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.