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