and reunited with its parent, the Spiritual
+Intelligence. Thus it may be roused from its dreamy state to vivid
+remembrance of the earth-life so lately left, and may--if any
+sensitive or medium is concerned, either directly, or indirectly
+through one of these grieving friends in communication with the
+medium--use the medium's etheric and dense bodies to speak or write to
+those left behind. This awakening is often accompanied with acute
+suffering, and even if this be avoided, the natural process of the
+Triad freeing itself is rudely disturbed, and the completion of its
+freedom is delayed. In speaking of this possibility of communication
+during the period immediately succeeding death and before the freed
+Man passes on into Devachan, H.P. Blavatsky says:
+
+    Whether any living mortal, save a few exceptional cases--when
+    the intensity of the desire in the dying person to return for
+    some purpose forced the higher consciousness _to remain
+    awake_, and, therefore, it was really the _individuality_,
+    the "Spirit", that communicated--has derived much benefit
+    from the return of the Spirit into the _objective_ plane is
+    another question. The Spirit is dazed after death, and falls
+    very soon into what we call "pre-devachanic
+    unconsciousness."[22]
+
+Intense desire may move the disembodied entity to spontaneously return
+to the sorrowing ones left behind, but this spontaneous return is rare
+in the case of persons of the type we are just now considering. If
+they are left at peace, they will generally sleep themselves quietly
+into Devachan, and so avoid any struggle or suffering in connection
+with the second death. On the final escape of the Immortal Triad there
+is left behind in Kamaloka only the desire body, the "shell" or mere
+empty phantom, which gradually disintegrates; but it will be better to
+deal with this in considering the next type, the average man or woman,
+without marked spirituality of an elevated kind, but also without
+marked evil tendencies.
+
+When an average man or woman reaches Kamaloka, the spiritual
+Intelligence is clothed with a desire body, which possesses
+considerable vigour and vitality; the lower Manas, closely interwoven
+with Kama during the earth-life just ended, having lived much in the
+enjoyment of objects of sense and in the pleasures of the emotions,
+cannot quickly disentangle itself from the web of its own weaving, and
+return to its Parent Mind, the source of its own being. Hence a
+considerable delay in the world of transition, in Kamaloka, while the
+desires wear out and fade away to a point at which they can no longer
+detain the Soul with their clinging arms.
+
+As said, during the period that the Immortal Triad and Kama remain
+together in Kamaloka, communication between the disembodied entity and
+the embodied entities on earth is possible. Such communication will
+generally be welcomed by these disembodied ones, because their desires
+and emotions still cling to the earth they have left, and the mind has
+not sufficiently lived on its own plane to find therein full
+satisfaction and contentment. The lower Manas still yearns towards
+kamic gratifications and the vivid highly coloured sensations of
+earth-life, and can by these yearnings be drawn back to the scenes it
+has regretfully quitted. Speaking of the possibility of communication
+between the Ego of the deceased person and a medium, H.P. Blavatsky
+says in the _Theosophist_,[23] as from the teachings received by her
+from the Adept Brothers, that such communication may occur during two
+intervals:
+
+    Interval the first is that period between the physical death
+    and the merging of the spiritual Ego into that state which is
+    known in the Arhat esoteric doctrine as Bar-do. We have
+    translated this as the "gestation" period [pre-devachanic].
+
+Some of the communications made through mediums are from this source,
+from the disembodied entity, thus drawn back to the earth-sphere--a
+cruel kindness, delaying its forward evolution and introducing an
+element of disharmony into what should be an orderly progression. The
+period in Kamaloka is thus lengthened, the desire body is fed and its
+hold on the Ego is maintained, and thus is the freedom of the Soul
+deferred, the immortal Swallow being still held down by the bird-lime
+of earth.
+
+Persons who have led an evil life, who have gratified and stimulated
+their animal passions, and have full fed the desire body while they
+have starved even the lower mind--these remain for long, denizens of
+Kamaloka, and are filled with yearnings for the earth-life they have
+left, and for the animal delights that they can no longer--in the
+absence of the physical body--directly taste. These gather round the
+medium and the sensitive, endeavouring to utilise them for their own
+gratification, and these are among the more dangerous of the forces so
+rashly confronted in their ignorance by the thoughtless and the
+curious.
+
+Another class of disembodied entities includes those whose lives on
+earth have been prematurely cut short, by their own act, the act of
+others, or by accident. Their fate in Kamaloka depends on the
+conditions which surrounded their outgoings from earthly life, for not
+all suicides are guilty of _felo de se_, and the measure of
+responsibility may vary within very wide limits. The condition of such
+has been thus described:
+
+    _Suicides, although not wholly dissevered from their sixth
+    and seventh principles, and quite potent in the seance room,
+    nevertheless to the day when they would have died a natural
+    death, are separated from their higher principles by a gulf.
+    The sixth and seventh principles remain passive and negative,
+    whereas in cases of_ accidental death _the higher and the
+    lower groups actually attract each other. In cases of good
+    and innocent Egos, moreover, the latter gravitates
+    irresistibly toward the sixth and seventh, and thus either
+    slumbers surrounded by happy dreams, or sleeps a dreamless
+    profound sleep until the hour strikes. With a little
+    reflection and an eye to the eternal justice and fitness of
+    things, you will see why. The victim, whether good or bad, is
+    irresponsible for his death. Even if his death were due to
+    some action in a previous life or an antecedent birth, was an
+    act, in short, of the Law of Retribution, still it was not
+    the_ direct _result of an act deliberately committed by the_
+    personal _Ego of that life during which he happened to be
+    killed. Had he been allowed to live longer he might have
+    atoned for his antecedent sins still more effectually, and
+    even now, the Ego having been made to pay off the debt of his
+    maker, the personal Ego is free from the blows of retributive
+    justice. The Dhyan Chohans, who have no hand in the guidance
+    of the living human Ego, protect the helpless victim when it
+    is violently thrust out of its element into a new one, before
+    it is matured and made fit and ready for it._
+
+These, whether suicides or killed by accident, can communicate with
+those in earth-life, but much to their own injury. As said above, the
+good and innocent sleep happily till the life-period is over. But
+where the victim of an accident is depraved and gross, his fate is a
+sad one.
+
+    _Unhappy shades, if sinful and sensual, they wander about
+    (not shells, for their connection with their two higher
+    principles is not quite broken) until their_ death-_hour
+    comes. Cut off in the full flush of earthly passions which
+    bind them to familiar scenes, they are enticed by the
+    opportunities which mediums afford to gratify them
+    vicariously. They are the Pishachas, the Incubi and Succubae
+    of mediaeval times; the demons of thirst, gluttony, lust, and
+    avarice--Elementaries of intensified craft, wickedness, and
+    cruelty; provoking their victims to horrid crimes, and
+    revelling 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Now the causes producing the "new being" and determining the
+    nature of Karma are Trishna (Tanha)--thirst, desire for
+    sentient existence--and Upadana, which is the realisation or
+    consummation of Trishna, or that desire. And both of these
+    the medium helps to develop_ ne plus ultra _in an Elementary,
+    be he a suicide or a victim. The rule is that a person who
+    dies a natural death will remain from "a few hours to several
+    short years" within the earth's attraction--_i.e._, the
+    Kamaloka. But exceptions are the cases of suicides and those
+    who die a violent death in general. Hence, one of such Egos
+    who was destined to live, say, eighty or ninety years--but
+    who either killed himself or was killed by some accident, let
+    us suppose at the age of twenty--would have to pass in the
+    Kamaloka not "a few years," but in his case sixty or seventy
+    years, as an Elementary, or rather an "earth-walker," since
+    he is not, unfortunately for him, even a "Shell." Happy,
+    thrice happy, in comparison, are those disembodied entities
+    who sleep their long slumber and live in dream in the bosom
+    of Space! And woe to those whose Trishna will attract them to
+    mediums, and woe to the latter who tempt them with such an
+    easy Upadana. For, in grasping them and satisfying their
+    thirst for life, the medium helps to develop in them--is, in
+    fact, the cause of--a new set of Skandhas, a new body with
+    far worse tendencies and passions than the one they lost. All
+    the future of this new body will be determined thus, not only
+    by the Karma of demerit of the previous set or group, but
+    also by that of the new set of the future being. Were the
+    mediums and spiritualists but to know, as I said, that with
+    every new "angel-guide" they welcome with rapture, they
+    entice the latter into a Upadana, which will be productive of
+    untold evils for the new Ego that will be reborn under its
+    nefarious shadow, and that with every seance, 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 far worse existence than
+    ever--they would, perhaps, be less lavish in their
+    hospitality._
+
+Premature death brought on by vicious courses, by over-study, or by
+voluntary sacrifice for some great cause, will bring about delay in
+Kamaloka, but the state of the disembodied entity will depend on the
+motive that cut short the life.
+
+    _There are very few, if any, of the men who indulge in these
+    vices, who feel perfectly sure that such a course of action
+    will lead them eventually to premature death. Such is the
+    penalty of Maya. The "vices" will not escape their
+    punishment; but it is the_ cause, _not the effect, that will
+    be punished, especially an unforeseen, though probable
+    effect. As well call a man a "suicide" who meets his death in
+    a storm at sea, as one who kills himself with "over-study".
+    Water is liable to drown a man, and too much brain work to
+    produce a softening of the brain matter which may carry him
+    away. In such a case no one ought to cross the_ Kalapani,
+    _nor even to take a bath for fear of getting faint in it and
+    drowned (for we all know of such cases), nor should a man do
+    his duty, least of all sacrifice himself for even a laudable
+    and highly beneficial cause as many of us do. Motive is
+    everything, and man is punished in a case of direct
+    responsibility, never otherwise. In the victim's case the
+    natural hour of death was anticipated_ accidentally, _while
+    in that of the suicide death is brought on voluntarily and
+    with a full and deliberate knowledge of its immediate
+    consequences. Thus a man who causes his death in a fit of
+    temporary insanity is_ not _a_ felo de se, _to the great
+    grief and often trouble of the Life Insurance Companies. Nor
+    is he left a prey to the temptations of the Kamaloka, but
+    falls_ asleep _like any other victim._
+
+The population of Kamaloka is thus recruited with a peculiarly
+dangerous element by all the acts of violence, legal and illegal,
+which wrench the physical body from the soul and send the latter into
+Kamaloka clad in the desire body, throbbing with pulses of hatred,
+passion, emotion, palpitating with longings for revenge, with
+unsatiated lusts. A murderer in the body is not a pleasant member of
+society, but a murderer suddenly expelled from the body is a far more
+dangerous entity; society may protect itself against the first, but in
+its present state of ignorance it is defenceless as against the
+second.
