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.