Needless to say, this class is millions of times larger than those of
which we have spoken, and the character and condition of its members
vary within extremely wide limits. Within similarly wide limits may
vary also the length of their lives upon the astral plane, for while
there are those who pass only a few days or hours there, others remain
upon this level for many years and even centuries. A man who has led a
good and pure life, whose strongest feelings and aspirations have been
unselfish and spiritual, will have no attraction to this plane, and
will, if entirely left alone, find little to keep him upon it, or to
awaken him into activity even during the comparatively short period of
his stay. For it must be understood that after death the true man is
withdrawing into himself, and just as at the first step of that
process he casts off the physical body, and almost directly afterwards
the etheric double and the Prâna, so it is intended that he should as
soon as possible cast off also the astral or kâmic body, and pass
into the devachanic condition, where alone his spiritual aspirations
can find their full fruition. The noble and pure-minded man will be
able to do this, for he has subdued all earthly passions during life;
the force of his will has been directed into higher channels, and
there is therefore but little energy of lower desire to be worked out
in Kâmaloka. His stay there will consequently be very short, and most
probably he will have little more than a dreamy half-consciousness of
existence until he sinks into the sleep during which his higher
principles finally free themselves from the kâmic envelope and enter
upon the blissful rest of Devachan.
For the person who has not as yet entered upon the path of occult
development, what has been described is the ideal state of affairs,
but naturally it is not attained by all, or even by the majority. The
average man has by no means freed himself from the lower desires
before death, and it takes a long period of more or less fully
conscious life on the astral plane to allow the forces he has
generated to work themselves out, and thus release the higher Ego. The
body which he occupies during this period is the Kâmarûpa which may be
described as a rearrangement of the matter of his astral body; but it
is much more defined in outline, and there is also this important
difference between the two that while the astral body, if sufficiently
awakened during life to function at all freely, would probably be able
to visit all, or at any rate most, of the subdivisions of its plane,
the Kâmarûpa has not that liberty, but is strictly confined to that
level to which its affinities have drawn it. It has, however, a
certain kind of progress connected with it, for it generally happens
that the forces a man has set in motion during earth-life need for
their appropriate working out a sojourn on more divisions than one of
the Kâmaloka, and when this is the case a regular sequence is
observed, commencing with the lowest; so that when the Kâmarûpa has
exhausted its attractions to one level, the greater part of its
grosser particles fall away, and it finds itself in affinity with a
somewhat higher state of existence. Its specific gravity, as it were,
is constantly decreasing, and so it steadily rises from the denser to
the lighter strata, pausing only when it is exactly balanced for a
time. This is evidently the explanation of a remark frequently made by
the entities which appear at _séances_ to the effect that they are
about to rise to a higher sphere, from which it will be impossible, or
not so easy, to "communicate" through a medium; and it is as a matter
of fact true that a person upon the highest subdivision of this plane
would find it almost impossible to deal with any ordinary medium.
It ought perhaps to be explained here that the definiteness of outline
which distinguishes the Kâmarûpa from the astral body is of an
entirely different character from that definiteness which was
described as a sign of progress in the astral of the man before death.
There can never be any possibility of confusion between the two
entities, for while in the case of the man attached to a physical body
the different orders of astral particles are all inextricably mingled
and ceaselessly changing their position, after death their activity is
much more circumscribed, since they then sort themselves according to
their degree of materiality, and become, as it were, a series of
sheaths or shells surrounding him, the grossest being always outside
and so dissipating before the others. This dissipation is not
necessarily complete, the extent to which it is carried being governed
by the power of Manas to free itself from its connection with any
given level; and on this also, as will be seen later, the nature of
the "shade" depends.