+
+Finally, the Immortal Triad sets itself free from the desire body, and
+passes out of Kamaloka; the Higher Manas draws back its Ray, coloured
+with the life-scenes it has passed through, and carrying with it the
+experiences gained through the personality it has informed. The
+labourer is called in from the field, and he returns home bearing his
+sheaves with him, rich or poor, according to the fruitage of the life.
+When the Triad has quitted Kamaloka, it passes wholly out of the
+sphere of earth attractions:
+
+    _As soon as it has stepped outside the Kamaloka--crossed the
+    "Golden Bridge" leading to the "Seven Golden Mountains"--the
+    Ego can confabulate no more with easy-going mediums._
+
+There are some exceptional possibilities of reaching such an Ego, that
+will be explained later, but the Ego is out of the reach of the
+ordinary medium and cannot be recalled into the earth-sphere. But ere
+we follow the further course of the Triad, we must consider the fate
+of the now deserted desire body, left as a mere _reliquum_ in
+Kamaloka.
+
+
+KAMALOKA. THE SHELLS.
+
+The Shell is the desire body, emptied of the Triad, which has now
+passed onwards; it is the third of the transitory garments of Soul,
+cast aside and left in Kamaloka to disintegrate.
+
+When the past earth-life has been noble, or even when it has been of
+average purity and utility, this Shell retains but little vitality
+after the passing onwards of the Triad, and rapidly dissolves. Its
+molecules, however, retain, during this process of disintegration, the
+impressions made upon them during the earth-life, the tendency to
+vibrate in response to stimuli constantly experienced during that
+period. Every student of physiology is familiar with what is termed
+automatic action, with the tendency of cells to repeat vibrations
+originally set up by purposive action; thus are formed what we term
+habits, and we unconsciously repeat motions which at first were done
+with thought. So strong is this automatism of the body, that, as
+everyone knows by experience, it is difficult to break off the use of
+a phrase or of a gesture that has become "habitual."
+
+Now the desire body is during earth-life the recipient of and the
+respondent to all stimuli from without, and it also continually
+receives and responds to stimuli from the lower Manas. In it are set
+up habits, tendencies to repeat automatically familiar vibrations,
+vibrations of love and desire, vibrations imaging past experiences of
+all kinds. Just as the hand may repeat a familiar gesture, so may the
+desire body repeat a familiar feeling or thought. And when the Triad
+has left it, this automatism remains, and the Shell may thus simulate
+feelings and thoughts which are empty of all true intelligence and
+will. Many of the responses to eager enquiries at _seances_ come from
+such Shells, drawn to the neighbourhood of friends and relatives by
+the magnetic attractions so long familiar and dear, and automatically
+responding to the waves of emotion and remembrance, to the impulse of
+which they had so often answered during the lately closed earth-life.
+Phrases of affection, moral platitudes, memories of past events, will
+be all the communications such Shells can make, but these may be
+literally poured out under favourable conditions under the magnetic
+stimuli freely applied by the embodied friends and relatives.
+
+In cases where the lower Manas during earth-life has been strongly
+attached to material objects and to intellectual pursuits directed by
+a self-seeking motive, the desire body may have acquired a very
+considerable automatism of an intellectual character, and may give
+forth responses of considerable intellectual merit. But still the mark
+of non-originality will be present: the apparent intellectuality will
+only give out reproductions, and there will be no sign of the new and
+independent thought which would be the inevitable outcome of a strong
+intelligence working with originality amid new surroundings.
+Intellectual sterility brands the great majority of communications
+from the "spirit world"; reflections of earthly scenes, earthly
+conditions, earthly arrangements, are plentiful, but we usually seek
+in vain for strong, new thought, worthy of Intelligences freed from
+the prison of the flesh. The communications of a loftier kind
+occasionally granted are, for the most part, from non-human
+Intelligences, attracted by the pure atmosphere of the medium or
+sitters.
+
+And there is an ever-present danger in this commerce with the Shells.
+Just because they are Shells, and nothing more, they answer to the
+impulses that strike on them from without, and easily become malicious
+and mischievous, automatically responding to evil vibrations. Thus a
+medium, or sitters of poor moral character, will impress the Shells
+that flock around them with impulses of a low order, and any animal
+desires, petty and foolish thoughts, will set up similar vibrations in
+the blindly responsive Shells.
+
+Again, the Shell is very easily taken possession of by Elementals, the
+semi-conscious forces working in the kingdoms of Nature, and may be
+used by them as a convenient vehicle for many a prank and trick. The
+etheric double of the medium, and the desire bodies emptied of their
+immortal Tenants, give the material basis by which Elementals can work
+many a curious and startling result; and frequenters of _seances_ may
+be confidently appealed to, and asked whether many of the childish
+freaks with which they are familiar--pullings of hair, pinchings,
+slaps, throwing about of objects, piling up of furniture, playing on
+accordions, &c.--are not more rationally accounted for as the tricky
+vagaries of sub-human forces, than as the actions of "spirits" who,
+while in the body, were certainly incapable of such vulgarities.
+
+Let us leave the Shells alone to peacefully dissolve into their
+elements, and mingle once again in the crucible of Nature. The authors
+of the _Perfect Way_ put very well the real character of the Shell.
+
+    The true "ghost" consists of the exterior and earthly portion
+    of the Soul, that portion which, being weighted with cares,
+    attachments, and memories merely mundane, is detached by the
+    Soul and remains in the astral sphere, an existence more or
+    less definite and personal, and capable of holding, through a
+    sensitive, converse with the living. It is, however, but as a
+    cast-off vestment of the Soul, and is incapable of endurance
+    _as ghost_. The true Soul and real person, the _anima
+    divina_, parts at death with all those lower affections
+    which would have retained it near its earthly haunts.[24]
+
+If we would find our beloved, it is not among the decaying remnants in
+Kamaloka that we should seek them. "Why seek ye the living among the
+dead?"
+
+
+KAMALOKA. THE ELEMENTARIES.
+
+The word "Elementary" has been so loosely used that it has given rise
+to a good deal of confusion. It is thus defined by H.P. Blavatsky:
+
+    Properly, the disembodied _souls_ of the depraved; these
+    souls having, at some time prior to death, separated from
+    themselves their divine spirits, and so lost their chance for
+    immortality. But at the present stage of learning it has been
+    thought best to apply the term to the spooks or phantoms of
+    disembodied persons, in general to those whose temporary
+    habitation is the Kamaloka.... Once divorced from their
+    higher Triads and their bodies, these souls remain in their
+    Kama Rupic envelopes, and are irresistibly drawn to the earth
+    amid elements congenial to their gross natures. Their stay in
+    the Kamaloka varies as to its duration; but ends invariably
+    in disintegration, dissolving like a column of mist, atom by
+    atom, in the surrounding elements.[25]
+
+Students of this series of Manuals know that it is possible for the
+lower Manas to so entangle itself with Kama as to wrench itself away
+from its source, and this is spoken of in Occultism as "the loss of
+the Soul."[26] It is, in other words, the loss of the personal self,
+which has separated itself from its Parent, the Higher Ego, and has
+thus doomed itself to perish. Such a Soul, having thus separated
+itself from the Immortal Triad during its earth-life, becomes a true
+Elementary, after it has quitted the dense and etheric bodies. Then,
+clad in its desire body, it lives for awhile, for a longer or shorter
+time according to the vigour of its vitality, a wholly evil thing,
+dangerous and malignant, seeking to renew its fading vitality by any
+means laid open to it by the folly or ignorance of still embodied
+souls. Its ultimate fate is, indeed, destruction, but it may work much
+evil on its way to its self-chosen doom.
+
+The word Elementary is, however, very often used to describe the lower
+Manas in its garment the desire body, not broken away from the higher
+Principles, but not yet absorbed into its Parent, the Higher Manas.
+Such Elementaries may be in any stage of progress, harmless or
+mischievous.
+
+Some writers, again, use Elementary as a synonym for Shell, and so
+cause increased confusion. The word should at least be restricted to
+the desire body _plus_ lower Manas, whether that lower Manas be
+disentangling itself from the kamic elements, in order that it may be
+re-absorbed into its source, or separated from the Higher Ego, and
+therefore on the road to destruction.
+
+
+DEVACHAN.
+
+Among the various conceptions presented by the Esoteric Philosophy,
+there are few, perhaps, which the Western mind has found more
+difficulty in grasping than that of Devachan, or Devasthan, the
+Devaland, or land of the Gods.[27] And one of the chief difficulties
+has arisen from the free use of the words illusion, dream-state, and
+other similar terms, as denoting the devachanic consciousness--a
+general sense of unreality having thus come to pervade the whole
+conception of Devachan. When the Eastern thinker speaks of the present
+earthly life as Maya, illusion, dream, the solid Western at once puts
+down the phrases as allegorical and fanciful, for what can be less
+illusory, he thinks, than this world of buying and selling, of
+beefsteaks and bottled stout. But when similar terms are applied to a
+state beyond Death--a state which to him is misty and unreal in his
+own religion, and which, as he sadly feels, is lacking in all the
+substantial comforts dear to the family man--then he accepts the words
+in their most literal and prosaic meaning, and speaks of Devachan as a
+delusion in his own sense of the word. It may be well, therefore, on
+the threshold of Devachan to put this question of "illusion" in its
+true light.
+
+In a deep metaphysical sense all that is conditioned is illusory. All
+phenomena are literally "appearances", the outer masks in which the
+One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more
+"material" and solid the appearance, the further is it from Reality,
+and therefore the more illusory it is. What can be a greater fraud
+than our body, so apparently solid, stable, visible and tangible? It
+is a constantly changing congeries of minute living particles, an
+attractive centre into which stream continually myriads of tiny
+invisibles, that become visible by their aggregation at this centre,
+and then stream away again, becoming invisible by reason of their
+minuteness as they separate off from this aggregation. In comparison
+with this ever-shifting but apparently stable body how much less
+illusory is the mind, which is able to expose the pretensions of the
+body and put it in its true light. The mind is constantly imposed on
+by the senses, and Consciousness, the most real thing in us, is apt to
+regard itself as the unreal. In truth, it is the thought-world that is
+the nearest to reality, and things become more and more illusory as
+they take on more and more of a phenomenal character.
+
+Again, the mind is permanent as compared with the transitory physical
+world. For the "mind" is only a clumsy name for the living Thinker in
+us, the true and conscious Entity, the inner Man, "that was, that is,
+and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike". The less deeply
+this inner Man is plunged into matter, the less unreal is his life;
+and when he has shaken off the garments he donned at incarnation, his
+physical, ethereal, and passional bodies, then he is nearer to the
+Soul of Things than he was before, and though veils of illusion still
+dim his vision they are far thinner than those which clouded it when
+round him was wrapped the garment of the flesh. His freer and less
+illusory life is that which is without the body, and the disembodied
+is, comparatively speaking, his normal state. Out of this normal state
+he plunges into physical life for brief periods in order that he may
+gain experiences otherwise unattainable, and bring them back to enrich
+his more abiding condition. As a diver may plunge into the depths of
+the ocean to seek a pearl, so the Thinker plunges into the depths of
+the ocean of life to seek the pearl of experience; but he does not
+stay there long; it is not his own element; he rises up again into his
+own atmosphere and shakes off from him the heavier element he leaves.
+And therefore it is truly said of the Soul that has escaped from earth
+that it has returned to its own place, for its home is the "land of
+the Gods", and here on earth it is an exile and a prisoner. This view
+was very clearly put by a Master of Wisdom in a conversation reported
+by H.P. Blavatsky, and printed under the title "Life and Death."[28]
+The following extracts state the case:
+
+    _The Vedantins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious
+    existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to
+    the latter as an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial
+    life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing
+    but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual
+    spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that
+    lives our endless, never-changing immortal I, the Sutratma.
+    Whereas in every new incarnation it clothes itself in a
+    perfectly different personality, a temporary and short-lived
+    one.... The very essence of all this, that is to say, spirit,
+    force, and matter, has neither end nor beginning, but the
+    shape acquired by this triple unity during its incarnations,
+    their  exterior, so to speak, is nothing but a mere illusion
+    of personal conceptions. This is why we call the posthumous
+    life the only reality, and the terrestrial one, including the
+    personality itself, only imaginary._
+
+    Why in this case should we call the reality sleep, and the
+    phantasm waking?
+
+    _This comparison was made by me to facilitate your
+    comprehension. From the standpoint of your terrestrial
+    notions it is perfectly accurate._
+
+Note the words: "From the standpoint of your terrestrial notions," for
+they are the key to all the phrases used about Devachan as an
+"illusion." Our gross physical matter is not there; the limitations
+imposed by it are not there; the mind is in its own realm, where to
+will is to create, where to think is to see. And so, when the Master
+was asked: "Would it not be better to say that death is nothing but a
+birth for a new life, or still better, a going back to eternity?" he
+answered:
+
+    _This is how it really is, and I have nothing to say against
+    such a way of putting it. Only with our accepted views of
+    material life the words "live" and "exist" are not applicable
+    to the purely subjective condition after death; and were they
+    employed in our Philosophy without a rigid definition of
+    their meanings, the Vedantins would soon arrive at the ideas
+    which are common in our times among the American
+    Spiritualists, who preach about spirits marrying among
+    themselves and with mortals. As amongst the true, not
+    nominal, Christians so amongst the Vedantins--the life on the
+    other side of the grave is the land where there are no_
+    _tears, no sighs, where there is neither marrying nor giving
+    in marriage, and where the just realise their full
+    perfection._
+
+The dread of materialising mental and spiritual conceptions has always
+been very strong among the Philosophers and oral Teachers of the far
+East. Their constant effort has been to free the Thinker as far as
+possible from the bonds of matter even while he is embodied, to open
+the cage for the Divine Swallow, even though he must return to it for
+awhile. They are ever seeking "to spiritualise the material", while in
+the West the continual tendency has been "to materialise the
+spiritual". So the Indian describes the life of the freed Soul in all
+the terms that make it least material--illusion, dream, and so
+on--whereas the Hebrew endeavours to delineate it in terms descriptive
+of the material luxury and splendour of earth--marriage feast, streets
+of gold, thrones and crowns of solid metal and precious stones; the
+Western has followed the materialising conceptions of the Hebrew, and
+pictures a heaven which is merely a double of earth with earth's
+sorrows extracted, until we reach the grossest of all, the modern
+Summerland, with its "spirit-husbands", "spirit-wives", and
+"spirit-infants" that go to school and college, and grow up into
+spirit-adults.
+
+In "Notes on Devachan",[29] someone who evidently writes with knowledge
+remarks of the Devachani:
+
+    _The_ a priori _ideas of space and time do not control his
+    perceptions; for he absolutely creates and annihilates them
+    at the same time. Physical existence has its cumulative
+    intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy
+    from dotage to death; so the dream-life of Devachan is lived
+    correspondentially. Nature cheats no more the Devachani 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.
+    To call the Devachan existence a "dream" in any other sense
+    than that of a conventional term, is to renounce for ever the
+    knowledge of the Esoteric Doctrine, the sole custodian of
+    truth._
+
+"Dream" only in the sense that it is not of this plane of gross
+matter, that it belongs not to the physical world.
+
+Let us try and take a general view of the life of the Eternal Pilgrim,
+the inner Man, the human Soul, during a cycle of incarnation. Before he
+commences his new pilgrimage--for many pilgrimages lie behind him in the
+past, during which he gained the powers which enable him to tread the
+present one--he is a spiritual Being, but one who has already passed out
+of the passive condition of pure Spirit, and who by previous experience
+of matter in past ages has evolved intellect, the self-conscious mind.
+But this evolution by experience is far from being complete, even so far
+as to make him master of matter; his ignorance leaves him a prey to all
+the illusions of gross matter, so soon as he comes into contact with it,
+and he is not fit to be a builder of a universe, being subject to the
+deceptive visions caused by gross matter--as a child, looking through a
+piece of blue glass, imagines all the outside world to be blue. The
+object of a cycle of incarnation is to free him from these illusions, so
+that when he is surrounded by and working in gross matter he may retain
+clear vision and not be blinded by illusion. Now the cycle of
+incarnation is made up of two alternating states: a short one called
+life on earth, during which the Pilgrim-God is plunged into gross
+matter, and a comparatively long one, called life in Devachan, during
+which he is encircled by subtle matter, illusive still, but far less
+illusive than that of earth. The second state may fairly be called his
+normal one, as it is of enormous extent as compared with the breaks in
+it that he spends upon earth; it is comparatively normal also, as being
+less removed from his essential Divine life; he is less encased in
+matter, less deluded by its swiftly-changing appearances. Slowly and
+gradually, by reiterated experiences, gross matter loses its power over
+him and becomes his servant instead of his tyrant. In the partial
+freedom of Devachan he assimilates his experiences on earth, still
+partly dominated by them--at first, indeed, almost completely dominated
+by them so that the devachanic life is merely a sublimated continuation
+of the earth-life--but gradually freeing himself more and more as he
+recognises them as transitory and external, until he can move through
+any region of our universe with unbroken self-consciousness, a true Lord
+of Mind, the free and triumphant God. Such is the triumph of the Divine
+Nature manifested in the flesh, the subduing of every form of matter to
+be the obedient instrument of Spirit. Thus the Master said:
+
+    _The spiritual Ego of the man moves in eternity like a
+    pendulum between the hours of life and death, but if these_
+    _hours, the periods of life terrestrial and life posthumous,
+    are limited in their continuation, and even the very number
+    of such breaks in eternity between sleep and waking, between
+    illusion and reality, have their beginning as well as their
+    end, the spiritual Pilgrim himself is eternal. Therefore the_
+    hours of his posthumous life, _when unveiled he stands face
+    to face with truth, and the short-lived mirages of his
+    terrestrial existence are far from him,_ compose _or make up,
+    in our ideas,_ the only reality. _Such breaks, in spite of
+    the fact that they are finite, do double service to the
+    Sutratma, which, perfecting itself constantly, follows
+    without vacillation, though very slowly, the road leading to
+    its last transformation, when, reaching its aim at last, it
+    becomes a Divine Being. They not only contribute to the
+    reaching of this goal, but without these finite breaks
+    Sutratma-Buddhi could never reach it. Sutratma is the actor,
+    and its numerous and different incarnations are the actor's
+    parts. I suppose you would not apply to these parts, and so
+    much the less to their costumes, the term of personality.
+    Like an actor the soul is bound to play, during the cycle of
+    births up to the very threshold of Parinirvana, many such
+    parts, which often are disagreeable to it, but like a bee,
+    collecting its honey from every flower, and leaving the rest
+    to feed the worms of the earth, our spiritual individuality,
+    the Sutratma, collecting only the nectar of moral qualities
+    and consciousness from every terrestrial personality in which
+    it has to clothe itself, forced by Karma, unites at last all
+    these qualities in one, having then become a perfect being, a
+    Dhyan Chohan._[30]
+
+It is very significant, in this connection, that every devachanic
+stage is conditioned by the earth-stage that precedes it, and the Man
+can only assimilate in Devachan the kinds of experience he has been
+gathering on earth.
+
+    _A colourless, flavourless personality has a colourless,
+    feeble Devachanic state._[31]
+
+Husband, father, student, patriot, artist, Christian, Buddhist--he
+must work out the effects of his earth-life in his devachanic life; he
+cannot eat and assimilate more food than he has gathered; he cannot
+reap more harvest than he has sown seed. It takes but a moment to cast
+a seed into a furrow; it takes many a month for that seed to grow into
+the ripened ear; but according to the kind of the seed is the ear that
+grows from it, and according to the nature of the brief earth-life is
+the grain reaped in the field of Aanroo.