The poetic idea of death as a universal leveller is a mere absurdity
born of ignorance, for, as a matter of fact, in the vast majority of
cases the loss of the physical body makes no difference whatever in
the character or intellect of the person, and there are therefore as
many different varieties of intelligence among those whom we usually
call the dead as among the living. The popular religious teaching of
the West as to man's _post-mortem_ adventures has long been so wildly
inaccurate that even intelligent people are often terribly puzzled
when they recover consciousness in Kâmaloka after death. The condition
in which the new arrival finds himself differs so radically from what
he has been led to expect that it is no uncommon case for him to
refuse at first to believe that he has passed through the portals of
death at all; indeed, of so little practical value is our much-vaunted
belief in the immortality of the soul that most people consider the
very fact that they are still conscious an absolute proof that they
have not died. The horrible doctrine of eternal punishment, too, is
responsible for a vast amount of most pitiable and entirely groundless
terror among those newly arrived in Kâmaloka who in many cases spend
long periods of acute mental suffering before they can free themselves
from the fatal influence of that hideous blasphemy, and realize that
the world is governed not according to the caprice of some demon who
gloats over human anguish, but according to a benevolent and
wonderfully patient law of evolution. Many members of the class we are
considering do not really attain an intelligent appreciation of this
fact at all, but drift through their astral interlude in the same
aimless manner in which they have spent the physical portion of their
lives. Thus in Kâmaloka, exactly as on earth, there are the few who
comprehend something of their position and know how to make the best
of it, and the many who have not yet acquired that knowledge; and
there, just as here, the ignorant are rarely ready to profit by the
advice or example of the wise.
But of whatever grade the entity's intellect may be, it is always a
fluctuating and on the whole a gradually diminishing quantity, for the
lower Manas is being drawn in opposite directions by the higher Triad
which acts on it from above its level and the Kâma which operates from
below; and therefore it oscillates between the two attractions, with
an ever-increasing tendency towards the former as the kâmic forces
wear themselves out. And here comes in the evil of what is called at
_séances_ the "development" of a spirit through a medium--a process
the object of which is to intensify the downward pull of the Kâma, to
awaken the lower portion of the entity (that being all that can be
reached) from the natural and desirable unconsciousness into which it
is passing, and thus to prolong unnaturally its existence in the
Kâmaloka. The peculiar danger of this will be seen when it is
recollected that the real man is all the while steadily withdrawing
into himself, and is therefore as time goes on less and less able to
influence or guide this lower portion, which nevertheless, until the
separation is complete, has the power to generate Karma, and under the
circumstances is obviously far more likely to add evil than good to
its record. Thus the harm done is threefold: first, the retardation of
the separation between Manas and Kâma, and the consequent waste of
time and prolongation of the interval between two incarnations;
secondly, the extreme probability (almost amounting to certainty) that
a large addition will be made to the individual's evil Karma, which
will have to be worked out in future births; thirdly, the terrible
danger that this abnormal intensification of the force of Kâma may
eventually enable the latter to entangle the whole of the lower Manas
inextricably, and so cause the entire loss of an incarnation. Though
such a result as this last-mentioned is happily uncommon, it is a
thing that has happened more than once; and in very many cases where
the evil has fallen short of this ultimate possibility, the individual
has nevertheless lost much more of his lower Manas by this additional
entanglement with Kâma than he would have done if left to withdraw
into himself quietly as nature intended. It is not denied that a
certain amount of good may occasionally be done to very degraded
entities at spiritualistic circles; but the intention of nature
obviously is that such assistance should be given, as it frequently
is, by occult students who are able to visit the astral plane during
earth-life, and have been trained by competent teachers to deal by
whatever methods may be most helpful with the various cases which they
encounter. It will be readily seen that such a scheme of help,
carrying with it as it does the possibility of instant reference to
higher authorities in any doubtful case, is infinitely safer than any
casual assistance obtained through a medium who may be (and indeed
generally is) entirely ignorant of the laws governing spiritual
evolution, and who is as liable to the domination of evil or
mischievous influences as of good ones.
Apart altogether from any question of development through a medium,
there is another and much more frequently exercised influence which
may seriously retard a disembodied entity on his way to Devachan, and
that is the intense and uncontrolled grief of his surviving friends or
relatives. It is one among many melancholy results of the terribly
inaccurate and even irreligious view that we in the West have for
centuries been taking of death, that we not only cause ourselves an
immense amount of wholly unnecessary pain over this temporary parting
from our loved ones, but we often also do serious injury to those for
whom we bear so deep an affection by means of this very regret which
we feel so acutely. As one of our ablest writers has recently told us,
when our departed brother is sinking peacefully and naturally into
pre-devachanic unconsciousness "an awakening may be caused by the
passionate sorrow and desires of friends left on earth, and these,
violently vibrating the kâmic elements in the embodied persons, may
set up vibrations in the Kâmarûpa 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.