+
+    _There is a change of occupation, a continual change in
+    Devachan, just as much and far more than there is in the life
+    of any man or woman who happens to follow in his or her whole
+    life one sole occupation, whatever it may be, with this
+    difference, that to the Devachani this spiritual occupation
+    is always pleasant and fills his life with rapture. Life in
+    Devachan is the function of the aspirations of earth-life;
+    not the indefinite prolongation of that "single instant," but
+    its infinite developments, the various incidents and events
+    based upon and outflowing from that one "single moment" or
+    moments. The dreams of the objective become the realities of
+    the subjective existence.... The reward provided by Nature
+    for men who are benevolent in a large systematic way, and who
+    have not focussed their affections on an individual or
+    speciality, is that, if pure, they pass the  quicker for
+    that 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 occupant._[32]
+
+Into Devachan enters nothing that defileth, for gross matter has been
+left behind with all its attributes on earth and in Kamaloka. But if
+the sower has sowed but little seed, the devachanic harvest will be
+meagre, and the growth of the Soul will be delayed by the paucity of
+the nutriment on which it has to feed. Hence the enormous importance
+of the earth-life, _the field of sowing, the place where experience is
+to be gathered_. It conditions, regulates, limits, the growth of the
+Soul; it yields the rough ore which the Soul then takes in hand, and
+works upon during the devachanic stage, smelting it, forging it,
+tempering it, into the weapons it will take back with it for its next
+earth-life. The experienced Soul in Devachan will make for itself a
+splendid instrument for its next earth-life; the inexperienced one
+will forge a poor blade enough; but in each case the only material
+available is that brought from earth. In Devachan the Soul, as it
+were, sifts and sorts out its experiences; it lives a comparatively
+free life, and gradually gains the power to estimate the earthly
+experiences at their real value; it works out thoroughly and
+completely as objective realities all the ideas of which it only
+conceived the germ on earth. Thus, noble aspiration is a germ which
+the Soul would work out into a splendid realisation in Devachan, and
+it would bring back with it to earth for its next incarnation that
+mental image, to be materialised on earth when opportunity offers and
+suitable environment presents itself. For the mind sphere is the
+sphere of creation, and earth only the place for materialising the
+pre-existent thought. And the soul is as an architect that works out
+his plans in silence and deep meditation, and then brings them forth
+into the outer world where his edifice is to be builded; out of the
+knowledge gained in his past life, the Soul draws his plans for the
+next, and he returns to earth to put into objective material form the
+edifices he has planned. This is the description of a Logos in
+creative activity:
+
+    Whilst Brahma formerly, in the beginning of the Kalpas, was
+    meditating on creation, there appeared a creation beginning
+    with ignorance and consisting of darkness.... Brahma,
+    beholding that it was defective, designed another; and whilst
+    he thus meditated, the animal creation was manifested....
+    Beholding this creation also imperfect, Brahma again
+    meditated, and a third creation appeared, abounding with the
+    quality of goodness.[33]
+
+The objective manifestation follows the mental meditation; first idea,
+then form. Hence it will be seen that the notion current among many
+Theosophists that Devachan is waste time, is but one of the illusions
+due to the gross matter that blinds them, and that their impatience of
+the idea of Devachan arises from the delusion that fussing about in
+gross matter is the only real activity. Whereas, in truth, all
+effective action has its source in deep meditation, and out of the
+Silence comes ever the creative Word. Action on this plane would be
+less feeble and inefficient if it were the mere blossom of the
+profound root of meditation, and if the Soul embodied passed oftener
+out of the body into Devachan during earth-life, there would be less
+foolish action and consequent waste of time. For Devachan is a state
+of consciousness, the consciousness of the Soul escaped for awhile
+from the net of gross matter, and may be entered at any time by one
+who has learned to withdraw his Soul from the senses as the tortoise
+withdraws itself within its shell. And then, coming forth once more,
+action is prompt, direct, purposeful, and the time "wasted" in
+meditation is more than saved by the directness and strength of the
+mind-engendered act.
+
+Devachan is the sphere of the mind, as said, it is the land of the
+Gods, or the Souls. In the before quoted "Notes on Devachan" we read:
+
+    _There are two fields of causal manifestations: the objective
+    and the subjective. The grosser energies find their outcome
+    in the new personality of each birth in the cycle of
+    evoluting individuality. The moral and spiritual activities
+    find their sphere of effects in Devachan._
+
+As the moral and spiritual activities are the most important, and as
+on the development of these depends the growth of the true Man, and
+therefore the accomplishing of "the object of creation, the liberation
+of Soul", we may begin to understand something of the vast importance
+of the devachanic state.
+
+
+THE DEVACHANI.
+
+When the Triad has shaken off its last garment, it crosses the
+threshold of Devachan, and becomes "a Devachani". We have seen that
+it is in a peaceful dreamy state before this passage out of the earth
+sphere, the "second death", or "pre-devachanic unconsciousness". This
+condition is otherwise spoken of as the "gestation" period, because it
+precedes the birth of the Ego into the devachanic life. Regarded from
+the earth-sphere the passage is death, while regarded from that of
+Devachan it is birth. Thus we find in "Notes on Devachan":
+
+    _As in actual earth-life, so there is for the Ego in Devachan
+    the first flutter of psychic life, the attainment of prime,
+    the gradual exhaustion of force passing into
+    semi-consciousness and lethargy, total oblivion, and--not
+    death but birth, birth into another personality, and the
+    resumption of action which daily begets new congeries of
+    causes that must be worked out in another term of Devachan,
+    and still another physical birth as a new personality. What
+    the lives in Devachan and upon earth shall be respectively in
+    each instance is determined by Karma, and this weary round of
+    birth must be ever and ever run through until the being
+    reaches the end of the seventh Round, or attains in the
+    interim the wisdom of an Arhat, then that of a Buddha, and
+    thus gets relieved for a Round or two._
+
+When the devachanic entity is born into this new sphere it has passed
+beyond recall to earth. The embodied Soul may rise to it, but it
+cannot be drawn back to our world. On this a Master has spoken
+decisively:
+
+    _From Sukhavati down to the "Territory of Doubt," there is a
+    variety of spiritual states, but ... as soon as it has
+    stepped outside the Kamaloka, crossed the "Golden Bridge"
+    leading to the "Seven Golden Mountains," the Ego can
+    confabulate no more with easy-going mediums. No Ernest or
+    Joey has ever returned from the Rupa Loka, let alone the
+    Arupa Loka, to hold sweet intercourse with men._
+
+In the "Notes on Devachan," again, we read:
+
+    _Certainly the new Ego, once that it is reborn (in Devachan),
+    retains for a certain time--proportionate to its
+    earth-life--a complete recollection "of his life on earth";
+    but it can never revisit the Earth from Devachan except in
+    Re-incarnation._
+
+The Devachani is generally spoken of as the Immortal Triad,
+Atma-Buddhi-Manas, but it is well always to bear in mind that
+
+    Atman is no individual property of any man, but is the Divine
+    Essence which has no body, no form, which is imponderable,
+    invisible, and indivisible, that which does not _exist_ and
+    yet _is_, as the Buddhists say of Nirvana. It only
+    overshadows the mortal; that which enters into him and
+    pervades the whole body being only it's omni-present rays or
+    light, radiated through Buddhi, its vehicle and direct
+    emanation.[34]
+
+Buddhi and Manas united, with this overshadowing of Atma, form the
+Devachani; now, as we have seen in studying the Seven Principles,
+Manas is dual during earth-life, and the Lower Manas is redrawn into
+the Higher during the kamalokic interlude. By this reuniting of the
+Ray and its Source, Manas re-becomes one, and carries the pure and
+noble experiences of the earth-life into Devachan with it, thus
+maintaining the past personality as the marked characteristic of the
+Devachani, and it is in this prolongation of the "personal Ego", so
+to speak, that the "illusion" of the Devachani consists. Were the
+manasic entity free from all illusion, it would see all Egos as its
+brother-Souls, and looking back over its past would recognise all the
+varied relationships it had borne to others in many lives, as the
+actor would remember the many parts he had played with other actors,
+and would think of each brother actor as a man, and not in the parts
+he had played as his father, his son, his judge, his murderer, his
+master, his friend. The deeper human relationship would prevent the
+brother actors from identifying each other with their parts, and so
+the perfected spiritual Egos, recognising their deep unity and full
+brotherhood, would no longer be deluded by the trappings of earthly
+relationships. But the Devachani, at least in the lower stages, is
+still within the personal boundaries of his past earth-life; he is
+shut into the relationships of the one incarnation; his paradise is
+peopled with those he "_loved best with an undying love, that holy
+feeling that alone survives_," and thus the purified personal Ego is
+the salient feature, as above said, in the Devachani. Again quoting
+from the "Notes on Devachan":
+
+    "_Who goes to Devachan?" The personal Ego, of course; but
+    beatified, purified, holy. Every Ego--the combination of the
+    sixth and seventh principles[35]--which after the period of
+    unconscious gestation is reborn into the Devachan, is of
+    necessity as innocent and pure as a new-born babe. The  fact
+    of his being reborn at all shows the preponderance of good
+    over evil in his old personality. And while the Karma [of
+    Evil] steps aside for the time being to follow him in his
+    future earth re-incarnation, he brings along with him but the
+    Karma of his good deeds, words and thoughts into this
+    Devachan. "Bad" is a relative term for us--as you were told
+    more than once before--and the Law of Retribution is the only
+    law that never errs. Hence all those who have not slipped
+    down into the mire of unredeemable sin and bestiality go to
+    the Devachan. They will have to pay for their sins, voluntary
+    and involuntary, later on. Meanwhile they are rewarded;
+    receive the effects of the causes produced by them._
+
+Now in some people a sense of repulsion arises at the idea that the
+ties they form on earth in one life are not to be permanent in
+eternity. But let us look at the question calmly for a moment. When a
+mother first clasps her baby-son in her arms, that one relationship
+seems perfect, and if the child should die, her longing would be to
+re-possess him as her babe; but as he lives on through youth to
+manhood the tie changes, and the protective love of the mother and the
+clinging obedience of the child merge into a different love of friends
+and comrades, richer than ordinary friendship from the old
+recollections; yet later, when the mother is aged and the son in the
+prime of middle life, their positions are reversed and the son
+protects while the mother depends on him for guidance. Would the
+relation have been more perfect had it ceased in infancy with only the
+one tie, or is it not the richer and the sweeter from the different
+strands of which the tie is woven? And so with Egos; in many lives
+they may hold to each other many relationships, and finally, standing
+as Brothers of the Lodge closely knit together, may look back over
+past lives and see themselves in earth-life related in the many ways
+possible to human beings, till the cord is woven of every strand of
+love and duty; would not the final unity be the richer not the poorer
+for the many-stranded tie? "Finally", I say; but the word is only of
+this cycle, for what lies beyond, of wider life and less separateness,
+no mind of man may know. To me it seems that this very variety of
+experiences makes the tie stronger, not weaker, and that it is a
+rather thin and poor thing to know oneself and another in only one
+little aspect of many-sided humanity for endless ages of years; a
+thousand or so years of one person in one character would, to me, be
+ample, and I should prefer to know him or her in some new aspect of
+his nature. But those who object to this view need not feel
+distressed, for they will enjoy the presence of their beloved in the
+one personal aspect held by him or her in the one incarnation they are
+conscious of _for as long as the desire for that presence remains_.
+Only let them not desire to impose their own form of bliss on
+everybody else, nor insist that the kind of happiness which seems to
+them at this stage the only one desirable and satisfying, must be
+stereotyped to all eternity, through all the millions of years that
+lie before us. Nature gives to each in Devachan the satisfaction of
+all pure desires, and Manas there exercises that faculty of his innate
+divinity, that he "never wills in vain". Will not this suffice?
+
+But leaving aside disputes as to what may be to us "happiness" in a
+future separated from our present by millions of years, so that we are
+no more fitted now to formulate its conditions than is a child,
+playing with its dolls, to formulate the deeper joys and interests of
+its maturity, let us understand that, according to the teachings of
+the Esoteric Philosophy, the Devachani is surrounded by all he loved
+on earth, with pure affection, and the union being on the plane of the
+Ego, not on the physical plane, it is free from all the sufferings
+which would be inevitable were the Devachani present in consciousness
+on the physical plane with all its illusory and transitory joys and
+sorrows. It is surrounded by its beloved in the higher consciousness,
+but is not agonised by the knowledge of what they are suffering in the
+lower consciousness, held in the bonds of the flesh. According to the
+orthodox Christian view, Death is a separation, and the "spirits of
+the dead" wait for reunion until those they love also pass through
+Death's gateway, or--according to some--until after the judgment-day
+is over. As against this the Esoteric Philosophy teaches that Death
+cannot touch the higher consciousness of man, and that it can only
+separate those who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are
+concerned; the man living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated
+from those who have passed onwards, but the Devachani, says H.P.
+Blavatsky, has a complete conviction "that there is no such thing as
+Death at all", having left behind it all those vehicles over which
+Death has power. Therefore, to its less blinded eyes, its beloved are
+still with it; for it, the veil of matter that separates has been torn
+away.
+
+    A mother dies, leaving behind her little helpless children,
+    whom she adores, perhaps a beloved husband also. We say that
+    her "Spirit" or Ego--that individuality which is now wholly
+    impregnated, for the entire Devachanic period, with the
+    noblest feelings held by its late _personality, i.e._, love
+    for her children, pity for those who suffer, and so on--is
+    now entirely separated from the "vale of tears," that its
+    future bliss consists in that blessed ignorance of all the
+    woes it left behind ... that the _post-mortem_ spiritual
+    consciousness of the mother will represent to her that she
+    lives surrounded by her children and all those whom she
+    loved; that no gap, no link will be missing to make her
+    disembodied state the most perfect and absolute
+    happiness.[36]
+
+And so again:
+
+    As to the ordinary mortal his bliss in Devachan is complete.
+    It is an absolute oblivion of all that gave it pain or sorrow
+    in the past incarnation, and even oblivion of the fact that
+    such things as pain or sorrow exist at all. The Devachani
+    lives its intermediate cycle between two incarnations
+    surrounded by everything it had aspired to in vain, and in
+    the companionship of everything it loved on earth. It has
+    reached the fulfilment of all its soul-yearnings. And thus it
+    lives throughout long centuries an existence of _unalloyed_
+    happiness, which is the reward for its sufferings in
+    earth-life. In short, it bathes in a sea of uninterrupted
+    felicity spanned only by events of still greater felicity in
+    degree.[37]
+
+When we take the wider sweep in thought demanded by the Esoteric
+Philosophy, a far more fascinating prospect of persistent love and
+union between individual Egos rolls itself out before our eyes than
+was offered to us by the more limited creed of exoteric Christendom.
+"Mothers love their children with an immortal love," says H.P.
+Blavatsky, and the reason for this immortality in love is easily
+grasped when we realise that it is the same Egos that play so many
+parts in the drama of life, that the experience of each part is
+recorded in the memory of the Soul, and that between the Souls there
+is no separation, though during incarnation they may not realise the
+fact in its fulness and beauty.
+
+    We are with those whom we have lost in material form, and
+    far, far nearer to them now than when they were alive. And it
+    is not only in the fancy of the Devachani, as some may
+    imagine, but in reality. For pure divine love is not merely
+    the blossom of a human heart, but has its roots in eternity.
+    Spiritual holy love is immortal, and Karma brings sooner or
+    later all those who loved each other with such a spiritual
+    affection to incarnate once more in the same family
+    group.[38]
+
+Love "has its roots in eternity", and those to whom on earth we are
+strongly drawn are the Egos we have loved in past earth-lives and
+dwelt with in Devachan; coming back to earth these enduring bonds of
+love draw us together yet again, and add to the strength and beauty of
+the tie, and so on and on till all illusions are lived down, and the
+strong and perfected Egos stand side by side, sharing the experience
+of their well-nigh illimitable past.
+
+
+THE RETURN TO EARTH.
+
+At length the causes that carried the Ego into Devachan are exhausted,
+the experiences gathered have been wholly assimilated, and the Soul
+begins to feel again the thirst for sentient material life that can be
+gratified only on the physical plane. The greater the degree of
+spirituality reached, the purer and loftier the preceding earth-life,
+the longer the stay in Devachan, the world of spiritual, pure, and
+lofty effects. [I am here ignoring the special conditions surrounding
+one who is forcing his own evolution, and has entered on the Path
+that leads to Adeptship within a very limited number of lives.] The
+"average time [in Devachan] is from ten to fifteen centuries", H.P.
+Blavatsky tells us, and the fifteen centuries cycle is the one most
+plainly marked in history.[39] But in modern life this period has much
+shortened, in consequence of the greater attraction exercised by
+physical objects over the heart of man. Further, it must be remembered
+that the "average time" is not the time spent in Devachan by any
+person. If one person spends there 1000 years, and another fifty, the
+"average" is 525. The devachanic period is longer or shorter according
+to the type of life which preceded it; the more there was of
+spiritual, intellectual, and emotional activity of a lofty kind, the
+longer will be the gathering in of the harvest; the more there was of
+activity directed to selfish gain on earth, the shorter will be the
+devachanic period.
+
+When the experiences are assimilated, be the time long or short, the
+Ego is ready to return, and he brings back with him his now increased
+experience, and any further gains he may have made in Devachan along
+the lines of abstract thought; for, while in Devachan,
+
+    In one sense we can acquire more knowledge; that is, we can
+    develop further any faculty which we loved and strove after
+    during life, provided it is concerned with abstract and ideal
+    things, such as music, painting, poetry, &c.[40]
+
+But the Ego meets, as he crosses the threshold of Devachan on his way
+outwards--dying out of Devachan to be reborn on earth--he meets in the
+"atmosphere of the terrestrial plane", the seeds of evil sown in his
+preceding life on earth. During the devachanic rest he has been free
+from all pain, all sorrow, but the evil he did in his past has been in
+a state of suspended animation, not of death. As seeds sown in the
+autumn for the spring-time lie dormant beneath the surface of the
+soil, but touched by the soft rain and penetrating warmth of sun begin
+to swell and the embryo expands and grows, so do the seeds of evil we
+have sown lie dormant while the Soul takes its rest in Devachan, but
+shoot out their roots into the new personality which begins
+to form itself for the incarnation of the returning man. The Ego has
+to take up the burden of his past, and these germs or seeds, coming
+over as the harvest of the past life, are the Skandhas, to borrow a
+convenient word from our Buddhist brethren. They consist of material
+qualities, sensations, abstract ideas, tendencies of mind, mental
+powers, and while the pure aroma of these attached itself to the Ego
+and passed with it into Devachan, all that was gross, base and evil
+remained in the state of suspended animation spoken of above. These
+are taken up by the Ego as he passes outwards towards terrestrial
+life, and are built into the new "man of flesh" which the true man is
+to inhabit. And so the round of births and deaths goes on, the turning
+of the Wheel of Life; the treading of the Cycle of Necessity, until
+the work is done and the building of the Perfect Man is completed.
+
+
+NIRVANA.
+
+What Devachan is to each earth-life, Nirvana is to the finished cycle
+of Re-incarnation, but any effective discussion of that glorious
+state would here be out of place. It is mentioned only to round off
+the "After" of Death, for no word of man, strictly limited within the
+narrow bounds of his lower consciousness, may avail to explain what
+Nirvana is, can do aught save disfigure it in striving to describe.
+What it is not may be roughly, baldly stated--it is not
+"annihilation", it is not destruction of consciousness. Mr. A.P.
+Sinnett has put effectively and briefly the absurdity of many of the
+ideas current in the West about Nirvana. He has been speaking of
+absolute consciousness, and proceeds:
+
+    We may use such phrases as intellectual counters, but for no
+    ordinary mind--dominated by its physical brain and brain-born
+    intellect--can they have a living signification. All that
+    words can convey is that Nirvana is a sublime state of
+    conscious rest in omniscience. It would be ludicrous, after
+    all that has gone before, to turn to the various discussions
+    which have been carried on by students of exoteric Buddhism
+    as to whether Nirvana does or does not mean annihilation.