This awakening is often accompanied by 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."
(_Death and After_, p. 32.) It would be well if those whose loved ones
have passed on before them would learn from these undoubted facts the
duty of restraining for the sake of those dear ones a grief which,
however natural it may be, is yet in its essence selfish. Not that
occult teaching counsels forgetfulness of the dead--far from it; but
it does suggest that a man's affectionate remembrance of his departed
friend is a force which, if properly directed into the channel of
earnest good wishes for his progress towards Devachan and his quiet
passage through Kâmaloka might be of real value to him, whereas when
wasted in mourning for him and longing to have him back again it is
not only useless but harmful. It is with a true instinct that the
Hindu religion prescribes its Shrâddha ceremonies and the Catholic
Church its prayers for the dead.
It sometimes happens, however, that the desire for communication is
from the other side, and that an entity of the class we are
considering has something which it specially desires to say to those
whom it has left behind. Occasionally this message is an important
one, such as, for example, an indication of the place where a missing
will is concealed; but more often it seems to us quite trivial.
Still, whatever it may be, if it is firmly impressed upon the mind of
the dead person, it is undoubtedly desirable that he should be enabled
to deliver it, as otherwise the anxiety to do so would perpetually
draw his consciousness back into the earth-life, and prevent him from
passing to higher spheres. In such a case a psychic who can understand
him, or a medium through whom he can write or speak, is of real
service to him. It should be observed that the reason why he cannot
usually write or speak without a medium is that one state of matter
can ordinarily act only upon the state next below it, and, as he has
now no denser matter in his organism than that of which the Kâmarûpa
is composed, he finds it impossible to set up vibrations in the
physical substance of the air or to move the physical pencil without
borrowing living matter of the intermediate order contained in the
etheric double, by means of which an impulse can readily be
transferred from the one plane to the other. Now he would be unable to
borrow this material from an ordinary person, because such a man's
principles would be too closely linked together to be separated by any
means likely to be at his command, but the very essence of mediumship
is the ready separability of the principles, so from a medium he can
draw without difficulty the matter he needs for his manifestation,
whatever it may be. When he cannot find a medium or does not
understand how to use one he sometimes makes clumsy and blundering
endeavours to communicate on his own account, and by the strength of
his will he sets elemental forces blindly working, perhaps producing
such apparently aimless manifestations as stone-throwing,
bell-ringing, etc. It consequently frequently happens that a psychic
or medium going to a house where such manifestations are taking place
may be able to discover what the entity who produces them is
attempting to say or do, and may thus put an end to the disturbance.
This would not, however, invariably be the case, as these elemental
forces are occasionally set in motion by entirely different causes.
But for one entity who is earth-bound by the desire to communicate
with his surviving friends, there are thousands who, if left alone,
would never think of doing so, although when the idea is suggested to
them through a medium they will respond to it readily enough, for
since during earth-life their interests were probably centred less in
spiritual than in worldly affairs, it is not difficult to re-awaken in
them vibrations sympathetic to matters connected with the existence
they have so lately left; and this undesirable intensification of
earthly thoughts is frequently brought about by the interference of
well-meaning but ignorant friends, who endeavour to get communications
from the departed through a medium, with the result that just in
proportion to their success he is subjected to the various dangers
mentioned above. It should also be remembered that the possible injury
to the entity itself is by no means all the harm that may accrue from
such a practice, for those who habitually attend _séances_ during life
are almost certain to develop a tendency to haunt them after death,
and so themselves in turn run the risks into which they have so often
brought their predecessors. Besides, it is well known that the vital
energy necessary to produce physical manifestations is frequently
drawn from the sitters as well as from the medium, and the eventual
effect on the latter is invariably evil, as is evinced by the large
number of such sensitives who have gone either morally or psychically
to the bad--some becoming epileptic, some taking to drink, others
falling under influences which induced them to stoop to fraud and
trickery of all kinds.