+    Worldly similes fall short of indicating the feeling with
+    which the graduates of Esoteric Science regard such a
+    question. Does the last penalty of the law mean the highest
+    honour of the peerage? Is a wooden spoon the emblem of the
+    most illustrious pre-eminence in learning? Such questions as
+    these but faintly symbolise the extravagance of the question
+    whether Nirvana is held by Buddhism to be equivalent to
+    annihilation.[41]
+
+So we learn from the _Secret Doctrine_ that the Nirvani returns to
+cosmic activity in a new cycle of manifestation, and that
+
+    _The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves
+    only in Nirvana, re-emerges from it in its integrity  on the
+    day when the Great Law calls all things back into
+    action._[42]
+
+
+COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN THE EARTH AND OTHER SPHERES.
+
+We are now in position to discriminate between the various kinds of
+communication possible between those whom we foolishly divide into
+"dead" and "living," as though the body were the man, or the man could
+die. "Communications between the embodied and the disembodied" would
+be a more satisfactory phrase.
+
+First, let us put aside as unsuitable the word Spirit: Spirit does not
+communicate with Spirit in any way conceivable by us. That highest
+principle is not yet manifest in the flesh; it remains the hidden
+fount of all, the eternal Energy, one of the poles of Being in
+manifestation. The word is loosely used to denote lofty Intelligences,
+who live and move beyond all conditions of matter imaginable by us,
+but pure Spirit is at present as inconceivable by us as pure matter.
+And as in dealing with possible "communications" we have average human
+beings as recipients, we may as well exclude the word Spirit as much
+as possible, and so get rid of ambiguity. But in quotations the word
+often occurs, in deference to the habit of the day, and it then
+denotes the Ego.
+
+Taking the stages through which the living man passes after "Death",
+or the shaking off of the body, we can readily classify the
+communications that may be received, or the appearances that may be
+seen:
+
+I. While the Soul has shaken off only the dense body, and remains
+still clothed in the etheric double. This is a brief period only, but
+during it the disembodied Soul may show itself, clad in this ethereal
+garment.
+
+    For a very short period after death, while the incorporeal
+    principles remain within the sphere of our earth's
+    attraction, it is _possible_ for spirit, under _peculiar_ and
+    _favourable_ conditions, to appear.[43]
+
+It makes no communications during this brief interval, nor while
+dwelling in this form. Such "ghosts" are silent, dreamy, like
+sleep-walkers, and indeed they are nothing more than astral
+sleep-walkers. Equally irresponsive, but capable of expressing a
+single thought, as of sorrow, anxiety, accident, murder, &c., are
+apparitions which are merely a thought of the dying, taking shape in
+the astral world, and carried by the dying person's will to some
+particular person, with whom the dying intensely longs to communicate.
+Such a thought, sometimes called a Mayavi Rupa, or illusory form
+
+    _May be often thrown into objectivity, as in the case of
+    apparitions after death; but, unless it is projected with the
+    knowledge of (whether latent or potential), or owing to the
+    intensity of the desire to see or appear to some one shooting
+    through, the dying brain, the apparition will be simply
+    automatical; it will not be due to any sympathetic
+    attraction, or to any act of volition, any more than the
+    reflection of a person passing unconsciously near a mirror is
+    due to the desire of the latter._
+
+When the Soul has left the etheric double, shaking it  off as it
+shook off the dense body, the double thus left as a mere empty corpse
+may be galvanised into an "artificial life"; but fortunately the
+method of such galvanisation is known to few.
+
+II. While the Soul is in Kamaloka. This period is of very variable
+duration. The Soul is clad in an astral body, the last but one of its
+perishable garments, and while thus clad it can utilise the physical
+bodies of a medium, thus consciously procuring for itself an
+instrument whereby it can act on the world it has left, and
+communicate with those living in the body. In this way it may give
+information as to facts known to itself only, or to itself and another
+person, in the earth-life just closed; and for as long as it remains
+within the terrestrial atmosphere such communication is possible. The
+harm and the peril of such communication has been previously
+explained, whether the Lower Manas be united with the Divine Triad and
+so on its way to Devachan, or wrenched from it and on its way to
+destruction.
+
+III. While the Soul is in Devachan, if an embodied Soul is capable of
+rising to its sphere, or of coming into _rapport_ with it. To the
+Devachani, as we have seen, the beloved are present in consciousness
+and full communication, the Egos being in touch with each other,
+though one is embodied and one is disembodied, but the higher
+consciousness of the embodied rarely affects the brain. As a matter of
+fact, all that we know on the physical plane of our friend, while we
+both are embodied, is the mental image caused by the impression he
+makes on us. This is, to our consciousness, our friend, and lacks
+nothing in objectivity. A similar image is present to the
+consciousness of the Devachani, and to him lacks nothing in
+objectivity. As the physical plane friend is visible to an observer on
+earth, so is the mental plane friend visible to an observer on that
+plane. The amount of the friend that ensouls the image is dependent on
+his own evolution, a highly evolved person being capable of far more
+communication with a Devachani than one who is unevolved.
+Communication when the body is sleeping is easier than when it is
+awake, and many a vivid "dream" of one on the other side of death is a
+real interview with him in Kamaloka or in Devachan.
+
+    Love beyond the grave, illusion though you may call it,[44]
+    has a magic and divine potency that re-acts on the living. A
+    mother's Ego, filled with love for the imaginary children it
+    sees near itself, living a life of happiness, as real to it
+    as when on earth--that love will always be felt by the
+    children in flesh. It will manifest in their dreams and often
+    in various events--in providential protections and escapes,
+    for love is a strong shield, and is not limited by space or
+    time. As with this Devachanic "mother", so with the rest of
+    human relationships and attachments, save the purely selfish
+    or material.[45]
+
+Remembering that a thought becomes an active entity, capable of
+working good or evil, we easily see that as embodied Souls can send to
+those they love helping and protecting forces, so the Devachani,
+thinking of those dear to him, may send out such helpful and
+protective thoughts, to act as veritable guardian angels round his
+beloved on earth. But this is a very different thing from the "Spirit"
+of the mother coming back to earth to be the almost helpless spectator
+of the child's woes.
+
+The Soul embodied may sometimes escape from its prison of flesh, and
+come into relations with the Devachani. H.P. Blavatsky writes:
+
+    Whenever years after the death of a person his spirit is
+    claimed to have "wandered back to earth" to give advice to
+    those it loved, it is always in a subjective vision, in dream
+    or in trance, and in that case it is the Soul of the living
+    seer that is drawn to the _disembodied_ spirit, and not the
+    latter which wanders back to our spheres.[46]
+
+Where the sensitive, or medium, is of a pure and lofty nature, this
+rising of the freed Ego to the Devachani is practicable, and naturally
+gives the impression to the sensitive that the departed Ego has come
+back to him. The Devachani is wrapped in its happy "illusion", and
+
+    _The Souls, or astral Egos, of pure loving sensitives,
+    labouring under the same delusion, think their loved ones
+    come down to them on earth, while it is their own spirits
+    that are raised towards those in the Devachan._[47]
+
+This attraction can be exercised by the departed Soul from Kamaloka or
+from Devachan:
+
+    A "spirit" or the spiritual Ego, cannot _descend_ to the
+    medium, but it can _attract_ the spirit of the latter to
+    itself, and it can do this only during the two
+    intervals--before and after its "gestation period". Interval
+    the first is that period between the physical death and the
+    merging of the spiritual Ego into that state which is known
+    in the Arhat Esoteric Doctrine as "Bar-do". We have
+    translated this as the "gestation period", and it lasts from
+    a few days to several years, according to the evidence of the
+    Adepts. Interval the second lasts so long as the merits of
+    the old [personal] Ego entitle the being to reap the fruit of
+    its reward in its new regenerated Egoship. It occurs after
+    the gestation period is over, and the new spiritual Ego is
+    reborn--like the fabled Phoenix from its ashes--from the
+    old one. The locality which the former inhabits is called by
+    the northern Buddhist Occultists "Devachan."[48]
+
+So also may the incorporeal principles of pure sensitives be placed
+_en rapport_ with disembodied Souls, although information thus
+obtained is not reliable, partly in consequence of the difficulty of
+transferring to the physical brain the impressions received, and
+partly from the difficulty of observing accurately, when the seer is
+untrained.[49]
+
+    A pure medium's Ego can be drawn to and made, for an instant,
+    to unite in a magnetic(?) relation with a real disembodied
+    spirit, whereas the soul of an impure medium can only
+    confabulate with the _Astral Soul_, or Shell, of the
+    deceased. The former possibility explains those extremely
+    rare cases of direct writing in recognised autographs, and of
+    messages from the higher class of disembodied intelligences.
+
+But the confusion in messages thus obtained is considerable, not only
+from the causes above-named, but also because
+
+    Even the best and purest sensitive can at most only be placed
+    at any time _en rapport_ with a particular spiritual entity,
+    and can only know, see, and feel what that particular entity
+    knows, sees, and feels.
+
+Hence much possibility of error if generalisations are indulged in,
+since each Devachani lives in his own paradise, and there is no
+"peeping down to earth,"
+
+    Nor is there any _conscious_ communication with the flying
+    Souls that come as it were to learn where the Spirits are,
+    what they are doing, and what they think, feel, and see.
+
+    What then is being _en rapport_? It is simply an identity of
+    molecular  vibration between the astral part of the
+    incarnated sensitive and the astral part of the
+    dis-incarnated personality. The spirit of the sensitive gets
+    "odylised", so to speak, by the aura of the spirit, whether
+    this be hybernating in the earthly region or dreaming in the
+    Devachan; identity of molecular vibration is established, and
+    for a brief space the sensitive becomes the departed
+    personality, and writes in its handwriting, uses its
+    language, and thinks its thoughts. At such times sensitives
+    may believe that those with whom they are for the moment _en
+    rapport_ descend to earth and communicate with them, whereas,
+    in reality, it is merely their own spirits which, being
+    correctly attuned to those others, are for the time blended
+    with them.[50]
+
+In a special case under examination, H.P. Blavatsky said that the
+communication might have come from an Elementary, but that it was
+
+    Far more likely that the medium's spirit really became _en
+    rapport_ with some spiritual entity in Devachan, the
+    thoughts, knowledge, and sentiments of which formed the
+    substance, while the medium's own personality and
+    pre-existing ideas more or less governed the forms of the
+    communication.[51]
+
+While these communications are not reliable in the facts and opinions
+stated,
+
+    We would remark that it may _possibly_ be that there really
+    is a distinct spiritual entity impressing our correspondent's
+    mind. In other words, there may, for all we know, be some
+    spirit, with whom his spiritual nature becomes habitually,
+    for the time, thoroughly harmonised, and whose thoughts,
+    language, &c., become his for the time, the result being that
+    this spirit seems to communicate with him.... It is possible
+    (though by no means probable) that he habitually passes into
+    a state of _rapport_ with a genuine spirit, and, for the
+    time, is assimilated therewith, thinking (to a great extent
+    if not entirely) the thoughts that spirit would think,
+    writing in its handwriting, &c. But even so, Mr. Terry must
+    not fancy that that spirit is consciously communicating with
+    him, or knows in any way  anything of him, or any other
+    person or thing on earth. It is simply that, the _rapport_
+    established, he, Mr. Terry, becomes for the nonce assimilated
+    with that other personality, and thinks, speaks, and writes
+    as it would have done on earth.... The molecules of his
+    astral nature may from time to time vibrate in perfect unison
+    with those of some spirit of such a person, now in Devachan,
+    and the result may be that he appears to be in communication
+    with that spirit, and to be advised, &c., by him, and
+    clairvoyants may see in the Astral Light a picture of the
+    earth-life form of that spirit.
+
+IV. Communications other than those from disembodied Souls, passing
+through normal _post mortem_ states.
+
+(a) _From Shells._ These, while but the cast-off garment of the
+liberated Soul, retain for some time the impress of their late
+inhabitant, and reproduce automatically his habits of thought and
+expression, just as a physical body will automatically repeat habitual
+gestures. Reflex action is as possible to the desire body as to the
+physical, but all reflex action is marked by its character of
+repetition, and absence of all power to initiate movement. It answers
+to a stimulus with an appearance of purposive action, but it initiates
+nothing. When people "sit for development", or when at a _seance_ they
+anxiously hope and wait for messages from departed friends, they
+supply just the stimulus needed, and obtain the signs of recognition
+for which they expectantly watch.
+
+(b) _From Elementaries._ These, possessing the lower capacities of the
+mind, _i.e._, all the intellectual faculties that found their
+expression through the physical brain during life, may produce
+communications of a highly intellectual character. These, however, are
+rare, as may be seen from a survey of the messages published as
+received from "departed Spirits".
+
+(c) _From Elementals._ These semi-conscious centres of force play a
+great part at _seances_, and are mostly the agents who are active in
+producing physical phenomena. They throw about or carry objects, make
+noises, ring bells, etc., etc. Sometimes they play pranks with Shells,
+animating them and representing them to be the spirits of great
+personalities who have lived on earth, but who have sadly degenerated
+in the "spirit-world", judging by their effusions. Sometimes, in
+materialising _seances_, they busy themselves in throwing pictures
+from the Astral Light on the fluidic forms produced, so causing them
+to assume likenesses of various persons. There are also Elementals of
+a high type who occasionally communicate with very gifted mediums,
+"Shining Ones" from other spheres.
+
+(d) _From Nirmanakayas._ For these communications, as for the two
+classes next mentioned, the medium must be of a very pure and lofty
+nature. The Nirmanakaya is a perfected man, who has cast aside his
+physical body but retains his other lower principles, and remains in
+the earth-sphere for the sake of helping forward the evolution of
+mankind. Nirmanakayas
+
+    Have, out of pity for mankind and those they left on earth,
+    renounced the Nirvanic state. Such an Adept, or Saint, or
+    whatever you may call him, believing it a selfish act to rest
+    in bliss while mankind groans under the burden of misery
+    produced by ignorance, renounces Nirvana and determines to
+    remain invisible _in spirit_ on this earth. They have no
+    material body, as they have left it behind; but otherwise
+    they remain with all their principles even _in astral life_
+    in our sphere. And such can and do communicate with a few
+    elect ones, only surely not with _ordinary_ mediums.[52]
+
+(e) _From Adepts now living on earth._ These often communicate with
+Their disciples, without using the ordinary methods of communication,
+and when any tie exists, perchance from some past incarnation, between
+an Adept and a medium, constituting that medium a disciple, a message
+from the Adept might readily be mistaken for a message from a
+"Spirit". The receipt of such messages by precipitated writing or
+spoken words is within the knowledge of some.
+
+(f) _From the medium's Higher Ego._ Where a pure and earnest man or
+woman is striving after the light, this upward striving is met by a
+downward reaching of the higher nature, and light from the higher
+streams downward, illuminating the lower consciousness. Then the lower
+mind is, for the time, united with its parent, and transmits as much
+of its knowledge as it is able to retain.
+
+From this brief sketch it will be seen how varied may be the sources
+from which communications apparently from "the other side of Death"
+may be received. As said by H.P. Blavatsky:
+
+    The variety of the causes of phenomena is great, and one need
+    be an Adept, and actually look into and examine what
+    transpires, in order to be able to explain in each case what
+    really underlies it.[53]
+
+To complete the statement it may be added that what the average Soul
+can do when it has passed through the gateway of Death, it can do on
+this side, and communications may be as readily obtained by writing,
+in trance, and by the other means of receiving messages, from embodied
+as from disembodied Souls. If each developed within himself the
+powers of his own Soul, instead of drifting about aimlessly, or
+ignorantly plunging into dangerous experiments, knowledge might be
+safely accumulated and the evolution of the Soul might be accelerated.
+This one thing is sure: Man is to-day a living Soul, over whom Death
+has no power, and the key of the prison-house of the body is in his
+own hands, so that he may learn its use if he will. It is because his
+true Self, while blinded by the body, has lost touch with other
+Selves, that Death has been a gulf instead of a gateway between
+embodied and disembodied Souls.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+
+     The following passage on the fate of suicides is taken from the
+     _Theosophist_, September, 1882.
+
+We do not pretend--we are not permitted--to deal exhaustively with the
+question at present, but we may refer to one of the most important
+classes of entities, who can participate in objective phenomena, other
+than Elementaries and Elementals.
+
+This class comprises the Spirits of conscious sane suicides. They are
+_Spirits_, and not _Shells_, because there is not in their cases, at
+any rate until later, a total and permanent divorce between the fourth
+and fifth principles on the one hand, and the sixth and seventh on the
+other. The two duads are divided, they exist apart, but a line of
+connection still unites them, they may yet reunite, and the sorely
+threatened personality avert its doom; the fifth principle still holds
+in its hands the clue by which, traversing the labyrinth of earthly
+sins and passions, it may regain the sacred penetralia. But for the
+time, though really a Spirit, and therefore so designated, it is
+practically not far removed from a Shell.
+
+This class of Spirit can undoubtedly communicate with men, but, as a
+rule, its members have to pay dearly for exercising the privilege,
+while it is scarcely possible for them to do otherwise than lower and
+debase the moral nature of those with and through whom they have much
+communication. It is merely, broadly speaking, a question of degree;
+of much or little injury resulting from such communication; the cases
+in which real, permanent good can arise are too absolutely exceptional
+to require consideration.
+
+Understand how the case stands. The unhappy being revolting against
+the trials of life--trials, the results of its own former actions,
+trials, heaven's merciful medicine for the mentally and spiritually
+diseased--determines, instead of manfully taking arms against a sea of
+troubles, to let the curtain drop, and, as it fancies, end them. It
+destroys the body, but finds itself precisely as much alive mentally
+as before. It had an appointed life-term determined by an intricate
+web of prior causes, which its own wilful sudden act cannot shorten.
+That term must run out its appointed sands. You may smash the lower
+half of the hand hour-glass, so that the impalpable sand shooting from
+the upper bell is dissipated by the passing aerial currents as it
+issues; but that stream will run on, unnoticed though it remain, until
+the whole store in that upper receptacle is exhausted.
+
+So you may destroy the body, but not the appointed period of sentient
+existence, foredoomed (because simply the effect of a plexus of
+causes) to intervene before the dissolution of the personality; this
+must run on for its appointed period.
+
+This is so in other cases, _e.g._, those of the victims of accident or
+violence; they, too, have to complete their life-term, and of these,
+too, we may speak on another occasion--but here it is sufficient to
+notice that, whether good or bad, their mental attitude at the time of
+death alters wholly their subsequent position. They, too, have to wait
+on within the "Region of Desires" until their wave of life runs on to
+and reaches its appointed shore, but they wait on, wrapped in dreams
+soothing and blissful, or the reverse, according to their mental and
+moral state at, and prior to the fatal hour, but nearly exempt from
+further material temptations, and, broadly speaking, incapable (except
+just at the moment of real death) of communicating _scio motu_ with
+mankind, though not wholly beyond the possible reach of the higher
+forms of the "Accursed Science," Necromancy. The question is a
+profoundly abstruse one; it would be impossible to explain within the
+brief space still remaining to us, how the conditions immediately
+after death differ so entirely as they do in the case (1) of the man
+who deliberately _lays down_ (not merely _risks_) his life from
+altruistic motives in the hope of saving those of others; and (2) of
+him who deliberately sacrifices his life from selfish motives, in the
+hope of escaping trials and troubles which loom before him. Nature or
+Providence, Fate, or God, being merely a self-adjusting machine, it
+would at first sight seem as if the results must be identical in both
+cases. But, machine though it be, we must remember that it is a
+machine _sui generis_--
+
+    Out of himself he span
+      The eternal web of right and wrong;
+    And ever feels the subtlest thrill,
+      The slenderest thread along.
+
+A machine compared with whose perfect sensitiveness and adjustment the
+highest human intellect is but a coarse clumsy replica, _in petto_.
+
+And we must remember that thoughts and motives are material, and at
+times marvellously potent material, forces, and we may then begin to
+comprehend why the hero, sacrificing his life on pure altruistic
+grounds, sinks as his life-blood ebbs away into a sweet dream, wherein
+
+    All that he wishes and all that he loves,
+    Come smiling round his sunny way,
+
+only to wake into active or objective consciousness when reborn in the
+Region of Happiness, while the poor unhappy and misguided mortal who,
+seeking to elude fate, selfishly loosens the silver string and breaks
+the golden bowl, finds himself terribly alive and awake, instinct with
+all the evil cravings and desires that embittered his world-life,
+without a body in which to gratify these, and capable of only such
+partial alleviation as is possible by more or less vicarious
+gratification, and this only at the cost of the ultimate complete
+rupture with his sixth and seventh principles, and consequent ultimate
+annihilation after, alas! prolonged periods of suffering.
+
+Let it not be supposed that there is no hope for this class--the sane
+deliberate suicide. If, bearing steadfastly his cross, he suffers
+patiently his punishment, striving against carnal appetites still
+alive in him, in all their intensity, though, of course, each in
+proportion to the degree to which it had been indulged in earth-life.
+If, we say, he bears this humbly, never allowing himself to be tempted
+here or there into unlawful gratifications of unholy desires, then
+when his fated death-hour strikes, his four higher principles reunite,
+and, in the final separation that then ensues, it may well be that all
+may be well with him, and that he passes on to the gestation period
+and its subsequent developments.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Book ii., from lines 666-789. The whole passage bristles
+with horrors.]
+
+[Footnote 2: xii. 85. Trans., of Burnell and Hopkins.]
+
+[Footnote 3: From the translation of Dhunjeebhoy Jamsetjee Medhora,
+_Zoroastrian and some other Ancient Systems_, xxvii.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Trans., by Mirza Mohamed Hadi. _The Platonist_, 306.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _The Sacred Books of the East_, iii, 109, 110.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Secret Doctrine_, vol. i. p. 281.]
+
+[Footnote 7: See _ibid._, p. 283.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Isis Unveiled_, vol. i. p. 480.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Theosophical Manuals, No. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _The Heroic Enthusiasts_, Trans., by L. Williams. part ii.
+pp. 22, 23.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Cremation_, Theosophical Siftings, vol. iii.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Man: Fragments of Forgotten History_, pp. 119, 120.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Key to Theosophy_, H.P. Blavatsky, p. 109. Third
+Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Magic, White and Black_, Dr. Franz Hartmann, pp. 109,
+110. Third Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 15: See _The Seven Principles of Man_, pp. 17-21.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _Theosophist_, March, 1882, p. 158, note.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _Essays upon some Controverted Questions_, p. 36.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Fortnightly Review_, 1892, p. 176.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 67.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Ibid._, p. 97.]
+
+[Footnote 21: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 97]
+
+[Footnote 22: _Ibid._, p. 102.]
+
+[Footnote 23: June, 1882, art. "Seeming Discrepancies."]
+
+[Footnote 24: Pp. 73, 74. Ed. 1887.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _Theosophical Glossary_, Elementaries.]
+
+[Footnote 26: See _The Seven Principles of Man_, p.p. 44-46.]
+
+[Footnote 27: The name Sukhavati, borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, is
+sometimes used instead of that of Devachan. Sukhavati, according to
+Schlagintweit, is "the abode of the blessed, into which ascend those
+who have accumulated much merit by the practice of virtues", and
+"involves the deliverance from metempsychosis" (_Buddhism in Tibet_,
+p. 99). According to the Prasanga school, the higher Path leads to
+Nirvana, the lower to Sukhavati. But Eitel calls Sukhavati "the
+Nirvana of the common people, where the saints revel in physical bliss
+for aeons, until they reenter the circle of transmigration"
+(_Sanskrit-Chinese Dictionary_). Eitel, however, under "Amitabha"
+states that the "popular mind" regards the "paradise of the West" as
+"the haven of final redemption from the eddies of transmigration".
+When used by one of the Teachers of the Esoteric Philosophy it covers
+the higher Devachanic states, but from all of these the Soul comes
+back to earth.]
+
+[Footnote 28: See _Lucifer_, Oct, 1892, Vol. XI. No. 62.]
+
+[Footnote 29: _The Path_, May, 1890.]
+
+[Footnote 30: _Ibid._]
+
+[Footnote 31: "Notes on Devachan," as cited.]
+
+[Footnote 32: "Notes on Devachan," as before. There are a variety of
+stages in Devachan; the Rupa Loka is an inferior stage, where the Soul
+is still surrounded by forms. It has escaped from these personalities
+in the Tribhuvana.]
+
+[Footnote 33: _Vishnu Purana_, Bk. I. ch. v.]
+
+[Footnote 34: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 69. Third Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Sixth and seventh in the older nomenclature, fifth and
+sixth in the later--_i.e._, Manas and Buddhi.]
+
+[Footnote 36: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 99. Third Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 37: _Ibid._, p. 100.]
+
+[Footnote 38: _Ibid._, p. 101.]
+
+[Footnote 39: See Manual No. 2 _Re-incarnation_, pp. 60, 61. Third
+Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 40: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 105. Third Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 41: _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 197. Eighth
+Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 42: Quoted in the _Secret Doctrine_, vol. ii. p. 83. The
+student will do well to read, for a fair presentation of the subject,
+G.R.S. Mead's "Note on Nirvana" in _Lucifer_, for March, April, and
+May, 1893. (Re-printed in _Theosophical Siftings_).]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Theosophist_, Sept., 1882, p. 310.]
+
+[Footnote 44: See on "illusion" what was said under the heading
+"Devachan".]
+
+[Footnote 45: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 102. Third Edition.]
+
+[Footnote 46: _Theosophist_, Sept. 1881.]
+
+[Footnote 47: "Notes on Devachan", _Path_, June, 1890, p. 80.]
+
+[Footnote 48: _Theosophist_, June, 1882, p. 226.]
+
+[Footnote 49: Summarised from article in _Theosophist_, Sept., 1882.]
+
+[Footnote 50: _Ibid._, p. 309.]
+
+[Footnote 51: _Ibid._, p. 310.]
+
+[Footnote 52: _Key to Theosophy,_ p. 151.]
+
+[Footnote 53: _Theosophist_, Sept., 1882, p. 310.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+Accident, Death by, 37.
+
+Appendix, 81.
+
+Astral Body, 19,
+  Fate of, 31.
+
+Astral Shell or Soul, 75.
+
+_Avesta_, quoted, 9.
+
+
+Blavatsky, H.P., quoted, 16, 17, 24, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 45, 49, 60,
+                         65, 66, 67, 73, 74, 78.
+
+_Book of the Dead_, quoted, 8.
+
+Bruno, Giordano, quoted, 21.
+
+_Buddhism in Tibet_, quoted, 47, (note).
+
+
+Communications between Earth and other Spheres, 70.
+      "        between Earth and Soul in Etheric Body, 71.
+      "        between Earth, and soul in Devachan, 72,
+      "        between Earth and soul in Kamaloka, 72.
+      "        from Adepts now living, 79.
+      "        from Elementals, 78.
+      "        from Elementaries, 77.
+      "        from Medium's Higher Ego, 79.
+      "        from Nirmanakayas, 78.
+      "        from Shells, 43, 77.
+
+_Controverted Questions, Essays upon some_, quoted, 28.
+
+_Cremation_, quoted, 21.
+
+Cycle of Incarnation, 52 et seq.
+
+
+Death, a Gateway, 79.
+  "    Chinese Ideas of, 11.
+  "    Christian Ideas of, 6.
+  "    Egyptian Ideas of, 8.
+  "    Theosophic Ideas of, 18.
+
+_Desatir_, quoted, 9.
+
+Devachan, 33, 46. et seq.
+
+Devachan, Passing into, of the average-living, 33.
+
+Devachan, The Soul in, 72.
+
+Devachani, The, 58 et seq.
+
+
+Earth, The return to, 66.
+
+Egos, Many lives of, 63 et seq.
+
+Elementals, 44, 78.
+
+Elementaries, 45, 77.
+
+_Esoteric Buddhism_, quoted, 69.
+
+Etheric Double, 12, 22 et seq., 24, 25, 71 et seq.
+
+
+Fiery Lives, 17.
+
+_Fortnightly Review_, quoted, 29.
+
+
+_Heroic Enthusiasts, The_, quoted, 21.
+
+
+Immortal Triad, The, 12, 13, 31, 33, 58, 60.
+
+_Isis Unveiled_, quoted, 17.
+
+
+Kamaloka, 26, 27, 29, 32, 34, 41.
+
+Kamaloka, The Soul in, 72.
+
+Kama Rupa, 30.
+
+_Key to Theosophy_, quoted, 24, 30, 31, 33, 60, 65, 67, 73, 78.
+
+
+_Lucifer_, quoted, 49, 70.
+
+
+_Magic, White and Black_, quoted, 26.
+
+_Man: Fragments of Forgotten History_, quoted, 23.
+
+Man: How Made, 12 et seq.
+
+Maya, 47.
+
+Medium, Communications from Higher Egos of, 79.
+
+
+Nirvana, 69.
+
+
+_Ordinances of Manu_, quoted, 9.
+
+
+_Paradise Lost_, quoted, 7.
+
+_Path_, quoted, 51, 54, 55, 56, 59 et seq.
+
+_Perfect Way_, quoted, 44.
+
+Perishable Quaternary, 12.
+
+Pishachas, 38.
+
+Prana, 26, 30.
+
+Premature Death, 36, 39.
+
+
+Re-incarnation, 8, 67.
+
+
+_Sanskrit-Chinese Dictionary_, quoted, 47 (Footnote: 27).
+
+_Seven principles of Man_, quoted, 26, 45.
+
+Shell, Astral Soul, or, 75.
+
+Shells, The, 41.
+
+_Shu King_, quoted, 10.
+
+Soul, Growth of, in Devachan, 56,
+
+  "   Powers of the, 80.
+
+  "   Relations of, with Devachani, 74 et seq.
+
+  "   The Disembodied, 71 et seq.
+
+Spiritualism and Esoteric Philosophy, 15.
+
+Suicides, 36, et seq., 81.
+
+
+_Theosophical Glossary_, quoted, 45.
+
+_Theosophical Siftings_, quoted, 21.
+
+_Theosophist, The_, quoted, 27, 35, 71, 74, 75 et seq.
+
+_Theosophist. The_, summarised, 75, 79, 81.
+
+
+Unconscious co-existence of intelligent beings, 28 et seq.
+
+
+_Vishnu Purana_, quoted, 57.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Death--and After?, by Annie Besant
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